Google Analytics takes away the guesswork from marketing because now you have hard data to use as valuable reference for your marketing campaign. You have the capability to fine tune your strategies and pinpoint the processes that are working and underperforming.
Marketing is no longer a shot in the dark. Google Analytics will help you identify your target audience as if you were guided by a laser sight. There will be no wasted effort. Every decision you make will have basis and empirical evidence to fall back on.
Google Analytics will justify your marketing budget by giving you the means to measure your ROI.
Google Analytics Adds Value to Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Businesses understand the value of investing in a marketing campaign. If you want to build markets, there are no excuses, you have to constantly push and promote your brand to potential end users. Success does not come overnight; just like a learned skill, proficiency comes by doing the activity over and over again.
But it’s difficult to justify a marketing budget if you can’t track performance or measure results. It’s like using a shotgun to hunt for ducks at night. You’re firing everywhere but you have no idea if you’ve hit your intended targets.
Many of our clients raised similar concerns. From their previous experience with traditional marketing, they wanted to know if having a mobile responsive website and switching to digital marketing would make any difference.
Would this just be another hit or miss experiment?
The answer is “No” and the reason is because of Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Before broadband technology opened up the Internet, websites functioned more like online company brochures. It had the usual pages but content was purely informational.
Today with the Internet growing to a population of more than 3.7 Billion daily users, companies are putting up websites as the hub of a digital marketing campaign. It is the destination point where leads are converted to sales.
If you want to enhance your online presence, no question, you must have a website. As we shared in our article, “Website vs. Social Media: Can You Have One Without the Other?”, distributing content in social media is not enough.
A website not only organizes your entire digital marketing campaign, it maximizes the collaborative effort of all its component parts.
Let’s assume we mapped out a digital marketing strategy for your business that incorporated the following processes:
- SEO
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- PPC Advertising
These processes are the online channels that we will use to drive inbound traffic to your website. Results will vary among these processes; some will generate more leads than others. As we implement our campaign strategy, your website will receive valuable data from these channels.
The objective of a digital marketing campaign is to generate website traffic. But you need to organize and sort out the traffic that comes in so you can make heads or tails of the information you receive.
Enter Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a freemium web service tool offered by Google. It was launched on November 2005 after the company acquired Urchin, a web statistics program developed by Urchin Software Corporation.
It’s purpose is to track and measure website traffic. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics tool on the Internet.
If you’re embarking on a digital marketing campaign for the first time, you may not be clear on what to expect. Google Analytics helps you find the answers to the following questions:
- How much traffic is my website generating?
- Where is the bulk of the traffic coming from?
- Which pages enjoy the highest level of viewership?
- Which content generates the highest levels of engagement and shares?
- What percentage of site visits generates leads?
For e-commerce proprietors, Google Analytics will help you identify factors why shopping carts are abandoned at the checkout counter.
Google Analytics gives you a snapshot of your market’s online behavioral profile. All data is provided in real time. You can be creative and run comparative studies between different timelines to track changes in demographics and demand patterns.
It will help you re-frame your buyer’s profile so you can fine tune your digital marketing campaign and accommodate changes in consumer behavior.
How to Setup Google Analytics
Setting up Google Analytics is very easy.
You only need to have a Google account. Then follow the instructions in setting up your Google Analytics account to get your tracking code. This is a piece of Javascript which needs to be integrated in your website’s code for Google Analytics to work.
What’s more important is setting your goals.
Goals set the direction which will help turn the wheels of your marketing campaign into motion. There are many ways you can achieve your goal but you have to identify it so we can determine the best tools to get the job done.
Here’s a list of goals identified by some of our clients:
- What do you want your website to do?
- What would you have your visitors do when they land on your website?
- What types of information do your visitors need to know to encourage higher sales conversions?
Clients know what they want but have some difficulty articulating it in the context of a digital marketing campaign. This is where we collaborate with them to come up with the best approach.
Google Analytics Goals will help you uncover the following important information:
- Engagement level or time spent by a visitor on a page of your website.
- Participation with submission forms.
- Specific actions taken by visitors: play video, chat engagement.
Incorporating your targets in Google Analytics Goals will allow you to measure the effectiveness of every strategy or process that will be implemented.
7 Reasons Why You Should Use Google Analytics
There are more reasons why you should use Google Analytics other than the fact that it is the preferred analytics tool of marketers.
1. It’s Free and Easy to Use
Google Analytics is a godsend for startups with limited or tight budgets. As a free tool, budding entrepreneurs have a cost effective way to efficiently manage their marketing campaign.
If you have deep pockets and want to fortify your analytics by subscribing to platforms that charge $10,000, go ahead. But please install Google Analytics as well.
The program is very easy to use and does regular updates. Still, we strongly advise that you hire an expert to help you get started. Having an expert onboard will minimize the risk of committing costly mistakes and fast track the learning process.
2. Helps You Build a Comprehensive Buyer’s Profile
Targeted marketing strategies become more effective when you can draw up an accurate profile of your potential buyer. It can be challenging when you are running your business on the Internet. Unlike a brick and mortar business, you don’t know who is checking out your products and services.
Google Analytics will help you sort out the traffic and categorize information on your site visitors. You will receive valuable data on where your audience is coming from; what issues concern them the most and information on tastes, demands and preferences.
Having an accurate depiction of your typical buyer’s profile will help you tailor your marketing content. You will know the right keywords to use, the best topics to write about, the products and services to focus on and where to distribute content.
3. Provides You With Customizable Reports
Our clients at Mountaintop have Google Analytics. Every month we send them comprehensive reports on how their digital marketing campaign is performing. These reports are easy to read and include awesome looking graphs that simplify data analysis.
We make these graphs through a program in Google Analytics’ API feature. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It gives you complete access to all data and allows you to back up your account.
Customizable reports make analytics unique to your business. It will enable you to assess the performance of your business in comparison with your competitors in the industry.
4. Generates Real Time Results
Gone are the days when you would sit and wonder how that $3,000 full page print ad you took out would generate returns. Traditional marketing methods remain relevant especially for brick and mortar establishments.
But it will never be as efficient as digital marketing. And Google Analytics just made digital marketing even better.
With Google Analytics, you can access data in real time. You can see how many people are on your website. You can determine which posts they are reading, sharing and engaging with.
Just like a brick and mortar business, you can identify your peak and slack hours. Google Analytics will show you the best times of the day to post content and which networks you should distribute them to.
5. Data-Based Alignment of Your Marketing Budget
In a digital marketing campaign, we will put together a number of tools and processes which we believe, based on preliminary research, would be most effective in helping you achieve your campaign goals.
As we discussed in our article, “How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business”, not all online marketing channels will give the same level of results.
Using hard data, Google Analytics shows you which processes and tools are contributing to your campaign and which ones are not. This way you can realign your budget and allocate more resources to marketing channels that deliver better results.
6. Customizes Testing and Tracking Methods
In web design, testing is an absolute must. Before we turn over the site to you for its official launch, we conduct numerous tests to make sure it will run 100% according to expectations.
It must be responsive to a variety of mobile devices, it must load in 2 seconds or less and all of its features must be functional and running smoothly.
Testing is not about trying to achieve perfection. It is mostly about minimizing the probability of problems and technical issues arising when your website goes live. The same meticulous approach to testing applies to your digital marketing campaign.
We mentioned earlier the importance of setting goals. Google Analytics allows us to run tests to make sure the components of the digital marketing campaign are working to bring you closer to achieving your goals.
It has features that will enable you to pinpoint targeted results such as the size of blog traffic, online channel that resulted in highest newsletter signups or if your content is getting any attention from the Southeast Asian market.
7. You Can Integrate It With Other Online Tools
The saying goes that if Google sneezes the Internet catches a cold. There is no question that Google generates the most traffic. For our clients, Google accounts for 92% of their organic traffic.
The great thing with Google is they always find ways to give users advantages for using its products. With Google Analytics, you can integrate it with other tools such as Google AdWords so your current analytics package can directly receive the right tracking codes.
You can also get data on keyword impressions from Webmaster and integrate these with Google Analytics.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is not a perfect analytics tool. It will not provide you specific information or data on site visitors because what it does is analyze trends. However it meets an important criteria in every digital marketing campaign and that is to always have an analytics tool to track and measure performance.
It’s free. It’s easy to use. It gets the job done and it is easily the most popular analytics tool on the Internet.
If you’re thinking of installing Google Analytics on your website or if you have one but are experiencing problems interpreting data, give us a call or drop us an email. We will gladly take a look at your configuration and do the necessary changes to make sure Google Analytics will work to your benefit.
