You’ve got your business’ website up and running – congrats. You’re also likely wanting to get going on telling the world about it. Before you go running headfirst into marketing like Han Solo dashing through the Death Star, you’ll want to make sure you’re set up for success. Specifically, verify that you’re taking full advantage of the free service Google Analytics.
TFW you’re excited about a brand new website but haven’t set up Google Analytics yet.
Similar to the Force in the Star Wars universe, Google Analytics is an invisible entity that has the potential to give your business a boost. Because of the breadth of its data, it takes time to get familiar with the platform and leverage its insights. However, if you start with the Google Analytics basics and focus your efforts, you can slowly build your knowledge. With some concerted effort, familiarizing yourself with its features you’ll be on your way to becoming a Google Analytics Jedi and improving your marketing, better serving your target audience, and more.
Below are four benefits that your business stand to gain from Google Analytics.
Smarter Content Creation
With Google crafting its algorithm to reward quality digital content with higher placement in search engine results, knowing what your customers find most interesting is essential for success.
Once you have set up your Google Analytics tag, you will be able to know which pages and links are popular. Additionally, the platform provides data about how long a customer remains on specific pages with longer dwell times denoting good content. Using this information, you can then take action by creating content for your blog and social media posts that resonates best with your target audiences.
Knowledge of Website Traffic Sources
Another Google Analytics benefit is identifying which channels are leading people to your website: forums, social media, emails, organic search, etc. This is helpful in a number of different ways. For example, if a large amount of traffic is coming in through social media, you may decide to want to devote greater resources (advertising budget, better quality visuals) to this channel. Alternatively, you might try using similar content, copy, and style on your other channels. For marketing campaigns, Google Analytics also allows you to see which ones are most successful, in terms of quantity or quality of traffic they generate.
Insight into Customer Journey on Website
Along with demographic information, Google Analytics also tells you what actions customers take on your site. Specifically, you’re able to see how much time they’re spending on the site, if they are a first-time visitor, the frequency of repeat visitors, and how long between visits.
You can also follow the path visitors take through your site, and see the actions they take before completing a conversion goal (filling out a form, completing a purchase). Thanks to this information, you are able to design your campaigns around actions users are taking, or you want them to take, and then measure their performance, avoiding wasteful spending.
Ability to Leverage Remarketing Lists
If you’re looking to get Google ads in front of website visitors it might seem like you need to use some Jedi mind tricks, but it’s not! Once you have a few months worth of data collected on your Analytics account, a new opportunity is available: remarketing audience creation. Google defines these groups as “a list of cookies or mobile-advertising IDs that represents a group of users you want to re-engage because of their likelihood to convert,” and provides a helpful how-to article about setting them up. Key benefits of remarketing audiences include the ability to target ads to them on Google Ads Search, Display, and YouTube campaigns and as a result, increase completion of your campaign goals.