Google Analytics is essential for your marketing strategies

If your organisation has an online presence, you have probably heard of Google Analytics, but do you understand how it can benefit your business? And are you using this tool to its fullest potential, including in your marketing strategies?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web analytics tool that can make a huge difference to your marketing by giving you insights into your audiences and trends.

If you aren’t using GA, you may be missing out on valuable insights that would otherwise shape your marketing plans and campaigns.

Clive Hawkins, Founder of Web Training Workshop Australia and Shortcourse Trainer at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education, said that using analytics is a key part of business information that all organisations should be collecting.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics offers extensive data collection that can provide you with information about the success of your website, as well as assist you in measuring your marketing campaigns, plans and content.

Using GA is really important for businesses because it gives you data-driven insight into your digital presence. A lot of marketing is going digital these days, so it is important that you have a way of tracking that success.

“If you create a google analytics account, you have a little bit of code you add to your site and it collects information every time somebody views a page on your website,” Mr Hawkins explained.

“So it builds up a lot of data but it’s good business information in terms of how the site is being used. Ideally, one of the main uses of it is to get insights into where you can try and make improvements to your website or your marketing.”

There are two versions of Google Analytics at the moment – Universal Analytics, or UA, (which finishes data collection on 1 July 2023) and Google Analytics 4, or GA4 – and if you already have UA set up on your website, you may need to look at converting to the latest version.

How can GA inform your marketing?

When it comes to website analytics, it can inform your marketing in a lot of ways – Mr Hawkins describes it as the “knowledge factor”.

“Even if you’re only getting a few visitors a week, you may not know that unless you’ve got analytics in place,” explains Mr Hawkins. 

Conversion tracking is part of the analytics that can be particularly useful, giving you insights into how many people are on your site and what they’re looking at.

When it comes to the marketing of your aged care facility or service, you want to know what is bringing people to your website, what people are looking at, and then how you can convert that into something that meets your business objectives.

Do you want more inquiries through your website or to educate people looking for aged care? Once you have an understanding of what you want to do on your website, you can create a marketing campaign to meet that objective.

And the most important thing is that you can then track the success of your campaigns through analytics, answering a number of questions including:

• Did your campaign meet the objective?
• How many people interacted with your campaign?
• Where are they coming from? Social media, referral traffic, google adverts, or organic traffic?
• Was the campaign successful? Where did people start getting stuck and could it be a website design issue?

With Google Analytics all this data can be at your fingertips and help you bolster your marketing success in the long term.

With the right set-up, all of your marketing activities can be trackable through GA, giving you a far better insight into the progression of your marketing, this includes on social media.

Mr Hawkins said, “If you know where you’re getting your conversions from, you can try and get more of those coming from that particular source or location or marketing campaign.

“And then [campaigns] that aren’t particularly working, you can try and improve them and it’s really that back-end information, I guess, in terms of how well your website and your marketing activities perform.”

What should you be looking for on GA?

Mr Hawkins said there are a couple of metrics that would be beneficial for any business to be utilising on GA:

• Traffic acquisition – source/medium
  How are people coming to your website? This can unveil targeted marketing opportunities
• Behaviour – Bounce rate (or engagement rate on GA4)
  Gives you an idea of how quickly people are leaving pages on your website. You can have a look over the landing pages and see what may be causing it – is it bad information? Poor links? Or no call to action?
• Behaviour – Page views and page visitors
  How many people are visiting your site and what pages are they landing on? This can help you identify trends and assist you in creating more content around these trends or creating marketing campaigns to piggyback off this trend success
• Track conversions – goals
  You can set targeted goals on GA that align with your marketing strategies, such as how many clicks you get on an advert, people making enquiries or the amount of page click-throughs on your website. You can easily measure and track your online target success through GA.
• Average time on website
  This can give you an idea of whether your website is meeting the needs of visitors. Are they getting the information they were looking for or did they leave straight away? This can help inform the content you create or the fixes necessary on your website.

The biggest thing you can do with the data if it doesn’t look good is test, test, and test. You want to be actively making changes on your website and marketing campaign to ensure you are getting the best results for your business but also giving the most benefit to your clients.

How do you use Google Analytics to bolster your marketing? Tell us in the comments below.