With more than half of Fortune 500 companies using Google Analytics, it’s hard to deny that it is an important complement to any digital search campaign. As a marketing analyst, you may already be somewhat familiar with Google Analytics. After all, analyzing data from marketing campaigns is the crux of your job. Although many digital marketing professionals use Google Analytics as one of their many tools, there are also many who have yet to fully see the potential of it.
If you haven’t mastered Google Analytics yet, you’re only cheating yourself because there are so many ways that it can make your job more efficient. Below are some lesser-known facts about Google Analytics, which can be helpful for marketing analysts, and can be motivation to dive deeper into what it has to offer:
1. See What Your Site’s Most Popular Pages Are
Google Analytics doesn’t just allow you to see how many visits your website is receiving as a whole—you can also get data on individual pages. You can get this data by clicking on the ‘Behavior’ button on your dashboard menu and then sorting your page list by number of views, entrances, average amount of time spent on the pages, or any other key performance indicators (KPIs) your business finds valuable to identify which pages are performing well.
2. View Real-time Traffic
Traffic reports aggregated from the last week or month are great, but when you want to see what’s happening right now, real-time traffic can tell you exactly how many people are on your site and from where.
For example, someone else from your marketing team might be live streaming something on social media, and you want to see how much traffic it’s driving in real time. With Google Analytics, you have the ability to see how many unique visitors are at your website at any given time, which pages they’re on, etc.
3. Comprehensive Activity Tracking
Some users go to your site and quickly leave. Others spend their time clicking through several pages before making a purchase. Every customer has their own journey; wouldn’t it be great to follow these journeys to gain more insight? With the Behavior Flow report on Google Analytics, you can do just that.
You can provide feedback to your broader marketing team such as which pages have the highest conversion rates versus the highest bounce and exit rates. This could lead to decisions to strengthen calls to action or link more internal resources on particularly weak pages.
4. Attract New Visitors
Although it’s always good to have your loyal customers or repeat visitors, the goals of your marketing campaigns might frequently be to attain new customers and attract new visitors. With Google Analytics, you can sort traffic data so that you’re only seeing exactly how many website visits in any given time frame were comprised of new visitors. You can then go further and search for patterns, like the type of content new visitors gravitate toward, how they found the website, and common times of day for new visitors.
5. Conduct Internal Searches
With Google Analytics, you have a limited report of keyword searches that brought some of your visitors to your website through organic search. But how about seeing what visitors searched for once they’re on your website? If your website has an internal search feature, Google Analytics can allow you to see what people were trying to find specifically once they came to your site.
Marketing analysts deliver some of the most important information to decision-makers to build a thriving marketing engine. Google Analytics’ abilities are undoubtedly far-reaching, and a must-have tool for marketers of every specialty. If you’re looking to grow in your marketing career, Simplilearn’s Digital Marketing Course offers a wide range of instruction that will teach you everything you need to know, including Google Analytics.
Simplilearn’s courses are also perfect for anybody looking to change career fields. If you’re thinking about making a career switch to marketing analyst, our online digital marketing courses will provide you with all of the fundamentals you need to thrive in your new career.