Marion Barnham • January 27, 2025
Analytics is a great way to track all of your marketing activities and it provides you with the opportunity to analyse and re-strategise.
Analytics is a benefit of digital marketing. Before digital, when it was print and television, it was really hard for marketers to understand which one of their efforts brought the highest level of conversions. However, the need for marketing optimisation was obvious.
Today, we have so many great tools in our hands and only a few marketers know how to use them effectively. Two broad categories are Google Analytics and Marketing Analytics. In this blog post, we will guide you through Google Analytics.
Google Analytics: A web analytics service offered by Google. It allows you to track your website traffic and create custom reports on Behavior, Acquisition, and Audience. Each of these categories has some subsection with more detailed insights. It is part of the Google Marketing Platform brand and it launched in November 2005.
Marketing Analytics: Marketers nowadays use a variety of tools, with each one specialising in different elements of marketing. Every one of these tools offers the option of analytics ~ monitoring the reaction of prospective customers to different campaigns and summarising all these data. This reflects as a prominent way to gather insights and test new ideas. There are tools that provide integrated solutions like Hubspot that help you manage everything in one platform.
So you have tons of data that can help you understand the behaviour of your customers. But this can become overwhelming, time-consuming, and chaotic. How do you know what the most important data are?
How to use Google Analytics effectively:
First of all, you need to understand what the different terms that Google’s platform uses mean. Google gives you a definition for each term but sometimes it is not enough.
Definition of Key Terms
Search Traffic:
- Organic: People that land on your website due to good matching keywords and high website ranking(unpaid).
- Paid: People that found you again on search results but because you placed an ad that helps you rank higher.
Traffic Sources:
- Direct~typing a url directly to the address bar
- Referral~clicking on a link from another site or social media platform.
Bounce rate: is the percentage that represents the number of visits when users leave your site after just one page; regardless of how they got to your site or how long they stayed on that page. When it comes to landing pages, this is not a negative metric.
Sessions: A period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.
Users: People who have visited at least once. This includes both new and returning visitors.
Reports: As mentioned above you have three main sections Behaviour, Acquisition, and Audience that are divided further into sub-sections.
Behaviour: This category helps you identify how people interact with your website, what they visit, how they stayed, which are your top pages etc.
If you have a page that doesn’t perform well but it has important information, you need to re-evaluate your target audience and what they need, what they search for and then you can A/B Test. Or on the other hand, you may be surprised with the pages that perform well and exceed your expectations. For those, you could try to boost your performance by using targeted ads.
Acquisition: You have different channels that direct traffic to your website: referral, social media, email, paid search, and more. This allows you to identify which channels lead to the most traffic.
You will realise that no month is the same. If for example, social media is your pain point for a specific period of time differentiate your content. When the text doesn’t work you could try videos. Schedule them at different times and see if there is a change in behaviour and re-evaluate. In general, be flexible.
Audience: It all starts here. Before formatting your marketing strategy you built your buyer persona. Does that reflect the people that are actually visiting your site? Check the sub-categories for demographics, interests, and even the devices they used to optimise their experience.
Analytics are a powerful tool that can guide your strategy and help you achieve growth. Don’t be afraid to test different things because that’s how you learn. It is doudtful that you will manage to get everything right from the start. The key takeaway is to listen. Listen to your data because that is how your audience talks to you.
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