Harness the Power of Google Analytics
What does Google Analytics tell me about my web traffic?
How do I use Analytics to measure how well my marketing campaigns are doing?
How do I personalize the data Analytics shows me?
Imagine Jolly Bali is a popular yoga studio on the tiny Indonesian island of Bali, where people from around the world travel for yoga retreats.
Jolly Bali does good business from yoga tourism, but the owner (a yogi nicknamed Jolly) noticed most of the mats and clothing people use are sold by foreign companies. So she started an online store with Indonesian products.
Jolly set up social media accounts for her store and sales started coming in. To really boost business, she wants to do some additional marketing, but she’s not sure who to target or where to advertise. Let’s help her figure out what information could help her.
One program Jolly could use to learn about her website and marketing campaigns is Google Analytics.
Analytics is a no charge service that shows you data like where in the world your website visitors are from, what language they speak, what their ages and genders are, and how they got to your site.
You can also see whether people are using mobile or desktop, how often they come to your site, what they click when they get there, how long they stay, and when they leave. All this data can help you improve your marketing and website.
There’s so much you can do with the data Analytics gives you, but like getting into a yoga routine, it can be a lot to take in at first. Let’s go over some tips for how to make Analytics work for you and your business.
An important part of your analytics to focus on is where your web traffic is coming from. Then, see what that tells you about your audience.
Knowing the sources of your web traffic can help you see how well your campaigns are doing and help you figure out where you should be spending your hard-earned marketing dollars.
There are 4 main web traffic sources:
Direct
People who know your website and type in your domain name directly.
Social
People who get to your site from social media sites like Twitter.
Paid Search
Traffic that comes from people clicking on your Google ads or paid ads on other platforms.
Organic
Traffic coming from user queries on a search engine.
Analytics shows where your traffic comes from, but more importantly, it shows which sources lead to conversions (like sales or newsletter sign ups).
Let’s say Jolly sees that she’s getting organic traffic from Google searches and social traffic from her social media posts about how her sustainable production process is giving good jobs to Indonesian women.
She digs deeper and finds that the people coming from her social media posts end up making a lot of purchases, but the people coming from Google searches don’t buy much or stay on her site for long.
With that knowledge, Jolly decides to make more social media posts that emphasize her company’s values. And she decides to start buying search ads to see if she can improve her conversions from Google searches.
There’s no magic formula for how to convert your traffic. The idea is to make informed marketing decisions based on your statistics, then test them and use Analytics to see what does and doesn’t work.
Let’s say a trendy British lifestyle blog writes a post about Jolly’s yoga apparel with a link to the page where you can buy it.
Jolly could see how much traffic and how many purchases that post brings in. If it’s a lot, she might try to form a partnership with the site and offer readers a special discount to drive even more business.
She might also try to get Jolly Bali products featured on yoga sites in other countries, or maybe start her own Jolly Bali blog and see how much traffic and how many sales that leads to.
Now that Jolly is running search ads, Analytics shows her the keywords and terms people are searching to get to her site.
Knowing which terms are most commonly searched helps Jolly adjust her ad copy and budget to maximize their impact.
For example, if she sees a lot people are coming to her site by searching for “yoga leggings” and “yoga stretch pants,” she might consider upping her bids for those terms and lowering it for the more generic “yoga pants.”
Analytics is great for tracking how well your marketing campaigns (social media, email marketing, and web ads) are doing.
Using the Analytics URL Builder, you can create custom URLs that track how many times your links are clicked. For example, say Jolly makes a social media post advertising a sale on yoga mats.
She can track how many of her followers click on the link. Then she can see how many of them buy a mat. When she knows these numbers, she can adjust posts that aren’t leading to sales and imitate ones that are.
Maybe Jolly’s email marketing is killing it, but her web ads are doing poorly. Jolly might start emailing more, spending less on web ads, or test new ad copy. The key is to test and check the data to see what works.
To find this campaign data, go to your Analytics account, and click Acquisition. Then click All Traffic and Channels in the lefthand sidebar.
Another way to use Analytics is to see the popularity of individual pages on your website.
Beyond just seeing which of your pages get the most traffic, you can segment data in the Pages Report to show you traffic sources, whether people are on mobile or desktop, and whether they’re new or returning visitors.
Jolly might see that more people are looking at her pants pages than her tops pages. She could then try to use more calls to action in her marketing to get more people to see her tops.
How you use Analytics will depend on your business goals. Goal Tracking lets you set those goals for yourself and track their progress.
There are 4 types of goals you can set in Analytics: duration, pages, event, and destination. Duration goals are about how long people stay on your site. For example, your goal might be to get users to stay 5 minutes.
Pages goals involve how many separate pages a user looks at per session. Your goal might be for users to visit 3 pages because your data shows that people who do that are more likely to buy something.
You achieve event goals when someone downloads a file, watches a video, or does something else you want them to do. You can think of them as little wins that you hope will lead to your larger goals.
Destination goals are about people visiting certain pages or taking certain paths on your site. For example, a destination goal might be how many people go from your homepage to your product page to your checkout page.
These destination goals are good for seeing where people are leaving your site, which helps you figure out how to improve your UX (user experience). You can set up new goals in the Admin section of your account.
To really dive into your analytics, you can create customer segments to view data based on specific criteria that you can personalize.
For example, Jolly might want to know how well her social media is playing in the United States this month. She could create a customer segment to see data for just Americans who came to her site from social media in the last 4 weeks.
If she sees that Americans are buying her products like crazy, she might dive deeper and find that Californians in particular really love Jolly Bali. Then she could target more of her marketing towards that state.
There’s no limit to the combos of data you can segment. Create a new segment from any report by clicking the +Segment tile below the navigation bar in the reporting interface. Just name your segment and set your filters.
DO THIS NOW
Segmentation with Analytics lets you break down your data into criteria you choose. To get you started, let’s create a starter statement of what kind of data you’d like to see.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Google Analytics shows you the sources of your web traffic, what people click on, which pages they go to, and when they leave your site.
You can use Analytics to create custom URLs for your marketing campaigns and then track how many people click on them.
You can create customer segments with Analytics to filter data into specific criteria like geography, age, gender, and traffic source.