Google Analytics has become a staple in any digital marketing toolbox. One of the best free software tools available to everyone with a website, Google Analytics is your ally in understanding how people interact with your online lot. By simply setting up Google Analytics tracking on your site, you can learn a lot about your customers’ behaviour — how many pages they viewed, what they viewed, and what they engaged with. When used to its full ability Google Analytics can be the insider information that fuels your well-informed and data-centric marketing decisions. In other words, you can see what’s working, what’s not, and know where makes most sense to get the most out of your marketing dollars.
How Google Analytics Works
A free web analytics service for anyone with a Google account, Google Analytics provides statistics and reports that tell the story of your customers’ activity on your website and beyond. The GA (Google Analytics) dashboard showcases changes in data over time, so you’re just a click away from seeing if the promotion you ran last week led to a spike in traffic on your website. But beyond checking how many people come to your site, Google Analytics also allows you to see what they do when they get there. Thanks to Behaviour Tracking, GA gives you insight into how long people spend on your website, whether they view your videos, which pages they bounce from, if they engaged with your tools section, and so much more. Essentially, it’s a real-time feedback loop on your marketing efforts.
Are You Making Google Analytics Work For You?
We’re going to assume you are ahead of the game: you’ve installed Google Analytics correctly, you have somebody internally who is checking in on it periodically, and you have a pretty good idea of whether your online traffic is going up or down. We salute you! You’ve taken a major step towards empowering your business to better understand the results of your marketing efforts. But are you looking to your customers’ behaviour to give you the detailed insights you need to make future marketing investment decisions? Or are you just executing campaigns and not measuring how they affect traffic? Because, let’s face it, Google Analytics gurus don’t walk into our marketing departments every day. Moreover, are you looking at your advertising analytics and your Google Analytics as an overview of your entire advertising ecosystem? These are all questions worth asking yourself. Because when it comes to digital marketing, the more data you have (and understand) the more it puts you in the driver’s seat of your campaigns.
If you want to get the most out of Google Analytics, you should first make sure you understand the basics yourself. Nothing can replace a first-hand understanding of how your marketing is working.
Does this sound complicated? Find an expert. Someone who understands these insights from your data, and who can alert you when something is wrong. This can be someone from your dealership or even someone from an outside source (just make sure it’s a trusted source.) This way you can get closer to making sure every dollar you invest in digital marketing is determined by hard data, rather than gut instinct.