Google Analytics For Beginners

Getting started with Google Analytics? Or have you had it installed for awhile and are looking to learn what some of things inside actually mean? Here’s a good starter video for you that walks you through what to look at, what’s important, and what the different reports mean.

Want to dig deeper into your Google Analytics? More Google Analytics in 60 Seconds after the jump…

Find The Best Keywords

You can use Google Analytics to find keywords that perform the best for you – ie which keywords lead to more sales… These reports will help you to optimize your search marketing targeting and advertising.

Find Poor Performing

Find out which keywords you are bidding on that are the worst performers. You don’t want to create campaigns where people leave right away. You can tell which keywords drive the most amount of traffic – and then determine which keywords are profitable. You don’t want to bid on keywords to drive bad traffic – which are ones that will leave right away. This is measured using bounce rate.

Link AdWords with Google Analytics

Linking your AdWords account with Analytics gives you insight on keywords, ROI, and more. This data allows you hone your advertising campaign to the most profitable keywords.

Identifying High Spenders

Using careful keyword and conversion analysis you can target the highest spenders… That’s good right? Using these techniques you can target the keywords that these big spenders use to find what they are looking for – and target them.

Improve Local Results with Google Analytics

Local search is huge and cannot be ignored. Many companies have customer demographics based on geographic location. Careful analysis in Google Analytics can help you find, target, and optimize new markets. This insight can show you where you need to target search advertising and SEO regionally. This is powerful stuff!

Need To Track E-Commerce with Google Analytics?

Track sales down to the product level with Google Analytics. You can also use Google Analytics to figure out which targeted keywords are creating the most sales for each product. This video shows you how to configure e-commerce tracking on your site.

Using Site Search

Find out what people are searching for on your site – to give you insight to what they are looking for. This data allows you to capture and optimize on trends you otherwise wouldn’t know. You can also use this site search data to optimize your keyword buys in Google AdWords.

Setting Up Conversion Funnels

We love conversion funnels at 48Web (I know, we’re data geeks) but we find this is some of the most valuable information available in analytics for fine tuning and measuring your web strategy. Using these techniques you can find out where people are coming from that are actually converting on your website – and where you are losing potential conversions. We always say – conversion trumps traffic. Traffic is easy to get but its often easier to double your conversions than traffic. Using these techniques you’ll be able to optimize for conversions.

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Any good web strategy has to have goals so you can analyze and measure progress. Without goals it is much harder to know if your strategies and techniques are working. Goals are equivalent to conversions – meaning getting your website visitors to take a specific action.

The number of conversions you make per website visitor is known as your “conversion rate” – and can easily be tracked in any web analytics service. See “How To Measure Goals in Google Analytics” for more information on setting these up.

Now that you know what conversions and goals are – here are five examples of goals you should have for your website. You can use a combination of goals – ie: sales and subscribers – which can also be tracked in analytics. Having and measuring goals can make analyzing and tweaking your website exponentially easier allowing you to use data to make decisions (which is what we do for clients at 48Web).

5 Web Strategy Goals

1. Make a Sale
Our first and most obvious goal for a website is to make a sale. After all – we are all about making money in business and if you can generate sales through your website – your potential is exponential.

2. Get Permission
Getting permission from a website visitor to opt-in to your marketing channel gets you one step closer to making a sale and is just as important as the sale itself. Having permission from a user – regardless of making the sale – gives you future opportunities to increase your future conversion rates and helps you reach the other web strategy goals you have in place. We’ll dive into more examples of getting – and acting on – permission in future posts.

3. Get Them To Subscribe
Having a visitor to your website subscribe to your content – whether it be blog, podcast, video, FriendFeed, etc – gives you an excellent opportunity at becoming a value-add resource for potential clients, leads, and sales. A content subscriber generally flows into other conversion funnels after trust has been established.

4. Build Community
Building and involving yourself in online communities helps you get one step closer to your other web strategy goals. Promoting community on your website is a key way in building that network. Strong community involvement is also often a path to your other conversion goals but by itself is powerful nonetheless. Strong community – whether it is on Twitter, FriendFeed, or Facebook can help generate organic traffic and help you build trust within your network. “Word Of Mouth” Traffic + Trust= high conversion rates.

5. Interaction and Engagement
Comments, sharing, referrals, word of mouth, etc are all amazing ways to increase your other conversion goals because this kind of crowd-sourced feedback helps you optimize and shape your online strategy. If you’ve built a strong community this level of engagement can have powerful results – again leading into your most important conversion funnels – permission and sales.

What other goals do you have in your web strategy? Did we miss something? Have something to add to one of our points? Let us know in the comments.

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