Leveraging Free Google Analytics Tools To Make Data-Driven Decisions for Your Business

In the realm of digital marketing, data remains the lifeblood of business success. Businesses, especially those focused on inbound marketing, rely on data to gain a competitive edge.

In fact, around 40 million websites today use Google Analytics to gather insightful information to bolster their SEO strategies. A data-driven approach helps digital marketers identify SEO gaps that need to be filled for increased organic visibility and traffic.

This article delves into the basic information you should know about Google Analytics, including the introduction of Google Analytics 4, free Google Analytics tools you need to start using, and how the platform can help scale businesses.

The Introduction of Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is the latest version of Google’s Universal Analytics tool, which started operating on July 1, 2023. Now, Google requires website owners and SEO experts must switch to Google Analytics 4 to maintain their websites’ measurements. However, the company gave a one-time data processing extension (up to July 1, 2024) to 360 Universal Analytics properties.

GA4 helps track website and apps’ activities to provide insightful statistics for Search Engine Optimization. It comes with different data analytical tools that help examine raw datasets for digital marketers to make strategic marketing approaches. GA4 makes business management more efficient and permissive and can help scale online brands if deployed effectively.

Some of the Cool Features From Google Analytic 4

• Machine learning to offer smarter insights: GA4 uses machine learning to automatically collect structured event data to give you intelligent marketing information about your audience. This includes present customer trends to help you predict the future behavior of your customers.
• Cross-platform tracking: GA4 makes it easy to track users across the web and app in one property. This lets you monitor your customer’s journey from acquisition to engagement to retention. It usually happens through unique user IDs assigned when logging into your app or website. The data you get will give you a better understanding of the cross-platform experience of your users.
• GA4 gives you more control: With GA4, marketers can customize the dashboard, allowing them to see the reports that matter the most to their business. Through Google Data Studio, GA4 lets you create custom visualization of the data you collect. Moreover, based on trigger events on their websites or applications, marketers can create custom segments to help them track customer interactions more accurately.
• Better Google Ads integration: GA4 has better Google Ads integration than its predecessor. It allows marketers to track their customers back to their first ad engagement. GA4 properties can be linked to individual Google Ads accounts, giving you a holistic view of your customers’ experience.

How the Free Google Analytics Tools Help Scale a Business

Essentially, Google Analytics tools are meant to help you get a better grasp of your website to make data-driven decisions. Here is how:

1.    Understand User Behavior

Without user behavior, optimizing your website’s performance would be difficult. With Google Analytics, you can understand how visitors interact with your website to determine which pages get more traction and engagement. In this case, the behavioral metrics you need to focus on are:

• Bounce rate
• Page views and unique page views
• pages/sessions
• Top pages and their performance
• Behavior flows
• Site search

2.    Run Targeted Campaigns

Using the information gathered by Google Analytics, you can run campaigns targeted to specific demographics. For example, you may notice that a specific group of users contacts your business via your website more often than others. In that case, you can run more targeted campaigns for that audience by transferring them to a Google Ads account or updating the messaging around the conversion point to appeal to that specific audience.

3.    Improved ROI

The best part of using google analytics is that it’s free. It will let you measure trends and provide data to help you allocate the necessary funding to different areas of your business to realize the best return on investment possible. With Google Analytics 4, you can measure both website and app data to give you a more comprehensive view of your marketing efforts.

List of the Google Analytics Tools You Should Start Using Today

Insightful data is crucial in understanding the performance of your business to improve decision-making for more growth. These tools help perform the following types of Data Analytics: Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive, and Perspective analytics. The best tools today are:

1.    Data Import

Usually, a business system will have its own data store, which exists separately and is not uniform or affected by data in other information silos. In that case, you need to combine data from your online data gathered by Analytics (e.g., CMS or CRM systems) with data from offline business systems to have a smooth business operation.

Data Import will let you do exactly that and even do data analysis for you.

The types of data you can import are Hit-data, Extended-data, and Summary-data imports.

2.    Google Analytics URL Builder

As you run Ad Campaigns, it’s imperative that you track how each campaign is performing to make informed decisionsIn that case, Google Analytics URL Builders help you track your Ad campaigns through URLs, such that when someone visits your website, you will be able to capture the data source from which the traffic came from. Google Analytics URL Builders let you add automatic reporting Tools to track the URL’s progress.

3.    Looker

Looker is a modern business intelligence platform capable of analyzing, visualizing, and sharing real-time Business Analytics. It lets you build data-powered applications (customizable informative reports and dashboards), helping you make data-driven decisions. The cloud-based platform can accelerate data-finding processes using SQL instead of traditional data extraction methods.

Its features are;

• Looker for Business intelligence
• Looker for embedded analytics and applications
• Looker studio
• Lokker studio pro
• Looker Modeler
• Looker for Google Cloud Console

4.    Google Tag Manager (GMT)

You don’t have to be a programmer to use Google Tag Manager because the free tool lets you install and track website tags with no code. It’ll save you time when adding and editing tags, triggers, and variables. It also helps troubleshoot tag configuration errors and lets you instantly modify and deploy tags on a website from a web-based interface. Upgrading to the premium version, Tag Manager 360, you can access more features, including approvals and commenting capabilities.

5.    Google Ads

Google Ads offers an online advertising platform for businesses to showcase their Ads to the right audiences. Its functioning is based on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where advertisers bid for specific keywords on Google.

With this tool, you can target the right audience based on demographics, location, devices, and frequency.

It lets you see the action taken by visitors and allows you to manage several campaigns using a single account.

6.    Google Search Console

Website owners and SEO professionals rely on Google Search Console to maintain, monitor, and optimize websites. This free tool gathers valuable data insights to help you understand the most popular pages on your website. This includes essential KPIs such as click-through rate, impressions, and average position on search engine results to optimize your website accordingly. For instance, using this tool, you can discover keywords with low or high click-through rates to help you understand visitors’ intent. This way, you can optimize your content better.

7.    Google Optimize

With Google Optimize, you can test the performance of your website pages against your specific objectives to know the areas that require improvement. The tool gathers data from Google Analytics to help you increase conversions and visitor satisfaction. The experiments you can run using Google Optimize include A/B tests, redirect tests, server-side testing, and multivariate tests (MTV).

Conclusion

Google Analytics 4 is among the essential tools you ought to be using if you want to make data-driven decisions and scale your business to greater heights. With improved accuracy, enhanced cross-platform tracking, and improved data privacy, GA4 makes it more efficient to gather the information you need to bolster your SEO efforts.

If you don’t know how to get started or are too preoccupied, simply contact Outreach Bee to get the ball rolling!

About Author: Brian is a seasoned and tech-savvy content writer with a passion for creating compelling and captivating content around digital marketing and iGaming realms. He is a regular contributor at Outreach Bee, and when he’s not busy crafting content, he enjoys exploring new topics and staying updated with the latest trends in the ever-evolving world of content creation. His curiosity and passion for learning contribute to his ability to produce fresh, factual, and engaging content consistently.