Google Analytics - a digital marketer’s best friend.
You’ve got a website? Yup...
You want people to buy from you or engage with your services? Yup…
Your website is a representation of your brand? Yup….
Websites are integral in raising and maintaining the profile of a brand…
But how well is your’s performing? Do you even know?
Google Analytics (“GA”) recently gave birth to a new baby, Google Analytics 4 (“GA4”), the next generation in web analytics. It promises to provide different kinds of reports from those delivered by the current GA.
Having sampled it on my own website, it’s still in the very early stages, so don’t rely on this new version yet, as the data is still a little sketchy.
Instead, if you already have the Universal version of GA, why not add the GA4 code to your website now (using the easy set-up wizard Google provides) beneath the current GA code that’s (hopefully) already hosted on your site. It’ll mean, as GA4 gets better in its reporting ability, you’ll have lots of rich, historic data from which to peruse. Once it’s more embedded, it will provide you with some real game-changing reports to help you pivot and scale your digital marketing effort.
On the subject of the Universal version of GA, when was the last time you logged in to yours?
If you have a website and have not yet created a GA account, the time is now. It’s super easy to create a GA account. All you need to do, to track all the good stuff happening on your site, is add a little code to every page header on your site. (If you have the same header on all pages, then you only need to add it to one page, usually your home one).
But what can Google Analytics tell me?
GA can display a multitude of data. Yes, it can sometimes feel a little overwhelming on how to navigate all the charts and tables, but this article should show you how to captain your data to better effect.
Know your visitors
So you’ve got a client database and maybe you’re lucky enough to own a CRM system (Client Relationship Management) which tells you how many customers you have, where they are from, what they do, and even what their dog is called. But how well do you know who is visiting your website?
Go to GA and click on Audience and it tells you how many visitors have visited your site over a date range; the Active Users section even tells you how many visitors are on your website right now. Drawdown into Audience and you can find out how many visitors visited your site over a date range, from which location and their possible demographic and web browser used.
But why does that matter?
Let’s say you had launched a Facebook or Google Ads campaign targeting the US for two weeks. You go to Google Analytics to check the success of your campaign and your Audience doesn’t show a peak in visits from the US. That is really important as it tells you that the campaign tanked, or you need to review it.
Find out where your web traffic is coming from
So you know you are getting hits from a lot of folk in South Africa and that’s great, but is that all organic searches or maybe that traffic is coming from other channels i.e. social, email, referral? Click on Acquisition and Google Analytics tells you how well each channel is driving visits to your site.
Organic
Organic refers to visitors who found your site using keywords. Unfortunately, Google has stopped displaying the keywords visitors are using to find your website. They say this is all to do with protecting the privacy of the searcher.
Paid Search
This refers to visitors who have arrived on your website from a Google Adwords or other paid search ad that you have placed on specific keywords.
Direct
Relates to visitors who type in your company name to Google to locate your website.
Referral
Visitors find your website by clicking on a link located on another website. It’s a good idea to try and get your website URL to feature on other websites. Maybe you have partners you work with? Why not add your logo with an embedded link to websites that supply services to you? Alternatively, why not start blogging and add links to your blog page or bio on your website. It all helps. To get better granularity on your referral and social link data, you can visit your Admin and edit/add names to the defaults on offer to give you even better insight into where the traffic is coming from.
Social
Whether you run adverts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, any traffic that comes from an Ad or post directed to your website, will display as a visit from a ‘social’ channel.
Other
Now, this metric is a goodie, it’s the one that picks up (if you’ve created campaign links) all the inbound traffic to your website, driven from email campaigns and the like. To make sure you are tracking your campaign activity, you should ensure you add a campaign URL to every campaign, using Google’s campaign URL link tool; URL builder.
The Google Campaign URL Builder - you so want to know about this…
Use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to track all your digital marketing campaign activity on GA. Every single element of a multi-faceted campaign can be tracked, right down to an individual advert! Click on the Campaign URL Builder link above to create your first campaign URL. The tool will ask you to complete the following fields:
Target URL
Where do you want your email button or social ad to point to?
Campaign ID
Give your campaign a name to be easily recognisable on the GA report/page.
Campaign source
What kind of campaign is it? A newsletter, Google Ad?
Campaign medium
What medium are you using for this campaign? For example, email, CPC, banner?
Campaign name
If it’s a specific campaign you wish to track i.e. home improvement campaign
Campaign term
This is useful to identify specific keywords
Campaign content
This is useful to help you differentiate adverts, for example, you have three different Facebook ads, all promoting your home improvement campaign, campaign content allows you to distinguish among each specific advert/email etc.
Complete the above fields and the Campaign URL campaign builder will create a unique campaign URL. Add it to your email, Facebook Ad, Google Ad to get a true reflection on the success of your campaign.
What’s hot right now? Find your most popular pages
Hygiene content is the main page content you have on your website i.e. products, services etc. Click on Behaviour and it will tell you which of your pages are proving most popular on your website.
Let’s say you were running a multi-channel digital marketing campaign (think email, Facebook ad, Google Adword) and all links redirected to a campaign landing page on your website. The page isn’t indexed (so not found on your site navigation) and can only be located if you engage with the campaign.
The ‘Behaviour’ section on GA allows you to see how well campaigns like these might be doing. If you’ve planned your campaign well, your GA report should show some decent traffic to your landing page and it may even show up as one of your top-performing pages.
Use the Campaign URL Builder and compare your page visits by channel sources to identify which elements within your multi-channel campaign performed the best.
Google Analytics can even track lead conversions and sales
If you are an eCommerce brand, chances are you want to track your sales. If you hang out in the B2B world, you’ll want to measure your success through lead generation. GA can track all of these and more, through a little thing called goals.
It’s all about the goals…
You tell GA what you want it to track on your website and it will do just that. Say you want to find out how many visitors visit a particular page and play a video, GA can track that. Maybe you want to track how many visitors download a white paper, GA can do that too. It can even track how many visitors will complete a contact form or make a sale.
Creating goals is the way to track all of the above. GA offers the following goals:
Destination goals
Tracked when a user reaches a certain destination. Think thank you page URL, when they complete a purchase (this will track sales) or a thank you page URL when they complete a form (this will track sales leads).
Duration goals
This will track any user that spends a specific time or more on your site.
Google will rank sites more favourably when visitors spend longer on the site - it’s called ‘dwell time’. Increase your users’ dwell time and chances are, you’ll see your Google organic ranking rise.
Pages per session goals
Just like it says on the tin, this is a way to track how many visitors are visiting a certain number of pages. You can then drive down into this data further to review the flow of traffic and ultimately user behaviour. if you have a business where it is your aim to engage visitors and instil trust, then chances are you want them to peruse more than just one page on your site. This goal, allows you to track how many pages a typical user will view in any one visit. Getting visitors to view more pages gives you more of an opportunity to capture their attention, and pull them through your sales funnel.
Event goals
A way to track how many visitors do certain things on certain pages, for example, watch a video or download a file.
You can even measure the effectiveness of your website by using a goal too!
Let’s say you are an e-commerce site, you expect your customer to take the following path to purchase:
You can create your own Goal Funnel on GA to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of your website in achieving your desired goal; purchases. Through GA, you can track and monitor the effectiveness of conversions at each step and introduce optimisations to boost conversions.
A bit more about dwell time...
The longer users stay on your site (dwell time) is good news for your Google ranking. Google likes to show sites that host users for longer, as it implies the visitor is engaged with your content. If you can keep your visitors on your site for longer, this will lead to a better position on Google search ranking. So through goals, you can even set one to identify how many visitors stay on your site for longer than 15 mins.
If it’s your aim to reduce exit rates aka bounce, then this is a good metric to help you quantify how many visitors are actually staying on your site for your desired time. This kind of goal is also useful if you flip it. For example, if you are looking to create a site that allows users to quickly access information, it would be your aim for them to stay on your site for as little time as possible, so again this goal can identify inefficiencies. This goal could identify negative user experience and allow you to focus more clearly on refining service delivery.
Google Analytics is more than just graphs and stats it’s your strategic marketing decision maker’s best friend!
In summary, Google Analytics is a digital marketers best friend as it gives you the data to truly measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing activity. It allows you to track what is truly important in your business and see how small iterations in marketing activity can help you achieve your overall business objectives, be that sales, lead conversion, brand awareness, loyalty and so much more.
Like what you’ve read?
Jo Buchanan, the author of this blog is the Founder and Director of TwitTwooYou Limited, a business growth strategic consultancy centred on getting brands noticed. TwitTwooYou offers a range of smart services to help businesses grow and achieve their aspirations and goals. Want to get your brand noticed? Get in touch for a free, no-obligation chat.
