Monday, July 27, 2015

6 Things Google Analytics Can Tell You About Your Marketing

By Kim Tarasiewicz

At Furia Rubel, we build many of our clients' websites and also provide hosting on a dedicated server. Part of our website services involve checking Google Analytics to see how those sites are performing. An analytics program can provide a bird's eye view of how many visitors are using your site each month, among other things. By defining your parameters in detail, you can even see how many visitors go to a certain page each day, month or quarter. When used properly, Google Analytics can provide crucial information on your customers/clients that can be used in the marketing process throughout the year.

Several of the key metrics we look for when compiling data to share with clients are outlined below. Depending on your marketing and advertising needs, different reports may be more or less important to your business. You will need access to your company's analytics account associated with your website to view your reports.

The traffic report shows the number of visitors to your site, this number should increase or at least remain consistent if your site is performing well. When using analytics properly, you should be able to increase the number of visitors to your site by reviewing behavior on your site and making edits to pages as needed. For example, by checking the "Organic Search Traffic page", you will see the number of visitors that used a search engine and which keywords they used to find the site. You can then incorporate additional related keywords into the site which should increase traffic.

The channel report image above provides a perfect overview to HOW visitors arrived at the site. This area can be used to develop or tweak your marketing plan. If your business determines that they want to increase their social media leads to the website, you can review the current social media number which in this case is very low (0.27%) and after running a social media campaign, check back to see if your percentages have increased, hopefully giving your campaign validation.

Referral traffic is important to evaluate as it shows which outside websites are sending online traffic to your company's website. This could be in the form of a news story that links to your website as part of the story, or it could be a partner company that has a link to your website on their site for referral traffic. It is important to follow-up on these resources, grow your network connections, and promote your company, in order to increase online visitors.


The device overview report will show you from what type of device your clients are accessing your website. On the report example above, 88.49% of these website users are using a desktop computer, perhaps visiting the site as they work. As the number of people accessing your site from a mobile device increase, you should consider building a mobile, responsive version of your website to provide those mobile visitors with content that is optimized to display on small screens.

Reviewing the pages report will show you which pages have the most traffic and have created the most interest. This will give you an idea of what your readers are looking for and allow you to add additional material such as blogs or media stories around that subject, with the goal of increasing traffic to your site.

If your marketing plan is to target certain geographic areas, you may want to review the location report to see what country or which state your viewers are coming from. This report can be narrowed down by clicking on the country, then the state which will eventually show the local towns visitors are in when viewing your site.

Google Analytics can be customized by day and date, locations, new and returning visitors etc. and can be an ideal tool to use in measuring your marketing tactics. Before your team sits down to create next year's goals and plan, do a little research in analytics and give your team cutting edge information to increase opportunities for a successful year.

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