Ways to use Google Analytics to empower your marketing efforts

Google Analytics is by far the finest, most powerful and widely used web analytics tool for understanding user behavior of a website. In today’s context, it’s imperative for any business to have a comprehensive online marketing plan to attract potential organic search traffic to their web pages. Be it online or local, researches have shown that almost 100 percent of the purchases are dependent on internet research. Internet marketing agencies employ strategies like content marketing, SEO tags and descriptions, email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing etc. to boost their website traffic and visibility. Here Google Analytics rightly comes in to provide you with the exact precision of your internet marketing strategies.

Why is Google Analytics important?

You get a wealth of information from Google analytics. It gives a clear picture of the strategies which are working in your favor and which are not. Some of the best features are: the top landing pages, exit pages, most popular content pieces, and how much traffic each source or channel is generating for your website. Google analytics allows a webmaster or site owner to track several key factors like user behavior and demographics data, user details, technology, mobile traffic, Ad words integration, social media reports, in-page tracking etc. So a webmaster has access to accurate statistics regarding the performance of his site at the click of a button. And the best part is, it’s free!

Let us take a look how your business benefits from the use of the Google Analytics

The first thing web marketing companies should concentrate on is to identify the metrics which are crucial for their website. If your website primarily focuses on content, the key metrics are the bounce rate and the average time spent per page. If your webpage focuses chiefly on selling products, you’ll probably keep your eyes on the time a user spends to make a purchase and shopping cart abandonment rate. Below are a few tips that a digital marketing firm swears by:

• Boost organic traffic with SEO feature: Recognize your site traffic with search engine optimization. Check the keyword ranking, impressions and clicks of your webpage by means of SEO report. Identify the highest impression keywords and boost your CTR and traffic. Just make sure that Meta descriptions are 156 characters and page title remains within 60 characters. Give priority to the content by keeping user’s intention and benefit in mind. Therefore your content should be written at par to the circumstances under which people search for your high impression keywords and that should be beneficial for the users. If you follow this, soon you’ll find your content in Google search once you type the keyword.

• Keep a track on the Bounce Rate: Get a clear picture of the number of visits within which a user is abandoning your site from the landing page without going further by installing Google analytics for website. A higher bounce rate indicates quicker abandonment and vice versa. The dashboard view of web Google analytics helps you to check the bounce rate of your site. To the left navigation column of your analytics account, you’ll find behavior> site content> all pages. Here you’ll get a clear picture of your website’s bounce rate for the most visited pages. Most common factors that contribute to a high bounce rate are:
  • A single page site – Single page websites have higher bounce rate of 70 to 90% on an average. Well, you can still bring down the bounce rate if you make sure that the page is mobile friendly (and looks good on it), takes minimal loading time, and it has a prominent call to action.
  • Slow loading – Load time plays an integral part in creating traffic and keeping site visitors hooked, especially for mobile traffic. Research shows that 40% of the users leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Studies show that a reasonable website load time is around 2.078 seconds.
  • Confusing navigation – Creativity is appreciated but not at the cost of user convenience. Make easy to understand navigation and avoid offending your traffic.
  • Mobile unfriendly – One of the key advises from SEOs is to check that your website is mobile friendly and actually looks good in handheld devices. So, become responsive and seize the maximum mobile traffic.
  • Google Analytics improperly installed – Inappropriate Google analytics installation can either provide you with a high bounce rate of over 90% or less than 10 %. If you have a drastic jump or a drop in your bounce rate, check the analytics.

• Referral report: Obtaining referral traffic is an important online business marketing strategy which you can get from Google analytics referral traffic report. Your referrers can come from communities, blogs, niche forums, websites and social media. You can opt for customized messages for each of the referrals or can develop specific landing pages to boost your websites referral conversion rate.

• Google analytics and social media: Promoting the brand and services via social media is not new. Social reports provide you with exactly the measurement of the impact of social media on your business and conversion. Quantify the value of social media traffic via conversions report. You get to know about the conversion rate and the fiscal value of conversions of the different social networking traffic. The preliminary path that the user took from a social network to reach to your site is understandable via social sources report. Also get to know which posts are most commonly shared and which social buttons are randomly used via social plug–ins report. Get to know how visitors are associating with your content on external webpages through activity stream.

• In–page analytics: One of the oft used free internet marketing tools, in-page analytics gives a detailed study on your websites online conversion and lead generation. Which links are driving the maximum clicks and how users are interacting with your webpage can be known from in-page analytics. It helps you to resolve some of the commonly asked questions like
  • Which links are getting maximum clicks?
  • Are the users viewing the post/content I want them to see?
  • Are they getting what they want?
  • Is the layout favorable for the users?
  • Are the calls to action motivating enough?

Few additional benefits like image map support, segments, date conversions, page level information and information of your website without scrolling are integrated within in-page analytics. It’s best with modern age browsers like the IE 9 or the current versions of Firefox and Chrome.

• Content Overview Report: One of the powerful digital marketing analytics tools, content overview report allows a website owner to understand which content is doing the best. Locate the top performing content and recognize the loopholes and make it even more comprehensive. It shows the total page views date wise, high-level counts, mini-trend-chart for page views and unique page views as well as shows the bounce rate metric for your website. Boost your blog engagement and average user time on site with content overview report in Google analytics.

• Keyword Report: An expert online marketing consultant rightly knows how to use this report and review keywords performance. Identify the ones that are actually helping to meet your ad goals. Make sure:
  • Use these high performance keywords as alternate tags in the images of your website
  • Same the same keywords for page titles and descriptions
  • Use them in the titles of your website image
  • Also not to forget to adjoin them with the anchor text of the internal website links

• Mobile Report: There is no way you can ignore mobile traffic in the current context. Mobile Report in Google analytics is an important website marketing strategy, commonly used by deft marketers. You get two types of report – overview and devices. Bounce rate and time on site are the two crucial aspects that one should take in account while considering mobile report. To avert bounce rate, go responsive and run an A/B test.

• Users Flow Report: It’s one of the key small business internet marketing strategies where conversion rate plays the major role for your website. Conversion is more crucial to traffic. Users flow report presents a graphical representation of the paths the user adopted after visiting your site. It shows the source, various page views, the point they left your site, traffic volume from varied sources and traffic patterns in your site.

To wrap up

Be it an information based site or a sales driven website, Google analytics is one of the best online marketing tools used by maximum internet marketers to analyze online marketing success and formulate strategies. You get a fair idea on the pages doing well, the strategies working in your favor, and at the same time, which web pages and marketing methodology needs to be altered and modified. It’s a fantastic tool for online marketing agencies to get the maximum commercial value for a website. If you know how to do it right, Google analytics can be a major tool for developing an all-inclusive online marketing strategy for your website.

Hope this helps all new webmasters to use the Google Analytics tool more to their advantage. If you feel I missed highlighting something critical, I am all ears. Please share your thoughts in the comments below!