Optimizing Google Analytics as a Marketer

Google Analytics

Being a marketer in 2022 means understanding what Google Analytics is, how to use it, and why it is beneficial for bettering every part of a company. Google Analytics has been collecting, inspecting, and organizing data since 2005. With Google Analytics you can track your campaign progress, discover what brought customers to your site, receive data-based reports, and much more. According to Google Analytics Academy’s for Beginners, “Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles them into useful reports.”

When sales are made at traditional brick and mortar stores, a company's marketing teams has to guess what drew those people in to make the purchase. Google Analytics enables marketers to be able to allocate their resources into promotions and campaigns that have proven to be successful in their desired outcomes. With the data provided by Google Analytics, marketers can view how many people entered their site through an affiliate link, an email promotion, or by search. When Google Analytics JavaScript is put on each site of a business website it lessens the amount of guessing a marketing must do, and instead automatically provides details that would otherwise be unknown. Besides informing how a person is finding your site, Google Analytics additionally collects information that provides information that can build on an existing consumer profile: the types of devices customers are using and the language they set their browser to.

While learning a new way of collecting data may seem overwhelming, Google made the process of learning and implementing Google Analytics easier with their two Google Analytics training courses. The first course is for beginners, the course goes over the basic information (similar to what I covered above), and teaches users how to read Google Analytics reports, create goals that can be used as Google Analytics based objectives, and how to measure the success of campaigns. The second course teaches the advanced Google Analytics skills such as segmenting, category specific analyses, filtering, and customization. Through these two courses there are assessments that help to ensure that you are fully understanding the components of Google Analytics

Google Merchandise Store Demo Account

After completing the two courses mentioned above you should be able to use your skills and practice with the Google provided demo account: Google Merchandise Store. 

From the first screenshot we can see that out of the total website users (17,760), 15,572 of them have an interest in Media & Entertainment/Comic & Animation, 15,318 have an interest in shopping, and 14,937 have an interest in Technology/Mobile devices. This table of data shows that there is overlap between these three top categories of interest. From the second screenshot, detailing which channel methods lead to the most conversions we see that by a large amount direct marketing has the most conversions. If The Google Merchandise company were trying to decide how to inform their users that a new product line was being released, then they could use both the user demographic interests and the channel conversion information to create promotions. A direct promotion that would engage with those who have these interests would be an email promotion using mailing addresses from individuals who have entertainment subscriptions to sites such as Hulu, Prime Video, YouTube TV, Peacock, etc. This direct promotion targets those who spend time watching entertainment.

Thank you for spending time learning some basics about how Google Analytics can help marketers and their businesses.