Online advertising is an essential part of marketing in the 21st Century. It provides businesses with endless possibilities when it comes to reaching new audiences. And, it provides the insight needed to understand if your approach is effective and efficient. However, there is a difference in understanding the ads measurement for your online ads versus the overall online journey of your potential and existing customers in regards to your business.
Building the complete picture of a customer’s online journey with your business is what Google Analytics is made to do. You’re able to follow each touch point a customer makes on your website or app from the second they make contact with your brand until they close out. Being able to understand, in detail, how your customers are interacting with your brand online can help you better understand them and find the best approaches to reach them (organically and with paid advertising).
The metrics are the details that make up your customer. These numbers tell you which page visitors go to and from where, how long they stay on your site, what form of technology they’re using to access your site or app, and so on. Each metric creates a more defined image of your customer. To help understand all the metrics, Google categorizes them into reporting tools. These tools represent different aspects of your customers.
This shows the activity of users over the last 1, 7, 14, and 30 days. These metrics can show the different lifetime value of users based on multiple sessions.
After a user clicks on your ads, you’re able to see how they interact with your site and app through specific post-click performance metrics.
Where your user begins their journey with your app or site is tracked through these metrics. You’re able to see how your efforts such as search, social media, and ads bring you traffic.
Customer interaction with your site is tracked through behavior metrics. This shows their on-site journey from page to page, if they utilize your site's search function, and how your site’s different page speeds influences their behavior.
If you have e-commerce, these metrics are crucial to growing sales. Conversion reports show how referrals to your site lead to spending as well as different purchasing activities of your customers, like time from search to purchase, average order value, and conversion rate.
These are live-updated metrics that reflect what’s happening in real-time, as well as metrics regarding retargeting audiences.
Similar to behavior reports, these metrics focus on the overall flow of the user’s on-page journey with your site and help group pages based on content your users move to.
While we provided the basics to understand Google analytics for beginners, the process to setting up an account is a little bit more complex. It involves applying code to your website from Google Analytics, as well as integrating your Google Ads account and Google Search Console. It’s important to know how it all works, but we recommend leaving the set up to your web design team or hire an online advertising agency. If you’d like to get started with Google Analytics, contact Team Vibe.
