Trying to figure out what the best marketing plan is for your business? The answer is rather simple – you start with data! Instead of trying to randomly guess what your customers are responding to better, use actual user behaviours to make necessary optimizations.If you’ve managed a website for a while then you’re probably already familiar with Google Analytics and you’re looking to understand your data better. That’s great, that’s what we’re here for. But, if you’re new to Google Analytics and want to know more about it, we’ve got that covered too. Let’s start with the basics.
What is Google Analytics?
A foundation of digital marketing, Google Analytics is an online analytics platform you can use to track and analyze the performance of your website. It helps you better understand user traffic, customer demographics, behaviours, and interests. By understanding this data, you in turn, are able to provide your customer base with a well-tailored experience. If you’ve been hesitant about doing digital marketing using Google Analytics, now is your time to switch over to the right side.
Benefits of Google Analytics
Is a free and easy-to-use tool
Google doesn’t charge you to use Google Analytics for businesses. In fact, the platform is accessible to anyone who has a Google account. It lets you check for various metrics, from user behaviour, as mentioned earlier, to bounce rates and session durations. If you don’t have an account yet, set up Google Analytics for your business now.
Saves you time
The Google Analytics data helps you determine what makes your business website well-optimized for your target audience and niche. This eliminates the time-consuming guessing game of what works and what doesn’t for your customers. With accurate data at your fingertips, you’re able to understand, decide, and implement changes quickly and confidently.
Helps identify your target audience
You see what you need to see. Your data gives you accurate information on user behaviours, interests, and demographics. Use this to make your customers feel understood, taken care of, and satisfied.
User behaviours: Google Analytics tells you what your customers are doing once they’re on your website. You get to know whether it’s their first time visiting the page, what products they seem to like, what they purchase, and how often they’re revisiting the website. To understand their behaviours better, you can track what actions they take before converting into customers. This is huge! All this data lets you create campaigns based on what you learn your users will like.
User interests: Google Analytics collects information on user interests. Are they huge Netflix bingers? Do they love shopping for shoes? Are they travel buffs? This information allows you to appeal to the interests of your customers by showing them your products that align with their interests. This way you’re appealing to their emotions and providing them with things they have an interest in.
User demographics: Finding out the demographics of your core customer base is like finding hidden treasure. It tells you about the people that want to visit your website, and want to get your products or services. You can find out current customer age, gender, and location, which in turn can help you identify which target audience base is more likely to convert, and then change your website content to cater to those needs. This will also inform how you write your ad copy, and how you go about advertising your business.
Helps you figure out where your audience is coming from (website channels)
This helps you understand whether your audience is coming from your landing page or website, social media accounts such as Facebook or LinkedIn, or through email. Google Analytics data helps you determine what channel to prioritize and add more focussed content to. This is a great place to start if you’re working on a marketing strategy as it will help you prioritize which marketing channels are important to your business. If a channel is underperforming, that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable for you and may mean that you want to test a new strategy for that particular channel.
Helps you figure out where your audience gravitates to (website pages)
Not only do you learn where your audience comes from, but Google Analytics helps you understand which pages on your website garner more traffic. Learn about which pages lead to more page views, which pages lead to conversions, and which pages customers return to. This informs you on how you can change less traffic bound pages to get more page views.
If you’re ready to reap all of these benefits, then it’s time to optimize your Google Analytics. That’s where we come in. At Digital Hot Sauce, we know the secrets to helping your business reach new heights through digital marketing. We’re going to let you in on some of those secrets for free.
Optimize Your Google Analytics
Set your goals
The variety of metrics Google Analytics offers can make it overwhelming to know what to track. This is where goals become very helpful. Understanding your website’s objectives and turning them into measurable actions makes it easier for you to understand how your website is performing. Based on what you want to achieve, you can set goals such as duration, pages per session, events, and destination (example: a thank you page). Duration tells you how long someone stays on your pages. Pages per session is another way to track an engaged audience. Events inform you about specific user interactions on events you’ve set up on your website, and destination allows you to set a particular page as a goal on Google Analytics.
Study your competitors
Google Analytics allows you to get some insight into how your competition is doing. Take advantage of that feature. See how much traffic they are getting, and what is working for them. This will inform you about the strategies you can take to help your business get more traffic as well.
Optimize your SEO to rank higher on Google
Whether you’re already using some keywords that drive traffic to your business or you’re thinking of what keywords to use, improving your on-page SEO is crucial. You don’t want to show up on the second page of Google’s search engine, because that’s as good as not existing at all. Google Analytics can help you understand where you rank in terms of SEO, and you can use that information to optimize your SEO strategies and rank better.
So, what are you waiting for? Don’t spend your time looking at those colourful and organized charts and data. Find ways to read and understand them better to grow your business and help improve your digital marketing strategy
Google Analytics is a great tool. And now that you know how it can benefit you, use it to your advantage to get more information on how to improve your website, content, strategy and catch up with your competition.
If you’re having trouble figuring it out or want help in reading the metrics, we’re here to provide you with our professional guidance. Contact us today and let our team of marketing experts help you grow your business.
