Why Marketers Need to Know Google Analytics

This is aimed to be a summary of Google Analytics and how it can benefit marketers. When I first started doing some digging into the topic of google analytics, I found that Google Analytics is a online platform for businesses to track their online presence in many different ways. Google analytics for beginners is a great place to start acquiring entry level knowledge on the platform.

Google Analytics works by collecting raw data from users websites. It operates by placing a small piece of Javascript tracking code on each page of your website that you want to track. Each time a user on your website uses one of these pages google analytics collects info on them. Google analytics stops recording data on them after 30 minutes of inactivity, these browsing sections are called “sessions”. After all this data is collected it is put into a report.

Reports are google analytics way of displaying data in an organized meaningful way so that users can make informed business decisions based on the raw data that was collected. Reports are organized into views; each view can have different filters applied and goals set. These report views allow the user to manipulate which information is displayed in the report.

Analytics reports can collect a plethora of information, so much so that it is often overwhelming and inefficient to look through it all. However the platform helps users surpass this problem by automatically organizing the data into a few large but manageable groups automatically. These groups can be located on the left hand drop down menu of your google analytics account.

1.     The first one that users will come across is the “real time” section. This will show who is currently using your website or mobile application, as well as some basic information about the user including what language their browser is set to.

2.      The second helpful summary of information can be found in the audience menu. Here the user can find information on user demographics.

3.      The third menu you will come across is the acquisitions menu. This will display summarized information on the channels that brought your customers to you. It could tell you things like weather they are using the mobile app or website, or weather they were referred to your page through another website or an organic search.

4.      The fourth summary is interaction. This data will show the user helpful information about how users are interacting with their website. Some things that would be included in this section are number of users, number of page views, or bounce rate which is the number of people who view one page of your website and then leave.

5.      The last summary of information that is provided for users by google analytics is the conversions tab. This is where you can check in on your conversion data and see if your company is progressing towards its goal.

This is a good place to start, but it is likely that your company will have a specific goal that they want to track. For this you may consider building a dashboard. A dashboard is simply a more condensed report, that you can easily customize and add widgets too. This Is helpful when you know precisely the data that you will need to answer a question, because it will become more instantaneously accessible and less cluttered.

This should provide a good overview of what google analytics is and how it is operated. For a more detailed description of how you can use it yourself you should review Advanced Google Analytics.

To gain more real world experience I highly recommend spending some time getting to know google analytics by using the Google Merchandise Store Demo Account. This is a fully functional google analytics account that will allow you to get a real world feel and play around with some of the features. When looking at this page through the lenses of a marketer the first thing that caught my eye was the average bounce rate of 45%. Although this is an E-commerce sight I would recommend that the Google Merchandise Store, include more engaging content that will keep the customer engaged while they make their purchase. When we consider the acquisition tab we see that the vast majority of consumers are coming to the website through organic search. Comparably almost no customers are acquired through social media or paid searches. This could be an indicator that these are not reliable channels to attain customers or this could be a sign that Google needs to focus more effort in these areas to ramp up efficiency.

After learning so much about this Google Analytics and how easy it is to use I began contemplating how important this could be for digital marketers. The amount of data collected is so large and the ability to filter it is so vast that this tool could be used to provide concrete insight into any digital marketing questions a company might have. When I consider how this could benefit companies in the Snow sports industry that I am passionate about the possibilities are limitless. The first example that comes to mind is companies with a large online presence such as Evo, once a small local ski shop, this company now has a booming online presence where a significant portion of there revenue is derived. Google analytics could help ramp up the efficiency of advertising, so they are more precisely reaching their target audience.

Another question I had was how google analytics could help with social media content specifically. In the Snow sports industry the use of Social Media for marketing is immense, hence this is an area of great interest to me. Social Media Examiner is a website that teaches techniques of how social media can be used by companies more beneficially, they have provided a great article on how Google Analytics can be used to enhance social media efforts. The first step that is recommended is to look at the source which the user came from, this will be displayed as a percentage of total users and can give insight on where your company is doing well and where they can improve. Next you will want to create Advanced segments, these you can customize to compare two or more social sites at once, allowing for side by side comparison.

Overall I learned that Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers to provide businesses with concrete evidence that can help those businesses make informed decisions.