Google Analytics is a key platform used not only to help with your SEO efforts, but also to keep track of various aspects of your website, from traffic to page views, and a lot more.
In order to get the most out of Google Analytics, be sure you are taking advantage of tracking the following notable aspects.
Form Submissions
With most businesses, you are going to be focused on getting inbound leads from your website. And if you are using various web forms on your website, it is important to have goal tracking in place to monitor your conversions and get key data on conversion metrics.
In the admin area, if you navigate to the third column, you will see “Goals” – from there, you can add up to 20 different goals for all the forms on your website. Having your form go to unique thank you pages will allow you to set up custom goals that go to a destination, with that destination being your thank you page:
Phone Calls
If you are utilizing call monitoring software like CallRail, or are able to have a web developer add some code to your website, you’ll be able to see phone calls come through as events in analytics. And once calls start appearing in analytics, you can then set them up to be counted as conversions.
You will first need to add some custom event code to the phone numbers on your website, or sync up your call monitoring software to Google Analytics. This will allow clicks and calls to show up in your analytics as an event, like so:
And similar to form tracking, you are able to set up a different type of goal, an event goal, that is configured based off of event data coming in through your website.
Purchases
If you have an ecommerce website, it’s vital that you take advantage of Google Analytics’s ecommerce tracking ability!
Depending on the type of CMS your website is built on, activating ecommerce tracking can either be very simple or a little more advanced. If you are using a platform such as Shopify, you can easily integrate Google Analytics so your website is ready to send ecommerce data to your account.
However, WordPress websites and other custom CMS types will need to have an experienced web developer add ecommerce tracking code to your website.
Once that code has been added, all you need to do in Google Analytics is go to “Ecommerce Settings” in the third column of the admin area of your account and toggle the button to be on.
Once implemented, ecommerce data can be found under “Conversions” from the main left-hand menu. There, you will be able to see conversion rates, transactions, revenue, and more.
Traffic Mediums
Have you ever noticed the long, funky URLs that you get sent to from clicking on a post on Facebook? The reason they are so long is due to UTM parameters.
If you’ve never heard of it, a UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a piece of code added to URLs that allows unique data to be sent to analytics and can be seen when looking at acquisition data. UTMs can easily be made with the help of builder websites, and from there you can add your unique URLs to different places, whether it be on your Google My Business profile, as part of your link building, in your emails, or wherever!
Adding UTM parameters to different URLs when implementing various campaigns can be super useful in analyzing your data in order to see where visits and conversions on your site are coming from. Not to mention, they can help track metrics of success and can help you make adjustments to your marketing strategy from there on out.
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