June 2, 2016 •Brennan Walker
Today kicks off our 9 part Google Analytics series with DemandJump Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Shawn Schwegman.
According to an article from Marketing Land, anywhere from 30-50 million websites use Google Analytics.¹ The same article sites that Google Analytics could be used on 10X more websites than the next most popular analytics option.¹
W3Techs, a website that provides information about the usage of various types of technologies on the web, reports that Google Analytics is used by internet giants like Youtube, Pinterest, Reddit, Alibaba, and The Guardian, to name just a few.
Of the 10 million websites monitored by W3Techs, 54.3% are using Google Analytics as of May 2016. 34.5% of those sites aren’t using any traffic analysis tools, meaning that Google Analytics captures 82.9% of the entire market.²
Full chart available at W3Techs.com
Undoubtedly, this is a powerful tool for marketers to leverage. But why is it that so many websites aren’t utilizing it to the fullest potential?
In this series, Shawn will cover best practices, and offer up some insightful tips to help marketers use this free tool to deliver incredibly valuable web analytics.
He’ll highlight what people get right and what they are get wrong. “Anyone in online marketing has to track and measure everything you do,” Shawn says. “That has to be part of your planning DNA.”
If Google Analytics isn’t properly integrated with your strategy, it’s very difficult to understand what worked and what didn’t. It’s more than just creating an account and inserting the code. In order to get deeper than traffic level data, marketers need to utilize goals, filters, attribution modeling, and more.
With even the lowest estimates predicting that Google Analytics is implemented on over 30 million websites, it’s hard to believe that the majority of people fail to do anything except insert the scripts on their pages.
Leveraging Google Analytics to its fullest potential can be the difference between traffic level data, and really insightful data that can help change the game in marketing.
Check out the video posted above, and stay tuned every Thursday for more of this series from Shawn.
Other helpful resources
Google Analytics Academy
Kissmetrics: A Beginners Guide to Google Analytics 5
More videos from Shawn
Citations
¹McGee, M. (2015, November 12). As Google Analytics Turns 10, We Ask: How Many Websites Use It? Retrieved May 24, 2016, from http://marketingland.com/as-google-analytics-turns-10-we-ask-how-many-websites-use-it-151892
²W3Techs. (2016, May 24). Usage of Traffic Analysis Tools for Websites. Retrieved May 24, 2016, from https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/traffic_analysis/all
