Customer Insight with Google Analytics

Introduction

Google Analytics is a great tool that can help businesses understand their customers, so they may better acquire and retain customers. Understanding customers’ digital behavior can help marketers to create more effective marketing campaigns. I choose all the metrics below to discuss because of the great ways they can specifically make a marketing campaign more effective.

Visitor Location

Knowing the different locations of people visiting a business’s website can help with numerous marketing decisions that must be made. The first is deciding in which locations to market your company’s products and services. For example, an ecommerce business trying to decide where to spend its online advertising budget could consider the locations of the people visiting the business’s website when making this decision. If a large percentage of website visitors are coming from New York, San Francisco and Chicago, showing online ads to people in these locations could produce better results.

Combining website visitor location information with keyword analysis may produce even better results. For example, if the ecommerce business also found that a lot of people are searching for their top three keywords in Chicago, it may be worth it to make the ad budget for this location higher.

Mobile Website Metrics

According to recent research from Pew Internet & American Life Project (Duggan, Rainie, 2012), 85% of U.S. adults now own a mobile phone of some kind. People are attached to their smartphone and many never leave home without it. This helps to explain the huge growth in mobile internet usage recently. According to ComScore (Flosi, 2012), 52.6% of total U.S. mobile subscribers used their phone’s browser from June 2012 to September 2012, up 2.4% from the three month period before. Millions of people are using their mobile devices to access the Internet; it’s time that businesses and marketers start to pay more attention to these mobile Internet users, because they are growing by the day.

Google Analytics is a great tool to use when trying to figure out the mobile website behavior of your customers. Using the advanced segments button in Google Analytics, choose mobile traffic. Tablet traffic is also a visitor segment that should be analyzed separately from other visitors. People accessing your website from a mobile phone and a tablet may want different things from your website and the only way to find out is to analyze these visitor segments separately.

Specific metrics that should be looked at for mobile website visitors are site content and traffic sources. Many times when people come to a mobile website from a smartphone, they are in the middle of a trying to accomplish a task, like calling to order food for example. Because of the on-the-go nature of smartphones, information like telephone number, hours of operation, address and services offered needs to be easily viewable from a mobile website. By analyzing the website content that mobile visitors are viewing on your business’s regular website, you will know what they are looking for and can place this information where it is easily accessible on your mobile website.

Traffic Sources

Understanding what digital platforms are sending traffic to a website is critical to making decisions about which platforms to market and advertise on. As an example, we will say that a marketer needs to know which keywords provide the most web traffic organically, so that the keywords may be prioritized and included in the business’s content strategy. Under the traffic sources tab in Google Analytics, you can see exactly what keywords lead website visitors to your website and how many visitors were brought by each keyword. With this information, a marketer can prioritize organic keywords and then create website and blog content that includes the best keywords.

Knowing which social networks drive the most traffic to your website is another insight that the traffic sources information on Google Analytics can give you. Under the social sources tab, a marketer can see the various social networks that drive traffic to their website. This information could be very helpful when deciding which social networks to expand your business’s online presence to.

Multi-Channel Conversion Funnels

Multi-channel funnels show how referrals and searches contribute to the sales of products and services. This funnel looks at the sequence of clicks in the 30 days leading up to each conversion and transaction. Data for this conversion path comes from sources such as paid and organic search keywords, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, email newsletters, and custom campaigns that have been created, like an offline campaign that sends traffic to a vanity URL (About, 2012).

In the multi-channel funnel report, channels are credited according to the roles they play in conversions. Assisted conversions shows how many conversions each channel initiated, assisted and completed, and their value. The top conversion paths report shows the conversion paths that customers took on their way to a purchase (About, 2012).

Knowing the exact online actions your customers took before making a purchase can help marketers in many ways. First, if you know what channels are creating the best ROI, you can invest more of the marketing and advertising budget into these channels. If done correctly, this will raise the ROI of your marketing as a whole, because you will be spending less money with channels that don’t work as well as others. To determine the ROI of each channel, use this ROI formula for marketing investments: (Return – Investment)/Investment. For example, if a marketer made $100,000 in sales from a marketing investment of $10,000, the formula would look like this: (100,000 – 10,000)/10,000 = 90,000/10,000 = 9. Multiply the answer by 100 to get a percent and you have 900%. This means the marketer made 9x in sales what was spent on marketing. By doing this for each channel, you can compare apples to apples and really know which channels are working best for your products, customers and business.

Another way to use this information is to try and spot trouble spots in your multi-channel funnel conversion paths. For example, if you notice that a good percentage of people are dropping out of the conversion funnel at a certain point, investigate this to find out why, so you may fix the problem. To do this, go through the conversion funnel yourself and when you get to the point that people are dropping off, look around and search for what could be causing the drop off. It could be something as simple as a broken link and you would have never known.

Conclusion

Analytics and metrics are critical to understanding your customers and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Any business with a website should be using Google Analytics to gain better insight in to their customers and marketing effectiveness.

References

About Multi-Channel Funnels. (2012). Google Analytics Help. Retrieved on 11/26/12 from https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&utm_id=ad&answer=1191180

Duggan, M. & Rainie, L. (25 November 2012). Cell Phone Activities 2012. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved on 11/26/12 from http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2012/PIP_CellActivities_11.25.pdf

Flosi, S. (2 November 2012). ComScore Reports September 2012 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share. ComScore. Retrieved on 11/26/12 from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2012/11/comScore_Reports_September_2012_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share