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Growth Through AI and 1 to 1 Digital Communications

Business Questions Google Analytics Can Answer – An Introduction

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Google Analytics is a “what” platform, not a “why” platform. It provides data on where people are coming from, what they do on your website, if they have taken a specific action, what pages they have looked at, how long, and more. It doesn’t provide the why someone visited your site or what their core needs are.

Questions GA can and should answer:

  • Where are the visitors coming from? geography, channels, sources, campaigns, etc.
  • What time of day are they most active? When do they convert vs visit?
  • What pages/content are bringing people in?
  • What, exactly, are they doing on the site?
  • Is my overall traffic increasing or decreasing?
  • How are my campaigns performing in terms of traffic and conversions?
  • What is the sales value driven from campaigns for e-commerce sites?

Where Analytics and KPI’s Fit into Customer Journey

Example is based on an Outlook Based Sales CRM System

Key Questions Google Analytics Can Answer – By Lifecycle Stage for an Outlook Based Contact Management System

Google Analytics Configuration/Setup

Google Analytics needs to be configured in order to get the most value out of the platform. These are the key elements to setup and to check as the analytics platform evolves as a key insight and reporting tool.

  • Google analytics tracking tags > add to the website using Google Tag Manager. Using GTM allows for ease of adding more tags from other services (Facebook, LinkedIN, etc.) and adds additional control over how the tags are fired.
  • Demographic and interest tracking > turn on. This allows some data regarding individual demographics and interests to be aggregated and used in Audience Section of analytics.
  • Search Console > connect. Google Analytics does not capture much keyword information on it’s own due to “security”. But, connecting Search Console allows more keyword data to come into Analytics and available in the Acquisition section of analytics.
  • Events > create. An event is any specific action that you want to track on the site – button clicks, videos watched, PDF’s downloaded, etc. An event can be converted into a Goal (conversion event).
  • Goals > create. Goals are business critical events that happen on your site. You have to set these up in order to track them (e-commerce sales, form fills, video plays, etc.) but more important than the count of goal completions is the fact that all other data gets tied to the goal so you can see what channels are driving goal completions/conversions, what devices/geographies/landing pages/etc.
  • Paid Media/Marketing Programs > integrate. GA is a passive system. You have to tell it when you have a marketing program in the field that is driving traffic to your site (email campaigns, LinkedIN media buys, etc.). We do this by using UTM parameters at the end of the click link to the site. UTM parameters look like this – www.avidian.com/landing-page?utm_term=sales-crm&utm_campaign=prophet-core-launch&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc
  • Audience Segment Creation and Management > Strategize and Create. As part of customer journey and media campaigns, you can create automatic segments in GA (new users, visited pricing page but didn’t fill out a demo form, etc.) and use that for specific re-targeting or analysis.

Audience Overview

Deeper level of information about who is visiting the website, where they are coming from and how they are accessing.
Key Insights from this section:

  • Geographies of visitors. Only 52% of visitors are from USA in 2021. Lots from India and some from Canada.
  • Devices > mobile vs desktop used to access the website – what does it mean if over 50% of your traffic is coming from mobile devices?
  • Age & Gender > are you getting a younger or older audience? What does that mean for copy, color, imagery, language?
  • Segmentation > The top section allows you to create a series of segments for comparison that will apply across all of Google Analytics
  • User Flow > Based on starting point (any dimension captures by GA) – where do those people go in site?

Acquisition Overview

Key section to understand sources of traffic and performance of tracked, paid media campaigns. Two things are critical to make this section useful:

  1. All marketing campaigns are either integrated into GA via native integrations (Google Ads, etc.) or are using query string parameters (UTM codes) – especially email, Facebook, LinkedIN and any paid media.
  2. Conversions that are important are set including the value of the conversion (if there is one).

Key Insights from this section:

  • Which channels and sources within each channel is driving traffic and generating conversions
  • How do the channels perform over time?
  • Which campaigns are performing the best? worst?
  • What is the volume of branded vs non-branded keywords (from Google Search Console)

Behavior Overview

The behavior section helps you understand what content is helping or hurting on the site and what people do on the site.

Key insights from this section:

  • What pages are generating traffic? These are landing pages.
  • What pages are generating conversion > associating landing page with conversion events
  • Where are people exiting the site? Which pages are not resonating (high bounce rate)
  • What are people doing on the site? Clicking buttons, watching videos, downloading PDF’s – this requires EVENTS to be configured.

Conversion Overview

The conversion section combines all of the different goals being tracked and provides additional data. The conversion or goal data is pushed into other sections as well (acquisiton, etc.), but there is more depth in this section.

Some key insights from the conversion section:

  • Counts and trends of all conversion goals
  • Goal funnel flows > how did people get to that goal, what pages
  • If an e-commerce site – a lot of additional data around shopping cart performance, orders, value, etc.
  • Multi-touch funnels > how are people interacting with your site, by channel, over time.
  • Assisted conversions > which channels played a role in a conversion vs the final click > goal

Additional Google Analytics Resources

I hope this introduction to Google Analytics is and how it can answer specific business questions is helpful.

Building a Great Mobile Marketing Tech Stack

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There are 4,000 plus companies that provide digital marketing technology according to LumaScape. There are over 40 technologies in mobile Analytics/Measurement/Attribution/Reporting category alone (full mobile LumaScape here). In our build-up to the launch of the Tomorrow iOS mobile app in July of 2017, we knew that we needed a great mobile marketing technology stack in order to drive:

  • Customer Acquisition – Tracking media spend through the channels, through the stores (iOS and Android) and into the apps. Not just to an install but a registration.
  • Customer Success – via mobile push notifications, in-app messaging, triggered emails and personalized website messaging.
  • Behavioral Analytics – user behavior, funnel analysis, success and challenges of the app, customer centric insight
  • Marketing Attribution – which channels, creative, messaging and offers are bringing in the right/best members
  • Testing & Optimization – both in-app and on website including the products on the roadmap like Web App and Android App

Over the span of four months we looked at dozens of technologies and platforms with the objective of picking the right combination to get us into the launch and learn stage of the company with the following objectives:

  • Scale – will the platform serve multiple purposes and be around for the long-term. Is this a product that we can grow into and will grow with us as.
  • Value– based on functional requirements, does the technology provide the needed features at the right price AND the right pricing structure. The. pricing structure is as important as the price itself as a new company just launching, a model that would scale with us made the most sense. More on this later.
  • Minimize impact on engineering team– we wanted to have as much control over messaging and communications in the hands of the growth team vs having to go to the engineering team for executional tasks.
  • Interoperability– how well does the technology work with OTHER technologies. In the age of the API economy, our belief is that having best in class point solutions is superior to a difficult to use and more expensive all-in-one platform.

Here is a simple schema of the platforms we selected to give you an idea of the complexity of the systems:

Primary Marketing + Analytics Tech Stack
Primary Marketing + Analytics Tech Stack @tomorrowideas

We launched the iOS mobile app in July of 2017 and have learned a ton about what we like and don’t like. Here are some of the lessons we learned during the research process and then implementation/execution stage vs a product by product comparison – there are lots or review sites for that.

What we did right

  • Defined what types of data we wanted to capture and what decisions we were going to make based on the data.
  • Thought hard about the value and purpose of each category of the tech stack we were adding: attribution, BI/Reporting, customer communications, analytics and ETL.
  • Researched and demo’d a range of solutions for each category. We sourced our short list of tech vendors from professional connections, team’s prior usage (especially including the engineering team’s experience), online comparison sites (like G2Crowd.com and Captera.com)

What we could have done better

  • Be realistic about your potential traffic and needs with regards to complexity of customer communications.We selected Braze (formerly Appboy) as our customer communication platform. It is a very robust platform that is the most expensive part of our stack, but we still don’t use it to the fullest. This is due to our need to manage many of our communications internally so we haven’t “turned over” all emails, push notification and in-app notifications to Braze. This is also due to launching a new product and not understanding how to best communicate with our customers to make them successful – much of this only comes from experience, but the product does a pretty good job of leading someone through creating a will that our communications are lighter than predicted (which is good).
  • Select an event naming structure that is informative at the top level, but gives you the ability to dig deeper with event attributes.Since we run both marketing programs and customer analytics programs off of event logging, the naming framework you create has a massive impact on your ability to connect media spend with specific user behavior as well as analyze user behavior through platforms like Amplitude.
  • Allocate more time UP FRONT for analytics.In the time constraint world of launching a mobile app with a hard deadline decisions had to be made. One of those was to post-pone allocation of time to address event naming and analytics. This has caused challenges downstream in terms of engineering time for refactoring and gaps in behavior knowledge that could have helped us advance the product further, faster.

Mobile analytics is a unique animal that requires solutions and thinking that is different than traditional web analytics. New platforms like Segment, Amplitude and Google Firebase give mobile app data analysts and marketers tremendous insight into how media programs perform at a deep level and how users are successful or get stuck.

Let me know your thoughts!