Google Analytics is a great tool to measure the success of your internet/social media marketing activities as they show how your efforts translate to the bottom line.
- Metrics that Matter, Creating Goals, Creating a Funnel
Google Analytics have several metrics, but you have to know which ones are applicable to your campaign. Define your goals. You also have to know what the given metrics are and align them to the goals you’ve set for your campaign. Google Analytics lets you set up “goals” which are the direct representations of the metrics you want to monitor.
From the dashboard, set up conversion tracking by setting up a goal. Select an account and edit the necessary settings. Add a goal and fill up the form based on the KPI you want to track. There are 4 goal sets that could be set up and each set could track 20 goals/KPIs. Put the needed tracking codes on the pages you want to monitor. In the example given in the video, they tracked the “core checkout process.” Select the appropriate goal type for your report and fill in the needed details, such as the subid (url). There are also general tabs you can look into for a report, such as conversions, traffic sources, and campaigns.
After doing the needed steps, creating a funnel is important as it gives an idea of how people behave through a conversion process. Choose the “goal funnel option.” This is important to see if the process (which the internet marketer thought out) set in place are effective. You can add as many funnel steps as you see fit. Google Analytics visualizes this, so you can see the chinks (where you lose people) and strong points of the process. After analyzing the information, you can go about optimizing (or eliminating) the weak points in the process. Google Analytics doesn’t exactly point out what’s wrong; you do this analysis on your own.
- Create Your Campaigns
Understanding traffic sources is very important. Knowing your traffic sources well can help you strategize your campaign more effectively.
Configuring campaigns include link tagging. Google Analytics has a tool for this (URL Builder). Identify your campaign source, medium, and all needed Generate the link/s and use it in your campaign. This will make you more specific reports, so you can see where your best traffic is from. Again, knowing these things will help you strategize how to run your campaign.
- The Power of Site Search, Benchmarking, and Making Custom Reports
You can leverage “site search data” to your advantage as this gives you a clue as to what people think or what they are looking for. You can leverage this information to make people search more within your site. There is a site search section in Google Analytics. Look into site usage conversions and see which one converts more. Normally, people who use a site search at a website have more conversions. Also check the “search term report” to see which keywords are usable for your campaign’s/website’s strategy. Configure the site search by activating tracking and add a query parameter.
Benchmarking is important as it places your business in direct comparisons in that of your competitors. It’s in the visitors section of Google Analytics. Google Analytics pits your data with that of others who have opted in. There are given benchmarks in analytics, so make sure to choose the most appropriate ones for your campaign/site for better contextualized comparisons.
Customizing reports is integral for your business. Having such reports enables you to see the data you need without any fluff. You can create such reports with Google Analytics. All dimensions are already given in Google Analytics, as they’ve already been set up and all that’s left to be done is to add these to the customized report.