Table of Contents
Introduction
In this blog, it will:
- Help marketers measure their marketing strategy and improve on them.
- Understand effective but free marketing tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Facebook Analytics etc in a way that they are a little bit more accessible to you.
- Use the Analytics Marketing Framework, which is 5 key pieces
- Planning
- Reporting
- Forecasting
- Optimizing
The goal here is really to get one thing, one new idea, one new concept, one new skill that you can practice.
Getting back to the topic, Google Analytics is a tool used to measure your marketing campaigns!
5 Marketing Elements that Google Analytics can impact
There is a strategy or a weapon which you should have before you begin to use any marketing tool. This weapon is called QIA which stands for Question, Information and Action.
You need to have a question ready before you even think of using a marketing tool to create an effective Marketing Strategy. Let’s say that you don’t have a question, what will you even do with the marketing tool? Isn’t it?
So, the strategy is
- Question: Simply ask a question
- Information: Use the tool to find the relevant information
- Action: Implement the information in your strategy
As mentioned above, Google Analytics makes the maximum impact on research with questions in 5 categories. Google Analytics has already organised them for you,
- Realtime
The only question that this category can answer is, ‘is my Marketing Strategy even working?’ Google tells you the Locations and Sources of the traffic, which content is engaging them, whether the visitors are showing interest in your events and the number of conversions that may have happened. This category is just for you to know, how well is your campaign running! - Audience
Simple question answered is, ‘who are the visitors who are or have engaged with your campaigns?” The information that you get from this report is massive but some of the main elements are age and gender of the people engaged. Also, you can see what other interests of your audience. This helps you know the people interested in your products and you will be able to target your audience. - Acquisition
This category answers your question, ‘where are the users coming from?’ This report gives you the specific number of visitors from Google Ads, Search Console, Social Media, Campaigns run by you etc. This category is extensive, and we will come back later. - Behaviour
It simply tells you about which of your content has had the most interest from the audience. For example, if you are tracking your website of 5 pages, the Behaviour report give you the number of audiences engaged on each of the 5 pages. Studying this report will help you build content in a way that the audience likes, and this attracts more engagement. In short, Behaviour report tell you about the actions that the audience is taking on your site. - Conversions
Simply tells you about the results that you are getting from your site. You will get the reports on the goals that you have set up using Google Analytics along with the traffic sources. Then there are eCommerce reports which will give you the numbers like, ‘what product is selling the most’ etc. So, this category is all about the results that you get from your Marketing Strategy!
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Show me the Playbook!Source or Medium Report
So, if you go to Google and search for Analytic reports, you will find millions and millions of results. One blog post will say that this report is important and the other one will say some other report is important. There is one report which should be enough for you so let’s jump straight into it.
This hidden report is called source/medium report and is available under Acquisition > All Traffic.
This one report gives you Source of the traffic along with the volume to determine the quantity, behaviour which helps you determine the quality of the traffic and finally it tells you the results, conversions that has happened.
In short, you are provided with the source of the traffic, quantity of the traffic, quality of the traffic along with the results of the traffic. There you go, you now have almost every detail that you need, and you now know why source/medium report is one of the most important and effective report in Google Analytics.
It surely looks overwhelming as this is a lot of numbers, but you must spend some time here, and you just must get comfortable if you want to create the most cost-effective marketing campaigns.
Reading a Report
Have you ever wondered how to read a stupid report in a way that it can give us the data required to create that insanely effective marketing campaign? I mean, yes, numbers and all sounds good but how can you derive the data and integrate it in your marketing plan?
Let’s crack that nut and understand how to read reports. Let’s begin with the most important element in the report which is Behaviour and let’s break it into 3 simple parts to understand it better.
- Let’s understand Bounce Rate to get started. Bounce rate simply means the percent of the traffic that visited your page and left. This traffic had no further engagement with your content. There is no specific number to a good bounce rate but lower the bounce rate, better the result.
- Next is Pages / Session which tells you, ‘how many pages did every visitor engage in?’ The higher the numbers, better the engagement so this report will help you understand which source is sending the traffic with maximum engagement.
- Last but not the least, Average Session and this tells you how much time every visitor spent on your site. You just must look at these to understand the trend.
The numbers may not be 100% accurate so you must focus on the trend that the reports show you as these numbers will help you create your new Marketing Strategy.
Once you understand the 3 simple parts vertically, it’s time to start studying the trends horizontally. For example, you have 5 sources of traffic and how will you compare the numbers? Study the following table as an example.
So now, let’s treat the above table as a report from Google Analytics and let us go through each of the elements horizontally. If you see the 1 source, email, the numbers are a little off when you compare it to the number from Referral.
So, consider that the email sent had the link to a very targeted page and the traffic came, spent time on that page and left. To understand this, check the Avg. Session Duration of Email and Referral. Here you’d notice that the average time that every user spent on the site is quite similar. So, does this indicate that the traffic from Referral came, browsed quickly and left but the traffic from Email came, studied the page thoroughly and must have engaged better?
That one thing that you should look for in this example is that the traffic from Referral is not sticking to the site. This means that there is nothing for the audience to get engaged with. So, that one thing that you can do here is to create that one page with content specifically to engage the traffic that is slipping away.
All this from a Single Source/Medium report!
Conclusion
- Tag your traffic
Google Analytics has already done the best it can for you by classifying the source of the traffic. Not only that but it also segments the traffic. For example, it mentions if the traffic is organic or via an email service provider, a referral or a partner. You can easily feed Google the topics in which you want your data to be segmented by using UTMs. Click Here to know more about UTMs in details. - Structure
A complete structure has the following elements in place to create that perfect marketing campaign, - Campaign: What is attracting the traffic
- Source: Which platform is providing the traffic
- Medium: What kind of traffic is coming from the source
- Term: What link did the traffic use to reach your site
- Content: What did the traffic find interesting enough to click on the link
When you start to read the reports like this, you will come to know exactly what content attracts more traffic. This study will give you a blueprint of how to design you next Marketing Strategy to be more effective. For example, you have a link for ‘Sign up’ and below you have a picture of the product or service that you sell. You will come to know whether the traffic is clicking on the link or the image so you can use that in a better way for your next campaign.
- Results – Once you have done your study, you want to know the results that you are getting from all the different sources.
- So, you begin with looking at the numbers of the quantity of traffic that you have attracted as this is, simply, the number of people who are aware of the product that you sell.
- Next you must study the completion report which will tell you the number of people who purchased your product.
- And finally, you look at the engagement report which will tell you, how many visitors were engaged on you site.
Once you have all the numbers, you compare them according to the traffic sources and pinpoint that one traffic source which is just outstanding with conversions. You need traffic sources that offer you an insane engagement as it is important for brand awareness, but success is when conversions happen.
You will also need to pay attention to the traffic source that provides you with a huge traffic, but conversions and engagements are not happening because the visitors are slipping away. You must work on creating that content to stop the visitors from just gliding through and try to grab their attention, to make them stick around your website.
Do you want to learn more about how to use modern marketing hacks to succeed in your e-commerce business? Visit the Top Marketing Hacks for E-Commerce Brands blog for more information.
What's your Goal?
Your goal, during the entire process is to understand how to begin analysing the reports from Google Analytics and use them to reach to the finish line of a campaign successfully.
The fun is not in reaching the finish line but it’s in the journey of how you can reach the finish line with grand success.
In the end, we hope that you have at least One New Thing that you want to do in the entire content that we have covered.
