Data-informed decision-making

You’ll collect a lot of data from your website. Interpreting it can be overwhelming. To understand the audience and strengthen your marketing strategy, let’s find out how to analyse this data.

Using Google Analytics to drive data-informed decision-making

Google Analytics breaks data down into eight main sections:

• dashboards
• shortcuts
• intelligence events
• real time
• audience
• acquisition
• behaviour
• conversions. [1]

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Each section has subsections with lots of detailed data. It’s a challenge to become familiar with it all. However, just by considering acquisition, audience, and behaviour, a marketer will have access to valuable insights that help their decision-making. By focusing on these three specifically, marketers can reveal customer insights that will link to many other subsections.

Let’s look at these three in more detail:

• Acquisition provides information on how people arrive at your site. Google breaks the data down into channels that give you detailed information. You can use this information to understand how your efforts are paying off and where more focus is required. For example, if most of your traffic is coming from social media, you should optimise these channels. Or if you’re spending a large portion of your budget on PPC, but you don’t see an increase in traffic, you might want to re-evaluate your campaign strategy.

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• Audience data gives you insights into your users’ demographic and geographic profiles. You find out about factors such as gender and age.

As you find out more about the profile of the audience you’re attracting, you are better able to tailor your strategy to suit your audience. For example, if you sell a product for older people but your traffic is in the 35–50 range, you might find that people are shopping for their elderly parents. Then, you might want to create content that speaks to this new audience and see whether that affects conversions.

Geographic locations also give you a marketing focus. If you see a spike of interest from consumers living in a specific city, you can test a dedicated campaign in that market.

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• Behaviour gives you insights into the pages your customers are spending more time on, which helps you measure the effect of your content. Which content do your web visitors find most valuable? If they’re spending time on the blog, you’re creating content that resonates.

Another area to look at in behavioural analytics is landing page views. This metric shows which content is most valuable so you can create similar content.

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By focusing on the data generated by these three metrics, marketers can plan short- and long-term goals that align with the overall business strategy.