Successful businesses are based on sound strategy and measurable objectives. Whether you are a traditional marketing communications professional, a web content manager, or anyone else conducting business online, it is vital to define your online goals or key performance indicators (KPIs). We have actually worked with a number of organizations on a consulting basis just to help them define and then monitor their KPI performance. By doing this, you give yourself a benchmark for success as well as a way to measure your progress over time. Using your goals as a blueprint, you will be able to monitor whether you are on track to meet your objectives, or need to revise your plans, using the important tools available within Google Analytics.
Google Analytics: An Overview of Setting up and Measuring Goals
Google Analytics is a great way to measure your success, since there is a wealth of information available via this robust tool. Below are examples of some basic and important website goals that can be monitored via Google Analytics. These should be a sound starting point for most online blogs or businesses.
- Generating engaged visitors: These are visitors who remain on your site for longer than the average user. The Visit Duration option in Google Analytics will help you to cull this information.
- Creating Readers: Readers are users who read more pages on your website than the average visitor. You can use the Google Analytics Goal Type category of Page/Visit to track this data.
- Generating email subscribers: These are the potential customers who provide their emails to you for newsletters, special offers, etc. To collect this key information, you will need a Thank You page, or something along those lines, to which visitors are sent after confirming their email address. By having this page set up, you will be able to monitor that page’s URL on Google Analytics to gain insights about these users.
- Creating customers: The visitors who make a purchase of your product, service or membership can be tracked in the same way as subscribers: by monitoring a conversion page that customers are sent to after making a purchase.
- Increasing/maintaining ad performance: The Event Tracking tool can be used to find data about the performance of ads running on your site. This is especially valuable even when tracking the effectiveness of your own ad creative.
- Creating conversion: This is a vital area, since it addresses who is sending you the traffic that converts to engaged visitors and readers, as well as customers and subscribers. There is a wealth of traffic information available on Google Analytics. You will be able to find out how well social media marketing, SEO, SEM, press releases, ads, blog posts and more are working, which will allow you to refine your techniques and strategies and stay on target toward meeting your goals.
Keep in mind that you can continue to expand what data you choose to analyze. All of this information will inform your future strategies, leading to more directed and efficient online business and better results.
There are technical steps involved with setting up your Google Analytics. A detailed step-by-step process is outlined in this article
Or, contact Zephoria and let us customize, monitor and interpret your Google Analytics account for you.