Google Analytics: The Perfect Tool For Understanding How Users Engage Your Site
February 16, 2016
Google Analytics: The Perfect Tool For Understanding How Users Engage Your Site
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Google Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics
Our department uses Google Analytics (GA) to better understand what types of content, people, and practices are most important to clients and potential clients. We use it to see which attorneys at our firm have the richest SEO, what practice groups are found during searches, what blog content is being read and what is being ignored. GA gives us a wonderful breakdown of what content on our site is being read, what is not, how long users are engaged with the content, and how users are finding and accessing our content.
- It effectively identifies what pages on your site are generating your web traffic.
- It does a good job of telling you how these users arrived on your site (i.e. search, direct, social media, etc.).
- It exports data really well, so you can support and defend your communications and marketing strategies.
- I was bummed that they moved some of the functions (keyword data, etc.) over to Google Webmaster tools. (On the bright side, this has prompted me to become more familiar with Google Search Console.)
- A lot of functions are right there. But it's hard to tell which functions are most important or what they offer.
- Perhaps this is related to number 2, but the UX is fairly intimidating. All of these tools and subsets of tools are right in front of you, and it's difficult to understand what ones are the most important. A simpler, streamlined format might be a better approach.
- In my previous job (managing editor of a digital media site), GA helped me understand what types of content drove mass audience. You knew exactly what types of content was engaging users and where they were coming from. That type of information is crucial to strategy building.
- In my current position (communications and marketing for a corporate law firm), the data we get from GA is helping us streamline our web navigation, develop our legal blog strategy, and better understand what pages are the most important ones on our site.
- Direct ROI is easier to measure on item 1 than on item 2. But I will say I would feel rather blind in either role if I did not have Google Analytics to help me better understand how users, clients, and potential clients are interacting with our web content.
A vendor that I had once worked with, Siteimprove, had an analytics tool that was very similar to GA. I used it a few times, but it didn't seem better to me than GA --which I already knew -- so I didn't see a need to learn a different tool.