Bonafide Marketing Genius

Online Marketing Analytics Tutorials for Beginners

In today’s world, the line between marketing and sales has blurred, and marketers now have to adopt an omnichannel approach to reach consumers.

This paradigm shift has created an entirely new set of challenges for marketers. One issue is understanding how marketing activities impact the bottom line.

Thankfully, the ever-evolving world of digital marketing has provided solutions to help marketers gain deeper insight into marketing performance.

If you’re interested in exploring online marketing analytics but don’t have the expertise to properly set up the software yourself, you’re in luck because we’ve got you covered. In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to set up Google Analytics so you can start getting the most from your website traffic.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a widely used web analytics service that provides in-depth insights into a site’s traffic and performance. With Google Analytics, you can track and measure everything about a visitor’s interaction with your site (known as metrics), such as:

  • The date and time that the visitor arrived at your site
  • The pages on your site that the visitor viewed
  • The time spent on each page
  • The link that the visitor followed to get to your site (referred to as a conversion path)
  • The name and email address of the person who signed up for your website
  • The location of your site’s most active audience

In addition to providing these metrics, Google Analytics can track and report on a variety of performance indicators, such as:

  • Site traffic
  • The number of visitors that landed on a specific page of your site
  • Which pages on your site get the most traffic
  • The time spent on each page
  • The location of your site’s busiest server
  • The search terms that led the visitor to your site
  • The email addresses of your site’s active subscribers
  • The demographics and psychographics of your site’s audience
  • The number of referrals that resulted in a conversion (i.e., the clicks on the links that you created to generate these referrals)
  • The conversion rates of the various campaigns launched on your site
  • The distribution of products purchased after following a referral link

Why Do I Need Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can help you understand the effectiveness of your website, which is extremely valuable information for any marketer. For example, if you find that your videos aren’t performing as well as you expect they should, you can determine why without having to guess. Similarly, you can find out which articles will be the best to boost your blog’s SEO and, as a result, its performance in organic search traffic.

With Google Analytics, you can also discover various metrics that your website’s visitors value the most, which can help you discover the type of content that your target audience craves the most. You can use this information to improve your website’s UX (user experience) and the quality of your content, which in turn, will make your site more valuable to its audience.

How Do I Set It Up?

It’s quite simple to set up Google Analytics. First, you’ll need to create an account on the Google Analytics website (www.googleanalytics.com). Then, you’ll need to add your website to your account. After that, you can use the Google Analytics interface to find the URLs of the pages on your site that you want to track. Simply enter the URL of a page that you access frequently in the URL bar, and click enter. This will pull up a long list of all the pages on your site with the keywords that you specified. Select the ones that you want to track, and then click “create tracking tag”.

On the next screen, you’ll need to enter a name for your new tag (this will be the text that appears beneath the image of the cartoon frog on any links that you create in the future). Next, you’ll need to paste the code that Google provides into the designated area on your website.

The Results

After a few days, you’ll start to see some data appear in the report that looks similar to this:

Here, you’ll see that our example website gets a decent amount of traffic from Google (currently, it gets about 17% of its total traffic from Google). However, what’s important to note is that this traffic is divided evenly between organic search traffic and referral traffic. The numbers in the red box indicate that about 14% of our website’s total traffic comes from people who found us through a search engine and click on an organic result, while the blue box indicates that 86% of our website’s traffic comes from people who found us through social media and click on a link shared on a social media site.

Hopefully, this illustrates how important it is to have a variety of traffic sources, as not every visitor will be willing to give you their email address or sign up for your newsletter. By discovering that our audience mainly gets their news from social media and clicks on links shared on social media sites, we can determine that this is where our target audience spends their time when they’re on the web. In turn, we can optimize our content to fit these platforms’ niches.

What’s even more valuable is that this data points to specific areas of our site that need improvement. For example, our “about” page gets the most traffic on our site but doesn’t convert well. This means that our target audience is mostly reaching this page, but they’re not doing much else once they’re there. In order to improve our site’s conversion rate, we can try to get more visitors to our “about” page, which, in turn, can lead to more revenue.

Further Considerations

You should consider a few things before you get started using Google Analytics. First, make sure that you have a legitimate reason for collecting this data. You won’t get in trouble with the law, but you could jeopardize your business’s reputation if a customer or employee discovers that you’re tracking their activity without their explicit consent. It is recommended that you get explicit consent for tracking users’ activity.

Second, make sure that you’re not using any tools that automate the process of discovering keywords and performing SEO. Doing these things on your own will take time and, for some people, a lot of trial and error. Investing in a tool that does this for you can make your life much easier and, as a result, improve your SEO performance.

Tool Choices

If you’ve decided that you want to try out Google Analytics, there are a variety of tools that you can use to perform SEO and keyword research. To start, try one of these tools:

  • Keywordtool.io
  • Majestic SEO
  • Yoast SEO
  • Withemes SEO
  • Ahrefs SEO

One important thing to note is that it’s not necessary to use all of these tools at one time. You can try out a free version of some of these tools, and then, if you find that they do all that you need, you can upgrade your subscription to a paid version of the same tool. This will save you money in the long run.

It can also be useful to check out these tools alongside Google Analytics. For example, you may want to use Google Analytics to discover the keywords that people are using to find your site, and then you can use one of the above tools to discover more specific and local keywords. The combination of these two tools can help you discover keywords that you may have missed when using only one of them.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Once you’ve set up Google Analytics (and verified that you’re not using any black hat SEO techniques), you can start getting the most from your website’s traffic. From there, you can discover the types of content that your target audience responds to the most and use this information to improve your site’s UX and the quality of your content.