Google Analytics offers business owners and marketers a substantial amount of information – at times, what may seem to be an overwhelming amount of data. With the understanding that not everyone has the hours in the day to deep-dive into analytics, these 5 insights will provide you with the background knowledge needed to confidently understand your audience.
Learn how users interact with your website and engage as consumers, and how you can target them in other channels efforts through the following Google Analytics insights.
- Audience Location – View worldwide stats to see where your users are located.
Understanding where your website visitors are located is crucial to any business, whether it be brick and mortar or B2B. In Google Analytics, click into the ‘Audience’ tab, then the ‘Geo’ category, and then sort by highest numbers of sessions or conversion. You can view locations as granular as city by clicking deeper in the countries in the table shown.
- Audience Interests – Learn what interest groups your audience identifies with across the internet.
Digital marketing has evolved to a detailed level of targeting that allows marketers to narrow their dollars spent on a very specific group of users. If you have yet to try audience targeting, such as Facebook Saved Audiences, Google Analytics can provide you with the background information needed to kick start your strategy.Click into the ‘Audience tab’ in GA, then into ‘Interests’ and view the ‘Overview’ page. This will show you a breakdown of how Google categorizes the interests of your website visitors. Take this information to develop detailed audiences on your other channels and begin testing the efficiency of the group.
- Site Speed – Analyze your website’s page load time.
Does it feel like your website is performing slower than you’d like? Google Analytics can look at the individual pages on your website and suggest optimizations that will improve overall speed performance, such as image updates and coding suggestions. To access these reports, visit the ‘Behavior’ tab in Analytics, then the ‘Site Speed’ category, and click into ‘Speed Suggestions’ to view the recommendations.
- Device Breakdown – Uncover what devices users are on when they visit your website.
Quickly see how your website visitors breakdown across desktop, mobile, and tablets by clicking into the ‘Behavior’ tab, then the ‘Mobile Overview.’ Based on the date range you have selected, you will learn the breakdown of devices site-wide for that length of time. For a visual breakdown, click the ‘Percentage’ button to break down the information into a pie chart.Finding that mobile and tablet sessions are higher than expected? That might mean it’s time to think about a website redesign.
- Campaign Tracking – Discover which online campaigns bring about the most traffic and conversions.
Marketing campaigns across multiple channels can make it harder to track performance, but with campaign tracking you can easily report on all metrics. Begin by thinking strategically about how your channels interact – maybe your email campaign and Facebook ads are a united effort directing users to the same landing page. In this case, we’d want to track both channel efforts under the same campaign in Analytics for ease of reporting.Organize your campaigns with UTM’s to ensure tracking is consistent across all campaigns. Check in on your newly organized campaigns in Analytics by clicking into ‘Acquisition,’ ‘Campaigns,’ and then organize by ‘All Campaigns.’ For an added level of visibility, you can use secondary dimensions or segments to break this data down even further.
