Learning how to utilize Google Analytics reports may appear like an overwhelming task, but once you have mastered its usefulness, you’ll be thankful that you took the time to learn this invaluable marketing tool. Any type of Internet marketing effort should include the utilization of Google Analytics reports.
The following reports provide you with a wealth of information, breaking down your marketing efforts into detailed strategic categories that make it easy to digest for anyone regardless of how savvy the are (or aren’t) with internet analytics.
( Read More: 5 Ways Google Analytics Can Save Financial Marketers Money )
Report #1 – Are your financial marketing efforts reaching a younger or older audience?
Report Parameters: Audience » Demographics » Age || Secondary Dimension » Users » City
This report will let you know the age demographics of your website visitors and the trends of ages by month. The Secondary Dimension will allow you to see where your visitors are located, because you really only care about people who are immediately within your geographic service area.
Financial institutions with a powerful social media presence and a great blog will have a website that attracts a younger demographic of an audience, whereas banks without a social media presence will tend to have a demographic that has an older more transactional audience. If the age range of your audience appears to be older, then it may be wise to increase the non-transactional content that connects to a more youthful audience. If you still don’t have a social media presence yet, then you should consider reading this useful article about why you need one.
Report #2 – Do you know how many mobile users are visiting your banking site?
Report Parameters: Audience » Mobile » Overview
If you don’t know how many mobile users are visiting your banking site then you have no idea if any of these mobile visitors are having a terrible experience and if so, how many? If you’re investing in a social media presence, you must have a mobile/responsive version of your site.
The mobile friendly version of your site will account for about 42% or more of the social traffic visiting your website since much of the social media traffic is mobile. If web visitors have a terrible experience upon arrival to your site, they’re not going to visit long, and they’re not going to come back.
Report #3 – Are your financial marketing efforts effective in the city that you service?
Report Parameters: Acquisition » All Traffic || Secondary Dimension » Users » City
This Google Analytics report will show you exactly where your web traffic is coming from, including websites, social networking sites, referral links, etc that sends traffic to your website. It will also tell you the exact cities that these web visitors are located in. Knowing what cities your web visitors are from will help you determine whether or not your branding is effective in the cities you service. One of our clients had seen a 75% increase in website traffic from the 5 major cities they serve after increasing their blog and Facebook content.
( Read More: 5 Ways To Fine Tune Your Bank’s SEO Strategy For Maximum Impact )
Report #4 – How effective is your recent content?
Report Parameters: Behavior »Site Content » All Pages || Secondary Dimension » Users » City
This report will help you determine the effectiveness of your content by specified pages. If you run a blog, this is the most valuable report that you can run, because this report will tell you just how much time people are spending on a particular page of interest.
Knowing how long they visited this page will also help you to determine whether or not they read the entire page through. Through this report you’ll learn the amount of unique pageviews versus pageviews this specific page has had. Knowing how many unique pageviews you’ve had (new organic pageviews) will let you know if that particular content is effective or not.
If you change the Secondary Dimension to Acquisition » Source, this will enable you to find out where most of these pageviews came from. For example, Facebook versus Google +. To dig further into these analytics, you can then learn whether these page views were from a particular Facebook post, video, or image. You’ll also learn the precise title and distribution of the content.
This information is invaluable and will save you both money and time in your marketing efforts. Learning which marketing measures are effective will help you avoid the waste of time and money on the efforts that are not effective.
Report #5 – What links are visitors clicking on?
Report Parameters: Behavior » In Page Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to view behavior flow from single pages or multiple pages. This particular report tells you exactly which links visitors click on within a specific page, their page activity, and where they went when they finished viewing this specific page. Clearly, the more links the web visitor clicked on within any given page and the more time spent on that page tells us that the visitor was engaged.
The purpose of this report is to identify the activity of web visitors and whether or not they’re engaged. Engagement is important but creating an event can be equally important depending upon your marketing intent. Was action taken by the web visitor before leaving the site – was there an event? How long did they visit the site and key pages for?
Learning how to use the many free useful tools that Google Analytics has to offer financial marketers will provide you with the precise information that you need to reach your marketing goals. Knowing all of this information will help to ensure that you’re reaching your target audience and that your audience is engaged.
It will also help you to know how many “events” occurred as a direct result of your marketing efforts. Knowing which marketing efforts were eventful will help you achieve the success that you desire while avoiding the pitfalls of blind Internet marketing.