How to better integrate analytics into your marketing strategy

Businesses connect with their target audience through several digital channels like search, email, text, apps, and videos. All of these touch points can be tracked and evaluated by entrepreneurs to better their company's overall marketing strategy. One of the best and most recommended tools in the world of data analytics and reporting is Google Analytics. For those who are new to Google Analytics, the process of digging through so much data and finding numbers that help you realise your goals can seem daunting in the beginning. Here is a quick guide to help you understand how you can better integrate analytics into your marketing strategy.

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Acquisition, audience and behavior

The three fundamental elements that can define your marketing strategy are acquisition, audience, and behaviour. The acquisition section will give you an insight into how visitors arrive at your site. Whether it is through social media, the search engine, or a blog you wrote, you will be able to determine the source from where your audience is pouring in. The audience section provides information about your website visitors. This material will have subsections like gender, age, location, and the varied interests of your visitors. The behaviour section will help you determine how people are interacting with your website. This section will also help you understand which pages on your website are most popular.

Understand important analytics terms

Before you can understand how to incorporate Google Analytics in your marketing strategy, you need to know what the key terms are so you can make informed decisions in the future.

1. Open rate – Of all the people you sent your email to, the number of individuals who clicked on your email to access it will determine the open rate. The effectiveness of the subject line will drive the open rate.
2. Traffic – Traffic measures the number of times a web page is viewed. It's an effective indicator of how efficiently your marketing strategy is driving people to your website.
3. Click through rate (CTR) – CTR represents the percentage of people who saw your call-to-action on your web page and ignored it as opposed to those who actually clicked on it.

Making sense of the data

The first step to contextualising data is to interpret what each metric really means. It's one thing to know that conversion rate is equal to total conversions divided by total clicks, and it is a whole different thing to understand the real life side of analytics. When you begin to connect the dots with the data at your disposal, a story starts to emerge. Tracking how the conversion rate has changed over the last week or month will help you evaluate your campaign's overall performance. Once you understand key metrics, you can make smart decisions about where to invest your budget and time in the future to enable best returns.

By utilising Google Analytics to its fullest, you'll have a deep awareness of who your audience is, what they are searching for, and how they find you. This will further help you to create imagery and content that your audience desires which will lead your marketing strategy to success in the long run.