Having an online presence for a business is essential, but as essential is knowing as much as you can about how your digital platforms are performing to deliver value and excellent experience to your customers, and to your business’s bottom line.
Effective data mining gives you the ability not only to understand key metrics such as where your customers are coming from, but also what they’re doing when they’re on your platforms, and how often they’re completing the goals that you want them to complete.
There are many analytical tools out there that can help you source, measure and understand data, but at the pinnacle of effective digital data mining is Google Analytics, or ‘GA’ as it’s often referred to.
GA has been around pretty much since the invention of Google as a search engine, and over the years has evolved to offer not only digital marketing experts but site owners and online business owners across the board a range of tools and dashboards to help them measure and understand an ever-growing number of data points.
What does GA offer, in a nutshell?
The complete picture – GA lets you build a very complete picture of your digital platform and how users are engaging with it. This means that over time you’re able to understand what’s working, what’s not working and how to tweak and improve aspects of your platform’s structure, content and more.
Machine learning for constant evolution – GA’s in-built machine learning capability means that it’s constantly evolving to understand your site and customer behaviour better and giving you more real-time insights to improve performance.
Goal-orientated data insights – data without purpose is, well, purposeless. GA offers users end-to-end insights and guidance for enhancements and improvements specific to your goals and needs.
Practicality no matter the user – GA’s dashboards are specifically designed to offer high-level, easily understandable data insights, as well as more in-depth dashboards, functions and tools for more advanced users. Either way, a novice digital business owner will be able to find useful topline metrics, or work with a digital partner to delve deeper into the data dashboards and insights.
Integrated features that really help you understand your site, customers and more…
GA is built with cross-platform integration in mind, meaning you’re able to plug in tools including marketing tools and social media tools to give you a very holistic picture, summarized in one place.
GA features include the ability to:
- Track online behaviour including, amongst other metrics, where your customers are coming from (Google, social media, a referral partner or link, an advert or banner, email marketing and more), where they are geographically, what device and browser they’re using, how they found your site, where they landed and where they clicked to from there, how far into the goal-processes they went (i.e. submitting a query, making a purchase, browsing for information etc.), how much they spent, how much time they spent on pages and the site overall, and many other metrics.
- Understand how effective your site content (including meta data) is at engaging your audience
- Improve your site’s discoverability on Google
- Understand and improve your goal journeys, and track conversions
- Track and understand e-commerce performance
All these features are designed to help you reinvest data into your platforms, and to help you improve performance across the board. In conjunction with tools like Search Console, you’ll be able to understand your target audience more deeply, find them more easily, let them find you more easily, and give them the online experience that they’re looking for.
Simply put, Google Analytics is an absolute digital business essential – without it you’re pretty much wandering around in the dark, and in the highly-competitive digital space that’s something you simply cannot afford.
If you’d like to know more about Google Analytics and how to improve your understanding of the metrics, dashboards and more, let us help you. Contact our digital marketing team today on 01223 550800 or info@realnet.co.uk