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This is the third article in what has become my ‘Google Analytics for Beginners’ series. Don’t worry if you didn’t read the previous parts — each part stands alone and you don’t need any additional knowledge to follow this one.
If you are interested in the other parts of the series, I’ll leave them here:
A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Reports in Google Analytics
This article is a beginner-friendly introduction to Google Analytics.
In the article, I explain how to find your way around Google Analytics, how to find all of the reports, and introduce the most important reports and metrics to monitor with Google Analytics.
A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Reports in Google Analytics
How to Navigate and Understand the Most Important Reports in Google Analytics
How to Set Up and Track Goals in Google Analytics
This article explains how to set up ‘goals’ in Google Analytics. Goals are actions that you want a visitor to take on your site like submitting a form or visiting a particular page.
I also show you how to find and interpret your reports on goal conversions in Google Analytics.
How to Set Up and Track Goals in Google Analytics
Understanding if your marketing and content is driving the user behavior that you want
Part 1: Introduction
Now that the backstory is out of the way, we can dive into the meat and potatoes of this article.
To understand how well your marketing is working, you need to understand where your traffic is coming from.
That means more than understanding what website your traffic is coming from. You need more granular information about exactly what post or link visitors are clicking to arrive at your site.
This data is essential for optimizing your marketing campaigns and content. In other words, this is information is essential for growing your website and possibly your business.
Google Analytics does its best to track your visitor acquisition by default but the default method isn’t perfect. Very often, you see that you have acquired a visitor from an (other) traffic source. This means that Google Analytics isn’t sure exactly how this visitor ended up on your site.
(other) traffic sources in Google Analytics Acquisition Overview report
Google Analytics also can’t provide granular information by default. For example, Google Analytics can tell me that 50% of my traffic is coming from Facebook but it can’t tell me exactly what post on Facebook people are clicking on.
The good news is that there is a solution available within Google Analytics. The solution is to use custom URLs to track your campaigns’ performance.
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