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| Ⓒ Provided by Forbes |
By Michael Fox, Forbes
As a business owner, you might have heard about — or are already using — Google Analytics. Today, millions of businesses use Google Analytics. If you are one of them, it is necessary to know how you can maximize this tool.
First, What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics helps businesses get a better grasp of their website. It also helps evaluate and measure how marketing, content and products are performing relative to user engagement. This tool collects data and sorts it into useful information.
In October 2020, Google announced a major upgrade in the system with Google Analytics 4. Traditional Google or Universal Analytics won’t be going anywhere, but in this iteration, new properties were introduced.
The biggest difference between the two versions is their measurement models. With Universal Analytics, measurements include pages, events, e-commerce and social interaction hits. In Google Analytics 4, these interactions will fall under one category: events. In other words, all interactions in Universal Analytics will be converted as an event in Google Analytics 4.
As a business owner, thinking of ways to scale and improve your operations may be exhausting. Fortunately, advanced tools like this can help make scaling a business easier.
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Ways Google Analytics Impacts Your Business
Let’s talk about five ways your business can maximize some of Google Analytics’ features:
Insights to Help Improve ROI
Google Analytics provides businesses with tools that help measure trends. For example, showing business owners if there are specific products on their website that are suddenly gaining traction.
Further, Google Analytics can help businesses predict clients’ behavior. For example, the rate of customer churn in a specific period. This tool is able to provide data that can help you allocate the necessary funding to retain your customers. These kinds of insights can help you create better marketing strategies and other business-related plans. These features create a clearer path for you to achieve a return on investment.
For Google Analytics 4, measurements include both website and app. So, data is a combination of two integral parts of your operations. It is now also able to include data from your YouTube account alongside other channels. This way, you have a more comprehensive view of your marketing efforts.
Better Understanding of Client Behavior
The upgrade has a more customer-centric approach in measurement. This includes user IDs that aid in tracking behavior with regards to your business. The new version is capable of providing information about your client’s life cycle in interacting with your channels. Since they are given unique user IDs, you can track their behavior individually — from the acquisition stage to retention.
This is important as consumer behavior is rapidly changing. Being able to get ahead by making real-time decisions based on true data is essential. Track which channels are effective in customer acquisitions, and keep a pulse on data regarding engagement with your products. This, in turn, can aid business entities to pave plans for better customer retention.
In my experience, this change has been one of the most useful as it can help businesses create a more personalized approach. In the older version, business owners were only given platform-centric data, which didn’t help much in regard to targeted marketing.
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Targeted Marketing
Google Analytics offers a comprehensive set of features that can help you scale how you manage your digital marketing efforts. The data collected by this tool can be managed in different ways. One is using these sets of data for ad personalization, which plays a great role in marketing. Google gives you the option to set up personalized ads relevant to the geographical data collected from your clients.
For example, say you have gathered a useful amount of first-party data from a specific state. You can use this set of data to create an audience for your next ads. This data will aid you in placing ads that will yield sure returns as it is targeted to an already interested market.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
At this point, you probably know or have an idea of what SEO is. It is one of the most highly effective digital marketing efforts today. Google Analytics contributes to making this even more efficient and effective in helping you grow as a business. The tool gives insights regarding the pages of your website that are gaining a relative number of visitors and your best-performing pages. This can help you strategize on what kind of content to invest in and how you allocate your efforts accordingly.
Creating Innovative Business Ideas
To make sure your business grows, you need to introduce new ideas that set you apart from your competitors. However, coming up with ideas is one story, but having ideas that are worthwhile is another. So, how do you introduce new things that are worthwhile? By basing them on data and facts.
With the information Google Analytics provides, you can start implementing upgrades and innovations. These changes can further help you have an edge over other competitors.
Going over these data can help you devise actionable plans and reasonable business goals. Take, for example, reports indicating that Reddit forums help in customer acquisitions. Given this information, you can create marketing strategies that are tailored to Reddit.
Takeaway
As a business owner, having control over your operations is important. This control should always be data-driven and factual. This is to ensure that your business decisions will bring valuable contributions to how you want your business to grow.
With Google Analytics and all the services it offers, tracking digital channels has been made easier and more efficient. Through this tool, you are provided with accurate data that can be used to scale your business.
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How to Grow Business Using Google Analytics
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