First, I like to review my Acquisition Report in GA. This breaks down where my traffic is coming from by channel. It also allows me to see that over a trend line throughout whatever period I have chosen to review. I’m usually looking at one month at a time, or one quarter at a time…and typically I compare this with year-over-year data. Additionally the Acquisition Report provide a view of all those channels broke out with other metrics like, Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Pages per Session and Average Session Duration. I can get these things from my blog account, however there just isn’t much data there to review.
We are also learning about Goals in Google Analytics. In my existing GA account with Modern Toyota or in the Demo site you can see examples of goals that are already set. These include things like certain page views, click-to-call conversions, chat leads, and form submissions. This report also aggregates all of the set goals so we can see a total every month. I can’t see any of that in my blog account yet. This is really because none have been set-up yet.
Another report I review that gives me ideas to create new marketing strategies is the Interests Overview report. The Affinity Categories piece in particular can help spark ideas. None of this data shows up in the blog GA yet (and probably never will during the class).
The Affinity report is what I find the most interesting. If I start to break down the data, and dig deeper into the layers I can see that big numbers of my users have an affinity with other categories that I may be able to use for partner marketing. Or, I can simply find local companies or brands in those categories and possibly run some kind of partnership promotion. For example, the top category is “fast food cravers”. In this situation we could dig for top performing fast food restaurants in the area and offer discounts, or coupons, or food while you wait…. Grub Hub is everywhere now. We could partner with Grub Hub so the shopper could decide what fast food they want. It could go as far as being a permanent program. Lots of companies try to add value to the consumer experience and avoid trying to drive traffic with shallow giveaways. We could provide a direct-link to Grub Hub our website right next to the Schedule Service tool. That way you could do both at once. Or, provide iPads in our Customer Lounge with the Grub Hub app pre-loaded so customers can order while they wait. There’s so many directions you could take this one small data point. They key is to spend the time looking at it, peeling through the layers to identify the biggest opportunities, then testing for success.
REFERENCES
Google Analytics. Acquisition Overview. February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-overview/a5960233w11520950p12050842/
Google Analytics. Interests Overview. February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-overview/a5960233w11520950p12050842/
Google Analytics. Interests: Affinity Categories (Reach). February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/visitors-demographics-interest-branding/a5960233w11520950p12050842/
Hey man, I really enjoyed the affinity category as well. I am also taking a Direct Marketing class and we were just studying about renting other companies lists. Having a knowledge of what your audience is also interested in would be extremely beneficial in knowing whose list a company should rent. Thanks for your post!!
ReplyDeleteTesting ideas is incredibly important. Often, we think we have great ideas, and they turn out to need refinement to make them work. We did a great deal of A/B/n testing at Lowe’s on the programs that I worked on, and my realization was that we rarely got it right the first time. But the beauty of GA (and Adobe) was that it quickly would prove to us what the best result might be with that audience. And we also found that the audience matters...
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