Google Analytics Tips to Improve Marketing Strategies

Google Analytics helps marketers identify the strength of their online marketing efforts. This indispensable tool is used worldwide by online marketers, corporate brands, marketing agencies, and high-profile bloggers to help them see if they are reaching their business goals. For instance, a brand can see how well a certain campaign is being received by customers through various marketing platforms (i.e., email, social media, blog posts, videos, etc.). It can then provide results from each platform to see what the true return on investment (ROI) is for the marketing effort.

For any brand marketer that wants to understand its audience’s purchasing behavior or attention span, Google Analytics helps find, sort, and measure the information captured on websites, landing pages, social media, and elsewhere. If you’re using Google Analytics, you already have an understanding of this. Here are some of the top tips to help you become even more proficient on Google Analytics.

Focus on three sections.

Audience, behavior, and acquisition are critical for marketers, so it’s important to know how to analyze these three sections in Google Analytics.

The audience section provides information about a brand’s site visitors and allows marketers to collect demographic info, and that of their interests and the devices they use. Having this information can help marketers target customers more efficiently in future campaigns.

The behavior section provides analysis on how that audience is interacting with a website. Which page did they land on? Which pages did they click to? Behavior patterns can be found in Google Analytics, helping marketers to tailor pages more accurately.

Lastly, acquisition reveals the type of content or advertising that brought a consumer to the site. Seeing where visitors are clicking from is a big boost to future marketing efforts.

Remember the subsections.

Google Analytics provides deep wells of information in its algorithms. Marketers should drill down deep into the demographics and geo subsections of audience, the content drilldown and landing/exit pages of the behavior section, and the all traffic/channels portion of the acquisition section. The invaluable insights gathered in these data pools can help marketers to improve content strategy, capture attention, and more.

Embrace filters.

Users of Google Analytics can sometimes get overwhelmed by the amount of data at their fingertips. So it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff. Marketers should set up relevant filters wherever possible. One pro tip that good online marketers use is to filter their own IP address with their email service provider. This helps brand marketers in two ways:

• It screens out internal traffic to its website, giving it analytics numbers purely from external traffic, and
• It can help boost delivery to your email customers. Marketers can filter out spam referral traffic to get more accurate results. For example, if you’re working with an email services provider whose other customers are spamming customers, your IP address might get blocked by Internet Service Providers and lessen your email campaign’s impact.

The amount of data from Google Analytics, as well as from Adwords, can be immense. Google knows this. So to help marketers, it recently launched Google Attribution, which the company says will deliver better insights into the effectiveness of certain ads and marketing campaigns.

Create custom tagging.

Tag campaigns correctly using UTM parameters on URLs with Google Analytics’ custom tagging feature. Google Analytics tracks these tags each time the connected link is clicked. This can assist marketers in determining how successful a campaign is, and determine other ways to drive visitors to a particular website or landing page.