Lecture 13 – Google Analytics Features

I will get caught up this weekend if it "kills" me.

 

If we start our business, it will be very small to begin with, so I believe it would be best to limit the features we use in the beginning and if the business grows to where we need to add additional employees, I would add additional features from Google Analytics.  I am not sure if we would employ mobile ads in the beginning .  However, I still would need to uncover just what my customer base is and how they get to and work with my site.

I have learned from my current job, that Dashboards are great for a quick overall view of how things are going.  It’s a summary on a single page and it has drag and drop widgets for customization (I find widgets are usually “fun” to “play” with).

The use of AdWords would be helpful in order to discover what key terms to use in order to bring business to our site.  Google offers support and help and you decide how much and what you pay for (clicks).  The Google Display Network allows us to use AdWords to creat and manage marketing campaigns by inserting tags so success can be measures.  Using AdSense would also be good as it allows content publishers and bloggers a way to earn money by placing ads on their sites.  It would also allow me to put ads on my blog to create interest in my business.

Using the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) report would be good as it allows me to see what search queries enabled the potential customers to visit our site.  Using the Content Experiments allow me to create and test variations of my pages and figure out which ones seem to bring in the customers.

The more useful reports would include the Advertising reports which would give us a view of conversion rates and returns on all the social media channels we employ.  The remarketing might be interesting as it would enable us to locate customers who have searched for products similar to ours.

Another report offered is on audience data.  This would allow me to figure out what common factors there may be among the customers or people who visit my site and then I can adjust my ads accordingly.  Then you have the social reports that let you see what impact social media has on your business (both goals and conversions). 

Being able to see how visitors interact with our page(s) using something like In-Page Analytics would be good as would Flow Visualization.  Site Search would be valuable as it would indicate what searches were used by visitors and possibly let me know how I may need to adjust my AdWords.  Alerts and Intelligence Events will monitor my website’s traffic to detect any anomalies and alert me to the same.  This would let me know if there was more traffic coming from one particular area or another site.

Google Analytics offers so many possibilities, it is almost mind boggling.  I hope some day I will get to use it to grow a small business.