As an online marketer your best tool should be your analytic tool. While there are numerous tools you can use, Google analytic provides one of the most robust tools that you can leverage to properly understand how effective your marketing is and what needs to be improved.
You can use Google analytic (GA) to:
- Measure ROI and ROAS for channels
- Understand audience behavior
- Measure the effectiveness of various source of traffic to your website
- Predict trends for marketing effort
Unfortunately majority of businesses do not know which metrics to measure and what do to with their data.
In this article, we will briefly go over some metrics you can setup and how to interpretation them. I quickly need to point out that which metric might mean different things to different businesses so understanding your goals and business objectives is very important. Not yet setup GA, go here to learn how to set it up.
The very first thing you want to do is setup some goals. Every business should have a set of objective when going online? By correctly identifying what action you want your web visitors to take, you can begin to setup goals to measure these actions.
While it is a wonderful idea to setup goals and measure it, goals in themselves are just one of the basic key performance indicators(KPI). Therefore utilizing your funnel report is a good mechanism to properly identify where your goal’s tracking code should be.
Now let’s dive in into some metrics that Google analytic can show us and we can use it to make some informed decisions about out customers.
Measure Your Audience
The Audience tab is a very important component of your Google analytic and it measure various information about your audience. The audience tab can tell you a lot about your customers and you can use this information to plan your marketing spend. Some of the basic metrics you will find in the audience tabs are:
Location:
The location metrics helps you determine if your right audience are finding you. Let us imagine for a moment you offer services within a particular city and you have your website setup. If the majority of your audience are not within your location where you do business, then it means that the wrong people are finding your website. On the other side of the spectrum, if you are a national business that offers your services nationwide, then understanding where new audience are can help you determine where next to focus your marketing campaign.
Frequency and Recency:
The frequency metrics measure how quickly a visitor return to your website within a time frame while the recency shows how many days goes by before using return to your website. This two metric are important to determining how loyal your web visitors are if you are running a blog for example or if you are a professional business that offers a service, can help you determine how long your buying cycle can be.
Most web visitors will not buy from you the first time they land on your website. A visitor to your website will first encounter your website, check it out. Try to see if they can align with your business offering.
Then , they might go out to check out other competitors also or to simply compare prices or read reviews before coming back to your website to either buy from you or not. By measure the first time a visitor lands on your website and the time lag before they return, you can get an average idea of how long your buying cycle is and what you can do to improve it.
Mobile:
Behavior of your audience that you should focus on is how much effect mobile devices are having on your online presence. You want to know if you should pay more attention to improving your website presence on mobile or desktop.
Although as the world becomes increasing interconnected, you cannot rely on all your customers finding you either via mobile or desktop but by carrying out a detailed analysis of what happens how they find you and which device they are using more, you can learn where to make improvement.
One of the key things to remember is that visitors might find you first on mobile and then go out to check your desktop and this could be vice-versa. So say for example, majority of your visitors are via mobile and you noticed that the bounce rate for mobile is high. Then you want to focus on reducing your bounce rate for mobile.
Conclusion:
The amount of data that Google analytic offers can be overwhelming. Yet, it provides valuable insight into our survival online. With Google analytic, you can measure the ROI on all on your marketing channels. Grab yourself a gmail account today and get started. By the way, setting up Google analytic for your website is also free.
Want us to interpret your GA for you and provide actionable insight for you, contact: [email protected]
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