At Media Horizons, we are focused on data driven marketing for a people-based solution. People-based marketing, according to Forrester, is “the ability to perform targeting and measurement at the level of real individuals by resolving consumer identity across all digital and offline channels.”
For the last 30+ years, our “secret” is placing emphasis on intensive data and analytics to ultimately grow our clients’ businesses. We were thrilled to host a webinar series this spring on data & analytics. Thank you to everyone who participated!
Our Strategic Lead of Business & Marketing Intelligence, Kunick Kapadia, led two sessions featuring our tips and tricks for maximizing the value of your Google Analytics data as well as what you need to know about attribution today.
We thought it would be helpful to put together key takeaways for anyone that could not join us.
Key Takeaways
(1) Google Analytics can be overwhelming! Before you log into your dashboard, we recommend having an idea or focus of what you want to glean from your analysis. This will help you avoid getting lost in the maze of data housed in GA.
(2) Don’t ignore “Segments, which are a subset of users broken out in GA based on a specific set of criteria (i.e., users who converted, users who bounced, etc.). Using “Segments” in reporting is a powerful way to gain more insight into user behavior and identify optimization opportunities. Pro Tip: You can also build audiences using “Segments” for use across other marketing channels.
(3) Invest time into UTM best practices. UTM parameters are extremely important because it is how naming conventions are entered into GA.
- – Consistent architecture and naming conventions will help you maximize value because reporting will be more efficient and accurate.
- – Capitalizations matter.
- – Use all 5 of GA’s UTM parameters as often as you can.
- (4) When assigning goals, keep in mind that they should be very important actions on the website that you can track. With the complimentary version of GA, you are only permitted 20 goals, so be strategic with how you used them! Pro Tip: Goals are more friendly and flexible than events when it comes to reporting in GA, so you want to use them instead of just events for those key user actions.
- (5) Data sampling is the key difference between GA360 and the complimentary version of GA. In regular GA, the larger the report you run, the smaller percentage of data is based on actual user data and the more is based on sampled data, which reduces accuracy. GA360 utilizes data sampling in a much smaller number of instances and also has more advanced integrations with other Google and third-party platforms. But it comes with a hefty price tag, so choose wisely between free GA and GA360.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on key takeaways from our second session in the webinar series: “Everyone’s Talking About Attribution: Here’s What You Need to Know.”
