What is Google Analytics?
For the uninitiated, Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic within the Google Marketing Platform brand. As a service, it helps you understand your site and app users to better check the performance of your marketing, content, products, and other items you offer across the internet. Because Google is the most popular search engine and browser - where the act of searching for something on the internet or “Googling” as we know it today has become ubiquitous to the brand, they’re also uniquely capable of giving you insights and machine learning capabilities to make the most out of the data you have available. It reports in real-time and gives valuable feedback to users who are looking to improve their brand’s searchability.
With Google Analytics, businesses can make informed decisions based on data and insight to improve and deliver the best business results - whether it’s working to optimize your content, better your website architecture, or catching up to the latest and changing trends.
Why use Google Analytics?
On its own, Strikingly features a built-in traffic analytics tool that gives you an overview of your site’s visitors, where they came from, and the pages on your website that they frequent. The data can help you start your market research but we suggest a more granular look into your website’s performance. When you add the site to Google Analytics, you get more detailed information on everything that has to do with your website - how much traffic your site is getting, the type of visitors you get, where they are coming from, the search terms visitors use to search for your site, etc. There is a wealth of data that can be used from this platform for shaping digital marketing campaigns and brand-building exercises. You can read more about how users have made their website work for them into a more successful business.
With that in mind, here are simple steps on how to add a site to Google Analytics and how you can customize your dashboard to suit your key performance indicators.
1. Create a Google Analytics account
The first step in how to add a website to Google Analytics is to create a GA account. You will go through a series of steps including adding your website’s name and location, the industry category and the time zone you want to receive your reports. After accepting the Terms and Services, you will get a tracking ID.
2. Add the tracking ID to your Strikingly website
Add a site to Google analytics by adding this tracking ID to your Strikingly website. On the website editor, go to Settings > Advanced > Services and add the tracking ID on the form provided. Do not forget to publish the site after adding the code to save the changes.
Adding the code verifies your ownership of the website and domain and allows you access to Google’s data on your site. You can link your Google Ads and Google Analytics account to share data between the two tools for better site monitoring. It usually takes a few hours for data to populate on your Google Analytics dashboard but Google will start collecting information as soon as the tracking ID is added to your site.
3. Customize your dashboard
With the wealth of information available on Google Analytics, many business owners understandably find the platform a bit too overwhelming. Instead of trying to digest everything, we recommend prioritizing the data that will help you with your digital marketing plans. When you’re using your website as a key marketing tool, Google needs to know about your website’s success indicators (key performance indicators) to be able to serve the information you need.
If all that seems like a lot of information just after learning how to add a site to Google Analytics, you can go through the next section below to get a more in-depth look at how you can maximize this platform.
What can you do after you create a Google Analytics account?
Once you add the site to Google Analytics, you can go through the next few recommended steps to help make the most out of this tool including but not limited to:
- Granting user access to core team members
If you’re working with a team, or have outsourced these types of tasks to another expert, you can go through the following steps to give these key people access to your data without having to create a Google Analytics account:
- Navigate to the gear icon found in the lower left-hand corner to access the Admin dashboard
- In the first column, click on the User Management button, and then click Add new users
- When prompted, enter the email addresses of the team members for their Google account
- Calibrate the permissions that you need to grant them, and click Add
Your teammates should be able to receive an email notification once their access has been granted but confirm with them regardless.
- Linking ads with Google Analytics
When you add Google Analytics to Strikingly, you’ll be able to better understand how your customer interacts with your website. According to Google, when your business uses Google Ads that are linked to your Analytics account, you’ll be able to, and quote, “see the full customer cycle, from how they interact with your marketer (e.g. seeing ad impressions, clicking ads) to how they finally complete the goals you’ve set for them on your site (e.g. making m=purchases, consuming content), etc.”.
To set up this link, follow the steps below:
- Navigate to the gear icon found in the lower left-hand corner to access the Admin dashboard
- In the “Property” column, click on Google Ads Linking and click on New Link Group
- Choose the Google Ads accounts you want to link with Google Analytics, and click Continue
- Check if the linking is on for each property you want to see data from Google Ads, and then click Link Accounts
This way, you’ll be seeing how your marketers and their ad campaigns are performing - whether they need improvement, are meeting key performance indicators, or have become ROIs.
- Setting up your views
By default, Google Analytics typically gives an unfiltered view of each website you’ve added to your account. You can go a step further add a few filters to help ensure your data’s integrity by filtering out the numbers of how frequently you or your staff visits your website, and filter out activities coming from specific IP addresses.
If you want a more streamlined view of your site’s performance, you can also create several filters to target different market segments. For instance, if you’re running a local business, you probably want to get more in-depth data on the traffic that is coming from within your city or the country where you’re located by filtering the traffic information by country or location. If you want to see how your site searchability is doing, you can get a view that helps you see only your organic search traffic or conversions from your target market. You can even see how your social media contributes to your traffic.
To set up these kinds of views and filters:
- Click on the gear on the lower left-hand corner of the Admin dashboard and navigate to the “View” column
- Click Create new view and select Web site or App and enter a name for the view it’s filtering for
- Choose the appropriate reporting Time Zone, and then click Create View
Remember to create broader views since these can be filtered and edited through your settings.
When you’ve learned how to add a site to Google Analytics and how to use it, you’ll be opening your website and your business to a world of information that will follow the times as your market and your brand change over time. Strikingly has optimized its platform for a seamless linking experience to Google Analytics. Read up on the updates we’ve been making and don’t hesitate to contact our 24/7 customer support team should you need any further assistance.
