Google Analytics can give you a huge amount of information about your existing and potential customers. By analysing your site stats, you can make informed decisions about the site itself, as well as your business as a whole.
However, most companies find themselves at one or other of the extremes of data analysis: either they swamp themselves in swathes of incomprehensible numbers, or they barely look at the top-line visitor stats.
There is a happy medium to be found for every company. With some forethought and work, you can make Analytics an asset to your business that builds customer intelligence and revenue and even makes your colleagues love you!
1. Set up and monitor Goals.
A Goal in Google Analytics is used to monitor an action that happens on the site. This can be anything from a purchase to a download, the completion of a form, to the length of time that the visitor spends on the site.
When setting up Goals, it is a good idea to go through your business aims and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and look at the most efficient ways of reporting on them. If you are reporting in a heavily sales-oriented organisation, for instance, it is a good idea to look at goals that relate to completed purchases and time spent on shopping cart pages.
2. Track your marketing campaigns
Imagine that your marketing department has come up with a crazy new scheme to drive traffic via Twitter, Facebook or whatever the next social media phenomenon is: that campaign needs to be tracked!
Using Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics, you can monitor traffic, revenue and other KPIs by tagging your links. This is especially useful for services that use URL shorteners, which usually skew referral URL data.
Getting your colleagues in the habit of tagging campaigns that go out on the web can be a drawn-out process, but it will pay dividends in the end. Your Financial Director will love you for the ROI data you present on that Twitter campaign!
3. Use Advanced Segments
Your site traffic is not one big group of like-minded people who all turn up for the same reason. Likewise you shouldn’t be treating your analytics stats as one almighty block of figures.
Using Advanced Segments will give you greater insights into the behaviour of different types of visitors, such as new and returning visitors or those from different sources, such as organic and paid search. You can even create your own Segments, tailored to your categories of visitor.
Segments will tell you a different story about each of your visitor types and allow you to make informed decisions on how to interact with them.
Like most site analytics packages, Google Analytics collects a huge amount of data, but there is no need to try to tackle it all at once. The three techniques we have gone through here will get you well started towards using Analytics in an intelligent way that relates to your company’s goals, targets and KPIs, without getting bogged down in a mire of data.
