How to implement Google Analytics

When it comes to online marketing, many small business owners focus on ‘doing stuff’ and don’t spend any time measuring the results and adjusting the plan. They just connect Google Analytics to their website and leave it at that - but they would get little value from doing that.

 Following on from our previous  blog ,  “Why should you use Google Analytics?” , Carolyn James from Website Insights, provides important steps you need to  take on how  you go about implementing Google Analytics.

Set up ‘goals’ in Google Analytics

The indicators that you choose to measure are not always tracked by default because every website is different. Therefore, your chosen indicators should be set up as ‘goals’ in Google Analytics. You could learn how to do this yourself, or get a web analytics expert to help you with this.

You’ll also need to configure your account to enrich your reporting, by doing things like:

● Link Google Search Console to Google Analytics

● Link Google Ads to Google Analytics

● Turn on ‘Advertising Reporting Features’ and ‘Demographics and Interest Reporting’

If you use email as one of your marketing channels, and those emails include links to your website, you should adopt a system to tag these links, so that individual email campaigns can be differentiated in analytics reports. Most email service providers will offer a way to do this.

When you implement Google Analytics, you may be advised to implement Google Tag Manager as well. If you are serious about measuring your online marketing, this is a good idea - Google Tag Manager makes it much easier to track goals and ecommerce without needing your web developer every time you want to track something new. Like Google Analytics, it is a free tool.

Make connections between data and business value

If you are fairly new to Google Analytics and haven’t yet got your account customised and optimised, Carolyn’s  article ‘How to read Google Analytics’ offers some suggestions for where to look to make connections between data and business value.

In this article, she suggests:

● The Channels report (found under Acquisition ; All Traffic ; Channels) to see how people are arriving at your website.

● The Search Console reports, especially ‘Queries’ and ‘Landing Pages’ (found under Acquisition ; Search Console) to show what people were looking for when they found your website through organic search.

● The Location Report (found under Audiences ; Geo Location) to show where your users are located.

● When you have your goals configured in Google Analytics, the Top Conversion Paths Report (found under Conversions ; Multi-Channel Funnels) is really useful. It will tell you which of your marketing activities are leading to valuable actions on your website.

Once you know which business indicators you want to track, and you want to do this easily and regularly, you will be ready for custom reports. These are reports that answer your specific business questions.

Using Custom Reports in Google Analytics

There are a couple of ways you can go about this. In Google Analytics, you can create Custom Reports, which allow you to choose the dimensions and metrics, and to add filters.

You can also apply ‘segments’, which allow you to view any report with a chosen filter applied. These are useful for a one-off investigation, but the presentation of the data is not very user-friendly.

A better way to do this is to create custom reports in Google Data Studio. This free tool gives you huge scope to present data in a way that focuses on what you want to know. You can draw data from multiple systems, e.g. Google Analytics and Facebook. The other things Carolyn likes about Google Data Studio reports are that they can be interactive, they can update automatically from the underlying data and they are easily shared.

Start making online marketing decisions confidently with Google Analytics

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio are free tools that can help you with this. It is worth investing in some upfront planning, set-up of the tools, and learning how to interpret the data. Every business is different, so you will need to make sure you are measuring the right things for your particular business. Then you will have a valuable feedback loop to help you make online marketing decisions confidently.

These two articles, may have stirred up several questions or your  need for clarification so we invite you to join us at the YTM Business Connect event to meet our member Carolyn James.    You can also subscribe to her youtube channel HERE  and sign up for YTM Business Connect alerts to keep you informed of the valuable and educational insights we to support you in your business journey.  

If you would like to sharpen your skills and be part of a business networking community that offers, much more than traditional business networking events check out our YTM Membership HERE