Google Analytics: top tips to maximise impact and insight

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July 2016

Prepared by Mary Butlin

NOTE: all statistics in this presentation are for illustration only.

Introduction to Tonica

Tonica is a marketing insight company led by Mary Butlin who has over fifteen years’ experience in market research, insight and analysis. We specialise in three main areas;

• Market Research & Insight

• Market Planning

• Data Protection and Customer Relationship Management

• Database Procurement, Data Analysis & Segmentation

• Technology for Marketing & Advertising

• Digital Analytics, Digital Advertising, Web projects

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Some of our clients…

Luxury British Lingerie Brand British Haircare Brand

Top Tips for Google Analytics

1. Improve Accuracy

2. Gain Insight

3. Build Relationships

4. Referrals & ROI

5. Define Success

6. Optimise your Reporting

7. Focus on your Audience

8. Be inspired

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1 a). Improve Accuracy; Notifications

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• Read the Notifications that appear in the top right of the screen & aim to

resolve as many as possible

1 b). Improve Accuracy; remove Staff

• Admin / View drop down / Create New View

• Name your View, e.g. Your Organisation without Staff and Set the Time Zone

• Click Filters / Add Filter. Choose Exclude and ‘traffic from the IP address’ and ‘that are equal to’ from the menus

• Put in your work IP address (check with IT if you’re not sure)

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1 c). Improve Accuracy; use Annotations

• Click the small grey arrow under the Overview Chart and select Create New Annotation. You’ll then see key dates with little comments/post-its, e.g. Google Places set up, new Season launch

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2 a). Gain Insight – Demographics

• Enable Demographics

• Navigate to Audience / Demographics

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2 b). Gain Insight – Interests

• Enable Interests

• Navigate to Audience / Interests / Overview

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2 c). Gain Insight – Benchmarking

• Add an Industry under Admin / Property Settings

• Access Benchmarking under Audience / Benchmarking

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3 a). Build Relationships – Link Google Adwords

• Once Google Adwords and Google Analytics are linked you can see in-depth information about your campaigns in GA, including Search Queries

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3 b). Build Relationships – Link Search Console

• Google Search Console shows you how many impressions your search listing is receiving – and the average position your site is shown in for each search term.

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3 c). Build Relationships – Link Email Software

• Once linked your Email Campaigns will show in Acquisition / Campaigns

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4 a). Referrals & ROI; Address Spam

• Visit Acquisition / All Traffic / Source Medium

• Use this blog: megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam to remove spam

4 b). Referrals & ROI; Self Referrals• If your website, your box office system or your payment provider appears as a referral it

could make any ROI calculations impossible. To resolve Self Referrals visit this blog; online-metrics.com/self-referrals/, for Box Office/Payment referrals talk to your provider

YourWebsite

4 c). Referrals & ROI: Return on Investment

• When Referrals work well and they are combined with Ecommerce tracking, they will demonstrate the ROI of your activities – for example, identifying blogs that are boosting your income

5 a). Define Success; Create Goals

• Visit Admin / Goals. Good examples of Goals for Arts organisations are: reaching the Basket page; completing an Order; Dwell time of more than 5 minutes; visiting the Support pages; and/or visiting the Education pages.

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5 b). Define Success; Ecommerce Tracking

• Ecommerce tracking enables you track your sales within Google Analytics

• The Ecommerce Conversion rate will help you track improvements to your site

• Ecommerce revenue allows you to track ROI of your activity

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6 a). Optimise your Reporting; use Custom Alerts

• Admin / Custom Alerts, e.g. set up an alert in case tracking drops out

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6 b). Optimise your Reporting; use Dashboards

• Setting up a Dashboard allows you to collate all your important stats in one overview – you can set it to auto-email as a pdf on a regular basis.

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6 c). Optimise your Reporting; Quarterly/Annual Reports

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64,855

2 mins 32 secsAverage Session Duration

322,928Pageviewsweb visits (sessions)

39%Bounce rate

77%New visitors

£21,269Taken in online sales

50,291users

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24% of visits from

the UK generating 34% of sales

21% of visits

from the US generating 21% of revenue

2490 ‘likes’

991 followers, 97 likes, 1212 tweets

Use images to communicate key messages….

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7 a). Focus on your Audience; Advance Segments

• Ask key questions for your Quarterly and Annual report, for example; how do High Value Bookers vary from other website visitors

• Create segments to explore key groups in your data

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7 b). Focus on your Audience; Advance Segments

• In this segment analysis, US visitors were more likely to be referred by Twitter;

Be Inspired – Case Study

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Case Study; Ecommerce Conversion Rate

• There has been a 450% increase in conversion rate from 2014 to 2015 – this increase in conversions has been the driving force behind the increased revenue

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Top Tips for Google Analytics1. Improve Accuracy

– Read the Notifications, remove Staff & use Annotations

2. Gain Insight

– Demographics, Interests & Benchmarking

3. Build Relationships

– link Google Adwords, Search Console & your Email software

4. Referrals & ROI

– Address Spam & Self-Referrals and measure ROI

5. Define Success

– create Goals & set up Ecommerce

6. Optimise your Reporting

– use Custom Alerts, Dashboards & Quarterly/Annual Reports

7. Focus on your Audience

– set up Advanced Segments

8. Be inspired - Case Study

– increasing Conversions & ROI 28