Digital marketing can get confusing and overwhelming – especially when marketers throw out terms that you are unfamiliar with. Your marketing account manager is always trying to help you understand the different aspects of Pay-Per-Click, SEO, and Social Media, but there is a lot of data involved that can get confusing for anyone.
To help you understand your digital marketing strategies better, here are some common Google Analytics terms that will help you grow your understanding of different pieces of data and why they are important:
Google Analytics is one of the most popular digital analytics software. It’s a free tool from Google that provides in-depth information about visitors on your website. Google Analytics can provide information for you like:
This data is crucial in analyzing different aspects of your online marketing strategies. Let’s look at these more in-depth and review why this data is so important.
When visitors come to your website, it’s important to understand how they interact with your website. One of the most important pieces of information that Analytics provides is how long users stay on your website on average. Depending on how the data presents, it can indicate a potential problem on the website like slow loading times or how user friendly it is on mobile devices. It also gives us an idea of how valuable your website content is and if the traffic coming is finding the information they are looking for.
The Top Viewed Pages on your website show us trends in search for your audience. If you have seasonal merchandise, you can use analytics to see when users start searching for those services, and when it slows down. This can help you prepare your marketing efforts to meet the demand of users by recognizing patterns of behavior.
You can also use information from the Top Viewed Pages data to optimize your website and try to drive more sales through specific pages.
We rely on the Sessions and Users data to help us understand trends in traffic on your website. Digital marketing efforts are intended to drive more high-quality traffic to your website, introduce you to new potential customers, and increase your profitability by driving more and more users. Without this information, we wouldn’t have much information on how marketing efforts are working.
With traffic source information, we can break down how your website traffic is finding you. If you are using SEO marketing to drive new traffic to your website, Analytics will show which organic search sent a user. For example, if 500 total number of users found you through Organic Search (SEO-related), those sources would be broken down by x number came from Google Search, x number came from Bing Search, and x number came from Yahoo Search.
The traffic sources can also show you the number of users that came from Google Ads, from Referral Sources such as social media platforms, and more.
With all of this information – and then some – your online marketing efforts are significantly increased and can continue to improve. It just takes the right data analysis and implementing the right marketing strategies to move your business in the best direction.