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Learn more about how to take advantage of Google Analytics to maximize the effectiveness of your online presence.
Google Analytics is a powerful (and free) tool that any business with a digital footprint should utilize to maximize the effectiveness of their online presence. The “bread and butter” of what Google Analytics does is to track the performance of various outreach initiatives and marketing campaigns of individual webpages. To do this, Google Analytics provides insight into traffic flow, the heaviest traffic periods by the hour, and how visitors landed on a particular page.
However, simple data accumulation is just the beginning of what Google Analytics offers. The software can also take the raw data measured by Google and turn it into actionable information that companies can harness to design more effective marketing and bump up SEO in the future. The following covers a few key features of Google Analytics and how you can read the reports to understand their practical implications.
Nearly all online activity leaves bread crumbs with nuggets of valuable information – provided you know how to interpret it. Google Analytics makes reading the bread crumbs easier. Tracking who visits your site, what they are interested in, and how long they stay are all critical bits of information that can inform smart marketing.
“Sessions,” which are essentially visits to a website, are recorded on the first page of Google Analytics reports. In addition to the number of visitors, you can view how many pages the average visitors clicked on, how long they stayed active on the site, and how many pages they viewed for each session. All of this information is contained in the Audience Overview section of the report.
Google can also track how individual visitors behaved on the site, including their media interests, geographical location, the path they took to reach each page, and the device they are using to access the web. This information is also found in Audience Overview.
Acquisition is arguably the second most critical page of the report because it shows how a user found your site. The main categories on the Acquisition page are organic search, referral, social media link, and direct contact, meaning they typed the website directly into their browser.
These represent a sampling of the many features in Google Analytics. Once you get used to the basic layout and information presented, you can move on to even more involved analytics to supercharge your future marketing and outreach work.
When analyzing your Google Ads, make the most of your budget and time by focusing on the four most important metrics.
Google Ads is the most popular advertising platform on the internet. If you want to monitor the performance of your Google Ads, you’ll need to analyze the platform’s paid search metrics. You have a limited amount of money to invest in marketing, so monitoring your results is important. Here are four of the most important points you need to examine when analyzing your Google Ads.
Impressions refers to the number of times that your ad is available to be seen by a Google user. One showing on a Google search page or anywhere else on the Google network counts as one impression. Keep in mind that just because your ad is shown, this doesn’t mean that a person actually saw the ad.
Analyzing your number of clicks for your Google Ads campaign is a smart move. Whenever a person clicks the blue underlined word or phrase within your ad, this counts as a click. Remember that if the click takes the person to a broken link or if they’re unable to reach your website for some other reason, such as the server being down, you still have to pay for the click. Once you have your number of clicks and your cost metrics, you can calculate the cost per click for your ad campaign.
Conversions are a measure of how motivational your ad is to the viewer. This metric shows how many people took the desired action. You can also analyze conversions based on the number of signups on a particular page of your site.
If you’re like most business owners, you don’t have an unlimited amount of money to spend on ads. That’s why it’s important to analyze your costs for Google Ads. You can look at charts and graphs that break down the cost by campaign, ad group and per acquisition. You can also look at the costs of certain keywords or groups of keywords. Tracking your costs over time allows you to plan your marketing budget and make the most of your money. Analyzing these four key metrics of your Google Ad will help you hone your marketing strategy and get the biggest possible return on your investment.
If you are new to the marketing business, you may have heard of the terms “customer journey” and “marketing funnel” and thought that they could be used interchangeably. Yes, they comprise similar ideas, but these two terms represent two different things.
As the term implies, the customer journey represents the path taken by a potential customer before making a purchase decision. A customer journey map can be used as a visualization framework to track the path via touchpoints. The following takes a closer look at how the customer journey involves more than just the marketing funnel.
Unlike the marketing funnel, which is linear and more rigid, the customer journey is more circuitous and meandering. The customer journey becomes longer as your sales cycle elongates. The customer journey is particularly interested in tracking the so-called touchpoints that a lead encounters before making the final purchasing decision.
These touchpoints include all the interactions made by the lead, such as opening marketing emails or visiting your company’s website. This is different from the marketing funnel, which focuses on the stages of interest that a client has in your business. For most companies, the average client has to engage in an average of eight interactions before deciding to make a purchase.
Tracking the customer journey, however, is not as easy as it sounds. You will have to gather a lot of information to find out what interactions your leads are making before buying a product or service from your business. Furthermore, it isn’t easy to create a completely accurate visualization of the touchpoints. However, if you manage to create a successful customer journey, it can significantly enhance your marketing efforts.
This is only possible, though, if you have gathered enough information and studied your client’s route enough. The customer journey, with a level of granularity that cannot be achieved by a marketing funnel, shows you which marketing efforts have the best return on investment (ROI) as well as those that are just not worth your marketing dollars.
With enough data, it is possible to create a touchpoint-based model (customer journey) that indicates the steps your average customers take before making a purchase. This is usually a good indicator of how clients interact with your business before making purchases.
Based on the audience’s distinct personas, multiple customer journey maps can be made to suit the company’s needs. It is important to keep in mind that not all customers are the same. It is therefore not wise to assume that all or almost every consumer will follow the same customer journey.
Despite being used for different purposes, customer journeys and marketing funnels are indispensable frameworks that can be used together to provide insight into where you should focus your marketing efforts for the greatest ROI.
There are 5 things you MUST include when building a website if you expect to get a high conversion rate.
You may notice that people are visiting your website. Great! However, you may also notice that people are visiting then leaving without buying anything. You need to create a website that makes people want to buy. The following covers five vital steps to ensuring a website converts well.
Who is visiting your site? You need to consider your clientele and design the website with these people in mind. In fact, you may even want to flesh out a customer persona by giving them a name, age, occupation, and lifestyle and then keep these details in mind when designing your site or planning your content calendar.
Your clientele is coming to you to solve a problem. What problem do they have? For example, if you are a plumber, a person is coming to you for your knowledge of leaking pipes or something similar. You need to identify the problem so you can move forward with effective website content.
After you identify the problem, consider how you can use your offerings to solve that problem? Highlight your products or services and make it clear how they can help your clientele right away.
There are likely a number of other companies that offer products or services similar to yours. You need to explain why people should use your company instead of the other options available to them. There are a number of reasons you may stand out from your competitors, including:
• Superior products
• Satisfaction guarantees
• Affordability
• Excellent customer service
If a customer believes you can offer something that others can’t, they will choose to shop with you. Be sure to show them why you’re the best option available.
Your business should have a clear identity and a personality. Ensure your branding is consistent across all platforms and mediums with the colors and font, pictures, and content you use. Customers will be able to get a sense of who you are as a company, and this will make them feel comfortable doing business with you.
When someone visits your website, you want them to move forward and actually make a purchase. Keep the above tips in mind when designing your site, and you will convince users to do just that.
