Meta Descriptions: Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful web tool for digital marketers to track and monitor the efficacy of their marketing efforts. Using this tool to analyze the success rate of your marketing efforts is simply the best tactic you can do for your business. Find out why with this article.
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Are your digital marketing efforts still doing their job? Or, are you looking for new ways to elevate your marketing? I have a solution for you: Google Analytics.
Most marketers find Google Analytics daunting at first. Of course, with so much data it’s not easy to look for the most significant metrics to better understand the target audience and develop a solid marketing strategy.
However, if you can’t see which pages to focus on and if you can’t analyze your website traffic, you might be spending your marketing budget ineffectively, wasting your time, or simply doing your marketing wrong. On the other hand, the faster you can analyze your data, the quicker you can act.
For example, most successful digital marketing companies in Toronto include the use of Google Analytics. It doesn’t only provide businesses with insights about who goes in and out (and the activities they do) on their site but also helps companies in understanding the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and the impact of user experience to drive conversions.
So, in this blog post, let’s introduce you to Google Analytics and how it can help you analyze your marketing efforts.
What Is Google Analytics?
Let’s start with this, Google Analytics is your data analysis. When you use the data for marketing, it needs to be done correctly.
Google Analytics exists to track the performance of your website and collect data from your visitors. It is a web analytics service that provides tools for your SEO (search engine optimization) and marketing efforts. It is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is free for anyone who has a Google account.
Marketers use Google Analytics to identify the top sources of their user traffic. It tracks purchases and the adding of products to carts, monitors user engagements through patterns and trends, measures the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and activities, and gathers visitor’s demographics.
Additionally, Google Analytics is used to analyze customer behaviour analytics, which is essential in improving the overall marketing process of driving website traffic, retaining visitors, and turning them into conversions.
How Does Google Analytics Help Marketers to Analyze Marketing?
Google Analytics is divided into 4 major sections:
- Audience: Google Analytics helps you determine who your customers are, where they come from, or what devices they use to access your site.
- Acquisition: Google Analytics shows you how customers got your website. The channels they used to get to your websites such as social media, email, ads, organic traffic, etc. This way you can make comparisons of which channels drive your traffic, and determine the effectiveness of your SEO and running campaigns.
- Behaviour: Google Analytics explores the activities that customers do when they are on your website. Which pages they visit, or how long they spend on your site. With this, you will determine the efficacy of the user experience, customer retention, and engagement.
- Conversions: Google Analytics helps you track if your visitors are taking the actions that you want them to do. For instance, making purchases or participating in your website encouragements.
Important Google Analytics Metrics to Keep in Mind to Analyze Your Marketing
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Since Google Analytics provides you a myriad of data, it’s hard for a newbie to identify the most essential metrics to analyze your marketing. So, here’s 10 to get you started:
- Users
In Google Analytics, they provide a user metric to track and monitor the users that visit your website. It is categorized in 2 ⸺ new and returning. New users are those who visited your website for the first time while returning users are those who visited your website before.
Given this, the user’s metrics can measure your marketing efforts such as how your campaigns have driven significant traffic and the number of times that users engage your site.
- Sessions
According to Google Analytics, sessions refer to the actions taken within a time frame. It begins when a user enters your site through campaigns and ends after an inactivity of 30 minutes, or when they leave the site.
However, it’s essential to know that sessions and users are different from each other. This is because a user can create many sessions. Sessions are also helpful to determine how effective your campaigns are by tracking the session count and sessions per source.
- Pages Per Session
These are the number of pages that your users visit on your website during a session. So, when your pages per session increase, user engagement (with your content) also increases. This means, your users are more engaged with your website and are well navigated to visit your other pages.
- Devices
Another feature of Google Analytics is its device metrics. This will allow you to determine the number of users who visit your site through mobile, desktop, tablets, or other devices. This will help you prioritize efforts on which resources to optimize.
For instance, if the majority of your users visit your site through their mobile phones, you need to ensure your website is well-optimized for mobile phones to provide the best mobile experience to users.
- Channels, and Source/Medium
Identify where your traffic comes from through the source metric. This will help you see if your traffic origin comes from search engines like Google or direct searches on the URL.
The medium metric also tells you how users arrive on your site. For instance, through organic traffic, or pay-per-click ads.
Additionally, there’s also the channel metric where it shows the traffic origin (within the same medium) such as emails, paid searches, social media, direct searches, or organic searches.
- Pageviews
These are the total number of views per website page. Unique pageviews metric shows how many viewers are on a page within a specific session. For example, in your blog post “How to Prepare Your Snowmobile for storage in an effective way”, Google Analytics will report the number of users who viewed or read that blog article. However, when a user visits that article more than once (in a single session), this will be tracked as one unique pageview.
- Time on Page
Google Analytics also measures the average time that users stay on your website pages. By looking at the average time per page, you would know how engaged your users are with the content. This is most effective if you want certain pages to increase user engagement.
- Landing Pages
A landing page is the first page users see when they enter your website. Knowing this would help you know which landing pages drive your traffic.
- Exit Pages
Google Analytics also shows your exit pages. Exit pages are the last pages that users view before they leave your site. When Google Analytics reports your exit pages, find good opportunities to optimize them to boost your conversions.
- Bounce Rates
Lastly, Google Analytics reports bounce rates. A bounce happens when a user visits your site in a single session then leaves immediately without checking other pages, or doing additional requests. If your page is intended to drive traffic but has higher bounce rates, then Google Analytics will signal you that there’s something wrong with that page.
Using Google Analytics to Analyze Your Marketing
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful web tool that supports every digital marketer to achieve their marketing goals. It brings marketers highly significant metrics that surely provide accurate data so you can:
- Track online traffic and conversions
- Analyze data and do customization
- Understand user behaviour
- Improve websites, advertising, eCommerce performance, SEO, and content marketing
- Target the right audience
Analyzing your marketing efforts through Google Analytics is the best way to improve your SEO and digital marketing strategies and eventually grow your business to the next level.
