Google Analytics is the marketing performance tracker and reporter within Google Ads. It’s the main way you can see stats, growth, and conversions when running an ads campaign. There are several ways to analyze this data and go further to use these analyses to improve your campaigns. But what are the most important aspects of Google Analytics performance data to track and actually make useful?
First Understand the Categories
There are 5 main reports categories in Google Analytics:
Realtime
Audience
Acquisition
Behavior
Conversions
When understanding how to effectively analyze all the reports Google Analytics has to offer, a marketing campaign can become quite successful. Realtime reports are exactly how it sounds– a realtime, present display of how many people are engaging with your site, and what’s happening at this very moment. For this reason, we won’t go into too much detail with this, as you can’t quite use this information for long-term improvements. Generally, the analytics performance you really want to focus on is the other four: Audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions.
Audience Reports
It’s crucial to understand your audience because they are the ones who will bring you conversions. Tracking their reactions to your website, engagement with your published content like blogs or media, and communicating your campaign in a way that makes them interested in your offer is all useful information.
When running a campaign, it’s obvious that you have in mind the audience you ideally want to attract. But with Google Analytics, you get to see who you’re actually bringing to the site. Then you can adjust accordingly.
Acquisition Reports
Track where your audience is coming from on the internet. The acquisition report shows you what search phrases are getting people to visit your site and click on your relevant content.
One of the great things about Acquisition reports is that you can view your social media data as well. It’s under “Channels” and then the “Social” section. Almost all (smart) businesses are active on social media, especially brands, startups, and service-based companies. Tracking your social media progress can give you insight into how many site visitors you get from some of the world’s top mobile and entertainment apps (like Facebook, Instagram, etc.).
Behavior Reports
Behavior relates to the actions and patterns your site visitors are making. You can see how many people clicked your CTA (Call to Action) buttons, exited out of the page early, or stayed to read more well-written copy on your website. This report is invaluable because it shows you where you can better grow visitor engagement. You can use the data to make necessary changes on your website, blog, landing pages, and CTAs.
Conversion Reports
A conversion report is mainly Google Analytics’ way of showing the rate at which users on your page took an action you wanted them to take. These reports can be seen on landing pages, ads, blogs, and more.
Maybe you’ve been creating content that totally sucks. People don’t like to stick around to read, watch, or pay attention to crappy content… Hence, if your numbers could be way down, you might want to restrategize or change your approach to such content. Google Analytics will show you what the click rate is, bounce rate, and more.
You should always be considering your actual marketing and business goals when deciding what types of content to publish. It might take a little longer than anticipated, but having trustworthy and interesting content on your company site goes a long way. And, it’s a long-term benefit to help build upon over time.
One Other Specific Report to Keep Track Of
Aside from the main categories and Google Analytics reports, there is another thing that is incredibly beneficial to keep track of.
Site speed. Rumor has it that for every second your page loading time is delayed you lost on average 10% of traffic before the visitor sees the page. You want to make sure your web pages load quickly on all devices. You can see Site Speed Overview under Behavior: “Site Speed”.
At Owl SEM we run off of using Google Analytics performance reports and data. It allows us to use our field expertise to help clients reach their ROI goals and land conversions. Want to know how? Reach out and get on a free strategy call with us by clicking here.
