Google Analytics is one of the most powerful web analytics tool available today. As a marketer, are you using Google Analytics to navigate your marketing programs ? A lot of marketers around the world are!
Google Analytics provides statistics and basic analytics for search engine optimization for marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google Account for any website. The most important thing about Google Analytics is that it’s an entirely free program.
Whether you are planning a strategy around New Customer Acquisition or Customer Retention, Google Analytics will provide you with tons of data to base your decisions on. Google Analytics also provides means to tracking traffic patterns on your website. You can easily track from which channel you are getting more traffic on the website and you can easily identify how your marketing campaigns are performing. Google Analytics easily integrates with other Google programs, like AdSense and AdWords, as well as Google Tag Manager, and this only makes it that much more valuable.
Why Google Analytics to navigate your marketing programs ?
Considering most people already use at least some Google products, it makes sense to use Google Analytics, because it is such a powerful, yet easy-to-use, product. Google Analytics helps track the entire life cycle of a visitor on the website, which pages did they visit, where did they come from, what were your successful referral channels, what was the amount of time they stayed on the page, Did they engage with other parts of the site, before they exited the site? All of this and a lot more. The role of Google Analytics to navigate your marketing programs is increasing among smart marketers.
Google Analytics can increase ROI, no matter how you plan to generate revenue from the website. Google Analytics can provide important insights into:
1. Know where your customers came from
By using Google Analytics you will get to know where are your visitors coming from? Where did they land on your website? Where all did they go on your site? Having a high volume of visitors on site is one (great) thing, knowing where they are coming from is another which provides you details about which marketing campaign is working or not working. Google Analytics can help you track your traffic sources, so that you can better identify which of your marketing efforts is working and what isn’t.
2.Identify What Your Audience Finds Interesting
One of the features of Google Analytics is that it keeps a list of words and phrases relevant to your business that can be used to help your website’s visibility on Search Engine results pages (SERPs). If you cross-reference the search rate for each of those terms on the number of new visitors of your website versus the returning visitors, you can use the data to develop or refine your marketing strategy.
3.How Many People Are Not Interested at All and why they are dropping off
Your website can have a huge traffic, but if they aren’t finding their way to your site and staying there to explore other pages or content, achieving online growth would be a challenge. To help you measure how many visitors are coming to your site to explore, and whether your landing page is engaging, Google Analytics provides you the matrix with Bounce Rate.
4.Tracking Marketing Efforts
By using Google Analytics, you will get answers for a few important questions like, which campaigns are driving traffic on your site? Which ones are not? Are campaigns able to successfully deliver conversions as a lead? Which are not?
5.Quality Control
Quality control is the most important term for every Business, Which pages have the least interaction? Are visitors trying to reach nonexistent pages? Know what is working and optimize what is not.
6.Goal Setting in Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to track whether your business is progressing in its digital efforts or not. From a number of clicks on the sites and campaign and visitors to increases in traffic, the Alerts feature of Google Analytics provides you with instant updates to let you know if you are able to achieve a certain goal.For example, you can set a goal that will correspond if a first-time visitor has filled in a form providing their contact details. Setting this type of goal helps you nurture each of these visitors as they move further into your sales pipeline.
Why Google Analytics is Important for your Business?
As a Business owner or marketer, you understand the importance of having information that allows you to make informed decisions on how to grow your business. Whether you are running a small business or Big Enterprise, you can easily track the Customer Journey.
1.It’s easy to use: The product does get regular updates, but its basic structure has remained the same for almost a decade. The initial configuration of Google Analytics does require a specialist, new users can easily grasp the basic principles of Google Analytics, such as goals, funnels, conversions, visits, sources.
2.It’s Easy to Track your Traffic on site: where your customers are coming from. With Google Analytics you will be able to track your visitors, their behavior, and their preferences.
3.Customize reports: You can choose one of the many reports that Google creates, or even build your own with easy to use drag-and-drop interface.
4. Insights into visitors: There is a huge amount of data about visitors available to you in Google Analytics. This data can, for example, help you determine which advertising campaign is performing well, and which one you’re wasting money on.
5. Real-time visitor tracking: You can see who is visiting your website in real time. This means that you will know how many active users are on your site right now, which pages they’re looking at, and what they are doing any time of the day.
6. Automated data collection: Once you set up your account and copy a simple piece of code on your site, Google Analytics will start collecting the data automatically. You can access your reports immediately. There is no action required on your part to get the data: Google Analytics does all the work.
7. Integration with other tools: Use Google Analytics with all your devices and easily implement data from Google Analytics to other well known Google products, such as Google Adwords (Google’s main advertising network) and Google Search Console.
What are the KPIs of Google Analytics
Companies have been using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for years to evaluate and measure their projects’ successes and failures. A KPI is a Business metric used to evaluate a factor that is crucial to the success of any Business.
Engagement on Site: Your website is your face to your customers, what your customers recognize about your product, service, and values. Your goal is to get increasing numbers of prospects to embrace your brand/website. These KPIs provide valuable metrics on how your website is working
Traffic on Site: Traffic on site means how many Visitors are coming to your website. Google Analytics tracks every visitor, whether they are Unique Visitor or Returning Visitors.• Unique Visitor- Unique Visitor means who they are coming to site first time.• Returning Visitor- Returning Visitor means those visitors who knows about the site, and they are coming . 10 Awesome Ways you can Drive Traffic to your Website
Time spent on website: Time on site give the analytics of, How long do prospects stay on your site? How much your content is engaging in your site, Ensure your pages load quickly and make your site interesting so they’ll stay longer.
Popular pages and navigation paths: Applications such as Google Analytics can track visitor traffic patterns and tell you which site pages are most popular.
Traffic Sources: Understand which traffic sources are driving visitors to your website and through which channel you are getting Traffic on site.The Traffic Sources metric measures which traffic sources are driving visitors to your website, and provides a comparison of each of those sources. The main traffic sources are direct, Organic, although your website may also have traffic from campaigns such as banner ads or paid search. In addition to measuring the number of visitors from each traffic source, consider analyzing the number of goal completions from each source.
Terms to you should know when your checking the website Performance
Direct traffic: Visitors that visit your site by typing your URL into their browser, or through an undefined channel.
Referral traffic: Visitors that visit your site by clicking on a URL on another website that’s is call Referral Traffic.
Organic traffic: Visitors that discover your website by entering searching a keyword in a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and that click on your listing. Ways to generate leads using SEO
Campaign traffic: Visitors that visit your website through a dedicated campaign or clicking on a link with certain tracking parameters.
Bounce Rate : The bounce rate shows you what percentage of visitors leaves your website before further exploring your website. For example, if a potential visitor finds your homepage after searching for you and leaves the page before clicking any other links, they will be considered to have “bounced.”
Conclusion: The most important thing to remember about web analytics is to not overlook it and make sure it is properly set up. The second most important thing is that once you have Google Analytics in place and you start collecting the data, your job is not done. You need to make sense of the data by seeing what’s important (your KPIs) to your site and business and then having a way to easily track your metrics – a dashboard or reviewing periodic reports will take care of this. If you cannot easily turn the data you are collecting into valuable marketing decisions for your website and business, then you are just left with a lot of meaningless numbers and are not truly using Google Analytics to navigate your marketing programs.
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