How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Digital Marketing

For a free tool, Google Ana­lyt­ics (GA) comes with a set of intu­itive and easy-to-use fea­tures. Fur­ther­more, an enor­mous amount of ana­lyt­i­cal pow­er, and a great bal­ance of depth and com­plex­i­ty. Through the use of GA, you can uncov­er a huge amount of data about your web­site and users, pro­vid­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion that you need to opti­mize your efforts. Here are some of the ways you can use Google Ana­lyt­ics to improve your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign and ensure it is successful.

Use Traffic and Behavior Flow to Optimize User Experience

Track­ing your vis­i­tors from page to page gives you an under­stand­ing of traf­fic and behav­ior flow. Know­ing what the land­ing pages are as well as the behav­ior flow of your vis­i­tors gives you an idea of the aver­age user expe­ri­ence. And where you need to make changes. For instance, if vis­i­tors land on your home­page and nav­i­gate to your ser­vice pages before leav­ing, then you might want to guide them to the top of your sales fun­nel. But if they leave short­ly after vis­it­ing your home­page, you’ll want to improve your site’s load time. Addi­tion­al­ly, include inter­nal links to make it eas­i­er for your vis­i­tors to find what they’re look­ing for. You may also look at chang­ing the lay­out of your home­page to entice vis­i­tors towards cer­tain pages by using a call to action.

Use Conversion Paths to Push Visitors Towards Conversions

Opti­miz­ing user expe­ri­ence to guide vis­i­tors towards con­ver­sion should be a high pri­or­i­ty. In GA, con­ver­sion path analy­sis is an advanced behav­ior flow ana­lyt­ic that shows the path­ways site-vis­i­tors take to con­ver­sion. Your data will show whether the users con­vert­ed after only a vis­it to the main site or after brows­ing a few spe­cif­ic pages. By using this data, you get an idea of what a suc­cess­ful con­ver­sion is and how you can opti­mize the user expe­ri­ence to make the con­ver­sion process more likely.

Understand Your Audience Demographic

If you have a mar­ket­ing plan in place, you prob­a­bly know your tar­get audi­ence and may have also worked on devel­op­ing the per­sonas. How­ev­er, there’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between being aware of who your audi­ence is and tru­ly know­ing them. The audi­ence affin­i­ty and in-mar­ket sec­tion in Google Ana­lyt­ics let you dig deep­er into user sta­tis­tics to see what kinds of peo­ple are vis­it­ing your web­site. You get to track the way they engage with your con­tent, inquire for ser­vices, or buy your prod­ucts. Use the data to find out what’s work­ing for your web­site and how to improve your con­ver­sion opti­miza­tion strat­e­gy. You can also use this data to remove pages that are irrel­e­vant or unnec­es­sary to help stream­line your site.

Create Goals for Your Website

You need to think about what you want your web­site to accom­plish and tie it togeth­er with dif­fer­ent user actions. For exam­ple, do you have a goal of newslet­ter signup or a com­plet­ed pur­chase? What­ev­er your objec­tive, GA will let you know the per­cent­age of users that meet a cer­tain goal. If pos­si­ble, assign a mon­e­tary val­ue to your goals so you can mea­sure your ROI more effec­tive­ly. You’ll have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what kinds of vis­i­tors are like­ly to con­vert. And how effec­tive your web­site is at cre­at­ing conversions.

Use Google Search Console for Search Engine Optimization

Iden­ti­fy pat­terns and know which search terms your vis­i­tors are using to find your web­site. This data is high­ly advan­ta­geous in get­ting your SEO efforts to pay off. With the Google Search Con­sole inte­gra­tion, you can get a look into a list of key­words, the aver­age num­ber of pages vis­it­ed from each key­word and the bounce rate. This infor­ma­tion can help you deter­mine which key­words are bring­ing in the bulk of traf­fic. More­over, inverse­ly which ones have not been as effec­tive.  As such, you get an idea of the type of con­tent you need to spend your efforts on in order to improve your web­site and get those conversions.

In Conclusion Use Google Analytics to Improve

It can be fun to look through the data. How­ev­er, you need to prop­er­ly ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion to find the most impor­tant met­rics to work on. You can work on your prod­ucts and ser­vices, meet vis­i­tor demands, and improve your bounce rate as long as your web­site is active.

SOURCE: Mike Gin­gerich