For any website or digital marketing campaign, you should be aware of your campaign performance in order to make adjustments that will further optimize your content and user experience. Without understanding your results, it’s difficult to efficiently distribute your marketing efforts and budget.

Google Analytics is a valuable, yet free web analytics tool that we rely on to provide data about our clients’ digital marketing campaigns. It helps us track all traffic from different marketing platforms, including search, display, social, email and much more.

By tracking, analyzing and utilizing the information from Google Analytics, we can increase conversion rates and boost ROI on digital channels.

Understanding The Four Segments of Google Analytics Reporting

Google Analytics is segmented into four central reporting areas: Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, and Conversions. Together, these four reporting areas provide vital data that is imperative to creating successful online campaigns.

1. Audience: Get to Know Your Target Demographic
Understanding your audience is essential when managing a successful website. You need to know who your audience is, how they are reaching and absorbing your content, and how loyal and engaged they are. Google Analytics allows users to identify their target audience based on dimensions such as age, gender, location (i.e. countries, cities, etc.) and interests. With web analytics, you can also see what devices and browsers are used to access your website.This is critical when marketing your website. With Google Analytics, you can create ads that will resonate with your target audience, based on their interests, location and device-type.

We focus on learning about your audience, and understanding what keeps them loyal and engaged. Recognizing where your audience is coming from, and what information they are searching for on your website provides valuable data on creating content that will strengthen your brand. Once we are aware of what your audience needs from you, we can adjust your campaigns to match.

Google Analytics tells you who is visiting your website. We use that data to identify who is visiting your site and adapt your website and marketing campaign to fit that audience.

2. Acquisition: Understanding How Visitors Find Your Site
Once you’ve established who your audience is, you need to understand how they are getting to your website. There are four traffic sources tracked in web analytics that point searchers to your website; they are direct, referral, organic and paid.

• Direct traffic represents users who type your website directly into their browser.
• Referral traffic is made up of users who find your website through another website via a link.
• Organic traffic is directed from search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. when a user’s search query triggers your website based on your website’s relevance to that query.
• Paid traffic is made up of people who click on your pay per click (PPC) or banner advertisements. Your business pays for this traffic through a media spend budget.

Google Analytics allows you to see the path visitors are taking to land on your website. Through web analytics, you can see where they came from, what pages they see, as well as what page they exit your website from. By understanding this data, you can focus on driving traffic from sources that are generating optimal results.

3. Behaviour: How Visitors Navigate Your Website
The next crucial step in web analytics is analyzing the behaviour of users once they land on your website. You want to know what users are doing on your website in order to deduce what pages are most popular, and what pages are not receiving high user engagement.

Web analytics tools provide you with behavioural data about pages, such as:

• Average pages per visit
• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate
• Most popular pages and the above data for each page
• Top search queries on your website (keywords used to find your site)
• Top landing pages (i.e. the first page on your site that is visited)
• The most clicked links on your website

The more data you have about the behaviour of your visitors, and how they engage with each page of your site, the better you can refine each webpage to improve results.

4. Conversions: Are Visitors Becoming Leads?
Conversions determine whether or not users have completed an action on your website that you count as a success. A conversion could be filling out a form, downloading a whitepaper, watching a video, making a phone call, or making a purchase from your website. It is up to you to establish what goals you want to track that are meaningful to your business success.

Tracking the success of these goals with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics is probably one of the most important pieces of information you can extract from analytics data. It allows you to see what pages are receiving conversions, where users are dropping off on the conversion funnel, and most importantly what traffic sources are driving your successful goal completions.

By consistently analyzing Google Analytics data and implementing improvements, Eden increases the number of people who become real leads for your business.

Benefits of Using Web Analytics Tools

• Positive User Experience
  User experience is improved immensely when using web analytics tools because you’re able to understand your audience and what they expect from you. Also, your website visibility is improved. By having insight into how people use your website, improvements can be made based on the wants and needs of your audience.
• Targeted Marketing Efforts
  Web analytics tools provide valuable information needed to optimize your marketing. It provides insight into where to invest your budget and marketing efforts to boost overall website performance. You can make smarter decisions about your marketing agenda through the details provided by Google Analytics. You’ll know what users are searching to find your product or service, what countries and cities are driving the most traffic to your website, and what platform (organic, paid, referral or direct) is the most successful. The ability to isolate information gives you the power to create extremely focused campaigns.
• Efficient Budget Allocation
  In addition to targeted marketing efforts, Google Analytics allows you to efficiently allocate your budget. When we know what areas of your marketing are seeing a high return on investment, you can confidently distribute your budget to those areas. Likewise, you can decrease your investment in platforms that are not seeing a profit.
• Simple and Customized Reporting
  Using Google Analytics data, Eden creates simple easy-to-read reports that address key areas of your website and marketing performance. Our reporting tells you what content is popular, how much traffic you are receiving, how long users are staying on your website, and more.
• It’s an Integrated Google Product
  Google products integrate with one another, meaning you can receive web analytics from all other Google tools that support your business. Google Analytics provides information on AdSense, AdWords, Google Display Network, Google+, and more. With one web analytics tool, we are able to optimize your digital marketing on a variety of platforms.

As you can see, using web analytics is a valuable tool for promoting growth in traffic, improving user engagement, tracking lead generation, and optimizing your return on investment for your digital marketing efforts.

If you would like to integrate web analytics into your business’ website, Eden offers website development and web analysis services. Our team of web analysts specialize in integrating, reading and reporting on Google Analytics data to help you optimize your online marketing. Call us at 1-800-844-0106 for a free consultation.