How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

Data is an important factor in any marketing campaign. Google Analytics is commonly used to help supply you with the data you need, but are you using it to full effect? Google Analytics can help you address issues with your website and make adjustments to your campaigns.  If you are a marketer who does not typically focus on data or analytics, Google Analytics might seem daunting at first, but we are here to help!

We’ll help you learn how to use Analytics so no data gets lost in translation.

What is Google Analytics?

Do you want to discover things you probably never knew about the people who visit your website and how they use it? Google Analytics, or GA, is an analytics tool that provides an in-depth look at your website’s performance and user behavior. When you understand your users’ behavior, you can deliver a better web experience. You can use Google Analytics to shape the digital marketing strategy for your business. It is also helpful for tracking your progress and results, whether it is for yourself, your boss, or a client.

How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

If you are a marketer who wants to understand their audience better and strengthen their marketing strategies, you can benefit from using Google Analytics. Whether you as a marketer work primarily with e-commerce sites or small local businesses, it is important to understand the behavior of the website’s users in order to upgrade the website and deliver the best possible results. Google Analytics allows you to track and understand the website’s users’ behavior, user experience, online content, and more. GA can help you discover what is working and not working for your website, or your clients’ websites. This data helps you create a marketing strategy for the website of any business. For example, it might help you decide which type of content is working well or the best times to post on social media.

Google Analytics Significance in the Marketing World

Google Analytics is one of the most important and powerful tools for monitoring and analyzing your website’s traffic. Marketers use Analytics to understand how their marketing campaigns are working, and how to understand how a site’s user experience impacts statistics like retention and conversion.

There are four sections in the GA dashboard:

• Audience: Audience helps you understand who your audience is with data like demographics, location, retention, and what type of device they are using.
• Acquisition: Acquisition shows you how visitors arrive at your website. This can help you determine how to
• Behavior: Behavior explains what visitors do once they arrive at your website. How many pages do they visit? How long do they stay?
• Conversions: Conversion tracks how many users take the desired action on your website, whether that is making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, downloading free content, etc.

Create a Google Analytics Account

The first step to using Google Analytics is to create your account or sign in. Go to google.com/analytics. Click on “Sign In” or “Create an Account” in the upper left corner. If you are already signed in, simply click on “Access Google Analytics.” Make sure to fill in the required information and click on “Get Tracking ID” to finish setting up your account.

Set Up Google Analytics on Your Website

In order to track your website, you will need a <script> tracking code. The tracking code will need to be on every web page you want to track. You can simply copy and paste the code directly into your website template. Or, your website host might offer Google Analytics integration. For example, WordPress has several Google Analytics plug-ins that will automatically add the tracking code to every page.

Start Tracking

Google Analytics offers a range of metrics that you can completely customize to fit your needs. You can access and configure all of GA’s different features in the left sidebar. Three of the features that tend to matter most for marketers are traffic sources, custom reports, and social settings.

• Traffic Sources: It’s not just important to know who is visiting your website, but also how they are finding your website in the first place. Your traffic sources show you where your visitors and customers are coming from. Simply click the “Acquisitions” tab and you can see all the traffic sources, like channels, referrals, and organic searches.
• Custom Reports: Custom reports allow you to configure metrics based on your own categories that are not included in the default settings.
• Social Settings: Every good marketer knows that it is not enough to simply run a social media marketing campaign. But you also need to track its progress.

Add Users

Marketers in particular often need to know how to add users to Google Analytics accounts, so that their teams can share access to this important data. You will need to learn how to share access to Google Analytics.

How Have You Leveraged Data to Develop a Strategy?

Now that you know how to use Google Analytics, it is time to use the data you can obtain from GA to develop an expert marketing strategy. There is so much data available in Analytics that it can be difficult to know where to find the most important and relevant metrics. Just like there are useful metrics in Analytics, there are also some less-useful metrics in Google Analytics. The metrics that are useful for one of your clients might be different from others. But if you know how to fish through the data streams, you are able to make better marketing decisions.