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The primary objective of any business that has online web presence and that’s implementing some form of a digital marketing strategy is to achieve positive return on investment (ROI).

However, the question is, how do you determine whether your business is in fact attaining the ROI you want?

We are a digital agency that puts data & measurement at the center of everything we do so let's have a look together at one of our favourite tools: Google Analytics

 

Analytics Tools

The use of analytics tools is crucial to measure, analyze and optimize a myriad of online performance parameters.

Whether it’s for the reporting of web data, to better understand web usage, to establish the effectiveness of a particular website or even to conduct business or market research, web analytics play an essential role for any organization in order to achieve the end goal – generating and converting potential leads into actual paying customers.

 

So how has Google Analytics managed to establish itself as the global go-to analytics tool?

Aside from the fact that it’s a free site tracking tool, Google Analytics is a powerful aid in terms of the information and insights that it can provide on issues that actually have value.

Google Analytics has simplified the process of measuring the effectiveness of your site’s marketing activities.  

In fact, Google probably describes their product best.  Here’s what they have to say: ‘Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site and how you can keep them coming back’.

 

So how does Google Analytics actually work in practice?

It utilizes a simple easy-to-understand platform from which you can draw data that you need from multiple dashboards, as well as generate reports customized in any which way you want.

Standard analytics reports make measuring and understanding engagement on your site an easy task.  These reports provide critical data helping you identify and then optimize areas that need improvement.

Google’s analytics reports include the following:

 

Content Analytics – what content is keeping people on your site and what isn’t.

This report enables you to identify what the most popular content is on your site, which site pages are performing better than any other (site pages generating the most traffic), how often people visit each page, new versus returning visitors, the amount of time they spend on each page, bounce rate (how many people come to your site and leave straight away) and how often they convert.

 

Social Analytics – which campaigns are driving traffic and conversion and which aren’t.

With this report, you can measure how well your social media campaigns are doing.  You will be able to gain insights not only on how visitors interact with your content across multiple social media channels but also, the impact of each campaign on your organization’s business objectives.

 

Conversion Analytics – what visitors are actually doing on your site.

This report is a great way of seeing how visitors are being drawn to your site through your digital marketing efforts.  You are able to find out the number of visitors you are appealing to and what actions they are taking on your site, be it downloading an E-book or watching a video.  

In this way, you can identify what’s working and what isn’t, you can measure what’s selling and what isn’t, and you can establish why some visitors are buying and why others aren’t.  By doing this, you can make any necessary changes to your site so as to achieve your ROI objectives.   

 

Mobile Analytics – work out the percentage of visits from particular mobile devices.

This is explained best by Google, ‘Google Analytics lets you measure mobile sites, apps and visits from web-enabled mobile devices, including both high-end and basic phones and tablets. We help marketers win across screens and devices by giving them insights to be relevant to customers to help them win the moments that matter’.

Advertising Analytics – what impact are your advertising campaigns across channels having.
Every business wants to know whether their advertising campaigns are working.  This report will help you understand if they are as you will be able to establish their impact on conversion rates and return across a variety of channels, be it email, social, affiliate, and others.  

 

It’s pretty evident that the advantages of using Google Analytics are endless.

From creating multiple dashboards through which you can obtain customised metrics data, to learning more about visitors to your site – including their engagement thereon, what they like and what they don’t like, what they’re searching for and what keywords are bringing them there – to attaining crucial insights of the impact that your digital, social, content and mobile marketing as well as other advertising campaigns are having across channels and on conversion rates – Google Analytics is arguably one of the best web analytics tools around today.