Data is a hugely valuable part of running a business and gaining insights into your target demographics and how they behave will serve you incredibly well over the years, allowing you to identify areas of your brand that are ripe for improvement, which areas to capitalise on, which products to prioritise and so on.
But how do you go about collecting this data and how can you extrapolate the most salient points in order to facilitate business growth?
With Google Analytics, of course! We’re very lucky to live in the 21st century, with amazingly innovative technology right at our fingertips – and, as such, it makes excellent business sense to leverage this to its full advantage, using all the tools and resources we have such easy access to.
Using the Google Analytics tools (which, even more excitingly, are freely available!), you can gain in-depth understanding of the customer journey and deliver improvements on your marketing returns on investment, seeing how people interact on your sites and apps so you can anticipate what they’re going to do in the future.
What is Google Analytics 4?
The latest version of Google Analytics is, you’ve guessed it, Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
The new iteration has been designed to provide users with a more comprehensive understanding of customer behaviour across their various platforms, making use of machine learning to provide further insights into the likes of which pages are being visited, what kind of content is being engaged with, what actions people are taking on your site and so on.
The main difference between GA4 and previous versions of the analytics tool is that GA4 puts individual user interactions at its heart, which means you can enjoy a more comprehensive understanding of how people are engaging with your digital platforms.
This, in turn, will help you identify trends and patterns more effectively that you can use to help inform and develop your digital marketing strategies, while prioritising privacy for data collection.
Making the transition to GA4 will be necessary if you want to carry on enjoying continuity in reporting, as from July 1st this year Universal Analytics will be replaced by the new service as the next-generation measurement solution for business.
After July 1st, you will still be able to access historical data in Universal Analytics GA3, but making the switch sooner rather than later is advisable.
How will GA4 affect SEO?
If you want to be visible online and drive traffic to your site in today’s incredibly competitive digital marketplace, then you’ve got to make sure that your digital marketing is on point… and the best way to go about this is to enlist the services of SEO experts so they can do all the necessary tech wizardry required to get you to the top of organic search.
By making strategic use of GA4, you’ll be able to collate even more useful data about the behaviour of your customers and website visitors so you can make your SEO campaigns even more targeted, driving even more custom your way.
There are all sorts of tools and resources you can use via GA4 that will help improve your SEO results and your rankings in search and delivering all sorts of value-added benefits, such as:
Improving the user experience
The user experience is becoming increasingly important for search and because GA4’s approach to proceedings puts the user at the heart of it all, you can utilise it to great effect and improve the user experience of your website by using it to identify areas ripe for improvement. This, in turn, will help drive you up the rankings.
Link building
One of the most essential parts of any SEO campaign is link building – but it can be difficult to increase the number of external links and to make sure that they’re sufficiently high quality to give your site a boost.
But you can use GA4 to analyse the traffic and conversions you get from external links to find your most popular pages, so you can then make changes as necessary to your link building efforts to zero in on those external sites that are proving particularly useful for your own site.
And not only that but you can also use GA4 to help you with your internal linking strategies, as well, so you can really capitalise on those pages that are working the hardest for your site.
Understanding user interactions
You can use GA4 to excellent effect to see how users are interacting with your website, monitoring what pages they’re visiting the most, the kind of content that’s most engaging and what actions they’re taking while on the site. This will then allow you to see which parts of the site you need to develop and what changes would serve you most effectively.
Do you want to find out more about GA4 and how it can be leveraged to help your digital marketing campaigns? Get in touch with UK SEO agency Ad Rank One today to see how we can help.