How to Understand Google Analytics Terms

Digital marketers have a lot of analytics terms they use in relation to their businesses. It is imperative to get a hold on these terms and to use them appropriately since analytics tools base their measurements/metrics on these terms. 

Here are some common terms you can measure using Google Analytics.

Keywords: Digital marketing relies on keywords as search terms to aid web users. These users find businesses if they use their keywords to search for products/services. Google analytics helps to identify and provide these keywords. Search engines use these keywords to improve the search engine rankings of websites.

Conversion Rate: Many web users habitually visit many websites. Of this lot, the percentage of visitors who do what you expect them to do on your website is regarded as “converted.” Such activities may include making a purchase or registering to download a free e-book, get a discount coupon, download how-to video or signing up for email newsletter.

Visit: This is any session in which a visitor interacts with your website irrespective of whether they do anything on your website or simply move on to another site.

Unique Visitors: This refers to the number of web users who visit your website within a specified time period. Irrespective of the number of times same person visits the site within that time period, the visitor still counts as one unique visitor.

Average Time on Site: This is the average time measured in seconds or minutes a user spends on your website.

Exit Page: This is the last page of your website that a visitor views before leaving your site. Knowing the last page your visitors visit before leaving your website can give you a lot of marketing insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website.

Traffic Sources: This refers to places sending the most traffic to your website. It could be referral sites, social media sites, search engines and traffic exchanges.

Referral Sites: These are sites where people come to your site by clicking on your link on the sites. If your website gets a lot of referral site traffic, it is an indication that your online presence is strong on those other sites.

Search Engines Traffic: This is the same thing as organic traffic. It refers to people who visit your site because it showed up in their search results. A measurement of your search engine traffic gives information on how effective your SEO is.

Page Views: Any time a web user views a page of your site, it counts as a page view. One visit may contain many page views depending on how long the visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit.

New Visitors: This represents web visitors who are coming to your website for the very first time. The information is vital because marketers need different strategies to market to new visitors as against repeat/returning visitors.

Returning Visitors: Returning visitors are visitors who make a comeback to your website for one reason or another. Some of such reasons may include to get more information, make inquiries and even to make a repeat purchase.

Bounce Rate: This refers to the number of users who exit your website after only viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate, the less the time visitors spend on your website.

Pages per Visit: This refers to how many pages users view on your website per each visit. The more pages they visit, the better your website engagement.

Direct Traffic: These are people who access your business by typing your URL directly in the address bar of their browsers. Direct traffic is a very good indication of your web authority and customer awareness. It also indicates how effective your marketing ads are.

Why Having an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy is Important for Your Small Business

How effective your digital marketing strategy is, is directly related to how well your small business can succeed online. Every small business needs a marketing strategy, an effective digital marketing strategy to make any impact online. Without it, you may end up struggling in vain to do business online. Good digital marketing strategies require that every business sets up business goals and initiates the right campaigns to meet these goals. Some of such goals can be anything from gaining more customers, raising brand awareness, lead generation, or boosting sales. If your business strategies are effective, they will ensure that the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals of your business are being reached as planned. If not, the business has ample opportunities to make adjustments to ensure the goals are reached as planned. This is made possible by having in place a digital marketing strategy that encompasses the following.

Budgeting

For your business to succeed online, it needs a digital strategy plan that can specifically analyze your set budget and deploy it judiciously. Budgeting and implementing a good budget makes planning for the future of your business easier and more practicable. That helps the businesses to grow and to produce more sales revenue.

Addressing the Basics

An effective digital marketing strategy is not just about crafting blog content and making a few posts here and there particularly on social media. It is much more than that and understanding the basics is a basic necessity. These basics help you to put all the necessary activities together to form part of a much wider plan that evolves into a working strategy. By doing this, your business stands a very good chance to start reaping the benefits right away.

The Right Tools

You cannot have an effective strategy without deploying the right online tools. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must encompass the use of the internet, mobile devices, social media and search engines to effectively reach consumers. As a remarkable contrast from common traditional marketing methods, such as print, billboards and TV, digital marketing is essentially data-driven. It relies on online technology/tools to measure and track what consumers are searching for or generally doing online. This data can be collected, collated, analyzed and used to understand how each strategy contributes to sales and conversions.

The Right Techniques

A digital marketing strategy requires the right techniques to be effective. Some of such techniques encompass anything from Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media marketing, Email marketing, Pay-Per-Click, PPC, Google Analytics and video marketing. The aim is to always get the message across to the right consumers and in the right form. When these techniques are deployed in a goal-driven approach, they help to reach more consumers. That helps the business to get more leads and customers with a corresponding increase in sales revenues.

Reaching Customers

Customers keep every business in business. Strategies that help businesses to reach customers easily are good for business. When a digital marketing strategy is well crafted, it helps to pinpoint the behavioral patterns of customers/potential customers. Through it, you can get to find out how they prefer to interact online, whether it is by way of smart mobile devices or through desktop computers. You can gather demographics data such as their ages and their consuming preferences. With a concise analysis of this data, businesses can plan effective methods to market to their audiences by taking advantage of the ways they prefer and ways that fit their demographics. That way, businesses can effectively deploy marketing messages that can better hold customers’ attention to get the desired results.

Performance Metrics

With online metrics, you can measure how well your marketing campaigns are doing. Online, you can take advantage of performance measuring platforms that provide tools that can be used to study the success of your marketing campaigns. The data provided by metrics helps businesses to optimize their marketing messages, track the target audience and make any improvements/adjustments in ongoing campaigns. Such metrics allow for more opportunities to reach targets/goals and are of huge benefits to future campaign plans/designs.

Business Transformation

If your priority is to completely transform your business, a well-designed digital marketing strategy will give you the means, platforms and ways in which to grow your desired business model. Overall, whatever you aspire to do in your online business, with the right digital marketing strategy deployed effectively, you can accomplish it.