What is Google Analytics?
It is a website analytics service offered by Google that provides insights on the customer’s user experience upon visiting the website of your interest/choice. The insights thus help shape the success strategy of the business by tracking and analyzing the online marketing ROI. In the current marketplace, it is accepted as one of the top contender analytics tools with initially zero investment operations that will allow a business investment of a decent amount of budget in some other important resources while parallelly collecting essential statistical information needed to optimize website performance. Certainly, the free version has limitations compared to paid version (known as “360 Premium”). For a startup or medium business, the standard, free edition still has quite a few features to track and analyze website performance.
Why is Google Analytics Important?
To acquire more customers, we must understand customer behavior by analyzing actions such as:
Measure internal site search; Gather knowledge and analytics about visitor/customer behavior; User profiling and interest categorization (Age, gender, location etc.); Collection of data about Social platform to target for best results; Setting up and tracking of Goals and their (predefined time based) effectiveness.
The above, at the minimum but not limited to, be the foundation to determine as to where and what to adjust in the configuration to cater for better user experience for effective marketing.
Also allows us to form a demographic profile of our customers, from which the business could draw insights and adjust strategies to gain competitive advantages in the market.
Thru the website traffic, you like to understand customer behavior and thus allows each website visitors to execute a specific action (conversion).
Let us consider a business with franchise locations all over the country. A type of conversion could be,
- An inquiry, as to whether an item is available at a specific location or
- A type of conversion may be achieved if the customer requesting a quote or a follow-up email from the business owner.
Where to Focus on Google Analytics?
A business could easily setup the service by signing up an account online and executing a few simple predefined configurations on top of the same. This will immediately enable the data collections capabilities from the website and allow instant access to the canned reports accordingly. The standard feature/functionality instantly help extract the data into Google Docs, Sites and Spreadsheets
Easy integration to other tools (such as AdWords) is an important and essential feature of this analytics tool leading to successful AdWords campaigns.
Please note, Google Analytics enables certain essential derived actions that could be grouped into 4 broad categories. The 4 Categories are Audience; Acquisition; Behavior and Conversion.
Audience category tracks explore our customers which includes information such as demographics, location, retention, and device technology etc.
A few essential metrics are:
- Users: Number of unique users that have visited tagged pages
- Sessions: Number of times a user has visited a tagged page
- Pages/Session: Ratio of pages viewed to sessions
- Average Session Duration: Average time spent per session.
- % New Sessions: Percentage of new sessions initiated by new users.
- Pageviews: Count of pages viewed by user during session.
- Bounce Rate: Percentage of single page sessions left without interacting with the page.
Acquisition manages customer visits and traffics interpretation. The analysis such as organic traffic, social media, email, ads, etc. help determine the efficacy of Search Engine Optimization effort.
A few essential metrics are:
- Organic vs. paid sessions: Organic search is the traffic from users originated from a non-paid search engine and Paid Search is the traffic from users clicked on an advertisement
- Google Ads: We can access detailed metrics about your Google Ads which help analyze customer activity on the website after an ad click or impression
- Behavior: effectively track actions, including but not limited to pages visited, time spent on page, etc.
A few essential metrics are:
- Average time on page: Average time a user spent on the page
- Top queries in search: The top Google Search queries that generated impressions of your website URLs in Google organic search results
- Top 10 landing pages: Top 10 landing pages hit by users
AdSense revenue: Revenue displaying appropriate ads with AdSense for content
Now the most important one is Conversions help identify if the customers actions is per expectation. Those are typically based on certain predefined set of action that help funnel essential actions such as purchase to see how well the site encourages such actions over time.
Most essential conversion metrics is
Goal conversion rate à Certain use conversion goals are configured to measure positive outcomes such as user registration; page visits; downloads or purchases etc. Tracking the goal value over predefined time, plots the effectiveness of the marketing effort and adjustment of the goal value if needed.
Goals and Achievements
Aspirent established and developed automated process to extract Google Analytics API data and took over primary responsibility of feeding data to Tableau dashboarding for marketing team.
Aspirent’s solution
- Produced a reporting solution that delivers the reports to > 450 recipients every month.
- Enabled client to drive 22% growth in digital inquiries and an average location occupancy of 85%, both huge improvements over baseline. The results are achieved through easier use of extracted API data.
- Enabled the client to Oversee end-to-end management of all digital marketing channels, paid/organic search marketing, programmatic media, social media, SEO, and website marketing strategy with the goal of driving qualified conversions.
- Enabled client to effectively analyze and optimize both front and back end campaign performance, executing changes based on quantitative, actionable insights.
