Using Analytics for your Marketing
This course will instruct you on how to use your basic web analytics to benefit your business and to evolve your marketing going forward. Sam will guide you through the basics of using google analytics and how to record them in a spreadsheet. These tips will help you start to build an understanding of analytics to improve the future of your marketing.
At first glance, website analytics can look confusing. Yet, the thing about them is they are absolutely crucial in understanding how your company website is doing, and all of the social media platforms you have accounts for. Social Media is integral for any modern company to be part of, and it’s what will most likely get you the most traction on the internet. Analysing your analytics week by week is incredibly beneficial to find out what direction you should take your social media and web presence in.
So how exactly do you go about doing this? Well, we’re going to help you with exactly that.
Step 1) Set up your sites and trackers
You’ll probably already be on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for example. To get the most out of social media, we’d recommend getting your company on Instagram and YouTube too, if the need suits your company. It’s also key to make sure your company is on Google My Business. It’s a free service that allows you to have a quick and easy to read page full of your company’s details, reviews and work that Google compiles for you. When you have all your social media sites set up, have Google Analytics set up to your website. Analytics is what you’ll use most of all to track website traction, it essentially gives you the who, what, when and where of those that are visiting your site. But we’ll get into that later!
Step 2) Create a Spreadsheet
You’ll need an easy to navigate place to keep all of your data and findings, and we couldn’t suggest anything better than a good old spreadsheet. It’s worth creating a spreadsheet so that you know all of your stats, not even just the ones from your social posts. Logging the rankings and places of your web pages and keywords for example is great to look back on every week and see if these webpages have moved up a page or two on Google, or if they’re more popular than the last week in the case of a keyword. If they haven’t, the spreadsheet can tell you exactly where you need to change things with your marketing. from a certain keyword The best way to do this is to list all of your platforms going across, with subheadings underneath including follower count, audience engagement and so on. Down the side, list your analysis dates, week by week. This will make your life a lot easier. Having something easy to read and that allows you to compare data with previous weeks quickly will be ever so helpful.
Step 3) Using Google Analytics
As we mentioned, looking at your analytics may look overwhelming at first. However, once you get into the swing of things, it’ll become second nature to you. The main page will tell you all the information needed to understand how your website has done over a matter of days, weeks and months. It’s all customisable to you, which makes reading your data easier. The best thing about analytics is that it will tell you everything. What kind of device a user visited your site on, what their interests are – you may not need all this information but the fact it is so in depth tells you it really does have the tools you’ll need to manage how your site is doing. We recommend looking at the Search Queries which you can find in the Acquisition tab. This allows you to examine what keywords people have been searching for that have brought them to your web page. You can check relevant keywords and how popular they are too, allowing you to adjust your marketing plans, incorporating these keywords into certain posts of yours for the future.
Step 4) Reading the data from your posts
Whilst Google Analytics is the mammoth source of reading data, did you know that every single social post you make has its own set of analytics too? Looking at an Instagram post for example, say you’ve posted an image of a new piece of technology for the office. You may have 20 likes on this post, with a few new followers when you come to read the data. How well has your post done in comparison to your last couple, or to ones you’ve had in the past that have a similar subject matter? Are any of your new followers people who may have liked your post? What kinds of hashtags have you used? All of these things should be recorded!
Step 5) Utilising your data for the future
When all your data has been recorded, you can now plan out how you can enhance your marketing. In the Instagram example post, the spike in engagement may inspire you to post more content to do with technology, or new additions to your office. You can also experiment with different hashtags to see what works for you. This can be applied to all of your platforms. See what is working best for you, and apply this to what you do in the future. Of course, don’t forget about other content. If a certain element of your brand is trending and you’re ranking for it, you might want to keep ranking it, taking it as high as it can go. But perhaps you’re thinking, well if that’s doing well, maybe we should focus our marketing efforts on something that we’d like to boost. Often the latter is a better choice as it’s good to not put all your eggs in one basket, but as said, it depends what works for you. When you know what is doing well, integrate this with your SEO. Using keywords that will attract your audience to your content in YouTube for example is all that stands between you and plenty of traction. It takes Google quite a while to recognise keywords and updates, although that depends what is trending at the time. So, it’s key to make sure you’re making keyword adjustments as soon as you can so you reap the benefits much sooner.
In summary it’s all about growth and how you can adapt your marketing approach. Whether you’re a new starting company or have been doing what you do for some time, using your analytics to their full potential can really help you figure out where to take your marketing.
