Did you know that 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last 24 months? If there is so much data in the world, why not take advantage of it?
You have a beautiful website, you told everyone you know about it. You have done everything you needed to do in order to be found: SEO optimized blog posts, great structure, links within the website and to external pages, you installed pixels, analytics, and every plugin you needed to install.
You have also done some marketing: Facebook ads, LinkedIn Ads, Newsletters, Insta posts. You have seen traffic on your website, you know your efforts are paying off. And now it is time to evaluate your data!
So, who are your visitors?
We're taking analytics to the dance floor! Imagine for a moment that your website is like a dance floor and you have people coming in to visit. Some people buy your products or consume your content. But others leave too quickly and don't engage at all. How can you find out how to attract more of those who stay and buy?
That’s when we bring in our analytics friend: Google Analytics, or GA for short. We need to know more about our audience. Let’s take out the magnifying glass and let the party begin!
Where are visitors coming from?
There are several groups of people, coming from different sources. Our task is to find out where they come from and what their behaviour is. Do they stay long? Do they buy? Do they share what we offer?
There is a group of people who visit regularly, at the end of the month to be precise. Let’s concentrate on one person in this group. We don’t know any names, but let’s call this guy Fred. So, if Fred visits at the end of the month, it could very well be that he visits around payday. And not only does he buy our products for himself, he also invites his friends to join him and pays for more than a few rounds.
The question is, where does he come from? How can we have more of them? If we go to our analytics report, under Acquisition, we find all campaigns. And if we tagged the campaign links properly (see link to UTM parameter builder below), we can see that Fred comes from the links on the Facebook Ads! Specifically, from the ad where young people are dancing and having a good time. This ad got a lot of engagement and tagging. He was probably one who tagged his friends to come and join him for a drink or two.
Now, let’s find out about someone else. There is another group who also come regularly. Let’s pick one lady from the group and call her Nathalie. She doesn’t buy much, but she visits every week. So, how did Nathalie discover you? Well, in our story, you once invited a well-known blogger to write a blog post for you. She wrote about loneliness, and how she decided to get out of her comfort zone and try dancing regularly, even alone. And how she not only lost weight, but she also met the love of her life at a disco! Well, Nathalie read that blogpost, opted-in to your Newsletter, and she reads every blog post since then.
In GA terms, we would find out about Nathalie also by properly tagging the link we included in the newsletter, with the right parameters (see explanation below). And combined with GA Goals and Events, this could be a powerful analysis. We could see if Nathalie (or her group coming from newsletters) clicked on the buy now button, visited the Thank you page when they enrolled in our newsletter, or scrolled all the way down when reading the blog post.
Let’s have a last example. Let’s analyze this other group and pick a lady that we will call Ingrid. Ingrid came from Instagram, we have lots of them! How can we tell? Well, as you might know, the only link you can click on is on the profile (if you don’t have 10K followers yet!). Instead of adding the home page link, we added a link to a special landing page with buttons on it. Each button triggers an event on Google Analytics. And we can also see which pages they visited after they entered our website. Ingrid is a regular, she tags her friends on Instagram. She posts pictures of herself and her friends dancing on your dance floor and tags your company every time. Thanks to Ingrid and her friends, your insta account has exploded. We might have to think of a way to thank her!
So these are a few of the groups we can identify, groups that are important for your business.
Key Takeaways
✔ Listen to your audience by analyzing their behaviour on your website
✔ When you analyse your data, you will know what is working and what is not
✔ You can then decide to do more of what is working
✔ You can change what is not working, or simply stop investing in it
✔ Take your audience to the next level: retarget them!
Keep doing the things that work, change the things that don’t work, and keep rocking on!
Best Practices
- Always create a raw view, a master view and a test view when setting up your Google Analytics
- Filter out your IP address in order to exclude internal traffic
- Enable auto-tagging on Google Ads if you are using them, see this screenshot
- Set up GA Goals from the beginning
- Connect Google Analytics to the Search Console
- Have a naming convention for your campaigns, i.e. "facebook-ads" for Facebook Ads
- Use the UTM Parameter Builder for email campaigns and other digital campaigns
Properly tagging your URLs
This is also called adding UTM parameters to your campaign links. Google makes it very simple to do, they even have a free tool you can use in order to do it. You need to have the following things ready before using the tool: the URL to your landing page, the name of the campaign and the medium (cpc, banner, email). Then you add one by one, copy the link generated, and add this link to your campaigns. A properly tagged campaign link would look like this:
https://www.dancefloor.com/?utm_source=facebook-ad&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=monthy-campaign
And on Google Analytics, you will find it under Acquisition > All Campaigns: Source
