Last month we introduced you to the world of analytics. In our second instalment of the 'all about analytics' series, we dive into some of the key analytics tools you can use to improve your digital marketing campaigns.
Keep reading to find out more 👇
Google Analytics 📊
Google Analytics is an analytics service that is great to use for SEO and marketing efforts. This will track website performance and user insights. The platform can seem a bit daunting at first as it’s packed full of data and graphs but making sense of it can give your marketing a real boost!
Insights include anything from how many visitors your pages get to how long they spend on your site. It uses a simple Javascript code that can be added to every page on your website and puts a cookie in the browser of each site visitor. You will gain access to this piece of code after setting up your Google Analytics account.
This code needs to be added after the <head> tag of your header file if you are using HTML. If you are using an online platform such as WordPress there are some great, easy-to-use plugins for Google Analytics that do all of this for you. Squarespace also has a handy easy to follow guide to set up analytics. You can then set up your site search and goals. Goals measure certain actions your users perform such as visiting a defined URL, when a user spends a specific duration on a site, clicking a specific link and when a user views a preset of pages in a session.
Once you’ve got all of that set up and you've waited for a minimum of 24 hours you’re ready to start analysing your data! When you log in you will be taken to the home page which gives you the main overview. On the left-hand side, you can access the main categories of a report which include Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.
The Real-Time dashboard does what it says on the tin! You can see real-time data of visitors currently using your site. It’s useful to see how users are getting to content on your website and current insights. Your Audience dashboard explains all your need to know about your website visitors with a simple overview of user information alongside more detailed information such as demographics which goes into your user’s age and gender.
Looking at the Acquisition dashboard lets you know how your website users came across your site, for example, the search console report lets you see who found your site off the back of an organic search.
Alternatively, if you want to learn more about how long users are staying on your website, views and bounce rate this can all be found in the Behaviour dashboard. It helps you to see which pages get the most views and keep the attention of users so you can focus efforts on this particular page.
Finally, your Conversion dashboard lets you see how often users perform specific actions you want them to do on your website. This is where the analytics for any goals you have set up will appear!
Now you should have a better understanding of how Google Analytics works and how to navigate it. You can use this data to focus on what is working and to improve (or stop) what isn’t! It’s a good idea to set aside a couple of hours a week or month to check through this data and shape your future marketing campaigns.
Facebook Insights 📉
Facebook data is known as Insights and can be found in its own tab on your business page. Here you can see an overview of your page including likes, views and reach. It automatically shows insights for the past seven days but you can adjust this timescale to cover today, yesterday or the last 28 days.
If you want to see your insights more in-depth and for a specific about of time, you can go to Page Views which will show you total views which can be toggled to see by age, gender, country, city or device. The Likes tab will show you organic and paid likes as well as any unlikes.
Navigating over to the Reach tab will show you how many people have seen you post at least once as well as a breakdown of when your likes comments and reactions were happening. If you want to know more about your audience head over to the People tab which will give you a basic breakdown of your fans (people who like the page) demographics and anyone you have reached.
Instagram Insights 📷
In terms of Instagram, as this is also owned by Facebook, they can be found within Insights too.
Inside the Insights section, you will find a Creator Studio tab which will open up a new window where you can tap the Instagram icon at the top and again click Insights. There you will see data including website visits, profile visits, accounts reached and impressions. Navigating to the Audience tab will show your Instagram audience stats, including when your audience is online, where they are from and their age and gender.
Want to check your insights on the go? 🏃♂️
Both Facebook and Instagram insights can be accessed via the apps although features are more limited. On Facebook, all you need to do is navigate to 'Pages', then to 'More', then tap 'Insights'. When it comes to Instagram you do need a business account to access insights which can be found on your profile page below your bio.
Don't worry if your account isn’t currently a business account, by going into your settings and selecting 'Account' you can then scroll to the bottom to switch account type to a business. We recommend all our clients have business accounts for the extra features it brings.
Google Analytics has its own easy to use app for both iPhone and Android available from the app store. Just download the app, log in and you are ready to go!
Hopefully, this blog has helped you understand the ins and outs of analytics tools! Stay tuned for our third instalment next month where we will be talking you through how to use your findings to improve and optimise your efforts.
Interested in using digital marketing and analytics to grow your business? If you’d like to see how we can help you connect with your customers please get in touch!