​Google's website analytics platform provides marketers with greater insights into their online customers' behaviors.

​Website analytics allow business owners to understand their internet audiences’ motivations and behaviors. The web has expanded into a landscape ripe with juicy lead-gen opportunities that impact brands’ bottom lines directly. Without a clearer picture of online consumers and their demands, marketers will continuously miss the mark when targeting custom content at certain users.

To perfect audience targeting initiatives, brands use content analytics services, and Google Analytics oftener garners much of the attention from internet marketing professionals. Google improves its reporting functions and features almost regularly, providing brands with new opportunities to understand web users and how they engage with branded content online. However, the search engine’s Universal Analytics beta release suggested that professionals would soon be able to connect online and offline data to track new and existing customers’ behaviors at a greater scale. Since October 2012, a few companies have used Universal Analytics with great success, and now the search engine will introduce the option to every Google Analytics customer.

Google Analytics Product Manager JiaJing Wang highlighted the major benefits of Universal Analytics in a recent blog post. Features include:

– Users can understand how customers engage with businesses across many devices.

– Marketers will gain new insights into mobile-app performance.

– Brands can evaluate offline and online interactions to improve lead generation and ROI.

– Business owners experience improved latency on their sites by reducing client-side demands.

Google also included a testimonial from Rojeh Avanesian, VP of marketing at PriceGrabber.com. He noted:

“At PriceGrabber, we know it’s important to understand consumer shopping behavior so we can provide a more customized experience to our users. Google’s Universal Analytics will solve this problem for us and many sites that are facing this challenge and help us serve our users better by providing them with more relevant content and shopping results…”

Marketers already using Google Analytics can switch to the Universal setting by creating a new web property in their accounts. When a new web property has been established, select the Universal Analytics column to get the new analytics.js code snippet, and then implement this into the website’s architecture.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.