Google Analytics needs no introduction, since its the most widely used web analysis tool worldwide. In order to optimise the effectiveness of our presence online, we need to use it, because it collects and displays data about our traffic, users and their interaction with our website or an app. Although it’s a monster, once configured correctly, it’s not difficult for an average user to extract the most valuable data out of it. Thus, the aim of this article is to help you, a company owner, social media marketer or a future startupper, to lose the fear of this tool and start using it to improve the performance of your business.
What can analytics do?
We can see a timeline with the visits our website has received, check how many of them are male or female, what age group they belong, what sources are generating traffic and what are the pages users spend most time… There are over 100 KPI’s analytics can track and the beauty of it, is that it all can be shown in pretty little graphs that help us to understand the essential performance details of our website.
The key for you to use Google analytics is to understand the basic KPI’s, know which ones we want to track and have dashboards set up for us, which through two clicks will show us all the essential performance details of our online business. The initial setup might be slightly tedious for an average user, since we have to implement a code in our website that will send analytics the important info. However any expert can configure it initially and then we’re free to implement it to our daily routine.
These metrics will be different depending on the nature of your website and the product/service that you’re offering. The easiest way to decide what we want to measure is the O.S.T.K. technique. This stands for Objective – Strategy – Tactic – KPI. Let’s imagine a website that sells toys online. Therefore:
Objective = Sell Toys Online
Strategy 1 – Have good organic positioning in Google
Tactic 1 – Optimise for keywords
KPI 1 – Traffic generated from search terms
KPI 2 – Sales generated from search traffic
Strategy 2 – Generate sales from Google Ads
Tactic 1 – Run search Ads in Google
KPI 1 Amount of sales from Google Ads
KPI 2 Cost per conversion
Strategy 3 – Generate sales from Social Media channels
Tactic 1 – Generate traffic from Facebook
KPI 1 – Amount of traffic received from Facebook
KPI 2 – Amount of sales from the traffic received from Facebook
KPI 3 – Amount of leads from traffic received from Social Media
Judging from this oversimplified model we can deduce, that there are 7 main KPI’s that we want to track.
So now, you can ask your digital assistant to set up a dashboard where you see this information. This can be done in Analytics or in Google Charts. Once done, you will never miss again your main KPI’s and will constantly be able to keep the pulse of the performance of your digital strategy.
