Advanced Google Analytics Tips for Marketing Managers

October 5, 2014

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools available for marketers that are looking to better understand their web presence. If you are going to be using Analytics for your company, it is important that you learn as much as you can about this tool so that you can use it effectively. Advanced Google Analytics tips for marketing managers will help you use Google Analytics in ways that you may not even have known were possible.

Segmenting Your Visitors

Google Analytics is excellent for measuring traffic, but did you know that you can also use it to determine which population group the majority of your traffic comes from? You can access all of this information from the Audience reporting section in Google Analytics, where you can get information about the interests of people who visit your website, how old and what gender they are. This information can be extremely helpful when you go to create an ideal customer profile or determine how well your marketing efforts are working when it comes to attracting people in a specific population.

Besides audience demographics, you can also create segments that help you determine where the users came from, what they did when they were on your site, and when they first visited your website. Using segments properly is one of the advanced Google Analytics tips for marketing managers that will help you better understand the people who view your website.

This deeper understanding will make you better able to align your marketing messages with the kinds of people who are more likely to want to purchase your products or services. Doing this will go a long way towards helping you reduce unnecessary marketing spending and improving the ROI of things like social media campaigns and other marketing endeavors that may not be working as well as you thought they were on particular demographics.

Tracking More Than One Goal

It is great to see how many people are signing up for your newsletter, but what if there is more than one action that could be considered a conversion on your website? With advanced use of Google Analytics, you are able to add multiple conversion goals so that you can tell how well each area of your site is doing. This feature is accessible under the goal dashboard and will help you gather data in a more sophisticated manner.

This allows you to take data from multiple goals and then apply it to some important areas of your business that you want to improve, such as marketing or customer retention efforts. This is one of the advanced Google Analytics tips for marketing managers that could exponentially improve the effectiveness of your use of Google Analytics by itself.

Use Google Analytics For Email Tracking

You might know that you can use Google Analytics to track data about your email marketing, but did you know that you can actually use Google Analytics to track the amount of people that open your emails? To do this, you need to create a custom metric in Google Analytics and then incorporate an Analytics code into your email marketing messages that is tied back to this metric. When users open your marketing emails, Google Analytics picks up on this code and adds it to your reports. Jim Gianoglio at LunaMetrics goes into more detail about how to do this in a blog post from last June

This is extremely valuable if you are the type of company that depends on email marketing to help build your client list, as many do; it will help you learn about where you need to improve your email marketing efforts and which specific messages are getting the most attention from the people that you are looking to attract as customers, so that you can continue to employ these tactics in the future.

There are lots of available resources that you can capitalise on if you want to learn more about the many sophisticated ways that Google Analytics can help you with your marketing campaigns. Retaining the services of a skilled Analytics consultant is a great way to make sure that you are taking advantage of all the more advanced Google Analytics tips for marketing managers.

However, if this is not possible, following these steps will allow you to manage your own Google Analytics campaign in a way that is most conducive to the success and continued growth of your business. By using Analytics, you can create a website that more people are interested in seeing and interacting with.