Using Google Analytics to Demonstrate ROI and Optimize Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re a director of marketing or owner of a brand, combing through loads of data and analyzing the results of your online campaigns can be overwhelming and time-consuming. While it may not fit into your daily schedule, data collection and analysis are crucial to the success of any marketing strategy, and with a little consistency can optimize your marketing efforts tenfold. The best free tool on the market, and one that allows you to make the most of the tools you are already using, is Google Analytics (GA).
Basic Insights
Your online and offline customers can differ a lot. The more you know about your web audience, the better you can serve them. By enabling demographic tracking in GA, you’ll receive reports on age, gender and interest categories. Later, you can segment the rest of your analytics data by these same characteristics so you can understand how conversions compare with other visitors. After setting up an account, Google Analytics will start collecting data for you about the most visited pages, how many users came to your site, how long they stay and from what pages they leave your site. This data will give you better insight into your web traffic, but the real power of Google Analytics is realized through configurations, advanced settings and comprehensive data visualization.
Advanced Configurations
Chasing an elusive audience simply by increasing web traffic is not a cost-effective way to increase profits for your business. Becoming an expert on your current web traffic is the best way to optimize for affordable conversions. Tracking audience behavior through goals, custom events, and site searches will enable you to map your sales process from lead generation ads to post sales follow-up, all the while identifying points of customer drop off. Google Analytics provides an intuitive platform for mapping your conversions through Funnel Visualization reports. These reports enable you to determine where users enter and exit the conversion process, and give you insight on where your marketing strategy can be improved. Using GA’s conversion funnels to expertly identify strengths and weaknesses of your strategy will ultimately increase conversions and lower the cost of sales.
AdWords
GA’s powerful integration with Adwords makes it the best place to get insights on your current campaigns. Reporting from AdWords allows you to track conversions such as eCommerce purchases directly back to your ad campaigns, helping you identify which ads are contributing to sales or brand awareness and which ones should be eliminated. Knowing where ROI is strongest gives you the opportunity to optimize so you get the most for your money.
Customized Reporting
All of this data is great, but hardly useful if it’s not easily consumable on a regular basis. Google Data Studio, connected to your Google Analytics account, turns your analytics data into informational, easy-to-understand reports through data visualization. These custom reports can be distributed periodically via email to your marketing team or internal stakeholders. This is where you get the most out of your data. Without spending all of your time preparing reports and analyzing your data, you’re able to present ongoing, highly digestible insights to your boss and/or team that demonstrate the growth and success of your marketing campaigns.
With a properly linked Google Analytics account, you get the capability to really optimize your marketing efforts. Interpreting data will help you identify revenue drivers and guide your marketing strategies. To learn more on how Zehnder’s GA-certified Research and Analytics team could help you track your marketing efforts and report how those efforts contribute to your bottom line, contact Client Development Manager Laura Gould at 504-962-3704 or lgould@z-comm.com.
