Google. Love it or hate it, your business depends on it. If you aren’t as familiar as you should be with Google Analytics, it’s time to change that. 

How do you use Google Analytics? It provides data to give insight into your marketing efforts, including the performance of your website(s). It can also guide your strategy when you are planning a new campaign, an update to your website and other changes.

But, if you aren’t a pro with Google Analytics, you may be inadvertently making mistakes. Such mistakes may include:

• Failure to add Google Analytics tracking codes to your web pages. You can’t track data if this isn’t done. Be sure to use the latest tracking code.
• Instead of trying to manipulate website code when you’re not sure what you’re doing, use Google Tag Manager to ensure fast and easy code edits.
• The tracking script and ID only needs to be on a page once. Avoid double tracking by checking that you only have these once on each page.
• Bots and spiders will overestimate your numbers if you don’t exclude them. You only want human interactions when assessing your site’s performance.

So what should you do with Google Analytics? Here are some tips:

• Stay on top of the bounce rate. If people are leaving your site almost as soon as they access it, figure out why and correct the problem.
• Focus on organic traffic. Organic traffic will give you more accurate insights into your key audience which can help you to make tweaks and improvements geared to them.
• Tools and plug-ins can be useful to help with filtering data.