Properly implemented, analytics tell the story of your marketing journey. Analytics provide insight into who your clientele is, how they got there, what they are interested in, who converted and who left without converting. Analytics measure marketing success, offer guidance for change and suggestions for exploration.
Even with proper installation, we find that many companies are not fully utilizing the data provided to help direct marketing decisions to pursue new opportunities, strengthen their current efforts based on available data or track goals and events.
How Analytics Can Help Your Business
Learn About Your Audience
The audience section of Google Analytics is perhaps the data set most familiar to business owners because of the base traffic, bounce rate, time on site and page view data. But we find that the audience category is often underutilized by most website owners. The audience category provides robust data that can help with online and offline marketing efforts.
For example, under the demographics sub-tab, a business owner can gain insight into the age, gender and general interest of the visitors to their website. The Geo sub-tab provides data on which country, states and even cities the traffic is coming from.
Considering the value of offering a website in a second language? The language sub-tab can help guide your decision. You can also learn which devices your audience uses the most to access your website, which supports demographic data and serves as a reminder to ensure your website is user-friendly on these devices.
Benchmark data, if enabled, shows how your website performs compared to others in your vertical. The user flow sub-tab shows how people interact with your website and can help identify areas for improvement or hidden problems you may not have realized.
How Did They Get Here?
Acquisition data shows how each marketing channel is performing. Categories include organic search , paid search, direct, referral and social traffic. A top level drill down into these categories provides insight into top performing keywords and paid ads. Additionally, you’ll find popular landing pages, top referring websites, and information on how your social media channels are performing. When tied in with your Search Console account, more robust keyword and landing page data are available.
Did They Convert?
As the name implies, conversions data is where we measure how traffic to the website takes the desired actions we expect. From here we can track how many people clicked on a lead form, as well as how many people finished the process and submitted the form with goal tracking. Do you have a white paper you want people to download or a video you want them to watch? With event tracking, you can see how many people interacted with your website in these ways. Sell items online? Ecommerce tracking enables you to track product and sales performance and associate them with revenue numbers. By using attribution modeling, you can give weight to the various marketing channels that a consumer used as they moved down the funnel toward a purchase. This helps evaluate the effectiveness of each of these channels and can guide changes to future marketing efforts.
What Does Your Data Say?
Lately, it seems like we get more and more calls for Google Analytics help. The call usually includes a phrase like this – “the numbers seem off”. After we look under the hood, we typically find installation issues that are either causing data to be shared cross-platform, dumped into the wrong buckets or not being fully captured. Not to mention Google Tag manager missing or not installed in the proper location and a lack of basic filters.
Having someone on your team who thoroughly understands Google Analytics is a must in today’s digital marketing landscape to help you get the most out of your advertising dollars.