5 Google Analytics Tips That Will Boost Your Marketing

Google Analytics is a useful tool for businesses to measure the progress of their digital marketing. However, it can also be quite overwhelming if you don’t have a clearly defined target for your business.

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Following these 5 steps, Traktion believes that businesses can make a more informed decisions to satisfy their digital marketing needs: 

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What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that provides businesses with insights on the performance of their website for both marketing and content optimisation.

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Why do I need to use it?

It helps businesses understand their audience

Google Analytics can provide you with key information about your website visitors such as its demographics, interests and geolocation. By understanding your visitors, you can formulate marketing strategies that specifically target your consumers. 

It increases your online popularity

Business owners can learn about the popularity of its web pages, improving the less popular pages while optimising the better ones.

It shows business owners the source of their traffic

The analytics platform gives a detailed report on how its social platforms are performing by showing how much traffic they are driving to your website. Through its findings, businesses can work out a more realistic budget per social media platform.

It is highly customisable

User can create custom reports, including dashboards, segments and alerts to measure your website performance according to your metrics.

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Tips for using Google Analytics

1. SET THE RIGHT GOAL

After signing up, users are redirected to a page where you’re prompted to set a specific goal. You must fill this out; otherwise, there is no way to keep track of your performance. 

There are four types of goals that you can choose from:

URL Destination‍

URL destination is a tool that keeps track of specific URLs. This is when a visitor arrives on a particular page, which is usually a confirmation or thank you page.

Visit Duration

This tool is used to track the minutes people spend on your website, which is used to measure engagement. 

Pages/visits

Pages/visits tracks the number of pages each visitor views before bouncing off the website. This could also be used to measure engagement but is more commonly used to track customer support sites. 

Events

The event tool allows you to track a visitor’s website interactions. By default, Google Analytics doesn’t show the events tool until you set up a goal. A goal may include the number of form submissions, website clicks or PDF downloads. 

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2. UNDERSTAND SESSION DISCREPANCIES

Business owners think clicks and sessions produce the same number of measurements but the results are actually drastically different since they are measured at various times. This is because Google Analytics calculates clicks immediately but only calculates sessions when the tracking code is loaded, which usually takes more time.

For instance, a user might accidentally click on your banner ads but once your website pops up, they close it immediately. This would be calculated as a click but not a session. It’s extremely important to understand session discrepancies to interpret the data Google Analytics provides in a more efficient manner. 

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3. USE FILTERS

Setting up filters allows a more accurate view of the data and avoids distorted results. To access filters, to go admin > view section > filter. From there, you can select the filter type, source/destination and expression. 

There are many uses to adding filters. For example, you have an employee that goes on your website several times a day. To make the data more accurate, you want Google Analytics to not count your employee as a visitor. So, you should set your filter type to exclude, destination to traffic from the IP address and the expression that are equal to. After which, all you need to do is fill in the IP address of your employee and you’re set!

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4. LEARN ATTRIBUTION

When looking at your conversion data and traffic source, only the last page would be counted as the conversion page. However, a visitor might go onto different pages before finally converting. To solve this, go to conversion > attribution > model comparison tool. On this page, you can see a dropdown menu which allows you to choose attribution models. There are different options for you to choose from, including last interaction, last non-direct click, last google ads click, first interaction, linear, time decay, and position-based. 

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5. CREATE A CUSTOM ALERT

By creating your own alerts, you can receive notification through Google Analytics whenever your website performance meets your alert condition. To access this, go to customisation > custom alerts to choose the metrics you want to track.

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For example, if you’re an E-commerce business, this might be a useful metric use for custom alerts:

This applies to: add-to-carters

Alert me when: users

Condition: % decreases by more than

Value: 25%

Compared to: same day in the previous week  

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If you'd like a digital marketing specialist to help run, execute and plan for your digital marketing strategy, Traktion can help through our exclusive network of pre-vetted digital marketing experts. 

Find your marketer here.