Improve Your Website, Get Full ROI and Beat Your Competition
In the same way your automobile’s dashboard displays speeds you may never reach, the untapped business advantages of Google Analytics all too often go unmet.
Many organizations have Google Analytics or a similar web analytics package for their website but do not know how to use it.
How does that happen?
- Some organizations don’t have the hours of learning time to learn how to fully leverage Google Analytics.
- Some don’t have individuals who can properly set things up.
- Some don’t understand the value that can be derived from proper implementation.
- Many are just too busy with other projects.
Whatever digital marketing challenges your organization may face, Gavin’s team of branding and communications strategists is here to help you understand and utilize the benefits of Google Analytics to increase your sales and grow your organization.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a completely free web analytics service for your website. It affords a website owner the ability to collect data on target audiences and help site owners better understand (and manage) their online presence.
Handled properly, this completely free snippet of code you place on your website to collect data becomes a treasure trove of detailed descriptions of an organization’s online business interactions.
For instance, Google Analytics can provide an organization with a clear-eyed view of performance details relating to a marketing campaign. Who visited? What social media sites did the come from? Which search engines did they come from?
Google Analytics will provide website owners with a host of site-related metrics, including:
- User metrics
- Acquisition metrics
- Behavioral metrics
The Benefits of User Metrics
User metrics provides you with details about the people who use your website.
In this area you’ll find details such as user gender, age, location and device type.
However, it also will collect data on the browsers, operating system, even the screen resolution for users visiting your site.
This is potentially powerful as you may look at your website on a desktop, while many users view it on a mobile device where the functionality is not optimal.
You can use that information to improve your mobile website or adjust your expectation on your website’s effectiveness.
Pulling insights from your website analytics does require you or someone to be involved in analyzing the data.
Find Actionable Insights from Acquisition Metrics
Acquisition metrics provide you with details about the path users take to get in and out of your website.
Knowing where your website traffic comes from can be a game changer, especially when cross-compared with goals or event completion rates.
Channel reports, for example, can show you that Google’s search engine sent 60% of your website traffic for a given month. You’d probably think – Google is my top performing channel.
But Google’s search engine sent may have only converted 3.33% of traffic, while Bing’s traffic did so by 30%.
The Bing traffic converted at a much higher rate, so it is actually the most meaningful to your bottom line. It’s the highest performing source of traffic, based on conversions.
Best Practices for Tracking Online User Behavior
Behavioral metrics provide a sense of what users do while they are on your website.
Although tracking conversions and associating that action with user variables is beneficial, we don’t know the on-site actions that users take. Enter behavioral metrics.
Event tracking is a custom feature that allows you, as a website owner, to track the number of times users take a specific action on your website.
With custom event tracking in place, you can see:
• When a contact form is submitted
• Which buttons and links users click, and how often
• When a video is played and how long the video is watched
• Any action a user can take can be tracked
Understanding when events, or high-value actions, take place gives you the ability to cross-analyze that information with other metric types, including traffic source, device time, user location and more.
Because we track the actions, we can grow those actions.
If we can monitor, we can better understand which segments of our audiences tend to take an action. This is powerful because we can use this insight to improve our website.
Tracking the high-value events most meaningful for your organization allows you to take full advantage of your analytics package and achieve true ROI on your website.
If you’re not getting meaningful insights from your analytics today, you owe it to your organization to explore the business advantages of Google Analytics.
For more on Gavin’s layered approach to digital marketing strategy and leveraging data to reach target audiences, listen to the latest episode of The Adlibber Podcast. If you are interested in learning more about how your organization can harness the power of Google Analytics to increase sales, contact our digital services team today.
