Using Google Analytics to refine targeting and marketing strategies

An integral part of creating, adjusting and maintaining any marketing campaign is knowing your customers. Where do they live? What are their ages? Gender? Economic situation? What types of purchases do they make, and what technologies do they consume? Identifying these key demographics will allow companies to continue growing and solidifying their consumer bases through successful marketing strategies.

For companies that operate their own websites, search engine and internet giant Google offers a free service that provides detailed statistics on visitors to a specific website. The tool, called Google Analytics, is able to track referrals, i.e. where visitors are arriving from, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks and email marketing, Mashable explains.

Google Analytics offers numerous aids that marketers should be leveraging, according to Rachael Gerson in an article for the website. Gerson highlights a number of tools, including dashboards, keyword clouds, real-time data and social engagement, among others.

With the dashboard feature, users can create 20 dashboards that are personalized for their company. Gerson names four widgets that will likely benefit any user, no matter the industry sector they are operating in. They include: Visits, Goal Completions and/or Transactions, Source/Medium and Bounce Rate.

Keyword clouds offer a visual representation of subjects and topics that have proved highly popular with visitors to websites. “Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can now evaluate a keyword cloud,” Gerson writes. “This cloud makes it easy to visualize top keywords based on different user-selected criteria, including visits, bounce rates and pages per visit.”

Real-time data allows companies to view data up to the moment, rather than 24 hours after the fact. This includes information on the top active pages, top referrals, keywords and geographic locations driving web users to company pages. Additionally, Gerson notes, this tool can be used in testing campaigns prior to launching them in a widespread fashion.

The social engagement analytic feature tracks which users are interacting socially with your site. This can help consumers see how social plugins and widgets are performing and which pages inspired social action such as “likes” and re-tweets. Gerson adds that companies can also partner social plugins such as “ShareThis” and “AddThis” with Google Analytics to enhance performance and information culled.

With these features implemented, Meghan Peters discusses in a separate article for Mashable how businesses and organizations can maximize Google Analytics’ processes and output.

For example, while businesses may have the “Visits” widget enabled for their website, Google Analytics recently released a mobile reporting function. Mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet devices, are increasingly being used to access websites and email, so allowing businesses to see the percentage of their audience coming from these sources and then optimize properly will ensure solidifying wider audience appeal.

When interpreting engagement analytics, Peters suggests that companies and organizations ask themselves a number of questions to improve the quality and quantity of traffic accessing a website.

“Ask yourself: Is your site user-friendly?” Peters writes. “How simple is it for a visitor to click to the next page? Is there interactive content in which your readers can participate? Does landing page content match the keywords in its title?”

However, businesses should remember that Google Analytics won’t do the work of marketing to consumers for them. It’s merely a set of tools that all companies can use to measure and actively improve how they are interacting with their consumers.

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