As an agency, we at iFocus offer a lot of innovative, cutting-edge solutions to your digital marketing dilemmas. Depending on your business goals, we can craft a custom plan tailored to your geographic area, your target demographics, and your intended success metrics. Part of what makes our job fun is the opportunity to collaborate with you and come up with the right mix of digital products to maximize your marketing dollars.
However, one of the most powerful tools we have available to us (and that is also available to your business) is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, we can take a look at what you’ve done in the past, as well as your current website statistics, to help lay the foundation for a more intuitive, more successful digital marketing campaign.
Why Use Google Analytics?
Consider these commonly asked questions we hear from our clients:
How can I get better information on people searching for my company?
How do I know that my campaigns are working?
Where would my marketing dollars be best spent?
These are all questions we as a team hear on a daily basis, and they’re also questions that our analytics experts can easily answer with Google Analytics. Utilizing the data available to us, we can take an in-depth look at not only the demographics and behaviors of consumers who are searching for your product(s)/service(s), but also the people who are more likely to convert into a sale or lead.
Gain insight into consumer behaviors
Google Analytics allows us to look at users based on location, age, interests, and by what method they are coming to your website. If your business relies heavily on e-commerce, we can tie in Google Analytics to your e-commerce platform on the backend of your website and show you in real time what geographic areas and types of users are producing the most revenue for your company.
Set up specific goals to track success
We can also set up goals in Google Analytics (which can then be aligned with key performance indicators, or KPIs) based on what metrics you’d like to track to quantify success for your business. If you want to track more form fills or get more qualified lead information, then we can set a goal based on landing pages to see how many people have completed a particular form on your site. We can also use those tactics to track what sources potential clients are coming from, such as Facebook, Instagram, e-mail, pay-per-click (PPC), referral websites, etc. Google also allows us to tie in other Google products – for example, Google AdWords – so we can optimize your other marketing campaigns to the goals we set in Google Analytics.
Bear in mind, too, that we can set these goals up for you company-wide, not just for the marketing campaigns we’re a part of. This truly allows you to see the full spectrum of data as it relates to the success of all your digital marketing efforts, regardless of which avenues you’re using to fulfill these efforts.
Access to real-time data
One of the other great features of Google Analytics is it allows us to look at multiple aspects of your business. This is thanks to a tool called real-time data (also known as RTD), which includes information such as how many users are on your website at any given moment, as well as what page of your site they’re currently on; audience information (as described in the above paragraph), plus more granular information, such as specific devices on which users are searching for your business (mobile devices, tablets, desktops, etc.); and much, much more.
In-depth tracking with acquisition data
In addition, acquisition metrics allow us to see which campaigns are working well and where optimizations can be made. For example, we can take a look at specific pages that may have a low conversion rate or high bounce rate (both of these metrics indicate a potential issue) and dig into those pages to determine why those numbers are off. Behavior metrics in Google Analytics let us look at the flow a user follows from initial landing page to additional pages they subsequently navigate to, giving us a better picture of where users might be leaving your site before converting. Lastly, conversion metrics allow us to track goals, sales, and multichannel functions to see how many touch points a consumer experiences before converting, ultimately leading to increased attribution accuracy and more informed marketing decisions across the board.
Google Analytics success stories
Not convinced yet? There are loads of case studies to prove the value of a smart Google Analytics strategy. Consider the success of L’Oreal Canada, who utilized Google Analytics data to identify and track the behaviors of consumers who may be interested in a particular brand of makeup they were promoting. Using that data, making regular optimizations, and driving target consumers to convert using targeted display ads, L’Oreal saw double the anticipated sales for that particular campaign, as well as an ROI of 2200%. Crazy, right?
Or, take a look at Panasonic Japan, who decided to ditch their product-focused marketing efforts in favor of a customer-centric approach. They started by consolidating data from all of their digital marketing efforts (paid search, targeted display, search engine optimization) into one place – Google Analytics 360 – to better analyze media and campaign performance. From there, they were able to build smarter advertising campaigns.
Some of these campaigns included building audience retargeting lists based on consumer interest categories to target consumers with ads depending on what other interests pertained to them, as well as which products they looked at. Using that information, Panasonic was able not only to target consumers with the product they were interested (for example, a new television), but they were also able to identify the ideal time to market to these consumers, as well as target them with ads for complementary products and accessories, such as speakers and Blu-ray players.
Ultimately, this revamped marketing approach resulted in a 30% improvement in ROI, and a 300% increase in click-through rates (CTRs) for some campaigns. Simultaneously, the bounce rate on their website decreased by a whopping 50%. Talk about a success story! You can read the full Panasonic case study here.
The bottom line
You still with us? Good. We know setting all of this up sounds daunting, but with our team’s help, it’s actually a fairly simple process to gain all of this rich insight. To get started, all our team does is create a Universal Analytics code (also known as a UA code) and place it on the backend of your website. Or, we can simply send you the UA code and your dedicated web liaison can place the UA code according to instructions laid out by Google, which we would also provide to you. After that code is placed, our team will start seeing your website data after about 24 hours. If your website includes an e-commerce element, there are a few extra steps we need to take to make sure the value of each product is properly correlated.
There are some platforms that offer some analytics value (such as Shopify), but to really gain valuable insight and big picture data, Google Analytics is a necessity. Plus, you can link your Shopify metrics (or whatever other platforms you may be using) with your Google Analytics to accumulate even more data, which could open up additional opportunities for your business. Another example of ways our analytics team uses platform collaboration for richer data is with Facebook Insights. Our team can use what we see in Insights to compare and further analyze the information in Google Analytics to build more productive social marketing campaigns.
By combining our team’s vast knowledge and the power of Google Analytics, we can design all-encompassing, results-driven digital marketing campaigns that zero in on your company’s KPIs, while also boosting ROIs and facilitating long-term success. Sounds like a winning combination to us! And luckily for you, it’s easy to get started with us – simply fill out this short form to get our team working on your free Google Analytics analysis (who doesn’t love free, right?!). We’ll look forward to hearing from you.
