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Are you getting the most out of your Google Analytics? (I mean, do you even know how to login?)
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but most people never scratch below the surface. With a little bit of setup, you could transform your understanding of your digital marketing.
Check out our 9 easy uses for Google Analytics to boost your marketing returns.
1. Dashboards
The dashboards area lets you see one or more pieces of data at a glance when you log in. Dashboards are widgets giving an overview of your most important metrics.
You can track your important metrics in one go. Also, you can check the health of your accounts and track any correlation between reports. They’re easy to create, customize to how you want, and share.
If you want to learn how to customize a dashboard, stay tuned, we are talking about that next week.
The dashboard offers the ability to change the date range so all your widgets update with data from that range. This provides an overview of stats for traffic, goals, completions, and more in, one place.
2. See What Devices Your Visitors Use
Google Analytics lets you see whether your users are computer or mobile-based. This will help you see how important it is to have a site that’s suitable for mobile devices.GA also lets you see what type of devices they’re using. You can see right down to the brand and operating systems. This means you can check your site’s performance for each device to max out your optimization.
3. Find Out Your Most Successful Campaigns
For you to optimize your marketing campaigns, you need to know which ones are the most successful. You need to find which strategies are bringing in the most traffic and conversions. If you look at your advanced segments, you’ll be able to find out in no time.
To make an advanced segment, click Advanced Segments, and press New Custom Segment. If you want to track traffic from local search directories, call it Local Search Profiles. You can then enter the sites you have profiles on like Yelp.com/ for Yelp or maps.google.com/maps/ for Google Places.
Once you’ve put in the domains you want to track, preview the segment to make sure it’s working. When it’s pulled the right data, save the segment. To view it, click Advanced Segments, check your segment, then press apply.
You’ll now see your traffic and goal conversion data coming in from those domains. This will give you an idea of what’s working the most for your website. You can see the ROI of your online marketing strategies with the right custom segments.
4. Determine Visitor Location
It can be daunting deciding who you should target during ad setups via the likes of Google and Facebook. Most of them ask if you want to focus on a specific country or target worldwide.
With Google Analytics, this doesn’t need to be a stress point anymore. You can look under Visitors and find the location statistics of your visitors.
Visible are your worldwide stats and the average time on the site. Also, you can see the bounce rate of visitors from each country. You can select a country and see these stats (and goal conversion rates) for different regions.
You’ll see the specific location of visitors who bring the most conversions. Targeting visitors in these locations with ads can see even more gains for your site.
5. Know Your Best…
Google analytics lets you find out which pages keep your visitors longest. You can also see which ones have the lowest bounce rate. Click on the Content menu, and select Pages under Site Content.
You’ll learn what content keeps visitors engaged for longer. Also, what leads them to keep exploring your site. This will help you tailor content that engages your visitors and keep them coming back for more.
6. …And Your Worst
In your Content menu, you can also find your top exit pages. This will let you know how many people arrive on a page and exit on it.
For blogs, this is quite common. People are often coming to your site looking for information. They then leave once they (hopefully) get their answer. For other sites and pages, it might show people aren’t finding what they’re looking for and leaving.
If this is happening, you need to check your site’s content. Make sure visitors are finding what they want and getting a call to action. You want to get them where you want them to go before they leave, like subscribing or buying a product.
7. Watch the Path Visitors Take Within Your Site
In GA, click on Behavior Flow and you can see each step visitors take through your site. You can see the page that brought them in, through to the one they left on.
This invaluable data shows you what attracts your visitors and retains their interest. It also gives you an idea of what pages you need to work on to boost their visitor retention rates.
8. Get Intelligence Events and Custom Alerts
GA can notify you when something happens on your site. If for example, your site receives loads of 404 errors one day, or revenue is up 30% one week, you can get a notification. Paid search is down 40%, you’ll get notified.
Whatever you want to get notifications for, you can set up a custom alert. You can even add teammates or staff to the alerts. GA also offers automatic alerts. These try to show you the big changes in different metrics, daily, weekly, and quarterly.
9. Track Form Abandonment
For conversions that involve filling out a form on your site, GA has a handy feature you’ll love. It will tell you which of the blank sections are being filled in. It’ll also tell you the exact point of abandonment on forms that don’t complete.
This can help you spot what’s turning off your visitors, and what changes to your form you might need to make. It’ll also help you narrow down your calls to action to get visitors to finish giving you their details.
Login and start to play with Google Analytics
So there you have it! Google Analytics offers a wealth of information to boost your business’ performance.
It helps you track important metrics in one go for regular updates. It’ll also help you spot what pages and campaigns are performing well…and which ones aren’t. There’s detailed information to help develop your online marketing strategies into real winners.
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