Whether you have a website and a blog, or a blog on your website – Google Analytics is a must-have for all marketers serious about improving their traffic, content and sales. So, what’s new with Google Analytics? A fair amount! They’re becoming more social, and providing answers that will definitely help your social success.
Courtesy of meadigital.com
If you don’t have Google Analytics for your blog yet get it here.
New Features For Your Blog’s Success
The most exciting new feature for social marketers is the ‘social media reports’ function. You’ll be able to view and use this data to improve your social traffic streams.
• There’s an ‘overview’ page that lists all of your social accounts, and shows you in simple graph format, how much traffic you’re getting from each site. This is an essential metric if you’ve focused on one particular social site to drive traffic to your website. It will also help you streamline your efforts to improve conversion ratios.
• After ‘overview’ in the new social section, you’ll get ‘sources.’ Zoom in on any one of your social sites to see: an overview of how long people have stayed there, what your page views are like, and how many pages are viewed per visit. It helps you measure engagement quality, when analysing your traffic streams.
• Next is the ‘pages’ tab. In this tab you’ll also be able to see bounce rate, page views and pages per visit – but for each individual URL. If you’ve been having trouble finding out which pieces of content have the highest viral potential, this metric will solve this issue. Just sort by ‘social activities’ for more info.
• After ‘pages’ comes ‘conversions’ a tab that savvy marketers will love. This involves your social metrics with monetary values and conversion ratios. You’ll be able to see which sites have sent you customers, when and why. Best of all, they are sorted into easy to read categories. Clicks, assists and overall role of the social site in sales.
• Marketers will get to use the ‘social plugin report’ – not strictly necessary, but a nice tool to have anyway. It will tell you which buttons are being used and how. That way, if you find that some buttons aren’t working, you can remove them.
• Finally, ‘the social visitors flow’ will track the exact path that each visitor took through your site. This one is amazing! It will show you over time, which pages are losing you conversions, and why they aren’t working. For direct product sales this is priceless, because you’ll be able to get inside the minds of your own target base.
Also back on the Google Analytics radar is the email function. Only it’s much better now – and allows you to set when you’ll receive your analytics reports and what they’ll look like in your email. If you don’t want emails, just get a PDF report straight from your account.
These are excellent new features for small businesses that are trying to make sense of their social analytics on a day to day basis. Set your parameters now!
Do you use Google Analytics? How often do you check in and make changes to your campaign, based on the numbers? Share it with me!
