Google Analytics is a very handy tool when it comes to Digital Marketing and our jobs would be nearly impossible to do well without it. Google Analytics gives you in-depth information about your overall traffic and your audience. Here are our tips on how to use this amazing analytical tool to your advantage.
Filtered View
First and foremost, we recommend you set up a filtered view to excluding all of your personal traffic. This means your personal data doesn’t skew the data that actually matters to your marketing strategy. You could call this view the ‘filtered view’ so that you know that none of the data within that view is your personal data. In order to exclude data being tracked from a certain IP address, Google ‘what is my IP address?’ and Google will give you yours. Remember to create a new view on Google Analytics so that you still have the raw data if needed.
Goals
When writing your marketing strategy, you will have certain Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to reach. This may be to get a certain number of conversions or to get a certain amount of revenue. You can use Google Analytics to track the success of your strategy. NB: You need to have admin access to be able to create goals on a view.
To set up goals, you need to go to Admin > Goals > + New Goal. Google Analytics has different templates to use, so follow each step in order to set up your goals.
Demographics
Google Analytics has the functionality to tell you the age and gender of the users who have visited your website. This will give you a better understanding of whether or not your marketing strategy is bringing the correct traffic to your website, or whether you need to target a different demographic.
From this example, you can see that most users were 25-34 years old and predominantly Female. This would indicate that you should be targeting Females aged 25-34, as this is the largest chunk of your traffic.
Channels
The channels section of Google Analytics tells you how a user found your website. The six most common channels are organic, paid, social, direct, referral and email. You can use this information to see whether there has been an increase or decrease in traffic from different channels over a set time period. Knowing this will help you assess the success of your marketing strategy.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is an important factor to consider when assessing the success of a marketing strategy. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who landed on your website and then left without any further interaction. The higher the bounce rate, the bigger the problem. This information could give an indication that there may be some technical issues with your website, or that particular landing pages aren’t performing the way they should be, helping you discover whether or not your marketing strategy is working to its best potential.
Real-Time
Real-Time gives you the chance to check how many users are on your website at the exact time that you check. You can also check which pages those users have visited over the previous 30 minutes, giving you an idea whether your marketing strategy is working at a given time and whether users are looking at the correct landing pages. From here, you can also see whether any conversions have happened in the last half an hour, indicating success.
Geographic Location
Google Analytics is also able to tell you the geographic location of your traffic, telling you where your visitors are from. This allows you to see your most popular locations, as well as whether you are targeting the areas outlined in your marketing strategy. It could also highlight areas which you may not have thought of targeting, helping improve your marketing strategy further.
To conclude, Google Analytics can be a very useful tool to help with your marketing strategy as it tells you a lot about your users as well as potential target audiences. It can help outline opportunities as well as problems with your current marketing strategy.
