You’ve launched an online store, and now you’re wondering if all that effort was worth it. You did everything you could think of – from creating a gorgeous storefront to using the best online marketing tools available – and yet you still struggle to make a sale every month.
If product research is a chore, and you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, wondering if change is even possible, then maybe it’s time to put all that effort into marketing analytics (often called marketing research or simply research).
If you’ve explored online marketing but aren’t sure how to analyze the results you’ve gotten, then this article is for you. We’re going to teach you how to do just that, using Google Analytics, a tool that you’re probably already using but may not be aware of all its potential. With this tool, you can easily track the performance of every single aspect of your marketing campaigns – from your banner ads to your email campaigns to your blog content – across different platforms (such as websites and blogs).
Why Marketing Analytics?
You may wonder why you should even bother analyzing your marketing results. You’ve probably already tried looking at the numbers and see that you’ve spent a lot of money on ads, and those ads didn’t bring in the results you hoped for. In that case, why not just throw more money at the problem?
The fact is, though, that seeing is believing. When we can’t see results, we assume they didn’t happen. However, with analytics, you can track everything from ad performance to website traffic to email open rates to landing page conversion, and you’ll be able to see exactly what is and isn’t working. This way, you can easily find out what changes you need to make and when you need to make them. If you find that your ads are not bringing in the results you expect, then it may be time to revisit your ad content, your targeting options, or both.
Setting Up Marketing Analytics
To start analyzing your marketing results, you need to have set up Google Analytics on your website. This is a free tool that you can get from Google, and it’s really easy to set up. You just need to make sure that you’ve entered the right URL – the one for your website – and that you’ve enabled tracking on the Analytics dashboard (on the right-hand side of the screen, next to the search bar).
Viewing Your Marketing Results
Once you’ve set up Analytics on your site, you can head back to your Dashboard. The first thing you’ll see is the traffic to your site over the past month. This will be the total amount of visitors to your site, including those who have visited previously and those who come back regularly. Along with the number of visitors, you’ll see the source of the traffic (i.e., people who found you through a search engine, through social media, or through a direct link on another site).
If you’ve set up a Google Analytics account (if you don’t already have one, you can create one through the Dashboard), then you can track the performance of each of your marketing tactics, including social media posts, banner ads, and more. To see how each of these perform, simply click on the small arrow next to the phrase “Behavior” in the upper-right corner of the dashboard. This will take you to a screen where you can choose the behavior you want to track.
From there, you can track the performance of your different marketing methods – including the ones you haven’t even tried yet – and assess which ones are bringing you the results you want and which ones you should ditch.
What To Track
Once you’ve set up the basic functionality of Google Analytics on your site, you can start entering key performance indicators (KPIs) into the dashboard. The purpose of these KPIs is to provide you with data so that you can track the performance of your advertising, email marketing, and content strategy – and use this data to make future decisions about your marketing campaign.
To track the performance of your ad campaigns, you can use the “Ads” dashboard found under the “Performance” tab. This dashboard will show you the conversion rates for different types of ads (i.e., those that display on a search engine, on social media, or as an email signup button).
If you’re wondering how effective your email marketing is, you can use the “Email Marketing” dashboard found under the “Performance” tab. On this dashboard, you can track the open rates and click-through rates for different email marketing tactics (e.g., email marketing templates, autoresponder sequences, and segmented lists).
If you’re wondering how effective your blog content is, you can use the “Blog content” dashboard found under the “Content” tab. This dashboard will show you the performance of different types of blog content (i.e., those that are categorized and tagged, with and without pictures, etc.).
As you enter key performance indicators into the Dashboard, you’ll see the results instantly. For instance, if you enter the word “blog” into the search bar, you’ll see the number of blog articles that have been published on your site over the past month. If you want to know the effectiveness of a particular blog article, then you can simply click on that article and the dashboard will tell you how many times it was viewed and by whom.
Where To Go From Here
If you want to dive even deeper into the metrics and figures found on the analytics dashboard, you can click on any of the small graphs at the bottom of the page or on the right-hand side of the page. This will take you to a detailed view of that specific indicator, including a breakdown of the data in a tabular format.
To get the most out of this tool, it’s important to enter relevant data. For example, if you want to track the performance of your banner ads, then you should enter “Banner ad” into the search bar. Doing this will not only give you the ability to easily track the performance of your banner ads but will also provide you with vital information about how people are finding your site (i.e., through a search engine, through social media, or through a direct link on another site).
Once you’ve entered all the relevant data, you can dive back into the performance of your different marketing tactics and assess which ones are doing the best (based on the metrics you’ve entered). From there, you can determine the type of content that your target audience is responding to the most – whether it’s your ad campaigns, email marketing, or your blog articles – and repurpose that content for future marketing efforts.
With Google Analytics, it’s easy to track the performance of every single aspect of your marketing campaigns. As you enter key performance indicators into the dashboard, you’ll see the results instantly. By using this data to inform future marketing decisions, you can easily find out what changes you need to make and when you need to make them.