Learning to Love Marketing Analytics

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been exploring the concept of web analytics and diving into the nitty-gritty of Google Analytics. From CTR to Visit Duration metrics and goal and segment filtering, there are many facets to Google Analytics that can be beneficial for businesses trying to understand their customers’ and prospects’ on-site habits. It is a tool utilized by nearly 5 million companies , many with 50 employees or fewer. Needless to say, a tool that is generally free and offers invaluable consumer insight, is popular. While Google Analytics offers robust metrics, with new tools currently in Beta, it does not offer deep insights into sources of social traffic. Yes, the Acquisition report can show a company some information about how social has impacted website traffic, but it is still challenging to piece together a clear picture of why they came from social without additional information; information provided by digital analytics tools like Sprout Social. According to...

The beauty of Google Analytics (GA) for a business in any industry is the ability to learn about your users (aka your customers and prospective customers). Data and metrics within GA provide insight into how people discover your website, what they look at and for how long, and you can track conversions. Depending on the purpose of your business you may just be interested in building an audience (like I am with this blog) or you may have an e-commerce site to sell your product(s). Depending on the purpose of your site, you will weigh the importance of various GA reports like Real Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions differently. Here is a look at how my blog data and reports of interest compare to Google Demo e-commerce account: Behavior Report The Behavior Report is helpful for deducing your most to least frequented pages. The Page Views metric in particular “can give an indication of how popular a post or page is” but it is best to compare it with another metri...

Whether you are a small business of 1 or have 10-plus employees, it can be challenging to keep up your social media presence. Perhaps you haven’t even started and are curious about which platform is right for your business. The best approach to determining which social platform your business will get the most out of involves considering a few key questions. Questions to Ask Yourself What are your main competitors doing?  What platforms do your target audience use most often?  Is your product or service visual?  How much time do you have to create, edit, and schedule posts? Do you have someone to engage with customers and prospects daily?  Is your brand’s tone of voice professional, quirky or somewhere in between? Not all social platforms are appropriate or valuable for every industry. For example, a property management company would likely have an easier time creating visual content for an Instagram page compared to a technology company that might just h...

From Pexels.com Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a KPI that details the “number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed”. Similarly, to Visit Duration , CTR is a helpful metric for businesses to track and understand using Google Analytics as it can be very telling of a link’s value to target users.  CTR and Linking Falling under the category of a visit characterization, CTR is helpful for determining how relevant internal and external links are to your users. Internal links are those that link to other pages within your own website and external links are those that go to relevant resources on other websites. In fact, the hyperlink added in the previous sentence on “external links” is an example of external linking and the hyperlink on “Visit Duration” in the first paragraph is internal linking to my other blog post.  A CTR Experiment An SEO company called 411 Local ran a three-month experiment on impr...

From Pexels.com For those who are unfamiliar with web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, they can be dizzying to dive into. Not necessarily because of the tools’ nuances, but because learning the terminology is like a second language -- digital marketing ‘speak’, if you will.  This terminology is used to describe different metrics. In his book, Web Analytics 2.0 , author Avinash Kaushik describes metrics as a “quantitative measurement of statistics describing events or trends on a website”. In other words, metrics tell us about our website visitors’ actions. These insights are beneficial to businesses of all industries, not just e-commerce.  One metric that is particularly helpful is Visit Duration. The following breaks downs this metric’s ins-and-outs: Visit Duration Defined Falling under the category of visit characterization, visit duration is descriptive of a website user’s length of time spent on the site (also known as a Session ). On a mo...