Google analytics is a digital analytics tool which has a feature-rich interface along with interesting visualizations to simplify the statistics. It is also the most popular tool used for tracking digital traffic as it uncovers an incredible amount of insights for enhancing your marketing strategies in all possible ways. It’s no surprise that 73 million website owners prefer Google Analytics over other analytics tools (Source: W3Techs). If you are already hooked on to Google Analytics, then you must be spending a fair amount of time in exploring some of the key sections of the tool: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. Some of these sections hold a load of information that can be extremely beneficial for marketers.
Here are some ways you can leverage the tool for optimizing your digital marketing effectiveness:
1. Dive deep into the Audience Section for analyzing your visitors
This section provides an outstanding breakdown of the visitors coming to your website. It gives a deep-dive analysis of audience demographics, gender, interests, geographies, behavior, technology, mobile usage, and more. You can use the benchmarking feature of the tool and even analyze user flow on your website. This section will give you a clear picture of who your website visitors are. What are they like? Where are they from? What are their preferences? How do they behave on the site? Which channel do they use to access your site? Which browsers do they use? All this data can act as a goldmine for marketers who are always looking for ways to make their content and design more suitable and useful for the target audience. The first step for any successful marketing strategy is to understand the customers better and this section helps you do just that. Based on the insights achieved, marketers can devise targeted strategies.
2. Take a peek into the Acquisition Section to analyze channels
Acquisition section gives detailed information about how people arrive at your website. This will help you frame strategies in that arena. “All traffic” tab will give you what you need to know about the visitors. This will show you how they land on your website. It could either be directly by typing the URL or through organic search, paid search, social media network, blogs, referral links, paid advertisements, and so on. It gives details about the channels, tree maps, sources, referrals and campaigns that the website is heading through. Focusing on this section will help you take smarter marketing decisions as you would be able to allocate marketing budgets based on the channel performance in order to increase ROI.
From a marketing perspective, here’s how you can use the Acquisition data to increase effectiveness:
- Organic search – Visitors who search using keywords reach your website through organic search from the search engine results page. If you have more organic search visitors it means you’re your marketing efforts are bearing results. Make your SEO strategies strong and utilize H1 and H2 tags effectively.
- Paid search – These are the visitors who come through inorganic/paid search or through advertisements that are appearing on the SERP. Optimize by concentrating of selecting the right keywords to increase traffic.
- Referral – Referrals indicate that a lot of people are talking about you. Contributing content to guest blogs or channels is the best way to drive traffic here.
- Social media – Being active on social media and increasing the frequency as well as relevancy of your posts will undoubtedly drive traffic.
- Email – These are the visitors who come to your website through email campaigns. Start with more engaging templates and more targeted as well as personalized content to increase conversions.
3. Study the Behavior Section to understand what your visitors do on your site
Behavior section helps you understand how people are using your website. You can analyze how long the visitors stay on your website and what exactly do they do on the website. Figure out what information they are looking for in the website. By making use of the content drill down feature you can understand what works and what doesn’t work. Which landing pages are performing better? What is the conversion path that people are following? Conversions can be easily analyzed through Google Analytics, and we can follow each step in the process from landing till conversion. These insights can be used to optimize the conversion funnel – find out where the users are dropping off and build corrective strategies to improve conversion rate.
4. Tread ahead with some testing and experimentation
With Google Analytics, you can set experiments for various elements on your pages. Google Website Optimizer helps with conversion rate testing. You can run tests for headlines, call to actions, logos, buttons, sizes and positions of images, page layouts, related products, content, and so on. Google Website Optimizer allows you to conduct A/B as well as Multivariate testing. The best way to start with testing is to analyze the conversion funnel and finding the weak link, then think of how that specific section or page can be optimized. Test the changes against the older version and revisit the conversion rate to find out what works better. Remember that customer preferences keep changing, so keep testing regularly to stay ahead in the race.
Optimize entire digital presence with Google Analytics
To make things integrated and simpler, Google has launched the cloud marketing analytics solution called Google Analytics 360 Suite. This suite contains 6 tools put together in a single platform: Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize, Audience Center, Attribution and Data Studio. This is an integrated solution for marketers where they can make use of all Google Analytics related capabilities through a single tool.
Google Analytics is a one-stop solution for basic analytics needs of any digital forefront and it can play a huge role in optimizing marketing strategies. Marketing budgets are always tight and to maximize profitability you must implement strategies straight to the point. Marketers indeed have a tough time when they need to measure everything, but it’s a blessing in disguise.