Google Analytics is a web platform offered by Google. Specifically, the site provides insight into statistics about website traffic, user behavior, and their impacts on conversion and retention. Marketers often rely on Google Analytics and its data reports to gain insights into a business’s online presence. They can test marketing campaigns, products, ads, and content to make correlations between user engagement and goals for the company. With this knowledge, businesses can make data-driven decisions that benefit the productivity and well-being of the business institution. Google Analytics offers important metrics that marketers utilize when analyzing their data and acting upon it to solve business obstacles. This article entails how to use Google Analytics for marketing through specific actions.
What Are the Four Components of Google Analytics?
Google organizes its web analytical service into four distinct sections. Notably, this segmentation makes it easier for marketers to understand how to use Google Analytics in marketing. To illustrate, here’s how Google divides the data:
Audience
This section helps you explore the qualities of your customers. Specifically, it analyzes demographics, geographics, and user interests, to create a customer profile or a target market for your activities. These metrics affect marketing strategies and efforts. By knowing more about your customers’ characteristics, you can make your marketing more meaningful and relevant. Providing current and fresh data to businesses about their customers will help ensure they meet the proper criteria. Ultimately, it also helps secure success.
Acquisition
This component attests to the channels your customers use to navigate the website or app. Channels like social media, emails, ads, and so on all produce customer traffic. However, knowing which ones generate the most is crucial to deciding which channel requires more time and effort. These reports not only track new customer behavior but also return customers. Its principal duty is to determine the efficiency of marketing efforts and accurately track traffic and conversions to the website. Optimizing marketing strategies on these selected channels will build more clientele and increase the exposure of the business.
Behavior
Customer behavior reports include pages visited and how much time a user spends on each page. This data is used to pinpoint areas of improvement and ensure a good user experience that leaves a positive impression. Analyzing user behavior allows marketers to understand what influences buying decisions. The analysis can also inform what services are required during certain parts of the sales journey and many more insights.
Conversions
These actions are precious to the business. They are decisions the company pushes users to make and count on, like a purchase, a subscription, or scrolling activity. They measure if a user is successfully diving into every stage of the sales funnel. The encouragement to make these user decisions are accomplished through marketing strategies and campaigns on the online platform. It can act as a troubleshooting tool for your website. And when applied to making data-driven decisions, it can drive up consumer activity and raise business profits.
Wondering how to set up your Google Analytics 4 for each funnel stage? Take a look at this article and get started!
What Is a Metric in Google Analytics?
A metric is a quantitative piece of data related to specific dimensions that are significant to evaluate the performance of a facet being looked at for a business. Metrics provide solid evidence of success that can be measured without errors or gaps. Both internal managers and external stakeholders manage these. In particular, they measure the effects of marketing efforts on audience actions. It is a way to test the present circumstances and improve future outcomes. Metrics are one of the most essential ways Marketers can use Google Analytics in Marketing. For a more in-depth explanation of metrics and how they work, refer to a more in-depth description in the article What Is a Metric in Google Analytics? [Explained]
What is a Dimension in Google Analytics?
Dimensions are attributes of your data. They organize, and segment data sets for better analysis and understanding. Dimensions include language, country, browser, medium, and device category. Each dimension is qualitative data that help sort traffic. When looking at the device category dimension, reports may include what type of device is used when your website or app is accessed, like a desktop, mobile, or tablet device. These are the values of the dimension and are calculations based on metrics.
8 Metrics to Focus on When Looking at Each Section
There are metrics in each section that empower Google Analytics users to extract the necessary information from data. To explain, here are a few:
Number of users and sessions
The number of users is a calculation of how many unique visitors an online platform receives, and the number of sessions is the frequency of their visits. There could be 50 users and 100 sessions, implying that every user visited the site twice. These stats allow businesses to learn about their customer traffic and how aware the public is of their brand.
Average pages per session
This data informs analysts of the pages a user views when visiting the site. This information can depict how effective your pages are and shows a business how to capture user attention and what to do to improve it. Businesses communicate to their target market through online platforms like websites with an array of information that customers should know when browsing for what the company offers, whether its products or services.
Ratio to new and returning visitors
The comparison of new visitors to returning depicts how well your campaigns are working and test retention factors. Many conclusions can be drawn with a good ratio, like what strategies work best and how strong your clientele is becoming. It tells businesses the success of such strategies and helps them get to know their customer more for future marketing events.
Organic vs. paid sessions
The difference between organic and paid sessions is that one informs about customer traffic from non-paid searches, and the other is traffic from paid channels like commercials and ads. It shows how strong or weak your SEO strategies are and how persuasive your ad campaigns are. This data is crucial to understanding the success of financial and creative efforts in a business.
All Google Ads metrics
This metric requires you to link Google ads and Google Analytics together so businesses can be informed on an ad click or impression of their designed campaigns. Companies dedicate a set budget for marketing and advertising. Hence, testing their ads is crucial to not wasting resources and improving users’ impressions so more people click on advertisements and participate in other marketing campaigns.
Newsletter user acquisition
The newsletter opens toward email campaigns and assesses the reach of emails and initial engagement. They look at how many users the newsletter brought to the website. They prove successful content and deliverability. If open rates are low, users may find content not valuable. Businesses should maintain a positive reputation and not be marked as spam emails.
Average Time on Page and Engagement Rate
Analyzing the engagement rate on your website pages allows the creators to understand user experience and get feedback on what they can improve. The engagement rate is measured in user sessions, which is how long a user engages with your website or app. To calculate the engagement rate, you must divide the number of engaged sessions by the total number of sessions over a given time and then convert it to a percentage. According to Google Analytics Help, “An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion rate, or has at least two pageviews or screen views.” This analysis answers questions about their content and if it is relevant to their target market. A high engagement rate results in low bounce rates as users find the website useful or entertaining and stay longer.
Goal conversion rate
A website has predetermined standard objects, including purchases, a subscription, the number of visitors, and the average time on page downloads. Over time this depicts how well your marketing strategies work towards a business’s goals. Factors that lead to success or failure can be identified and guide future decisions.
To learn more types of metrics used in Marketing, check out: 14 key metrics in Google Analytics for digital marketing
Key Takeaways
Google Analytics is an essential tool in today’s business world. By using its many free features, businesses can make informed decisions and improve their marketing strategies to achieve their goals with no strings attached. It’s crucial to utilize this tool to ensure success and accomplish anything you desire, as long as you have the proper knowledge and decision-making skills. To gain a deeper understanding of why Marketing Analytics is critical, check out “What is Marketing Analytics? Tips, Tools, & Why It Matters.”
Want to learn more about how to use Google Analytics for marketing? Contact us to level your data tracking and take your business to the next level!