Understanding analytics

Is your marketing proving to be successful?
Are you getting a good return on investment?
Are you generating new leads from your marketing?
Has the traffic to your website increased?
Which keywords are directing traffic to your website?

Okay, you get the gist. These are all the types of questions you should know the answer to if you have a digital marketing strategy in full swing. Monitoring and measuring your digital activities should be a critical aspect of your digital marketing strategy. It can become all too easy to lose track of what’s going on and more importantly, how much money you are spending. At the end of the day, you only want to be spending money if it is having a positive outcome and increasing your business.

Here we identify some key ways in which Google Analytics can aid your monitoring and measuring of your digital marketing so that you can decide where and what you should allocate your digital budget to.

Where are your visitors coming from?

Tracking how people are getting to your website is a great indicator of where you should invest. Google Analytics has an acquisition section that breaks this information down for you. You will be able to identify how many people are landing on your website from organic searches, social media, paid advertising or perhaps even email campaigns.

Track how effective your paid campaigns are

Perhaps your marketing strategy includes email marketing and Facebook advertising. Google Analytics will allow you to break down how effective these strategies are. Is one campaign resulting in more people landing on the website, or perhaps it’s leading to a greater lead generation? Identifying which campaign is proving to be successful can guide you on where you should invest more money.

What are people doing on your website?

Google analytics also allows you to see what people are doing on your website: how long they are spending on each page, which pages are the most popular, is your website loading at a good speed and so on. It can also give you some good information on your bounce rate or exit rate. If one page has a higher exit rate than others, it could be an indicator that you need to spend some time improving the content on that page or research into what else could be causing users to drop off.

What search terms/keywords are bringing traffic to the website?

Your organic traffic should be a high volume traffic driver. It’s good to have an understanding of what people are searching for and whether those keywords are driving traffic to your website. It’s very important to ensure that your keywords and search terms are embedded in your high quality content on your website. By seeing which keywords are resulting in traffic can again help you identify which keywords you need to work on.

It is a great idea to create a report on at least a monthly basis, so that you can track and effectively plan your strategy moving forward. If you need any help tracking and curating a digital strategy, Carrick are on hand to do so.