3 ways Google Analytics will improve your business

Email marketing can be turbocharged with every bit of additional data you can gather about your subscribers. There is no more powerful tool for doing just that than Google Analytics. Here’s how it can boost your conversions directly impact your bottom line.

1. Where to aim your e-marketing to increase sales

You already know about diversifying your online presence on multiple platforms to reach a wide range of potential subscribers.

This kind of strategy can be time-consuming, however, and even operating on a few social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter can demand quite a bit of engagement. Add things like writing guest posts and articles on your blog and your schedule gets filled pretty quickly.

To avoid ineffective “spray and pray” tactics and get most out of the resources you put into your marketing, you need to know which channels get the best results and offer the best chances of helping to achieve your marketing goals.

How to do it

In Google Analytics, go to the "Acquisition" tab and then to "All Traffic" to view the “Source/medium” report and learn what path online visitors take to get to your site.

In the secondary "dimension window", select the "traffic type" tab. This will show what subpages subscribers visited after clicking on link in your newsletter or after a promotion on Facebook, etc.

This is how you get information about the sources of traffic to your page. Pay careful attention to which subpages subscribers view. Content posted to Facebook related to social media will likely work well but posts related to technical matters will probably not get the response you are looking for. If most of your traffic comes from Google search, then it investing in SEO is your best bet.

2. Enhanced E-commerce

Around 50% of the online population has made more than one ecommerce purchase. The statistics that they generate while browsing and moving on your page are worth their weight in gold.

Thanks to e-commerce reports, you can check to see what percent of carts were abandoned and at what stage. This can help to alert you to issues that need to fixed in order to improve conversions.

The reports have two levels - customer behaviour during purchasing decisions and behaviour while completing the transaction. The data allows you to follow the path that visitors take through each stage of the process, including what they add to and remove from their carts.

What you get from e-commerce reports:

• insights into the purchasing behaviour of customers,
• an easy way to identify problems in the purchase path,
• the ability to see what products have been removed from carts,
• comparisons between new and returning visitors to your site.

3. Using non-standard data

During the most recent Mail My Day conference, FreshMail’s annual email marketing workshop, Maciej Lewiński demonstrated how you can use data attached to ISP accounts to identify companies that have visited your site. Essentially, the idea is that many corporate internet connections are identified by the name of the company. Seeing which firms have visited your site can be useful lead information than can nurtured and eventually turned over to sales. Using non-standard data are my favorite Google Analytics tips :)

How to do it

Go to the “Audience” tab and then to “Technology”, where two more tabs will appear, “Browser & OS” and “Network”. Select “Network” and you will see the technical data.

Technology has been a double-edged sword for marketers. Having so many tech tools at our disposal has changed the mindset of many marketers to a more technology-based approach while traditional strategies of focusing on the basic aspects of marketing like time, message and people has been moved to the background.
Despite huge market competition, we should focus on quality, not quantity, when it comes to gathering leads. When dealing with budget and time issues, we need to have as much information as possible to help us make the right decisions. The numbers don’t lie. That’s why Google Analytics is so useful. Its ability to collect data is unrivalled and tells you everything about the who, what, why and when on your site.

The reports in the “Subscribers” tab are like a road map to the changes and improvements you need to make to get the most out of your email marketing. The data it presents creates a picture of your customers and tells you who they are and what they need.
Maciej Lewiński Akademia Analytics

Google Analytics tips offer an amazing range of possibilities for building your online sales. All the data is there, it’s up to you to put it to work.