Google Analytics is a perfect tool for businesses to measure the progress of their digital marketing. However, if you do not have a clearly defined goal for your business, it can be quite overwhelming.
SEO and marketing professionals are so focused on doing magic in that last mile. Yet, many of them are still looking at sessions, time on page, and total conversions when it comes to the basic steps.
To better inform your marketing strategy, you must have to understand your customer. To better understand your customer, you need to optimize your use of Google Analytics.
While writing an article focusing on data in digital marketing strategies, we found ourselves following some rules:
- Only valuable insight: it has to save on expenses and increase conversions.
- Simplified Steps: No advanced knowledge of analytics is required.
- No additional code is required: right now, all reports are accessible within Google Analytics.
Here are eight ways to use Google Analytics that you did not think of but should start today.
1. Let Top Google Analytics Reports Emailed To You
Email reporting is the simplest way to take less time through data. Do you know how to set up a Google Analytics email report ?
If you take this simple trick seriously , it will save you a lot of time. Also, you will be miles ahead of your competitors who spend too much time through analytics for insights. You can spend time working instead.
One of the common challenges that businesses face in Google Analytics is the ability to extract valuable data. The truth is that your ability to depict the supporting data is the only way to implement insights on your website and increase conversions.
Given that there is already sufficient data, you need to be able to get some snippets of your top report (a report that matters to you) in your email. Yes, this can be done when you install it correctly. With email reports, you don’t have to browse Analytics continuously for hours to find information that’ll help you increase organic visibility and create custom reports.
2. Dig Deeper
To see where those high bounce rates are coming from, look at your traffic channels, user locations, devices, and personal page performance and address them. E.g., If you have a healthy bounce rate for desktop sessions but a high bounce rate for mobile, then see an improvement in the mobile user experience. If popular pages have a high bounce rate, check to see if their load time is slow due to outdated/ineffective content.
3. Claim your Domain
Sign in to your Gmail address and then go to Google Analytics. In the setup panel, add the name of your account, usually the name of your business or holding company. Then add the website’s name being tracked and finally the URL (homepage) of your website. We suggest that you copy the homepage address directly from your browser and make sure to choose a secure or non-secure version of your domain (HTTPS: // or HTTP: //). Choosing the wrong version can cause data irregularities. Select your industry category, time zone, and any other essential information sought.
4. Integrate All Analytics Platforms
If you have to combine Google Analytics data with additional platforms and analytics tools to get information about your traffic, try Segment. It allows you to manage data from over 100 different advertising, analytics, developer, marketing, sales, support, and user testing platforms in one place.
Simply install a portion of the tracking code on your website, and the rest of the tracking code from any platform you choose is managed by Segment.
The Segment offers a free plan to use Google Analytics along with 20 other specific platforms. Premium plans for more platform integration start at $29 per month, depending on the integration you need.
5. Understand Session Discrepancies
Business owners think that clicks and sessions generate the same number of measurements, but the results are actually very different as they are measured at different times. It is because Google Analytics calculates clicks immediately but only counts sessions when the tracking code is loaded, which usually takes longer.
For example, a user may accidentally click on your banner ads, but they immediately close it once your website pops up. It will be counted as a click, not as a session. Understanding session inconsistencies is of utmost importance to interpret the data provided by Google Analytics more efficiently.
6. Improve and Optimize Paths Through Your Website
Your site’s homepage is the focal point of your site, and it also connects to your internal pages. Therefore, you’ve to deliberately consider the layout and the experience it provides for users.
On your homepage, users can navigate to other pages of your website. Well, that’s what we would expect.
But Google Analytics reports us something completely different. When you look at your most popular pages or landing pages, one thing you will see is that, in most cases, there’re pages other than the homepage that receive the most traffic.
It’s true regardless of the size of your website. Suppose you have a blog associated with your website, and you update it frequently. In that case, you can get about ~ 30% of incoming traffic from the homepage and the rest from your internal blog pages to target long-tail keywords, which are generating traffic from informative and conversational search queries.
If so, you will agree that visitors’ navigation path on your website is entirely different from what you have in mind or plan. From the ‘navigation summary’ in your Google Analytics account dashboard, you can see where they came from and what page they visited next.
Segment your entire traffic based on the source/medium from which it is coming. Basically, organic sources (from Google) are the most viable way to find organic search visitors to your site through content, keywords, and other organic means.
7. Focus on Lowering your Bounce Rate where it Counts
Obviously, someone visiting your contact page is likely to bounce. Still, you can apply a robust user experience to other pages and posts by encouraging more actions—content related to convenience and using strong copy to facilitate travel.
8. Link Your Website and Social Engagement
If you use several social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to publish and schedule updates on your top social media networks, you will benefit from linking them to Google Analytics.
Link to Hootsuite, and you get an overview report with your Google Analytics data, along with social updates published through Hootsuite. A custom report is included with the $9.99 per month pro plan.
If you want to learn more secret Google analytics tips, you can always contact us. Our Google Analytics experts will give you a free consultation regarding your doubts and queries. Call now!