Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing Strategy

Every business is looking for their website to be a success. However, it is nearly impossible to measure the success of a website on your own. For this reason, tools like Google Analytics have been created to help with your online marketing mission.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics was first launched in November of 2005. It is now the most commonly used web analytics tool available. While there is a free version, Google also offers a couple of different subscription based plans to choose from.

With Google Analytics, web designers and owners are able to discover a great deal of information about the traffic that visits their site. With it, you are able to discover the type of person that is visiting your website as well as when they are visiting. You will also learn the content that is most effective among those visitors.

When a visitor arrives at your site, your computer will be asked to provide certain information back to the servers of Google. With this data, reports are able to be created based upon how the visitor travels through your site as well as how they arrived at your site to begin with.

Why do you need this Data?

There are many reasons that Google Analytics is an important part of any website. For starters, you can learn where the majority of your visitors are coming from. The reason that this is helpful is because this will allow you to target specific markets and to gear your content towards the people who are arriving at your website.

Another benefit of Google Analytics is that you are able to determine if your marketing efforts are paying off. When you are able to determine how visitors are arriving at your site, you will be able to measure the effect of your online ads and social media campaigns.

Along with these items, Google Analytics will allow you to determine exactly which search engines are being used to reach your site as well as the specific keywords that are being used. Knowing this information can be invaluable when you are creating content for your website.

Making it your Strategy

Businesses can easily develop a strategy around Google Analytics. To do this, start by determining what your most popular pages are on your website. This will help you to determine exactly what your visitors are most interested in reading so that you can duplicate it for other pages of your site.

You should also focus on learning which blog posts are the most popular. Look for posts that users visit the most and that they spend more time on. Look at your in-page analytics as well. This data will allow you to know exactly which pieces of clickable items are being interacted with the most. There is also an option that will allow you to determine where to place your clickable items on your page.

Google Analytics can also help determine how well your social media campaigns are functioning. There are a couple of different reports that you can use to learn this information. One report will allow you to designate which pages link to your social media sites so that you can determine if they are being viewed and shared. A second report will allow you to see exactly who is posting links to your site and what is being said.

The important thing to remember when you are relying on Google Analytics for information is that it is an ongoing process. This strategy will allow you to test and refine your strategy until you are able to find a system that works the best for your visitors. Contact us to learn more about how you can use Google Analytics to enhance your website’s effectiveness.