One view – that’s what we all want, isn’t it? One place we can visit where we can see the results of all the activity we have in place; be it website traffic, campaign activity, social (including KPI’s and customer journey), through to acquisition or conversion.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but for the most part customers are only using a very small percentage of it. Used correctly and by maximising the tools within it, you can start to glean some strong information that will allow you to optimise more effectively and build a clearer picture of what’s working.
By tagging pages and setting up goals and events, we can start to see a picture of what part of the traffic is converting better and establish true costs and efficiencies.
The first place to start is your campaigns. In the first instance, tagging your website means that you are in a stronger position to keep talking to interested visitors via re-marketing. Re-marketing can now be delivered from both digital campaigns as well as SEM and social.
By tagging your website, you can start to see the meaning within traffic data. Which source, medium and campaign name and the level of this detail is dependent on how you name parameters.
Source, for example, might be social media, but it could also be as detailed as Facebook. While medium could be a post, but it also could be as highly defined as blog. So, option one might read Social/Post while option two could read Facebook/Blog, the latter providing far great detail in terms of which ‘campaign activity’ has delivered.
For example, at a simple level, you might see that you get 25% of traffic from your programmatic activity. When you drill into programmatic, you see that a couple of mediums combined with sources provide strong lead generation. You might identify a line of messaging has better conversion.
So, what’s the out-take? Continue to build in-line with the messaging / campaign or format that is converting and increase budget against that.
Setting up goals beyond traffic is also important, these can be actions within the website. For example, ‘ask for a demo’, contact us, sign up to enewsletter. A campaign might deliver well, but if it doesn’t lead to converting users to an end goal, this may not be as effective as the messaging or medium that only delivers a small high quality user.
Goals can be added to various parts of the funnel. Tracking this enables you to understand how well it is working, could it be optimised? For example if it consistently sits at 14% of your site’s traffic, but you think it could be higher. You could build some more tracking goals to understand exactly where a higher percentage of users are falling off the funnel. As a consequence, you review this part of the sign up form to see if you can increase conversion.
So, while Google isn’t the be all and end all of analytics, it is a good place to start. It helps to define what other paid tools you might put in place to give better meaning or where to place more investment and focus on the business. This could range from spend prioritisation and focus of the customer experience.