Do you have marketing campaigns running but aren’t sure whether they’re working or not? Fact is, if your Google Analytics isn’t properly set up, you’re likely making decisions based on incomplete information.
In my role as Director of Digital Marketing, setting up robust Google Analytics programs always ranks high on my list when working with a new client. This is because Google Analytics is our best tool for measuring marketing outcomes.
“Google Analytics is your best tool for measuring marketing outcomes.” – Glenn Walker, Director of Digital Marketing
But what if I already have Google Analytics installed on my website? I’ve got all the info I need, right?
Maybe not. Kudos to you if you do already have Google Analytics set up, but unfortunately default installations only track website visitors, pages visited, and certain referral sources (organic traffic, paid traffic, etc.); it does not track key marketing outcomes like: how many people downloaded an important product whitepaper or how many people filled out lead form. And understanding these key marketing outcomes are crucial when you’re making real marketing decisions.
The following 4 Google Analytics customizations will help you get a complete picture of your marketing efforts and help you make better marketing decisions.
Event Tracking
Custom events are useful for tracking the unique actions website visitors take on your website. Common actions that you may want to track (but are not tracked by default Google Analytics installs) include:
- PDF downloads
- Video views
- Links clicks to pages not on your website
“Custom events are useful for tracking the unique actions website visitors take on your website.”
Goal Tracking
Similar to event tracking, you can also track certain business goals through Google Analytics. These goals specifically relate to key performance indicators (KPIs) that you have selected to help measure overall success.
So whether your business’s goal is to raise brand awareness, reduce the number of support calls, or simply sell more product, you can see how well you are achieving these goals with Google Analytics goal tracking. Some examples of goals you can set up include:
- Number of visits to a key page on your website
- Number of price-list downloads
- Number of click-to-call completions
- Number of contact form completions
“The majority of your business goals can be tracked on Google Analytics.”
Custom URL Tagging
If your marketing efforts span several channels like email, social media, and online advertising, it’s important to know which channels are driving website traffic and conversions. But unless you’re consistently tagging your urls, you won’t be able to tell with much certainty which channels your website visitors are coming from.
We recommend building a custom url tagging strategy so that your data will be easier to interpret.
“Building out a custom url tagging strategy can help bring context to your web traffic.”
Filtered View
Since Google Analytics tracks every visitor to your website, your traffic numbers could appear overinflated because of visits from internal staff and external contractors (like web designers and developers).
Setting up filtered views will give you the confidence to trust that the traffic data you are seeing is an accurate reflection of your website’s performance.
Summary
We hope these Google Analytics customizations will help you look beyond your website’s traffic numbers and really dig into how users are discovering and interacting with your website.
If you’d like to learn more about the kind of insights you may be able to glean from Google Analytics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by leaving a comment or getting in touch.