How to Become a Google Analytics Superhero
If you’ve ever run a Google Adwords campaign, chances are you used Google Analytics in harmony with your ads, to keep track of conversions, your sales funnels, and keyword ROI.
Setting out on an adwords campaign without tracking your analytics is like throwing bundles of money into a dark room and hoping someone in there will throw a wad or two back your way. You can’t use Adwords effectively without a comprehensive system in place that will help you understand where your campaign is working and where it isn’t.
But the benefits of using Analytics doesn’t just stop there.
Remarketing
Google Analytics’ capability to help you reel in those lost conversions is very effective. It allows you to use the information they’ve gleaned from your site’s visitors that stopped pursuing a conversion and dedicate your ads entirely to their needs.
For example, a transportation service might remarket tickets around Spring Break travel times – especially to college kids who bought tickets home with them on Thanksgiving. Or you might advertise the newest iPhone to the techie customers who buy the new version of the iPhone every time it comes out. Or, of course, you can keep it simple, and advertise specialized discounts to people who were almost carried through your sales funnel, but stopped at the cart checkout. This is a great place to offer free shipping.
Advanced Segments
A huge advantage to using Google Analytics is it’s granular ability to to specify different audience segments down to the smallest details. Some of the most helpful segments to use include:
-Converters by count of visit. This segment will generate three segments that show how people who convert after 1 visit, 2-5 visits, or 6+ visits interact on your site. This helps you understand what content is engaging people as they’re carried through the conversion cycle. It also helps you pinpoint the people who come to your site the most – in other words, the people you should be directly marketing to.
-Cart abandoners by traffic source. Cart abandonment is a huge problem for eCommerce sites – mainly because it leaves to much to the imagination. Why did they leave? Were they ever planning on checking out, or were they just looking? Did my shipping rates throw them off?
This segment allows you to gain some insight by targeting the source of abandonment traffic. You can use it for all of your major traffic sources, and then study if all of your Twitter traffic leads seems to abandon their carts, if it’s coming from a Facebook PPC, etc.
-Mobile traffic by operating system (excludes tablets). This helps you understand how many people are accessing your site on mobile. This can make it clear whether you should focus more on creating mobile-optimized ads, a mobile version of your site – or if you should focus more on your desktop website.
Visitor Activity
The basic metrics for an adwords campaign is to look at the simple, A to B signifiers. Where did they fall out of the funnel? How long did they stay on which page?
But Google Analytics helps you take it further. It can help you gain a much more comprehensive understanding of how visitors interact with your site and use the information you give them. With Google Analytics, you can explore Entrances and Bounce Rate. These are hugely important.
The entrances column will tell you the number of visitors that visited a specified page. This helps you to understand what is grabbing their attention. Bounce rate is even more pivotal. Unlike Exit percentage, which will simply tell you the number of people who left after visiting a certain page, bounce rate will tell you the number of users who visited a page without navigating to any other pages. Exit percentage doesn’t measure that – it’s number can be derived from many people who were visiting other pages on your site beforehand. This is why bounce rate is a great way to zero in on pages that are stark dead ends.
But Google Analytics is a powerful force of cyber-nature – there’s much more to it that the aforementioned tools. Learn how to become a Google Analytics Superhero with this superpowered infographic.
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