Google Analytics is one of the most widely used and powerful tools for businesses to track and analyze the performance of their online marketing activities. Google analytics allows businesses to track:
- Traffic sources
- Keyword performance
- Bounce rates
- Time spent of website/pages
- And much more
The “much more” is where many marketers get lost or overwhelmed. Many businesses fail to use some critical functionalities of google analytics, which can help in the understanding of marketing metrics and making more informed decisions.
Here is a list of google analytics features most of the business often overlook.
- Flow Reports
Evaluating the efficiency of defined conversion funnel determines the success of the marketing plan. The flow reports in google analytics helps you in visualizing how a visitor is progressing in your defined funnel. It can help you analyze the part of funnel where you are seeing majority of drop offs. Using google analytics you can analyze visitor flow, behavior flow, Goal flow and event flow. All these reports help you in understanding your visitors better and provide actionable items to improve your conversion rate.
- Multi – Channel Funnel Data
This feature of google analytics provides in-depth analysis of how your various marketing activities are working together to generate your conversions. For instance, you have visitors on your website through organic search, display ads, Social traffic and Emails. Now, multi-channel funnel can help you analyze the number of conversions initiated by each individual marketing channel, the role played by various marketing channels during the sales process, the last marketing interaction which resulted in most conversions and many such parameters.
Such information can be used to design data driven marketing campaigns and strategic follow up to expedite the sales process. Multi-channel funnel reports will also help in analyzing various conversion paths, time lag between initial interaction and conversion of the customer ( i.e. the length of online sales cycle) and how many interactions it takes to convert a visitor.
- Attribution Modelling
Majority of the conversions don’t happen during the first visit. Customers take time to research the product/service, review pricing, read product reviews or a lead nurturing email or a display ad or any such marketing activity can capture their attention.
Attribution Modelling is a statistical way of determining the value of each customer touch point. Some channels are likely to bring more traffic during the early stages of conversion and some channels may play a role in keeping the visitors engaged during the conversion process. Attribution modelling helps you in assessing the performance and role of each individual touch point or marketing activity in the conversion process. By studying the various available models in attribution modelling tool of google analytics, you can determine your marketing spend in different activities.
- Advanced Segmentation
Knowing the characteristics of target segments and analyzing their behavior is an important aspect of marketing. This not only helps in understanding the channels which produce high value customers but also helps in designing more specific messaging and content for such segments.
The advanced segmentation feature of google analytics allows you to split your data into multiple subsets based on various custom defined criteria. This can help in analyzing your content in totality and identify the segments that are producing desired results and the one’s underperforming. This can help you in designing and analyzing the market campaigns for your target segments.
- Intelligence Events
It is important to constantly monitor the traffic changes to assess the performance of the website and various marketing campaigns being executed. The intelligence events feature lets you create alerts to notify you the changes in traffic or various other custom parameters. It helps you in analyzing both good and bad events happening on your website. Alerts are triggered whenever there is an abnormal positive/negative change in the parameters you want to track. Such alerts will allow you to constantly monitor your website without being logged on to analytics platform. The alerts also help you in reacting quickly to the abnormal events, analyzing those changes and making necessary corrections.
Google Analytics is a powerful marketing tool for every business which provides vital insights to their marketing data. It provides various options for the marketing analysts to mine the data and get useful insights into your traffic, funnel optimization, understanding user personas and how they are responding to your marketing campaigns. All these insights can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
