With the growing competition, every business wants to be on the top pages of Google. Therefore, they spend tons of bucks every month or every year to sustain the current rankings. Now, we all want instant results, which is practically not feasible. However, with the Google Analytics tool, you can check how your current plans are working.

For those who are new to this, Google Analytics is a free tool, where you can check the online traffic of your website. Now, you must own a Google account to use it, of course. However, installing the tool on your website and starting to track the traffic can be a little troublesome. So, in this article, we will discuss how to use this incredible service from Google.

Step 1: Setting up the account

As mentioned before, you need to own a Google account to use this tool. So, once you sort that out, you are ready to use Google Analytics. Now, after you wrap up the initial signing procedure, Google will ask for the URL. Next, you need to generate a Tracking ID, which will provide all the information back to you. Then, follow the steps, and it should let you generate the ID.

The next step involves installing the tool on your website. Now, suppose your site is running on any popular CMS like Wordpress, Magento, or Drupal, then the process is pretty straightforward. You need to download the dedicated Google Analytics plugin or addon and paste the Tracking ID that you have generated earlier.

Now, in case you are using a custom-built site, you need to generate a Java Snippet and copy-paste that onto your website manually. You will get the snippet from the Google Analytics account. However, in the case of custom websites, you can also install the tool from the hosting server you are using, such as GoDaddy, Bigrock, or Hostgator. Most of those services have built-in support to integrate the service.

Step 2: Understanding account navigation

Now, a lot many digital marketers often get confused with the options with the navigation. So, the first thing you should do is go to the 'Reporting' option, which is usually at the top menu. Over there, you will find the "Audience Overview" option, which is the first place you should look for.

Once you are onto the "Audience Overview" option, you can see many features that will give you the information about the audience that you have set for the campaign. You will get the Realtime report as well as reports related to the various events of your SEO campaigns.

Dashboard: To start with, you will get the 'Dashboard,' where you will get a summary of the status of the site's performance.

Shortcut: There is a dedicated 'Shortcut' option to create handy shortcuts of the same pages that you may need to access in the future.

Intelligence Event: The "Intelligence Event" option provides all the necessary info about your SEO campaigns, including featured alerts.

Realtime: Then comes the 'Realtime' option, which, as the name suggests, gives the Realtime status report of how many people are checking on your site. It also offers some other crucial stats as well.

Audience: The 'Audience' option gives a complete summary of how many people are visiting your website. Alongside that, it provides info on the location, age group, the device they are using to access your site.

Acquisition: Finally, the 'Acquisition' option gives a clear idea of how most of your audience visiting your site. How people know about your website and how the current strategies are working in the search engine. If you go to the "Overview" section, you will get another option, "Traffic." Upon clicking, you will get to see how many people are directly visiting your site and how many are following your organic content. Not only that, you will get to see the list of people visiting sites from social media as well via using referrals.

Step 3: Google Analytics in SEO Campaigns

The main reason for using Google Analytics is not to check out the current traffic status only, but also to use it on SEO campaigns. Now once we have discussed the steps to install this tool, let us dive deep to know how it can help in the SEO campaigns.

One of the most obvious questions whenever we create an SEO campaign is how much traffic or site visits we will get once we run it. Also, it is crucial to know how many visitors check the site via organic searches and how many using the paid campaigns. So, to understand how much traffic is generating from your non-paid activities, go to 'Acquisition' and check out 'Overview.' Then, we will suggest you check out the "Source/Medium" option to view the detailed report.

The next most important thing that we must figure out for your SEO campaigns is which are the keywords that you should select. As we know that keywords the most essential aspect of SEO; we should choose them wisely. So, Google Analytics can help you in figuring that out. It has an option called 'Queries' that can help to find the best-suited keywords for your campaign.

Google Analytics not only tracks the number of page views, but it also fetches critical information like the bounce rate. The tool will give you clear stats of whether your site has a good, average, or bad bounce rate. You can check for the Sessions as well, where you can determine and evaluate whether it went right or not.

At the same time, Google Analytics will help you to figure out where to put more effort while running an SEO campaign. So, if you check out the options under Search Engine Optimization, you will get the list of the best-performing pages of your site. You can check the number of Clicks and Impressions, as well as the Average Position of the pages in the search results. With a constant effort, you can push it to the top 3. Now, any expert will understand the report and combine all these factors into good effects and lift the overall status.

Google Analytics can be handy in building the ideal SEO campaigns using all the techniques mentioned above. You can design the entire campaign based on this tool. Go to Campaign Design and then Campaign Optimization to make needed editing if necessary.

The last thing that you should also consider checking is the performance of the keywords. After running the SEO campaign for a while, it is essential to check which keyword is the best working. You can check it on Google Analytics as well.

The Conclusion

It is integral for every website to be in the Google ranking. Now, this article will help you to know why you should use this tool. However, there are tons of other features that Google Analytics has that you should know as well. What we have figured out is optimizing the campaigns are mandatory to get the desired results. This makes Google Analytics a must-have for every digital marketing agency.