Do you know what your audience cares about? What is important to them? What content would they like to read? You may think you know, but your Google Analytics can tell you exactly what sparks interest with your online audience. This is the secret to creating content that will engage and spark interest with your online audience.
Follow these steps to learn how to use Google Analytics to build your marketing strategy.
Make sure Google Analytics is installed on your website.
Obviously, digging into your Google Analytics only helps if you have it installed on your website in the first place. It’s a simple process that you or your website designer could set up in just a couple minutes. Start by setting up an account with Google Analytics. Once inside, click “Admin” from the menu bar and “.js Tracking Info”. Then, click “Tracking Code” to get your Tracking ID and Tracking Code. Check with your website host to learn exactly what to put where on the backend of your website. Or contact INFUSEALLY to set it up for you for $50.
Build a monthly marketing report and study the past 3 months of your website traffic.
If you already have Google Analytics installed you can jump right in and start analyzing your traffic. If you just installed it, you’ll have to wait a couple months as your data begins only once the code is installed.
You’ll want to start by creating a basic marketing report for yourself, using your Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to fill in the details. If you don’t know where to begin, you can download a free marketing report template from our resources page.
Step 1: Overview
In your Google Analytics, click in to see all your website data and set the date range at the top right of the page. Next, scroll down until you see “Acquisition” in the left hand column and click it. This will give you all the data to fill out the Overview tab on your marketing report, except your leads. You may have to get information on your leads from another location if you are using another landing page tool.
Step 2: Top Blog Content
If you have a blog, and you should, this information is invaluable when it comes to finding out what your audience wants to hear. Your information will become more valuable as you add data from additional months so you can start spotting trends in your content.
In your Google Analytics, click Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in the left sidebar to bring up the pages of your website. If you have less than 10, you will see all of them reflected here. This information becomes more valuable the more pages you add to your site. Each blog counts as a new page and can give you great insights into your data. In the “Top Pages” tab of your marketing report, write down the top 10 pages listed. Ignore the page that just shows “/” as this represents your home page and will typically carry the majority of your traffic. What you are looking for is where people are going within your website. Do this for the past three months.
Step 3: Social Media Analytics
If you have a presence on multiple social media platforms, this can be a very illuminating section. Let’s say you spend most of your time focused on Facebook, but when you look at the data, you realize the majority of people are coming to your site from LinkedIn. This section will help you identify how people are finding you and what they’re engaging with on social media.
Click Acquisition > Overview in the left hand column and scroll down until you see the breakdown of how people are coming to your site. Click on Social to bring up more information about how people are finding you. Use this information to fill in the the Social Media tab of your marketing report. This will help you be strategic with social media. You may find that you have people coming from sources you weren’t even aware of. Or, that you’re spending your time in all the wrong areas.
Step 4: Analyze Your Facebook Insights
If you have a Facebook business page, login to your business account and click on Insights. This will show you a list of all your posts and the engagement level on each. Focus more on engagement rather than reach. Reach just means that someone saw the post as they were scrolling through their Facebook feed. Engagements however, show who actually clicked, shared, reacted to or commented on your content – which is far more valuable. Make note of the top five posts for each of the past three months.
Step 5: Analyze Your Results
You can get much more detailed with your marketing reports but this will help you get started. When you see all the data in one place it’s easier to draw some conclusions. This is why you should start with a minimum of three months. Anything less would make it difficult to see trends within your data.
- On the Overview tab, look for overall drops or increases in website traffic and leads and compare this to the marketing efforts to put forth for those months. Did something bring a lot of additional traffic? Or did you advertise and see no increase in traffic whatsoever?
- On the Top Pages tab, see if some of your blog content or other pages seems to show up toward to top of the pile again and again. When considering this compared to your marketing efforts you can start to see a picture of what resonates with your audience and what they are most interested in. Start thinking of blog topic ideas that your audience would likely have interest in based off the information you see.
- One the Social Media tab, consider whether or not you need to change your social media strategy. Maybe all that time you spend on Pinterest isn’t netting you the results you want, while other channels are bringing in a good amount of traffic with little effort.
- On the Facebook Posts tab, see what content got the most engagement. You might be surprised by what you find. Sometimes the things you think will resonate don’t and vice versa but you can learn from all of this. Think strategically about the content you are posting – the images, the offers, the way you say it, the length of your posts, etc. Take all this into consideration as you make plans for future social media posts and content in general.
Your Google Analytics contains a wealth of information that you can, and should, use to direct your marketing strategy moving forward. You should make a habit of collecting this data at a minimum every month so you have an idea of what’s working and can really craft a marketing plan and strategy that will be more effective in subsequent months.
Remember, marketing is all about testing a theory, analyzing the results, and making changes based on your learning. You may not always be right, but you won’t know if you are on the right track or not if you don’t take the time to analyze your results.
If you’re not the type to nerd out over data, or you want more direction on what you’re seeing in Google Analytics, consider signing up for our Quarterly Consulting. We will build detailed marketing reports for you on a quarterly basis. Then, we will analyze your reports and share our insights to help guide your marketing strategy for the next quarter. Contact us today for more information.