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Top 10 Google Analytics Features to Measure Your Marketing

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With so much industry emphasis on things like Big Data and Attribution Modeling, it can be a bit daunting for newcomers to the world of digital analytics to gain a proper foothold. That’s why we decided to put together a free webinar back in early November covering some of the top features in Google Analytics. Our presentation offered the best ways for you to obtain the insights that drive better marketing and a better user experience on and off your website.

In this webinar, we covered a host of features and functionality in Google Analytics, including:

  1. Multichannel Funnels
  2. Content Experiments
  3. Social Media Reporting
  4. Real-Time Reporting
  5. Custom Reports
  6. Shortcuts
  7. Annotations
  8. Webmaster Tools Integration
  9. Visitor Flow Report
  10. Email Integration

This webinar is now available for free on DaBrian Marketing Group’s YouTube channel, so we decided to share it with you today. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show! And if you like what you see, or have some suggestions for us, please leave a comment below!

Analytics Christmas Carol: 12 Things To Measure

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This time of the year we’re either busy analyzing the past year’s data for the new year or dreaming of great food, presents, and time with the family over the holiday. In keeping with both of those notions, I’ve decided to take a stab at song-writing with this fun cheesy little version of the “12 Days of Christmas” carol/blog hybrid!

Enjoy (or point and laugh profusely. Either way, you’ll have fun)!

On the 12th Month of Service the Client Wants to Track:

12 PDF downloads

In the case of Google Analytics, tagging downloads on your website with Event Tracking can reduce inflated bounce rates and give you greater insights into how supplemental information and deliverables impact the decision process of prospective customers and ultimately your bottom line.

11 Affiliate link clicks

The same methodologies that are used with tracking downloads can also be applied to links to affiliate websites. Tagging these affiliate links with Outbound Link tagging can help reduce those artificially-inflated bounce rates.

10 billboard adverts

Traditional marketing initiatives need not be segregated from your web analytics data any longer! Through a combination of vanity URLs and unique landing pages, you can easily track the effectiveness of initiatives like billboards and radio ads and uncover the insights to improve these campaigns.

9 PPC campaigns

There’s far more to a pay-per-click campaign than just clicks. Though Google AdWords provides cost data and click analysis, you can get the complete picture by tying Google AdWords and Google Analytics together. You can see how well the landing page content and call-outs are resonating with your paid search visitors, identify disconnects between a display ad and your site, and use these insights to hone in your PPC strategy.

8 Tweets-a-tweetin'

Don’t just throw Twitter and social posts out there and hope something sticks! Tag those links pointing to your site using Google’s URL builder so you can use Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of those Tweets!

7 QR codes

QR codes have enabled marketers to easily point recipients to their web assets via a hyperlink in barcode form. As an added layer of measurement, you can add tracking parameters to the destination URL of these QR codes. Another great way to bridge the insight gap between traditional and digital!

6 Customer segments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you’re not segmenting your web analytics data, you’re probably not doing it right. Customer behavior from your campaigns to your website can vary greatly depending on what segment they fit into. Slicing and dicing your data accordingly will help optimize your customer’s experience and improve marketing to those individuals.

5 KPIs!

You can’t measure without a unit of measurement to go by! That’s just a fact of life. When it comes to measuring your marketing, establishing solid KPIs that align with your business goals and objectives is crucial. You want to ensure that these KPIs are meaningful to the decision makers and speak to the success of your campaigns.

4 Vanity numbers

Similar to how vanity URLs and QR codes can be used with traditional marketing, there’s also opportunities to use vanity phone numbers that are integrated with call tracking platforms. This provides another great layer of measurement and yet another opportunity to bridge that digital and traditional gap!

3 Email blasts

Most email marketing platforms allow for varying levels of integration with Web Analytics tools. Platforms like MyEmma offer automatic tagging for links pointing to your web assets. This extends your analytical visibility beyond just open rates and allows you to see whether or not the subject lines, messages, and call-outs are really resonating with your audiences.

2 Subdomains

Perhaps your organization’s site stretches across several subdomains (or even across multiple domains entirely). This is often the case with websites that incorporate a blog, online application system, or 3rd party shopping cart. Seamless deployment of web analytics tracking through the use of cross-domain methods will shine light into problem areas of conversion funnels and other valuable tidbits.

And a CVAR in a tracking cookie!

Google Analytics allows for the use of CVARs, or Custom Variables, which allow you to set specific variables within the tracking cookie. These CVARs can be set when a user performs a specific action on your site, comes from a certain traffic source, or fits other specific criteria.

And there you have it, folks: My half-blog-half-Christmas Carol masterpiece! Hopefully you found it festive AND informative! On behalf of everyone at DaBrian Marketing Group, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy Holiday!

Not Segmenting Your Data? Turn in Your Gun & Badge

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"Market segmentation is a natural result of the vast differences among people."

– Donald Norman (author of “The Design of Everyday Things” – excellent read! I’ll never look at doors the same way again.)

Donald nailed it when it comes to customer segments. Your customers are all unique. They all have their own interests and motivations for looking at your product and service offerings. You (hopefully) use your analytics data to gain insights for improving marketing initiatives. So why wouldn’t you arrange your data in a manner that captures these differences in motivation and behavior? Analysis of all-encompassing data can yield some interesting sticking points, however it can just as easily mislead you with regards to customer behavior.

What Can Be Done to Avoid This?

As marketing professionals and analysts, it is our duty to get to the information that leads to more effective campaigns. So if you haven’t considered segmenting your data, here are four steps to take to get it done in your web analytics tools.

  1. Look at your high-level offerings. Before jumping into the creation of segments in your solution, it is a good idea to take a few steps back. First look at your organization from a high level. What are the core service and product offerings of your organization? How do your target audience and customer demographics align with these service offerings? This information will give you the foundation on which to base your analytics customer segments. If you already have this figured out, great! Move on to the next step.

  2. Identify touch-points with your customer segments. Now that you know who your customer segments are, it’s time to determine how your analytics solution will identify them. For this, you’ll want to identify how they are discovering your brand. In the case of web analytics, are customers in a particular segment arriving via search engines (organic or paid)? If so, what search phrases did they use? What landing pages did they use? Use the trending you see with these questions to create the rules for each segment.

  3. Create your segments! You’ve identified your segments and how you can find them in your analytics data. Now it’s time to set up these rules in your solution. In the case of Google Analytics, set up the proper Include rules using Regular Expressions for related search phrases and landing pages.

  4. Make sure the segments actually work! At this point you may have put some significant time and effort into creating these customer segments. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste. Make sure it separates and organizes your data properly. Test them with different date ranges to ensure the results are somewhat consistent and make sense.

As modern day analysts and marketers, most of us do our best not to think in silos. This mentality should translate over when it comes to data analysis. Though some questions may warrant looking at high-level, all-encompassing data, the best insights will come from segmentation. Adapting these tips to your own process should help you discover hidden gems for converting more customers.

Have some other helpful tips for segmentation of data? Feel free to leave a comment and share the wealth! Also be sure to follow us on Twitter (link to the right) to stay up to date on the latest tips for better analysis.

Streamline Your Tag Management Strategy

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So your organization has made the decision to pursue digital analytics. You’ve managed to get the buy-in you need from the decision makers and now you have plans to measure everything under the sun, from billboards, to pay-per-click campaigns, to social media. You’ve created scope documents and measurement plans until your fingers bled. To quote one of my favorite movies, Independence Day, now it’s time for “the really icky part”: deployment.

Let's Rewind a Bit…

If you’re familiar with deploying web analytics tracking on your site and your campaigns, you are surely aware of the time and effort that may be involved. For the less technically-inclined, it’s easy to get lost in all of the Javascript, URL tags, and parameters. Luckily, there are some powerful (and free) tag management tools out there to help streamline this process as well as improve the load time of your website. These platforms provide a single place to manage, change, and deploy all of your tags, regardless of their source. With this in mind, you should consider developing a strategy for tag management for your measurement initiative.

Creating a Tag Management Strategy

After you have established what you will measure by aligning business goals and objectives with the right KPIs in your measurement plan, it’s time to get the how in place. This starts with getting the right people in a room (or conference call) together. The IT personnel and webmasters should be present, as well as any marketing and advertising partners that will be involved with any of the initiatives that are to be measured. During this meeting, establish any technical requirements or limitations that may exist when it comes to analytics deployment. It is imperative to identify any constraints at this stage, as any roadblocks may require additional planning and maneuvering.

After you’ve gathered sufficient information, it’s time to take a look at potential tag management solutions. It is important to understand the great deal of time that can be saved when using tag management solutions. It provides a single place where you can manage tracking scripts and tags and only requires a single script to be placed on the website to be tracked. This is ideal when you have large quantities of tags to spread across a site.

There are a handful of excellent platforms out there that offer a great deal of flexibility for multiple analytics and measurement tools. Google recently announced their own free solution, Google Tag Manager. This platform has clearly been designed with Google Analytics in mind; however it offers great flexibility when it comes to using it to deploy scripts for other solutions as well.

If you’re not a fan of Google, there are other tag management solutions out there. UberTags is a powerful paid solution that allows for 3rd party scripts.

Less Time, Less Headaches

Large amounts of time and effort go into preparing tactics for measurement of campaigns. Implementation of tracking scripts can take up even more time than the planning – but it doesn’t have to. Identifying the right tools to help reduce deployment time can spare your organization unnecessary headaches and create efficiencies that lead to saving more money.
Be sure to share any questions or experiences you have had about tag management in the comments below!

Video: Saving Time in Google Analytics

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When it comes to Web Analytics, your time literally equals money. That’s why our chief web analyst made a comprehensive video guide outlining 4 ways you can save time in Google Analytics. Spend more time analyzing and less time gathering data!

Check out the guide below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more updates!

Want to learn more about Google Analytics? Sign up for our Free Webinar on October 29th; we’ll be covering a host of features that can save your business time and money!

Successful Campaign Analysis Via Tagging Strategies

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There can be a lot of unknowns when it comes to marketing campaigns. Who’s seeing your ads or print pieces? Of those people, who are they resonating with? Are your strategies working? These are all very important questions, that if answered, can lead to valuable insights into improving these strategies. But how can you gain visibility into these in the first place? If these marketing initiatives are designed to drive traffic to your company’s website, you’re already headed in the right direction!

If you have advertisements on billboards, print, you likely already have a web analytics platform selected to measure your site. If not, what are you waiting for? If you are using a platform like Google Analytics, you can mark your campaigns for easy analysis via URL tagging. New to manual tagging? Here are a basic outline so you can get the most analysis out of your campaign data.

  1. Identify Advertising Methods & Locations: The first step is to get your ducks in a row by laying out all of our advertising methods. What type of ads will they be? Where will they be placed? What will the call-to-action be? What URL will be featured on the ad? These are all things that should be considered before proceeding.

  2. Evaluate Campaign Flexibility & Constraints: It is a good idea to identify any strengths and weaknesses with the campaign. Are the placements permanent, or is there flexibility to change the ad up periodically? It is good to know whether or not you will need to prepare additional tags for the different ad variations, be it a billboard or a banner ad.

  3. Create Information-Rich Tags: Now that you have all of the information you need, it’s time to make sure you carry as much of it over to Google Analytics as possible through information-rich URL tags. What do I mean by this? For Google Analytics URL tagging, you have the option of using several different fields for labeling, including campaign source, medium, and campaign. There are also other fields like term and content which will allow you to differentiate even more. You’ll want to make sure you get as much information as you’ll need down the line. The more information there is, the deeper you can drill down for analysis in the future.

  4. Test, Test, Test! This step is pretty self-explanatory, but perhaps one of the most important steps of all. You should the new tags with their URLs to ensure that they send you to the proper page, as well as verify proper data collection within Google Analytics. You don’t want to find out after deployment of these tagged links that something isn’t right!

  5. Deploy & Analyze: And now, the waiting game! Once enough data has begun populating in your analytics profile, you can begin slicing and dicing for deep analysis!

It is important to understand that this entire process can be time-consuming to start, but will serve to be a wise investment as the data comes rolling in. The insights that will be brought forth will be well worth it, as they’ll help you understand how well all of your advertising is performing, regardless of the medium.