No matter which role you have in your organization, there is going to be valuable information hidden inside of Google Analytics for you.
At KWSM: a digital marketing agency, we usually have our Content Editors and Digital Marketing Strategists analyzing Google Analytics for our clients. Each month our clients receive a report that is filled with data about their site. We report on all types of Google Analytics data points, including where the traffic came from, which pages they visited most often, and when they converted. We are all Google Analytics certified and use the tool to figure out exactly what is working and why.
Our website project manager, Alexandra Hall, knew there was a lot she could learn through Google Analytics that would help her team produce better work. As a part of our mentorship program, I partnered with Alexandra, to show her how Google Analytics could add value to the web team’s work. Together, we put together a 3-month program to help her learn some new tricks!
Below are some surprising takeaways I got from our Analytics 101 training program.
If you don’t know your KPIs, it’s impossible to track them.
During one of the very first meetings Alexandra and I had, we discussed goal tracking. It’s a fantastic feature in Google Analytics that allows you to know when a person filled out your contact form or gave your business a call. For business owners, this is invaluable information because they can find out when the conversion happened and what path the visitor took that lead to the conversion.
In our training, Alexandra and I walked through several of our newer clients’ websites, to help get goal tracking implemented. We needed to know each client’s objective in order to properly add the goals, so we brought in some of KWSM’s digital marketing strategists to fill us in on their client’s marketing goals, and used that information to add goals to their Google Analytics account.
If you don’t filter your data, you aren’t looking at the real problem.
Since Alexandra’s web and design team often tests the websites we build before they go live, she wanted to understand how to remove our team from the analytics. In the past this has always muddied up the data and made it impossible for her to know what was working and not working once the site was live.
Together, we walked through the Google Analytics basics and noted a few key points of data that mattered. Alexandra got a good grasp on the different channel sources, setting data ranges, and how to add filters and segments. Check out this fantastic recap Alexandra wrote about all her new knowledge in the blog: How to Get Started with Google Analytics.
If you don’t know how to track your website analytics, you can’t make data-driven decisions.
During our onboarding process, we always run a thorough web audit that digs into the behavioral flow of a client’s site. Using analytics, we find places where customers are getting stuck and discover which pages are not effective at keeping people on the site. These findings give Alexandra and her team a list of improvements that can be made to give the website a quick refresh before we launch the full marketing strategy. Alexandra wanted to know how to do this analysis herself, so she could help continuously improve all the sites we maintain.
To practice, we spent a whole afternoon looking through the behavioral flow of our Video Studio Day web pages. There were several important insights that we learned, which gave Alexandra the idea to simplify our check-out process. This optimization is going to make it much easier for our website visitors to reserve their spot, ensuring that more people join us every month!
Continuous Learning at KWSM: a digital marketing agency
Digital marketing is an incredibly dynamic industry, and it is difficult to know it all. Our KWSM mentorship program makes it possible for us to learn from one another. By sharing our knowledge we build each other up, and make the agency stronger as a whole.
If you are interested in joining our agency, check out our open positions. We’re waiting for you!
