Understanding your site visitors is one of the most important elements of building an effective web marketing campaign. Without understanding who your site visitors are and what they are doing, you can’t make adjustments to continually improve your web marketing strategy.

In this video, I walk you through all the data within Google Analytics that I focus on, what it means and why it is important. I also go through how to interpret the data to come to conclusions as simply looking at the data on the surface could lead you down the wrong path of understanding.

Here are some of the things I cover:

Goal Tracking is a Must

Traffic is great, conversions are what’s important. If you know golf then you know the saying “Drive for show, putt for dough.” Getting a lot of website traffic is showing off for your friends, getting conversions is taking all their money. I prefer the money.

Often times we find client sites that have Google Analytics setup, but at it’s most basic level. In almost all cases, we build websites in order for users to do something like fill out a contact form, call or buy a product. In Google Analytics, it is of the utmost importance to track conversions via Goal Tracking. This allows you to see how many people successfully accomplished a task on your site. Without it, your data can’t help you improve your bottom line.

Finding Your Best Marketing Channels

When you have a clear view of how effective your web marketing is working for you, Google Analytics also gives you data on where those people came from. By looking at your conversion data and where those conversions come from, you can see which marketing channel is your most effective. Maybe you are spending $1,000/day on Google AdWords and $1,000/day on Facebook ads. By looking at your conversion data you can see which of those is producing the most actual conversions. You can then make adjustments to your marketing strategy to iterate and improve its effectiveness.

Mobile is Necessary for Everyone, but How Important Varies

Many clients ask me about making their site mobile-friendly. Every site should be mobile-friendly. But how important it is for every business will vary. It depends on your business, your site’s information and what your users are hoping to accomplish while on your website.

Most Valued Pages On Your Website

With Google Analytics data we can understand which pages on your website are the most important to your users. By seeing which pages they visit most often we can understand what information they want to know. With that information, you can make informed decisions on how to organize and present content on your website to help users find what they want and then drive them to take an action next. Your content should be answering their questions to they have no reason not to contact you. With this data you can perform some amazing conversion optimization.

If you have further questions about Google Analytics or need further help to configure your account or understanding your data, please reach out to us and we can help.