Introduction

Tons and tons of consumer data are practically worthless if you don’t know how to cleverly chisel it into meaningful building blocks that together make a befitting marketing strategy. With over half of the top 1000 performing websites on Alexa leveraging the power of Google Analytics, it’s fair to sharpen your skills at better decoding the consumer data using Google Analytics than your competitor.

Let’s learn how to best use Google Analytics for marketing success in minutes.

Step 1 > Dive in with an objective

The charts, dashboards and stats that pop in front of your screen after you log into Google Analytics can be easily overwhelming and without a focus, it might just be as good as window shopping for nothing. Create a goal beforehand like – seeing how many users over 20 years of age visited your website the day after your social media campaign. It’s a great idea to create custom charts and alerts on Google Analytics to follow up your marketing campaigns.

Step 2 > Know the most useful sections

Out of the eight sections that show on Google Analytics namely Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligent Events, Real Time, Audience Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions, some are more useful for marketing purposes than others if used in the right manner. Let’s list out the ones you cannot ignore for getting valuable marketing worthy insights.

Audience – This is a direct filter to your target audience, it lets you segregate the visitors and their browsing data on marketing related parameters like age, gender, geographic location and their interests and likings.

Acquisition – Taking the vague out of your marketing campaign’s performance requires knowing how the different media performed in engaging with your target audience. Acquisition easily lets you gauge that by showing how people arrive to your website, whether they clicked on a paid or organic Google search result, directly punched in your URL on the browser, redirected from social media site or followed the link on a blog etc.

Behaviour – The name of this section itself is a giveaway to the bounty of useful marketing related insights it contains. This section tells you about how visitors spend time on your site, which pages or sections they visit the most, for instance they could be coming to your website purely for the blogs and not the services you offer. This means that you need to add call to action messages and link your blog to your services page to redirect the users where you want them to be.

Conclusion:

With Google Analytics being a freemium product and at everyone’s disposal, one must cleverly exploit it to increase their marketing performance and get ahead of the competition who have access to very similar customer data. Many Digital agencies have expertise in decrypting the customer data with a marketing focus to enable marketers to assess their performance on accurate and measurable parameters. Google Analytics can also be enhanced with add ons like Google Webmasters, Google Tag manager and Enhanced Ecommerce etc. for specific business or enterprise needs.