Shying away from Analytics costs you. Use Google Analytics by Faux Digital Advertising Agency

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Tutorial > On-page SEO & Keyword Guides > Shying away from analytics costs you. Use Google Analytics APRIL 14, 2017

Shying away from analytics costs you. Use Google Analytics

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This is how Google Analytics is your best friend in Content Marketing Marketing is an integral part of business. Without marketing, your product has no value. However, only undertaking marketing campaigns is not enough. You need to optimize and analyze the results in order to make sure that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re doing it right. Content Marketing, like all forms of marketing, requires some metric which can help in understanding the e cacy. E cacy is pivotal because you need to know if your marketing strategies are working or not. Understanding performance is also important because, to be honest, most of the marketers do not even understand what success means in content marketing. 2/3rd of the B2B marketers feel that their content marketing campaigns are not as e cient. This further increases the need for metrics and analysis of data. So, what are these metrics? From where can you get these? Enter, Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a freemium service provided by Google. They launched it back in 2005 and it has now become the most widely used analytics service in the entire world. Google Analytics o ers loads of free tools to you that can be exploited for insights which can help in decision making. Failure to optimally use analytics by Google can result in catastrophic losses for your business and cause you to overlook critical insights.

Google Analytics â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Turning Data into Decisions Now, the basic dashboard of GA (we will refer to the product as GA from now) is self-explanatory. The basic reports like the number of page views, the number of users, bounce rate and so on are not very tough to comprehend. However, if you want the best from GA, you need to delve deeper. I am going to list the 4 report types that you must go through thoroughly in order to derive the best. These reports literally rule everything related to content marketing and can give you useful insights into your marketing e ciency.

The 4 Pillars â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4 Types of reports that give it all

Figure 1: The 4 Reports that Give it All 1. Audience: These reports are meant to analyze who your audience is, where they come from and how they interact with your content. 2. Behavior: The user experience can be judged from this report. The engagement potential can be understood and optimized using the data that you gather from the behavior reports. 3. Acquisition: This tells about the source of your tra c and the keywords your visitors use to discover your content. 4. Conversion: Goal oriented reports giving your conversion rates of your content and telling you which areas need attention and which are yielding the best results. Understanding these reports will de nitely take some time. Also, based on the nature of your business, the goals of your content marketing strategies may be di erent. So, tweaking a few things here and there is something that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll actively have to do in order to succeed. However, to give you a better insight to whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in store, I have put together some metrics which are de nitely worth checking out while using Google Analytics.

Gauging performance based on platform: To understand the power of GA, let us take this example. For every content marketer, it is important to see which platform (desktop, mobile or tablets) is working best. By using the audience reports and viewing under the comparison view, you can see how audience from a di erent source is coming to your site.

It will tell you the total sessions for the given period and break it down to how many were on the desktop, mobile and tablet respectively. Also, you can compare metrics like an average page per session, average time per session, bounce rates, etc. in order to compare the performance based on the platforms.

Social Media Tra

In the acquisition reports, you can lter the sources of your tra c and view them. So, by using this, you can nd out how many people are visiting your site due to social media. This tells you which social media networks are the best for business and where you need to work more. You can also lter using goals in order to nd out the conversion rate contributed by each of the channels. Conversion rates tell you how e ective the channel is for your business goals. Goals can be anything from subscribing to your newsletter to buying your product. In this way, GA helps in ensuring that you know what your content is doing for your business and can intervene and correct any mishaps ASAP.

Merging GA with Sheets â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Your Report Buddy So far we learned about what di erent reports in GA can tell you. Though there is a lot to cover, it is not possible to do so in a single post. However, I am certain that you now have a clear idea that GA is important to measure your marketing e cacy, so I am going to give you another tip that will help you in the long run. Google Sheets is an online spreadsheet provided by Google. This works just like MS Excel, with the added advantage that the sheets are hosted on the cloud and can be worked on by multiple users sitting at di erent locations simultaneously. Now, the reason I am talking about sheets is the fact that you can install a GA Add-On to Sheets, which can then be used to import data from your GA account and create reports in Sheets. The advantage of using sheets is the fact that you can lter, sort and use charts and graphs to analyze the data that you get. Another striking feature which completely blew me o was the Reports Scheduler. Yes, you heard me right. You can actually schedule when you want to re-run the reports so that you never have to create one of the same types again. Understand this using the following example. Suppose you need a report stating the various sources of your tra c with the metric comparison between new users and returning users. Once youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve created and run this report on Sheets using the GA add-on, you can actually schedule to run it hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Now, this will save a lot of your time as you will never have to re-create the reports which have been created once. I found this very helpful because this essentially automates the report creation which is a time-consuming task and in business, time equals to money. Installing the add-on is fairly easy while creating your reports need a little ddling around before you get the hang of it.

So, by using GA and Sheets, you can easily understand what your content is up to. Though it is going to take some time before you become well versed, it is worth the time and e orts. Are there any points that you want to discuss? Feel free to comment and I’ll get back to you!!

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