What’s the one thing that digital marketing can give you that other more traditional forms of marketing can’t?
Data
Cold, hard, real data.
We can never really know how many people heard our ad on the radio, watched our ad on TV or saw our ad on the TV. We can’t really know how many people came into our store, drove past our sign or picked up our flyer – let alone read anything written within it.
But digital marketing does tell us that.
Yes, I know that radio can tell you how many times your ad was played, so can TV, the paper can tell you have many papers were purchased – but they can’t tell you with certainty the way digital methods can, who saw it, who read it, who acted on it, who bought it and what they might have done on the way there.
Google Analytics can.
So why do so many small business owners baulk at this great tool?
Well, Google doesn’t make it easy for us when we first start diving into our data. Traditionally Google Analytics looked more like a great big data mess so it was hard to know where to start – however there are now lots of great tools to help make this easier for small business owners to OWN their data and to understand more about what is really going on, more than just glancing at how many visits they’ve had, what their bounce rate was and was this going up or down.
I have three great areas for you to focus on.
1. Dashboards
A dashboard is literally an area where the key information you need to know is all gathered together. Google has very helpfully put together a great starter kit if you are new to using Google Analytics properly. You can see this when you into your GA account and notice Dashboards up in the top left.
If you haven’t done this already – go into Google Analytics and click in the Dashboard area and click new Dashboard – then click on Import from Gallery. There are many many options in here ( too many for me!) but if you are very new to Google Analytics – go with New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle and click IMPORT.
This is going to give you more data than you know what to do with initially – but it is a great starting point to owning your data and making better decisions.
PROTIP – make sure you review the Site Performance dashboard to see if your site is performing fast enough on mobile in particular and what about your key pages, how fast are they loading? According to Google this is what they say is acceptable for 2016.
In Google’s Site Performance for Webmasters video, Maile Ohye states that “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
2. Create Goals
As Stephen Covey says in 7 Habits of Highly-Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” This is where goals inside Google Analytics come into play, we need to start by thinking about what is the end point or result I want to monitor. Think what is the URL of the page people land on after they buy, sign up click thru, etc. You need to have that URL to hand to create your goal.
Creating simple goals that inform your business decisions or strategy implementation are often missing from many businesses. I personally don’t see a lot of business owners using the Goals area and often this is because they are not aware it exists or they are worried that they won’t be able set up what they need easily. Like all new things, it does involve some initial puzzled looks but it can easily be done by any business owner or marketer, without needing necessarily to go off to your web developers.
It also isn’t solely related to monetary transactions. You might want to track how many people are spending longer at your website than say 5 mins. You might want to track how many people are viewing more than 3 pages. You might want to monitor the success of your landing page messaging and track how many people come in and then either go through or leave.
All of these options are easily created in the Goals area of Google Analytics via the ADMIN option and then Website Data – Goals. Creating Custom Goals is where you need to be to keep things simple. You may even be able to utilise some of Google Templates.
Really owning your business means paying as much attention to metrics like these as you do to cash flow, leads and sales. If your website is a key plank of your business, then don’t be blind to the data that you actually have at your fingertips.
3. Turn on Demographics and Interests tracking
Whilst not as fulsome as say Facebook data, you still can track more about your audience than you might not be aware of simply by enabling 2 tabs. Go into ADMIN – Property – then Property Settings. You need to turn on Demographics and Interests within the Advertising settings. Make sure that this has been enabled so that you start to see Age, Gender and Interest data that may be available to you. You should now be able to see this in your reporting area via the Audience area.
This can really open you eyes to site visitors, in the same way that when you look at your Facebook page likers and see their demographic breakdown. Is your site actually being visited by your target customer? Whilst the interest data is not great, the gender and age breakdowns should be invaluable for your business.
These 3 steps alone will open your eyes to what is going on under the hood of your online business. So embrace your inner numbers nerd and get a better handle on Google Analytics.