As a busy Personal Trainer, the last thing you need is to waste your time with a marketing activity that is not working. At first, Google Analytics can seem complicated, but the dynamic platform can help you understand and track how your customers interact with your website.

This personal trainers beginners guide to Google Analytics will show you the basics to help you get set up and how to start looking at your first reports.

What do I need to use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics reports on all users' interactions within your Personal Trainer website. You may think you will need to know how to code to implement analytics on your website. But the majority of website builders will do this for you.

The website's owner needs to integrate the Google Analytics code on the website. The Google Analytics code is a piece of JavaScript that gets incorporated into your website's code. This code will speak to your analytics account when a customer interacts with your website. You will be able to look at and analyze this data.

Google makes it super simple to integrate this code into your website. For example, if you have a website that has been built with WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix, integration with Google Analytics is usually built into the software. First, you need to add your unique Google Analytics account ID, which will then start sending data between your site and GA.

If, by chance, you need to add the code yourself, then follow this Google guide for help

Getting oriented in Google Analytics

The image below shows a snapshot of the default landing page for Google Analytics. As you can see, the analytics account opens up in the master view by default. You can change this by changing your selection in the top left-hand corner.

You will want to play around with this area, as this is how you interact with all data within Google Analytics. It is split up into four main zones:

Audience

The audience section is where all of your customer information is stored. You will be able to look at the age group of your website visitors, their interests, and the technology they use to view your website. Here is the complete list of what you can see:

• Demographics

• Interests

• Location

• Behavior

• Technology

• Mobile

We like using the "Interest" report to see what In-market segments and Affinity categories our audience falls into, to help create content, and to understand where our audience is consuming content. This report can also help you if you want to target people with a Google Ads campaign.

Acquisition

The Acquisition tab lets you understand where your customers come from before visiting your website. This area is a great place to see the performance of any paid campaigns, check out how your SEO is performing, and also see the impact social media has on your website data. For example, if you notice a specific publisher or website sending customers to your website, you could use the information to create a partnership. As a next step, you can also link your Google Search Console and Ads accounts to sync all your data into one place, helping you make more data-led decisions.

Behavior

The behavior section allows you to look into the performance of the content on your site. For example, you can look at the number of page-views your fitness product page has received, how long people are looking at your contact us page, and even look at the value of each page.

Conversions

The conversion data is the most important set of reports for most businesses. First, you will find out how many conversions your social, organic, and paid campaigns have received. Then, within the admin section, tell Google what conversions you want to track. For example, the created goal could be someone landing on your product page or purchasing a fitness package or product from you.

The great thing about this is that UTM tracking links on your marketing activity lets you track which channel brings in conversions.

Google Analytics Glossary

To understand the basics and get you up and running with Google Analytics, we have put together some keywords you will need to know before looking at your website data.

Date Range

This is in the top right-hand corner and allows you to change the date range, analyze a specific time range, or compare two time ranges to compare performance.

Segments

Google will always show you all of the data arriving at your website. However, if you want to analyze all data from social channels, for example, you must set up a segment that allows you to view the data from one source or channel.

Metrics & Dimensions

Every report in Google Analytics contains metrics and dimensions. They help you understand information about your visitor (Dimension) and user value (metric). For example, this could help you understand the amount of traffic you get from a specific city.

Google Analytics can seem overcomplicated and out of reach for most Personal Trainers. However, this post will help you understand how to set up your account, how Google gets all of its information, and where you can find the data to study and understand the story it tells you.