You have likely put a lot of time, money, and effort into building the best marketing strategy for your business. (You haven’t? Contact us!) Once you have found your target customer and created content to engage them through the channels you have chosen, then what? If only there was a way to measure these goals. Luckily, there is. Google has constructed one of the best free tools on the web to help you reach your goals and improve upon them.
Google Analytics was created to measure website, app, digital and offline data so that anyone signed up (it’s easy, and did we mention free?) can access and track the insights for their website.
Google Analytics breaks down the categories of insights daily, weekly, monthly, or for a custom date range. Offering the insights this way can help you determine where you are in your goal set for any amount of time or time period.
Even though there are many categories available, there are five that we think are pretty important. Let’s break it down:
Audience
What is it? Under the audience tab, located on the convenient sidebar, a website owner can see an overview of how many users the webpage has for any given time period. This information is complete with the number of sessions, pageviews, average session duration, bounce rate, and pages per session.
Why is it important? The number of users and sessions allows you to see how much traffic your webpage is receiving. The average session duration and bounce rate are important because they let you know how long a user is on your page. If the bounce rate is high, then the user is likely spending more time with your content rather than “bouncing” around to other pages.
Demographics
What is it? The demographics category, also located under the Audience tab, includes the age and gender of your users.
Why is this important? This is your target audience. If these numbers do not reflect that, then it is time to change up your content.
Geo
What is it? Like demographics, this category is located under Audience and overviews the language and location of your users.
Why is it important? If your marketing strategy zeroes in on local customers, you will want to have more users from your local area. If you are looking to expand country-wide, users from all over the U.S. will be your target. Using paid ads on social media or advertising in other areas of the country could help expand your reach.
Acquisition
What is it? Acquisition refers to how a user finds your webpage. An organic search refers to a user typing finding your site through a search engine, direct refers to a user typing in your website URL directly, referral is being referred by links on other websites, and social is access to your site through social media.
Why is it important? This is where SEO is really important. The keywords you use in your content need to match up to what your users are typing into the search engine in order to acquire organic searches. Once you put your content out there and have gained a lot of organic searches, your company will start to have a larger online presence, thus increasing the acquisition in all areas. Another great tool to modify your SEO is Google Console, but that is for another day.
Behavior
What is it? The Behavior overview is about pageviews. The information in the overview encompasses the number of page views, which page is receiving the most views, and how each page on your website ranks.
Why is it important? Each time you post content, you want your customers to see it. The pageview behavior will allow you to see which pages are gaining the most traffic. If the most traffic is going to the pages where you have posted new content, then you are hitting your goal with your target audience.
Google analytics is always improving and new categories with easier ways to measure your goals are being created and modified all the time. A goal is no good if you cannot measure it and this tool covers so many goals that, if used correctly, your business can be as dynamic and expanding as Google Analytics in no time.
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