Google Analytics is one of those tools that every marketer or website owner has used at least once. It is such a versatile tool that it can be leveraged equally well for small, simple website as well as large, complex ones. Google Analytics will start generating useful insights and give out tracking details as soon as you implement it, but what about going a level deeper. What are some of the things that you can do with Google Analytics to get more out of it?
Here are some ideas on how you can make optimum use of Google Analytics:
Track Multiple Goals together
Website owners are usually stuck on the traffic numbers, but instead, they should be focusing more on conversions. To track conversions, you must set-up Goals on Google Analytics. By setting up Goals, users can track the number of visitors who took the step they wanted them to take; for instance, the number of people who saw the “thank you” page after submitting a form. This is an example of setting a simple Goal. But what do you do when you have multiple ways for a visitor to complete a goal and you wish to track the effectiveness of those ways? You can create separate goals for each specific task but ultimately you would wish to see the numbers under the same goal. For this, you can utilize “Regular Expression” feature of Google Analytics under “Goal Details” while you are setting up the goal.
Understand Goal Performance with Funnel Visualization
Your visitors go through complex paths on your website before reaching the goals that you’ve set. By analyzing the customer journey on your website you can clearly identify the places where visitors abandoned your website or lost the path they were pursuing and moved on to something else, or did they have to go to multiple pages back-and-forth to get the necessary information, and so on. Under the Goals > Conversions > Flow Visualization section of Google Analytics, you can find “Funnel Visualization”. Funnel Visualization gives a clear picture of how your goals are performing and places where you need to optimize your site. You can also study goal conversions based on Acquisition, Advertising, Behavior, Custom Variables, Social, and Users.
Do In-Page Analytics
Usually, website owners conduct analytics for the website as a whole. In-page analytics is a great feature that can be used to understand exactly what your users did while they were on a particular page. This gives deeper insights into visitor behavior and how you can optimize engagement. In-Page Analytics feature comes under “Behavior” section of Google Analytics. It visually displays the most popular links and features of the specific pages that you are studying. It also allows you to experience how much of your page a visitor sees based on the browsers they are using. You can study each page of your site and the kind of engagement and interest it generates with ease.
Take Advantage of Remarketing Lists
Many visitors come to your site but do not convert. Remarketing is a great technique to reach back to those who showed interest initially but fell out. Remarketing gives you a second shot at the same audience without having to invest in getting new traffic. If you already have a Google AdWords account, then you can use the Remarketing feature that comes under the Property column. With the use of this feature, you can build remarketing lists that can be used for future marketing campaigns.
Make the best use of Segmentation
Segmenting is one of the most important features that every digital marketer is looking for. Overall traffic numbers do not paint a clear picture of kind of insights that are necessary for creating targeted digital marketing campaigns. Google Analytics enables the users to create, track, analyze and compare multiple segments. The “Add Segment” feature comes under Audience Overview section of Google Analytics. The tool already gives you an option to select from a list of segments that most people use. You can select as many as you like, for instance, you can opt to segment your visitors by traffic sources, mobile traffic, multiple-session visitors, visitors who made a purchase, and so on. Apart from picking from the list provided by Google Analytics, you can also create very specific custom segments of your own.
Get more Insights with useful Add-ons
Google Analytics is a flexible tool that enables the use of add-ons so that you can enrich your experience of using the tool, make several tasks easier, save time, and get the value and insights you want to achieve. For instance, you can use add-ons such as Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics Debugger, Wordsmith for Marketing, Table Booster, Campaign URL Builder, Analytics Edge, Live Site Search Visualization, and much more.
Get unified view of your Visitors with Data Collection and Management
Google Analytics enables integration of the data from multiple external sources so that you can get the analytical insights with a single login, instead of parsing through all those tools one by one. It also makes data comparison and correlation among tools much easier. It enables you to integrate disparate data sources so that you can get all the information and insights in one place.