Why Google Analytics Is Important – The Essentials of Campaign Tracking

One of the most important elements to digital marketing is the ability to accurately track and record data from marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is a tool that every digital marketer should not only be acquainted with, but should be an expert in using. It can provide valuable and detailed insights into your campaigns, like the different places that your traffic is coming from, to how users are interacting and engaging with your website. Generally speaking – if there’s anything you want to know about a campaign or its performance, Google Analytics will have the answer for you. That being said with all of this data compiled into one place it can become difficult to work with and find what you’re looking for, and therefore the more skilled you are with using this tool the better your marketing campaigns will perform.

Tracking your campaigns with UTMs:

Before you become fluent in reading and working with complex data sets within Google Analytics, you need to ensure that the foundations are in place and working properly. It is vital that campaign tracking is set up correctly, collecting large sets of data and having the ability to work with it is useless if all of the data is inaccurate. Having accurate data on the other hand, as well as a strong understanding of how Google Analytics works provides marketers with an advantage, allowing them to discover new opportunities and produce plans accordingly.

The process of tracking user visits and traffic to a website involves adding some additional code to the end of each page (known as a UTM). This code is then triggered every time a user visits that page and the information is sent to Google Analytics. Having this information allows marketers to see how many visits and sessions each page receives, and can determine which pages are performing well and which ones are performing poorly (for example a page with a high bounce rate would indicate that there are issues with the page and that improvements are required). A common mistake when adding UTMs to a page is entering the code incorrectly, Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder is a useful tool for creating UTMs and ensuring that the code formatting is correct.

Purchase funnel & remarketing:

Tracking and recording different pages that users land on and navigate to from other pages can help determine different stages of the purchase process that visitors are reaching, and is often referred to as the “purchase funnel”. From being able to determine which users are leaving straight after landing on the homepage, to which are browsing products or abandoning shopping carts, you can identify the value of different users based on how close they come to making a purchase, and based on this data implement remarketing campaigns.

Tracking conversions:

Tracking conversions (which refers to a desired action made by a user) is a key component to campaign tracking and to digital marketing in general, after all you can’t measure how well your campaigns are performing without tracking the results of what you’re aiming to achieve. If you have a website that sells products online, conversions would be tracked by applying a UTM to the page that customers are taken to after making a purchase, such as a thank you page. There’s a variable and extensive range as to what Google Analytics can track, and how you track and analyse conversion data is dependent on the type of business. It’s possible to set up goals to track data in Google Analytics uniquely designed and tailored to how visitors interact with your business specifically.

Google Analytics is an effective tool in gathering data for almost any business, and collecting accurate and relevant data is the key to taking full advantage of this tool and the insights that they are able to offer.

Our team are Google Analytics certified and fully trained experts in data analysis for marketing and developing online growth. We provide analytics services to evaluate and review your online performance, and offer statistical reports on key areas important to your business. For more information on building your online visibility and what we can offer contact us today, or keep up to date with our blog for the latest news in digital marketing.