Understanding Google Analytics
It's common to think of fashion, electronics, and personal care when it comes to making online purchases. While it is crucial for these industries to understand their consumer data, there has been a massive surge in different industries online with the recent outbreak of COVID-19. Suddenly, consumers are flocking to online stores for medical and cleaning supplies, groceries, and other necessities.
With online sales surging in different industries online, it is important now more than ever for businesses to understand how to effectively apply data analysis to meet consumer needs. In this blog, I plan to summarize my findings from Google Analytics for Beginners, Advanced Google Analytics, and the interactive Google Store Demo Account. These online modules offer step-by-step guides that explain the inner workings and relevance of Google Analytics. If you haven't taken these courses on Google, they are completely free and very informative (another activity to fill your surplus of quarantine time!). I highly recommend them to any marketer.
Google Analytics for Beginners
This course effectively describes how to navigate the Google Analytics interface and create basic reports. Google Analytics is based off of the processes of acquisition (business awareness and interest), behavior (how consumers interact with your business), and conversion (when a consumer transacts with your business). By connecting tracking codes to each page associated with a website, Google Analytics compiles data that can be analyzed into reports. In this course, the main reports that are highlighted are Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior.
Audience reports can be used to understand the demographics and interests of your website audience. This can also provide a breakdown of geographic locations of users and how often they visit different pages. Acquisition reports help to breakdown the different ways that consumers access your site, called mediums. These different mediums identify if the site has been accessed by a search engine, email campaign, or through typing the web address into a browser. Behavior reports are used to understand how specific content is performing on the site.
Advanced Google Analytics
This course builds on the basic structure found in Beginning Google Analytics to provide more specific tools for analyzing data. For example, instead of just describing how to employ default metrics on Google Analytics, this course details how custom dimensions and and metrics can be made specific to your business. Custom dimensions provide you an opportunity to specify what unit you would like to measure (ex: hits) and custom metrics describe what this unit will measure (ex: hits on the "About" tab of the website). This course also describes how to monitor Event Tracking, which helps monitor if consumers are performing the intended actions, like playing a video through the site. Together, these tools provide a deeper look in consumer behavior specific to your site.
Multi-Channel Funnel Reports help businesses understand how different marketing efforts work together in order to lead to a purchase. This tool, found in the Conversions section of Google Analytics can show the amount of time and activities before a conversion. The detailed analysis guides feed into the final unit in the course about remarketing. Remarketing can be used to target users that have not yet been converted and feeds into ad creation through Google Ads.
Google Store Demo
To practice the new skills learned from the two Google Analytics, the Google Merchandise Store Demo allows you to play with the interface of a Google Analytics account. In the demo, I took time to look into some of the reports that I learned about in the Beginning Google Analytics course and apply concepts from Advanced Analytics like Multi-Channel Conversion Reports.
This demo gave me an opportunity to see how marketing efforts could be refocused by the information gained by analytics. For example, I noticed on the Multi-Channel Conversion Report that the majority of conversions come from direct and organic search, meaning that the most searches are made without intervention from ads or paid content. However, the next most common kind of conversion was through site referral. Combining this information with the fact that there is high cart abandonment for both new and returning visitors (new and returning), marketing efforts could be a solution to help complete transactions for the Google Store. A marketing example that could be enacted from this information would be to work with influencers on the site through which there are most refferals that give consumers a discount incentive to complete their purchase.
Why Analytics?
The world has been becoming more digital over the past decades. However, the current state of the world is influencing access to goods and services through technology in a completely new way. Large companies like Spotify and Airbnb are current users of Google Analytics. However, with the sudden surge that the world is facing in digital purchases, smaller companies in the health and food industries can benefit from the information collected on Google Analytics. The needs of your customers could be better met through the information found within analytics, you just need to know where to look.
