Google Analytics is a great tool to help discover what’s working and what isn’t

With so many digital marketing options available, a key challenge for digital marketers is to choose the option(s) that get the best results for every £ spent. Google Analytics can help identify which digital marketing activities are best at:

Here are 10 ways to use Google Analytics to improve your web marketing performance.

1) Optimise Pay Per Click advertising performance
Google Analytics provides significantly richer data than standard Adwords reports e.g. Do specific ad groups or keywords attract higher bounces or shorter visits or a lower average spend?

2) Measure website traffic and conversions
Most Analytics users would look at the obvious metrics like visits, pages per visit, duration etc. However, it’s important to also measure conversions (desired objectives) such as sales, subscribes, downloads, visitors greater than x minutes or those that have viewed more than z pages etc. It can be especially revealing to look at different metrics by segment such as by source or people who bought something or downloaded something.

3) Analyse navigation and page flow
How did people arrive at a specific page? What do you want people to do next? Did they do what you wanted or something else? Understanding the answers to thes question will help improve website conversions.

4) Produce management reports
The business owners / managers want to know what’s working and what isn’t. Few have the time or inclination to look through a 30 page report. Agree the key perfomance metrics and provide tailored reports showing items of significance and planned actions to improve performance

5) Track campaign performance
Track the performance of campaigns such as Pay Per Click, SEO, referrals, email etc to see if they are delivering the desired results.  Analyse why campaigns under-performed and focus resources on top performing campaigns.

6) Measure repeat visits / sales
Most businesses work really hard to get a customer. This should be the start of the relationship rather than a ‘1 night stand”.

7) Review content performance
Is every page doing its job? Is the content still relevant and still compelling?

8) Improve SEO performance
Are you getting more organic search traffic over time? Do specific keywords generate more value to the business?

9) Optimise conversions
Which visitor segments deliver the highest conversions? What are the opportunities for improvement? Are people leaking from specific stages of a conversion funnel such as the application or buying process?

10) Site search analysis

What are people searching for on your site? Why? Do you need to add new content or improve site structure or navigation?

Google Analytics is great but with so many metrics and so many segmentation opportunities, most people can’t see the wood from the trees. If you need help in setting up a web analytics strategy, reporting or training then contact a web analytics expert.