Using Google Analytics to Measure the Success of Your eMarketing Tactics

By Heidi Ocker on 2008/11/12

If there is one thing that makes Online Marketing better than any other form of marketing - it is its measurability. Knowing where your site traffic is coming from and what it's doing on your site is vital in formulating and perfecting your Online Marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is a really useful (and free) tool that can help you to measure the success of your Online Marketing activities. In this article we will be covering the basics of this tracking program in order to get you on your way to eMarketing success.
Before you get started you'll need to sign up - it's easy (here's a tutorial).

Dashboard

The first screen you get to once going into the reports section of your Analytics account is the Dashboard. This section gives you a visual and statistical overview of your account. Here you will be able to compare your current and past traffic and spot any general trends. For example, as you can see in the graph below, there is a definite dip in traffic over the weekends. You can scroll over the graph to see the number of visitors on a specific day or use the calendar's "compare to past" option to evaluate the current to the previous month's performance.

Also within this section are the main metrics including:

• Number of page views
• Number of average pages per visit
• Average time spent on site
• Bounce rate

All of these are self-explanatory except perhaps for bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that do not progress beyond the landing page - which in most cases suggests that they did not find the site relevant. Delving deeper in Analytics, you will be able to look at the bounce rates of different types of traffic, specific keywords and specific landing pages - and in all cases you will want to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.

Visitors

The Visitors section allows you to get more insight into the traffic visiting your site.
People often confuse visits with visitors - remember that one visitor may come back several times and therefore generate several visits. It is also important to look at the difference between new visitors (those visiting your site for the first time) and retuning visitors (those who came back) to see what kind of visitor loyalty your site has.

Use the Map Overlay Feature to see which areas of the globe bring in the most traffic - you can click on the countries of the map to see a representation of how much traffic comes from each city and you can also click on the city under the graph to see how that particular area compares in terms of time on site, bounce rate, goal conversion etc.

Other data you can get from this section includes length of visits, browser capabilities and languages of visitors.
Using this information you may decide that some countries or cities are better targets than others. You can then use geo-targeting or language targeting on your paid search campaign. You could also try including more area-specific keywords in your SEO efforts to ensure that you get more of that area's traffic.

Traffic Sources

The Traffic Sources section allows you to compare which online sources drive traffic to your website. This will include the following types of traffic:

• Direct traffic - Traffic that came to your website after typing in the URL or clicking on a bookmark that contained the URL.
• Referring sites - This includes traffic that is referred to your site via a non-search engine site. In most cases it refers to links - so you can see which sites that link to you drive the most traffic.
• Search engine traffic - Traffic that came to your site via the various search engines - both paid and organic traffic combined.

If you are using Google AdWords to run a PPC campaign, you can implement auto-tagging which allows Google Analytics to separate out your paid and organic search. You can also manually tag campaigns you are running on other advertising platforms - whether it be PPC on another search engine or display adverts in a Facebook campaign. Click on "campaigns" within Traffic Sources to see each campaign's traffic in detail. Being able to compare each campaign's metrics like time on site and bounce rate will allow you to optimise your campaigns to improve post-click activity.

 

Content

The Content section of your Analytics account allows you to see how each page of your site is performing. Here you will be able to see which landing pages attract traffic and from which keywords. This allows you to research if the keywords you have optimised your page for are bringing in traffic - and also if the bounce rate of those pages indicates that the traffic finds the page relevant (bounce rate being especially important for PPC quality score).

Not only can you see how traffic is coming in, but also the flow of traffic through your content - which pages visitors progress to and in which order and which pages they depart the site from.
All of this can tell you how useful and relevant your traffic finds your site - and if they are following a path that you intended.

Goals

Last but not least is the Goals section. Google Analytics works via URL tagging, so in essence you tell Analytics to record a goal when a certain URL has been accessed. In most cases this URL will be a page which the visitor can only reach once having reached a goal or conversion. A good example is a Thank You page after filling in a form or a payment confirmation page after purchasing a product.

You choose your goals and can set them up within the "settings" section of Analytics.  Once set up you can compare how different traffic sources, keywords and types of visitors achieve goals, as well as work out the all important CPA of various keywords or types of traffic.

It is also possible to set up a funnel - the path you expect visitors to follow from landing page to goal completed page. Using this information you will be able to see on which pages your traffic drops off and then test different versions of that page to try and improve your conversion rate.

Although this is just a basic overview of the options available on Analytics it is more than enough to get you started on investigating the traffic activity on your site and, most importantly, using that data to set up tests and make informed decisions about your future eMarketing strategies.

The amazing thing about Google Analytics is that the more you investigate, the more you realise how much there actually is to investigate. Happy hunting and good luck.