THE DIGITAL WAVE – VOL. 1

HOW TO USE GOOGLE ANALYTICS TO IMPROVE YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING

THESE DAYS THE MOST POWERFUL TOOLS FOR ANY BUSINESS ARE THE INTERNET AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, YOUR WEB PRESENCE. THE INTERNET IS THERE AT EVERYBODY’S FINGERTIPS FOR MOST OF THE DAY. MOST QUESTIONS CAN BE ANSWERED ON THE INTERNET. YOU WANT TO KNOW WHERE TO EAT? GOOGLE. NEED YOUR CAR WASHING? GOOGLE. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO COMBAT AN ANT INFESTATION? GOOGLE. THEREFORE, ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL TOOLS AT OUR FINGERTIPS, SPECIFICALLY, IS GOOGLE ANALYTICS. AS MUCH AS ANY OTHER SEARCH ENGINE WOULD LIKE TO ARGUE, GOOGLE IS KING. WHAT THEY SAY GOES, AND THAT’S WHO WE’RE TRYING TO IMPRESS WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR WEB PRESENCE.

We’ve decided to share some insider knowledge with you and put together some hot tips on how to get the most from Google Analytics.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM GOOGLE ANALYTICS?

There are many options when it comes to measuring analytics, but up at the top is Google Analytics. Firstly, it’s free; secondly, Google are the guys we’re trying to impress so their feedback is most important. If you’re betting on the dogs, there’s no point in watching the horses.

Analytics is basically the analysis of data. What GA analyses is the flow of traffic through your website. It follows the footsteps of visitors to your site and collates the data, presenting it for you to see as figures. Imagine entering a shopping centre and at the door there’s a large puddle of paint, everywhere you go in the shopping centre you leave a trail, in and out of all the shops you visit. Now imagine all those shops are the pages on your website. Knowing where people are looking by how many ‘footprints’ they leave around each shop gives you a good idea of where your marketing pulling power hits, and where it misses. Google call this ‘behaviour flow’.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER (KNOW YOUR USERS)

Once we know where people are heading, we need to know what they’re doing. Whether you’re building leads, selling a product, having them download information or simply reading your blogs it’s handy for GA to know your goals. Setting up goals in GA is fairly straight forward and an excellent way to manage view what you’re achieving on a weekly basis. Through your admin panel you can let GA know what the end game is for your site. You can add a value to certain actions, like downloading a brochure, making a purchase or spending 5 minutes reading your blog. With a monetary value added to an action, GA can better create the data you will use to gauge the return of investment from your marketing strategy.

Having the correct goals and events tracking set up is absolutely crucial to the success of your business as this will allow you to discover a detailed view on what the true ROI on your digital marketing efforts is with key data on how your customers are interacting with your website.

A more detailed overview of revenue can also be set up by forwarding your eCommerce transaction receipts to your GA reports. To find out more about eCommerce and how we can help with this click here.

With knowledge of passing traffic on any particular page, you can generally work out why it is that one page leads to another. Your blog page that gained a few hits on Facebook may have been geared towards a product you sell. You linked that product page of your site and a percentage of visitors followed it through. We call these ‘conversion paths’. In analysis of ‘conversion paths’ the data will hopefully indicate where your sites’ successes lie. By identifying what works well, you can replicate that process elsewhere, feeding more traffic through to your products or services and converting visitors to sales.

THE ALMIGHTY AUDIENCE REPORT

Another great data set within GA is your Audience Report. Hitting your target audience is also key to what we do. Understanding exactly who your demographic is becomes a lot easier with audience data from GA. Within this data set you’ll be able to track what types of people are visiting where on your site and how they behave. Further to this report, you have Audience Affinities which allows you to see Googles search data history for visitors to your site. With knowledge of a visitor’s interactions outside of your site and knowledge of where they end up inside your site, you can tailor certain areas and pages to the types of people landing there.

GET CERTIFIED WITH A CERTIFICATION EMPLOYERS WANT

If you enjoy the idea of working through data sets within analytics or think it would be advantageous to your web development, you may want to consider getting yourself Google Analytics Certified with the Google Analytics Individual Qualification. You can obtain this by working through the information on Google Analytics Academy and taking the test. The course is free to take (used to cost $50) but it is fairly complex in parts and can be overwhelming if you haven’t used the platform before, never fear though! Tidal can assist with this which we’ll cover in just a moment……….

Everyone knows the old adage, ‘knowledge is power’. Data certainly has a knowledgeable value and Google Analytics will put that knowledge into your lap for free. A good understanding of how traffic through your site flows gives you the chance to optimise and manipulate its flow to best suit your intentions. With GA data indicating where you need to scrub up, you’ll find the whole process much easier.

I WANT TO GET CERTIFIED!

Fancy getting yourself Google Analytics Certified? We can facilitate this for you with a Tidal Training GA Crash Course. Our courses can be tailor-made to your learning requirements and can be carried out from the comfort of your own home. Each of our courses ends with an official Google Certificate with your name on it! How cool is that? Contact us if you want to know more! 

Hope you enjoyed Wave 1 from the series! For more tricks of the trade check out the next part in the series in Wave 2.