How To Use Google Analytics To Empower Your Marketing Decisions-Part I

Google Analytics is universally used by small, medium and big businesses. Its one of the popular analytics platform being free and equally powerful. Google analytics gives you insights much beyond Sessions, users and bounce rate. Many people use GA for the basic information. Even though they are aware that they can get lot more on GA, but hesitate to use because of non-familiarity with the platform.

I got my first exposure to Google Analytics 3 years before, and just like majority I was always on the audience overview dashboard checking total number of users, sessions and bounce rates. Though I was aware that I can get much more insights from GA, due to unfamiliarity with the platform I never explored. Slowly with my increased comfort with GA, I drive a lot of insights about my website performance and can back my marketing strategies with data.

Here are 6 ways you can use Google Analytics to empower your marketing decisions

Please note – To make the article more engaging, we will publish it in 2 parts. The 2^nd Part will be published on 18^th June 2017.

1) Set up your Google Analytics and integrate with Google Search Console & Google Adwords

Setting up your GA account correctly is very important. If you work on WordPress, this gets easy with MonsterInsights plugin .

Google Analytics Integration with MonsterInsights Plugin in WordPress

Only 2 click verification steps and you are ready to go. One you set up your GA account successfully, it’s equally important to link it with Google Search Console and Google Adwords . Do it parallel with GA set up. Many times skipped and ignored. By the time you realize that you must integrate your search console account with GA, you already miss many insightful data, hence do it parallel.

Integrating Google Search Console will enable GA to give you detailed insights into your organic performance, keywords you are scoring for, impressions and CTR. You can also check the behavior flow of organic traffic, conversions if any. This empowers you to strategy your organic SEO efforts .

Integrate Google Search console with Google Analytics

Integrating GA with your Google Adwords account will give you deeper insights over your search or display campaigns. It will tell you you the behavior of traffic acquired through Adwords and the quality of the traffic.

Integrate Google Adwords with Google Analytics

2) Get more sense from your traffic data

Measuring your website traffic is one of the most frequently used features of GA. On the other hand, when you ask any business on “What do you do with GA, the simple answer comes “we measure website traffic”. Measuring traffic is not only about users, sessions and bounce rates. This information will not help you fine tune your marketing decisions. Rather club this data with other actions.

For example- if you are seeing a sudden increase in web traffic, analyze deep into it. Try seeing which time of the day you get more visitors, which blog/page is attracting your traffic, what are the sources pushing more traffic to your site and importantly what is the demographics of your audience. How much time they are spending on your page. Is there any specific behavior flow this traffic causing? Are they completing any funnel (Check your goal settings)

This kind of detailed dissection of your data will present a clear picture in front of you to check performance and improve marketing performance.

Where to see these data then? Well very simple, I will take you step by step

To check traffic data instantly

Path: Audiences-Overview- Adjust date range (Top right)

To check which time of the day traffic is higher

Path : Audiences-Overview- select hour

To check which blog/page is attracting your traffic?

Path : Behavior- Site Content- All pages( Check for pages causing more sessions/users- check session duration )

To check demographics of your audience

Path: Audiences- Demographics- Country & City- Look for age groups and gender Check the pages causing more sessions/users- check session duration

To check behavior flow of the traffic

Path: Audience-User flow

Which kind of actions/strategies you can derive from such detailed analysis ?

• Is there any specific time of day your traffic is more active. Analyze the “why” and try to optimize it further or scale it up
• Which is that source giving you traffic. Is the traffic valuable, giving you conversions on your site. Strategies to increase traffic from that source.

3) Power Your Content Marketing Strategy

Google Analytics gives you lots of insights over the performance of your content marketing strategy.

Check out following to drive performance

• How much is the traffic and how long is the time spent on your blogs/posts
• Measure referral traffic
• Measure Downloads

The part-2 of this article will be published on 18th June 2017.

Contributor – This article is contributed by Prativa Satpathy .

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