In today's data-driven business environment, data is the new "oil," according to Clive Humby, a British mathematician and entrepreneur. Raw data is useless, so marketers need specific metrics to analyze their businesses and use them to enhance their processes. CRM analytics provides crucial insights directly into multiple areas linked to your business's survival and growth.

Importance of CRM Analytics

Using key CRM metrics, you can manage many areas of your business such as internal workflows, customer experience, ongoing sales, and customer acquisition. Measuring these metrics at the surface level will not yield any results, so you need to dive deep into the CRM data to find ways to boost your revenue.

CRM Analytics You Should Track

Here are 13 key CRM metrics to help you build successful customer relationships and confidently scale your business.

1. Sales Activity Reports

You should track sales activity reports to track whether the MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) shared by the marketing team are converting into sales or not. It will also assess the prospecting tactics used by your sales teams and their effectiveness.

For that, you should track the performance of your emails, etc., using vital email marketing metrics such as open rate and reply rate. If these metrics indicate a dismal performance, you should tweak your email copy.

You can also measure the call to appointments ratio to determine your outbound calls' effectiveness. How many calls turn into meetings indicates your fronters' performance. At the same time, it also tells you the capability of your sales team to convert those sales calls.

Consider implementing an auto attendant to efficiently route inbound calls, helping your sales team connect with the right prospects and improve call-to-appointment ratios.

Pro Tip: AI-powered CRM tools are extremely useful in measuring such KPIs as they help you analyze your prospects' engagement with your brand. They will also suggest what should be your next move.

Pro Tip: You can also use DashClick's Sales CRM software to shorten your sales cycle, automate tasks, and close deals faster with actionable insights.

2. Sales Cycle Duration

A sales cycle indicates the time taken to close one deal. So, it's a rough estimate of the number of days a sales team takes to convert a prospect into a paying customer. The sales cycle largely depends on the industry and product type. Other factors influencing it are product or service cost and stakeholders involved.

Again, identifying the right decision-makers and persistent follow-ups may help shorten your sales cycle. Similarly, contextual engagement and relationship building can also help you in a significant way.

Pro Tip: You can fix many issues related to Sales Cycle Duration using DashClicks CRM. The deals app on our platform will give you comprehensive information about your deals pipeline.

3. Close Rate or Sales Closing Ratio

You can get many sales opportunities through different tactics such as social media advertising, Google Ads, and even organic traffic, but what matters the most is the deals successfully closed by your sales team.

Close rate is a metric that helps you track your sales team's actual performance and the factors responsible for it to take corrective measures. So, this CRM metric is needed to evaluate your sales strategy and identify the factors that lead to lost opportunities.

4. Net New Revenue

Money comes first in a business. If there is no revenue, you can't do business. Net New Revenue is a metric that informs you how much revenue your startup earns. You can periodically track it to check your business's health and your sales team's performance. You can track it every month, once in a quarter, or once a year.

5. Marketing ROI

Marketing may attract an unlimited budget, yet you can be unsure of its impact on your overall sales and profits. Marketing ROI lets you track how your marketing expense contributes to revenue growth. You can easily track it by the number of leads generated against the number of conversions. It helps you decide your marketing spend for future campaigns.

Pro Tip: DashClicks' CRM software and apps will provide insights into your customer behavior. It will also help you refine your target audiences and messaging.

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a crucial metric that helps you project the average revenue you'll earn from a single customer when they stay with you.

You can use the 80:20 rule to target high customer lifetime value. To improve your CLV, you should also pay attention to the customer support and customer experience (CX) you offer. Without that, you will only increase your churn and the number of unhappy customers. It's also directly linked with your branding. If you have a higher CLV, your brand will grow and vice versa. You can increase it by boosting your cross and up-sell and regular subscriptions. If you offer value, your customer would love to buy from you.

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7. Outreach Activity

It's an important metric that helps you track every point of contact your salespeople have with prospective customers. It enables you to measure the effectiveness of your prospecting strategy and provides crucial information about the average sales cycle and average follow-ups required to close the sale.

You should pay more attention to quality here than quantity. So, making 15 well-researched and quality daily calls on your refined list is always better than making 40 random cold calls.

8. Leads by Source

This is the Internet age, and your best leads may not come from your sales department. Brands use multiple online channels and consistently receive genuine inquiries and leads. Tracking those sources will give you a good picture of how marketing channels are helping you in lead generation.

Some might be your website visitors, while others may come from social media and other marketing channels. Identifying the channels offering you the best return on your investment might be crucial to your success. Investment of time and effort also pays you back, just like monetary investments.

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9. Customer Retention Rate

According to a study, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. According to another analysis by Small Biz Trends, increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-to 95%.

The above stats prove that gaining a new customer is much more expensive than retaining your existing customer. That is the reason brands should focus on retention as much as possible. You should maintain excellent relationships, provide top-notch customer support, and offer an outstanding experience. It will always pay you back many times over.

The formula to calculate the custom retention rate is as follows:

Once you start tracking it, you can further improve it.

10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The metric is used to measure customer satisfaction. Customers are asked to share their experiences and feelings about your brand on a scale from one to 10. The lowest score is 0-6, whereas 7-8 is considered good. The latter score suggests that the customers passively enjoy your products and services. But a 9-10 speaks volumes about your business and indicates that they can recommend your product to others. With that score, your customers become your brand ambassadors.

11. Rate of Renewal

This metric is highly beneficial for you if you have a subscription-based business model. It represents the number of customers renewing their subscriptions after their expiration date. It also indicates the value you offer your customers and how fast your business grows.

12. Customer Churn

Customer Churn is also a critical metric because it tells you why customers are leaving your brand. Customer churn or attrition represents why customers are unhappy with your products or services and what you can do to plug in these major loopholes. It is as important as new customer acquisition because if you do not arrest customer churn, it will backfire on you.

13. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

It is an important metric that tells you about the feasibility of your business model and whether your business is sustainable in the long run or not. It also tells you which processes you can automate and how to reduce costs in order to decrease the customer acquisition cost.

A high customer acquisition cost can be disastrous for your business. It would help if you revamped your strategy in that case. It also enables you to identify the red flags in your overall strategy to reconsider your costs and pricing, etc. Your expense may include staffing, marketing, software and tools, taxes, third-party partnerships, training, etc.

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Final Words

It would help if you started tracking these crucial CRM metrics to improve your business performance. According to a CRM tool survey, 70% of the businesses saw a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction.

You can use CRM tools like DashClicks, to improve your company's performance and customer satisfaction. It is equipped with apps such as Deals, Analytics, and Inbound, which bring valuable insights into your business processes. You can access them through a single dashboard.

Sign up for the DashClicks white-label platform for free and improve your business performance.

Before we begin, let's consider the following stats:

In a survey of companies using content marketing in their arsenal of digital marketing tools, 74% of companies said that content marketing helped increase their marketing leads, both in quantity and quality.ā  (Curata)

Content marketing provides almost six times higher conversion rates than other digital marketing methods.ā  (ABG Essentials)

Content marketing is highly effective, as we all know, but just how do you measure its ROI to convince your boss to ask for a budget increase or to generate a report for your client!

There is no formula to measure content success. However, there are a few things you can focus on to evaluate your content’s performance:

• Define the goals you want to achieve
• Set their KPIs
• Track those KPIs

Now, your digital marketing goals can realistically be achieved by content marketing, such as increasing traffic, establishing trust, generating leads, and boosting lead velocity rate (LVR).

You should set goals and track KPIs for each piece of content you produce, including the repurposed content. For example, if you created a podcast and a video using a blog post, you can measure ROI on all three content formats.

Now, switch to the ideal frequency.

Almost 37% of content marketers measure the success of their content every week, while 26% do it every day.

What Is Content Marketing ROI?

Content marketing ROI is a crucial metric that justifies the spending on content marketing efforts compared to the monetary gains.

In general, we can understand it with the help of the following formula.

How to Calculate the ROI?

It isn't easy to calculate the ROI on content marketing because the metrics marketers use can't be directly linked with monetary gains. For example, page views, social engagement, and Time-on-Page have no direct bearing on the sales and business profits, but they surely contribute toward that.

Further, they don't apply to every content marketing channel. For eg., a podcast doesn't have anything equivalent to pageviews.

However, you can establish a relationship between a metric and measurable results such as leads and sales using data. For instance, you can calculate the average page views it takes to generate a lead or close a sale.

Still, different people may have different perceptions about these metrics as far as their contribution to sales is concerned. For example, for some marketers, the number of email subscribers and ebook downloads can be more important than page views and Time-spent-on-page.

So, here is a simple technique to calculate the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

List all the monthly-spend on content marketing, such as:

1. External workforce cost (Agencies, experts, freelancers)
2. Regular headcount
3. Media spend
4. Spend on technology (software, tools, subscriptions)

Simultaneously, you should also consider the returns such as visitors and leads, and calculate their dollar value in sales and profit. You can quickly establish it with the help of metrics such as traffic and lead conversion rate, etc.

You also need information about the sale rate, overall profit, and average selling price.

Here is an illustration that explains how you can calculate your content marketing ROI.

Below, we tell you the 4-step process for measuring content success.

4-Step Process for Measuring Content Success

Before we dive into measuring content marketing ROI, you need to understand how marketers measure content success. When measuring content marketing ROI, it's essential to follow this 4-step process.

Step 1: Determine the Objectives of Your Content

Andrew Becks of 301 Digital Media says that the choice of metrics for tracking content performance should match your goal.

For example, direct sales and conversion should be the ideal metrics to track for an eCommerce business.

For a software tool or subscription-based service, tracking customer lifetime value (CLV) is more appropriate.

Choosing your yardstick to measure success is crucial irrespective of your industry or content type. According to Ollie Roddy, former Marketing and Business Development Manager of Catalyst Marketing, your content's success largely depends on the goal it's supposed to fulfill. If you are writing SEO articles, measuring your Google ranking for the targeted keyword is the perfect yardstick for performance measurement.

But, if you are writing content to answer questions and engage customers at different stages in the buyer's journey, you should measure conversion rates. So, tracking is directly related to the goals set by you.

Step 2: Set KPIs for Each of Your Goals

KPIs are the metrics marketers choose to measure their campaign performance. For example, bounce rate and Time-on-Page are the metrics that indicate the engagement level on your website.

Similarly, improved search engine rankings and a high number of inbound links are directly linked with organic traffic.

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Pro Tip: KPIs from social media engagement, user behavior, and SEO impact are all you need to measure your performance against any goal.

According to Brandon Andersen of Ceralytics, since ROI is directly linked with finance, your goals must be specific and measurable. If these aren't measurable, you can't assign a monetary value to them. Metrics such as likes, impressions, and shares are vague as they don't tell you much in regards to their monetary value.

For example, you can calculate an inbound lead's average value using this simple formula.

However, it's not always as simple as that. Businesses these days consider various other things apart from leads such as unique sessions and visit-to-signup as even more crucial KPIs for calculating content

ROI.

The most important KPIs to track are as follows:

• Leads
• Visit to Sign Up
• Sessions
• Unique sessions
• Bounce Rate
• Page Views

Jonathan Aufray, co-founder and CEO of Growth Hackers, lists the following three (non-monetary) metrics for tracking:

1. Traffic stats (volume and other vital stats such as demographics)
2. Leads generated (through email signups)
3. Sales

You can measure brand awareness through impressions and clicks. For conversions, determine which content piece specifically triggered sales.

Pro Tip: The best metrics to track ROI are the ones that are related to earning more money.

The metrics such as lead magnet downloads, unique visitors, and conversions are all relevant while measuring the return on your content investment. The idea is to include everything that leads to earning a paying customer.

Step 3: Measure Your KPIs

Restrict yourself to conversion rates, especially if you want to track sales. But there are various other ways you can measure revenue growth through content marketing. Organic rankings and brand awareness are also crucial to track for your campaigns.

Metrics also change with the platform you use. So, CPC has become a crucial metric for Google Ads, LinkedIn campaigns, and Facebook Ads.

As discussed above, to increase organic reach, you need to increase backlinks by posting quality content. But how do you know the quality content is infact working? You can do this by simply measuring your KPIs.

Marketers use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush for measuring campaign performance.

However, the most convenient option is to use a single dashboard rather than using several third-party tools. You can use DashClicks' automation dashboard to measure and track your content marketing performance.

Step 4: Measure Your Progress and Adapt as Needed

Most successful marketers conduct periodic reviews of their content marketing strategies. It ensures that your efforts are paying off. It also provides you an opportunity to learn, change, and adapt to achieve even better results.

For example, let's say you published two articles within a fortnight, and Google indicated incoming traffic growth. You'd think the former article is the one responsible for this traffic. But Google tells you another story. It says your latest article brought you so much traffic.

In the review stage, you will analyze why your recent article became so popular, while your old post struggled to turn any heads. It will provide you with some valuable insights that you can use in your future articles.

Conducting reviews regularly will also help you determine the tactics and trends that yield better results than others, and help you achieve your goals.

To improve your content marketing campaigns, DashClicks provides you with the following metrics:

1. Campaign Insights
2. Custom date-based reporting
3. Multiple integrations
4. Real-time reporting

Are You Ready to Start Driving ROI for Your Content Marketing Efforts?

While calculating content marketing ROI isn't an easy task, you can use the calculation methods described above and the 4-step process for measuring content success. You can also gather essential information to be used, such as visitors, leads, and sales, using the DashClicks dashboard.

Marketing analytics tools continue to change the way we advertise businesses.

Before digital marketing, brands and agencies were spending far more on their advertising campaigns in exchange for very little feedback. Smaller businesses with less budget to work with could not benefit from the additional exposure to help business growth.

With the advent of digital marketing tools and techniques, brands can now approach a level playing field. Even a small, local company can reliably drive business growth with the help of marketing analytics tools.

Here are four ways that analytics can help your business grow successfully.

1. Marketing Analytics Tools Improve Your ROI with Direct Feedback

Free-to-use platforms such as Google Analytics have effectively taken all of the guesswork out of digital advertising. Even paid ad platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads support all of your work with constant analytical feedback.

Whether you're choosing the right image for an ad, working on the perfect headline, or writing copy for your home page, marketing analytics tools can help you improve.

These digital advertising platforms allow you to keep track of vital metrics including page visits, bounce rate, average session duration, click-through rate, and much more. You can even leverage marketing heat maps to see where on the page users tend to look and which areas they're skipping.

Even when you are unable to precisely pinpoint an issue, your analytics will provide enough feedback to help you construct a better marketing product. You can and should A/B test several versions of an ad or website page to see which performs better with your target audience. You'll be able to actively study what visitors enjoy and what they don't want to see from your brand.

Provided that you actively monitor and engage with your analytics, improvements to your ROI are virtually assured. Even if your early campaigns do not boast huge sales numbers, the feedback you're purchasing is a sound investment in your business's future growth.

2. The Ability to Create Personalized Advertisements

One drawback to the accessibility of digital marketing is that audiences are inundated with advertisements daily. If you simply hit publish on a generic ad and landing page for your campaign, you shouldn't expect to see many conversions.

However, one of the many benefits of analytics tools is the ability to discern more vital information from your target audience. As you gather enough data, you can begin to segment your target audience into specific groups. This allows your company to create highly-personalized advertisements to increase your CTR and CVR.

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This is vital as each individual in your target audience is at a different stage of the buyer's journey. Some may be uneasy at the idea of spending cash and simply want to gather information. Meanwhile, others may be on the verge of checkout, but abandon the process for some undefined reason. You wouldn't approach these two individuals with the same sales tactics in real life, so your marketing should also reflect this.

With marketing analytics tools, you can create content to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions. You can meet undecided buyers at their level and send follow-up emails personalized with their name and email. Your company can also publish email marketing lists that are exclusive to recurring customers.

When the customer feels a personal connection with your brand, there's a far greater chance of achieving a conversion. The more conversions you obtain, the more data you have to drive future marketing decisions, which drive business growth to new levels.

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3. Marketing Analytics Make It Easier to Find New Leads

As a customer moves from the discovery stage to the buying stage, your brand can gather a wealth of information. When you obtain a satisfying number of customers, you'll have enough of a sample size to draw meaningful conclusions about your marketing as well as your customer interests.

With this analytical data, you can utilize digital marketing platforms to rapidly discover and connect with new leads. In the paid ads world, this is sometimes referred to as targeting lookalike audiences.ā

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These new potential leads share similar attributes to previous or existing customers. Because your marketing analytics already helped you curate an effective strategy, you can reuse similar techniques to reach new customers with little additional effort. Your previous investment is rewarded by allowing you to spend less on new customer acquisition.

Typically, it can cost as much as five times more to obtain new customers than it is to retain existing ones. However, your business cannot grow without expanding its customer base. By utilizing your marketing analytics tools, you can achieve this growth while keeping your expenses low.

4. Achieve Growth by Keeping Tabs on Competitors

Your analytics not only provide personal company insights but can help you see the latest activities from your closest competitors online. Your marketing analytics tools will help you with this in a variety of ways.

First, you can look at competitor websites that rank higher than yours for the same targeted keywords. This helps you focus your vision on the specific sites and web pages that are utilizing more effective copy, graphics, or techniques.

You can use this study to take note of what you can change or implement within your website or advertisements. Alternatively, you can rule out specific keyword targets that are victims of a bidding war and seek new routes for obtaining qualified traffic. Oftentimes, the strategy is not to simply burn your budget by outbidding the competition, but by capitalizing on unique angles that suit your business and differentiate you from other results.

Companies can also utilize their marketing analytics to see the exact number of clicks and average estimated ROI competitors are getting for the same keywords. This will assist in gaining a better understanding of marketing costs so that you can modify your strategy according to your budget.

As a final note, know that all of your competitors are already taking advantage of marketing analytics tools for these same reasons. You must adapt to new technologies and expand your knowledge if you want your brand to survive and remain competitive for the years to come.

Business Growth is Achievable for Any Brand with Marketing Analytics

The benefits of marketing analytical tools cannot be ignored. Not only are the insights imperative for creating effective ads, but they also make digital marketing far more cost-effective than any traditional advertising method.

With these marketing analytics tools, you never waste your budget simply for the hopes of potential exposure. The constant feedback loop will serve as your blueprint of what to do and what to avoid when creating your new web pages, paid ad campaigns, or even social media posts. Everything a visitor does or does not do is recorded for your observation.

However, while these digital marketing platforms do the heavy lifting of collecting the data, you still need to remain active. With a capable digital marketing manager at the helm, you can turn your investment in analytics into your key for dependable business growth.

Optimizing your website for success has never been easier thanks to the power of the internet's number one analytics tool - Google Analytics. It is estimated that as much as 53% of all websites use the platform to reach their business goals.

While most users may be able to navigate Google Analytics at the elementary level, there are countless tools available for tracking goals, analyzing user behavior, and increasing your level of user engagement.

If you've had an opportunity to poke around the platform and are ready to take your experience to the next level, then continue and learn how to navigate Google analytics like a pro and start gaining an edge over your competition.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an analytics tool developed by Google to help users monitor and analyze their website traffic. It provides invaluable insights including the number of unique visitors, geographic locations, demographic information, time spent on individual pages, and traffic sources.

While other alternatives exist including Chartbeat and Semrush, Google Analytics is unquestionably the industry leader thanks to its accuracy and ease of use. Creating an account is also absolutely free.

However, a premium version of the tool does exist called Google Analytics 360. This subscription will cost businesses $150,000 a year for the additional reporting features and tools. Thankfully, unless you're managing a large-scale enterprise or corporation, the free version provides everything a website owner needs to have mastery over their domain.

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Why Should I Use Analytics for My Website?

Attempting to create and operate a successful website for your business is like attempting to travel to a foreign location without a map. Though it's technically possible for your journey to be a success, you will undoubtedly waste valuable time, money, and resources without a reliable guide pointing you in the right direction.

Google Analytics allows you to tag any material you create for marketing so that you can gather actionable information about your audience in real-time. If your analytics reporting determines that certain website pages have a high bounce rate, it's a sign that the content or layout of your page is low-quality and unengaging.

Demographic insights can tell you the age, gender, and average income level of those who most frequently visit your website. You can then utilize this information to create and optimizing future website content and marketing campaigns to capitalize on those visitors and create conversions.

Not only will Google Analytics automatically track all of this data and more automatically, but it also offers the ability to create countless custom goals and reporting so that you can tailor solutions that fit your business's unique needs.

How to Navigate Google Analytics Like a Pro?

Now that you understand the importance of having a website analytics tool on your side, it's time to take a look at how you can start improving your website reporting today.

1. Start Crawling and Indexing Your Site with Google Search Console

For those that are new to managing a website, the concept of web crawlers might be brand-new. Google Search Console is a tool that's separate from Google Analytics but is necessary if you want to gain reliable data from the latter.

Crawling is what a web crawler, also called a spider, performs to grab and index all of the information from all websites across the web. Search engines like Google use their crawler to index information along with its search algorithm. This is how the search engine can rank websites and provide you with the best search results possible.

You can manually submit the latest version of your website to Google Search Console so that it crawls and downloads the most recent information. This same tool will also help you in remedying existing issues with your sites such as URL structure, duplicate content, page speed, and mobile performance.

You can access Google Search Console here by logging into your existing Google account. From there, you will need to select the domain you wish to crawl and index. If you have yet to submit your domain to Google, you will need to verify ownership of the site before proceeding. You can add a new domain by clicking on + Add Property when searching for a property.

After completing that step, you can begin the process by clicking on Fetch as Google underneath a section titled Crawl. Make sure to do this for all versions of the site. After the Google Search Console finishes fetching data, be sure to index it.

If Google Search Console detects any issues with your site health, you will need to take steps to remedy each one. Failure to optimize your site in this regard will almost certainly cause any actions taken as a result of Google Analytics to be in vain.

You can also submit a sitemap to Google Search Console to potentially improve its ability to properly read and index your entire site. You can learn more about that topic here.

2. Implement Google Tag Manager to Track Your Marketing

Google Tag Manager is an essential feature within Google Analytics that allows you to easily track events on a given website page. This will provide you with a short code snippet that you can paste into the header and body of the page without needing to edit or modify any lines of code. Many modern website editors provide a field for you to paste this without ever needing to access the HTML.

The power of Google Tag Manager is the ability to sort captured data automatically so that it only reports the information you want to see. You can access GTM here.

While it can be easy to get overwhelmed with all of the tools and dashboards associated with Google Analytics, allowing them to work together harmoniously will give you the best results. In the Tag Manager, simply select the same domain you are managing through Google Analytics. Then, you can click the box that says New Tag to start tracking new events.

You can also find your existing tags by selecting Tags within the column on the left-hand side. Examples of events that you can track include conversions, completing a form, downloading a file, link clicks, video plays, scroll tracking, and much more. By aligning your business goals with the right events, you'll be able to know exactly how your site is performing and make adjustments as necessary.

Learning Google Tag Manager will not just be beneficial for your core website, but can benefit any additional campaigns you run when creating new landing pages or sales funnels.

3. Get Comfortable with All Types of Google Analytics Reporting

Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of reporting options so that you can keep your eyes on what’s happening with your site both in real-time and in the long term. Those primary types of reports include:

• Real-Time
• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

4. Real-Time Reporting in Google Analytics

Real-time reporting will provide insights regarding your web traffic each moment that it happens. This type of data allows you to utilize actionable data and make changes to your website and campaigns immediately. Real-time reporting allows you to review visitor locations, the origins of the web traffic, custom event goals, goal conversions, and what pages users are spending time visiting.

For all of these, you can view what active visitors are doing on your site at the moment or within the last half hour. Not only are the insights invaluable, but real-time reporting offers the added benefit of allowing you to catch errors in your campaign early. Whether there's an issue with your Google Tag Manager, your content, or a page loading correctly, you can solve the problem before it has a lasting impact on your marketing results.

• Audience Reporting

Audience reporting refers to any data that Google Analytics can determine about the types of users visiting your website. When multiple users happen to share similar attributes, you can consider that segmented group one type of audience. By observing the actions and behavior patterns of different types of audiences, you can determine which types of audiences are more worthwhile to pursue.

The Audience tab allows you to gain reporting based upon age, gender, interests, geographic location, behavior, technology, and device types. You'll be able to filter unique visitors from returning ones, determine which types of devices are being used to visit your site, and even compare your website's data with competitors in your industry.

Audience reporting data is invaluable as it allows you to tailor future campaigns to your audiences based on how they interact with your content. This makes Google Analytics one of your greatest allies in building remarketing campaigns that can help push buyers that are on the fence to become paying customers.

With audience reporting, however, it's important to note that while this data is valuable, it is ultimately a general assumption. There is no definitive way for analytics tools to know exactly why a visitor came to your site. You will still need to utilize strategies such as A/B testing to explore new ways of engaging with your audience. However, these insights give you the target you need to aim for rather than aiming in the dark.

• Acquisition Reporting

Acquisition reporting within Google Analytics allows you to take a deep dive into exactly how your website acquires visitors. You can access a snapshot of your traffic through the Overview subsection found underneath Acquisition.

This will show you the top channels used to access your domain whether it be through organic keyword searches, social media, or direct navigation. You can also easily view statistics such as bounce rate, average session length, or conversions for your various custom goals, which we will cover later in this article.

Your Acquisition Reporting is further segmented into closer looks at the following:

• Channels (The method used to access your site)
• All Traffic (The top traffic sources from all channels)
• All Referrals (Websites and social media links to your site)
• Campaigns (Visitors from ad campaigns using UTM parameters)
• Keywords (An analysis of keywords used for organic and paid search)
• Cost Analysis (The costs per session)
• Social (Activity from social media including referrals and conversions)
• SEO (Impressions, Clicks, Ranking, Clickthrough Rate, etc.)

The Acquisition reporting tab provides you with comprehensive data that can positively impact every aspect of your digital marketing. From optimizing on-page content to improving site health to improving your overall search rankings, Acquisition reporting through Google Analytics will allow you to operate your website like a professional.

While all of Google Analytics' tools will improve your game, spend time getting familiar with each column and metric available in this section of the platform. These insights will allow you to create highly personalized campaigns and advertisements that push for better conversion rates than your initial discovery efforts.

• Behavior Reporting

The Behavior Reporting section is invaluable for learning exactly how your visitors spend time on your website. This will not only cover the basics such as time spent but will demonstrate the behavior flow of your visitors.

Behavior flow is a term used to describe how a visitor moves from one page to the next on a website. An example of a behavior flow would be as follows:

Home Page > Services Page (2nd Interaction) > Service A Page (3rd Interaction) > Contact Page (4th) Interaction

If significant portions of our audience follow this behavior flow, we can deduce that something about our content is driving visitors to learn more about a specific service before inquiring how to contact the business. We could then look into link clicks or form submissions within our events to determine if any further action was taken beyond this page navigation.

Gaining a visualization of your audience's behavior flow can give you a greater understanding of how your content impacts the user's choices. This is tremendously advantageous when you are attempting to funnel users to specific sections or your site to trigger specific events or goals.

Behavior reporting will also give insights such as time spent or bounce rate for every page. If users are spending more time on a page, it's a great sign that our content is effective and keeping audiences engaged. To contrast this, a high bounce rate on a page means that we need to improve the content on a page to avoid losing visitors at that point in the sales process.

Finally, Google Analytics also features an Event Flow visualization that can help you track a visitor's journey when engaging with a flow of events as opposed to pages. This is a highly important tool if you happen to be running a campaign on your site that requires users to participate in events within a sequence. A multi-page form would be an example of this as it includes engaging with form fields, following links, and submitting the data upon completion.

When you gain a mastery level of knowledge over your audience, you can cater your website and campaigns to suit their needs while still reaching your goals.

• Conversions Reporting

The point of Conversions Reporting is to help you determine if and how your website is helping you to drive conversions. A conversion can simply be a sale (the end goal) or any other custom, predefined goal you set for your website.

Not unlike the behavior and event flows, Conversions features reports that can help you visualize your goal path and the actions users take on their journey to fulfilling that goal.

The most common strategy for tracking goals is to push users to a confirmation page any time they complete a goal (making a purchase, completing a form, etc.). In your Conversions reporting, that page will display a high goal success rate. However, Google Analytics allows you to create as many steps in that goal as you would like so that you can track performance at each step and learn when users abandon the conversion. An example of a multi-step conversion might look like this:

Add to Cart (Step 1) > Enter Shipping Information (Step 2) > Enter Payment & Billing Details (Step 3) > Review Your Checkout Info (Step 4) > Complete Purchase (Goal)

As a general rule, it's easier to drive conversions with as few steps as possible. However, this is not always possible. With Conversions reporting, you not only track when users reach the finish line but can count your wins at each step. If large numbers of users are abandoning the process as step 3, for example, there may be ways we need to improve that part of the process.

Familiarize yourself with Conversion reports to help guide you in achieving your various business goals. In this way, Google Analytics can become your greatest ally when it comes to increasing your sales.

5. Set Up Your Custom Goals in Google Analytics

Now that you've gained familiarity with the wealth of reporting options available, it's time to set up your own custom goals in Google Analytics. This elevates your data from simply being informative and helps you to visualize how your business goals and needs match up with how visitors engage with your brand.

As we briefly described above, a goal can be an act of any kind that you wish for a user to perform when visiting your website. You can begin the process of creating custom goals by navigating to Admin > All Website Data > Goals.

Google Analytics features an intuitive setup process that walks you through the goal creation process step-by-step. It even features pre-built templates for common goals that other Google Analytics users frequently employ. These templated goals include actions like payments, account creation, contact inquiries, or media plays. If one of these suits your needs, you can start there. Otherwise, go to the bottom and click Custom.

Next, you’ll need to select the type of goal you want to set up within your Google Analytics account. Your goal will fall under one of four umbrella categories including:

• Destination (Track when a user arrives at a designated place on your site)
• Visit Duration (Set a goal for how long you wish for a user session to be)
• Pages Visited Per Session (Set a goal for how many pages you want a user to interact with)
• Events (Assign a specific action as an event and track every time a user performs it)

It may take testing for you to create custom goals that accurately define what you need for a user to accomplish. With the help of all of the reporting options available, your initial goals may provide insight into what you need to do when creating new goals, so that you can further optimize website performance.

Remember from above that you can track all of this data in real-time, make corrections on the fly, and gain a horde of in-depth data that can help to push conversions further. When using Google Analytics, you set your goals, watch how the data lines up with your goals, and continuously optimize aspects of your website and campaigns to keep pushing the numbers in your favor.

6. Don't Forget About the Demographics and Interest Reports

Finally, you should know that Google Analytics offers Demographics and Interests Reports that can further improve your insights about your visitors. However, this feature must be manually enabled to take effect. To do this, find the Audience while selecting your domain. Then click on Demographics > Overview. You can then find a blue button that to click that says Enable.

After this, you're all set. This process is not instantaneous, and it may take several days for your new data to populate in the dashboard.

This reporting feature will show you valuable personal data regarding the audience that is visiting your website. However, a key feature is that it also shows the other interests that these users have that may or may not be related to your brand. The more well-rounded the visualization of your potential customers is, the better equipped you are to create campaigns tailored to their wants and needs.

7. Finally, Track What You Want with Custom Reports

If there's anything left to learn from what Google Analytics has to offer, it's that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every business. For this reason, Google Analytics also offers you the ability to create customized reports to track the metrics most critical to your unique goals and success.

To create a custom report within Google Analytics, find the Customization section within the left-hand column. Then, click on Custom Reports underneath it. You can create new reports by clicking on + New Custom Report and even categorize them by clicking + New Category. There are four major types of custom reports, including:

• Explorer (A line graph with a data table – the basic report you should be familiar with now)
• Flat Table (A general table that allows you to custom sort your columns and rows)
• Map Overlay (Contains a geographic map that’s color-coded to represent key metrics)
• Funnel (Generate a graph of your funnel steps and see which were completed by users and which were not)

You can also take advantage of the Google Solutions Gallery by clicking on Import from Gallery. This allows you to browse and select countless custom reports generated by other business owners and marketers like yourself. While these custom reports were made by the user for their needs, you may find other like-minded individuals who already created exactly what you need.

Custom reporting exists primarily due to the sheer amount of data available within Google Analytics. While all of it is extremely valuable, it only is so in the correct circumstances. By setting up a custom report that better aligns with your business goals, you can save countless hours by sorting out that data automatically and capturing exactly what you and your partners need to see. This allows you to examine the data with purpose, rather than manually clicking through the data each week or each month.

Navigate Google Analytics Like a Pro for Website and Marketing Success!

Google Analytics dominates the market for website analytics for great reason. For zero cost, you have access to countless intuitive tools and reporting features that can automatically track exactly what happens on your website, how your audience engages, and then use that data to improve in every area.

The moderate time investment of learning Google Analytics is worthwhile as it can single-handedly be the deciding factor in making better content for your website and improving steps on your website to achieve more conversions. You can also quickly sort that data by creating custom goals and custom reports so that you can capture and use that information with a purpose.

In addition to setting up your Google Analytics account, don't forget to crawl and index your website with Google Search Console to improve your site health. Failure to do so will completely undermine any marketing efforts taken with the help of this incredible tool. Also, be sure to set up your Google Tag Manager on any site where marketing actions are taken so that you can more easily track your events and conversions.

Now that you're familiar with everything that Google Analytics has to offer, the only thing left is to analyze your domain and start testing these features for yourself. With time and application, Google Analytics will become a critical ally for your business success just as it has been for countless others to date.

Though Google Analytics (GA) can be a nightmare for a novice, if you perform website audits and implement effective technical SEO, it can be the most reliable and effective tool.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics provides an in-depth assessment of a website or app's performance. Its ability to accurately analyze vast incoming traffic data makes it indispensable for marketers who mean business. Google Analytics (GA) integrates with Google's various marketing and advertising platforms, such as Google search console and Google ads.

There are several other tools with similar features. But since GA offers actionable in-depth reports and insights, it is most suitable for a data-driven marketing environment. This blog is an introductory guide to using GA. We discuss the essentials ā setting up your GA account, the various GA dimensions, metrics, GA audience, segments, and reports, and how to navigate through it all.

Is Google Analytics Free?

Google Analytics offers a free version with most of the features a small or medium-sized business might need. However, if you have a large enterprise, you should opt for the premium version ā Analytics 360. It has many advanced features such as attribution modeling, advanced funnel reporting, and roll-up reporting. But it has a high subscription fee. Analytics 360 starts at $150,000 annually.

How to Set Up Google Analytics?

Like other Google products, to set up GA, you need to create a Google account. You then need to register for Analytics. Usually, it has three layers.

• Organization: Bigger businesses run many accounts under an umbrella account known as an “organization.” For example, Microsoft can run many GA accounts, but the organization will remain the same, i.e., Microsoft. It’s optional to choose.
• Account(s): Various users can access GA using their accounts. You can assign up to 50 properties, i.e., websites or apps, to one account.
• Views: There can be two views per property — one with no configuration, the other with a filter to exclude any traffic from your own company, bots, and spam.

Here's how you can set up your Google Analytics account:

1. Create a Google account: Go to google.com/analytics and click on Sign in to Analytics

Begin with creating or signing into your current GA account.

2. Add the website's name and enter additional relevant information in setting up your property field

Create and name your property and enter additional relevant information such as industry, timezone, etc. You can also choose an account to link this property to.

3. Add a view to the propertyĀ

Go to the property, create a view from the menu, name it, select the typeāweb or app, and fill in other necessary information. A property can have up to 25 views.

4. Add your tracking code to your website's <head> section

When creating a property, you need a unique ID and a global site tag to track and collect data. You can paste your global site tag on each webpage you want to "track." Place it right after the opening <head> tag. You'll also have to disclose what type of website it is, i.e., dynamic or static. It will help you to set up the data collection accordingly. For more information on how to install the Google Analytics tracking code, click here.

5. Verify if the analytics code is working on your website

Open the website to check real-time reports. It will show at least one visitor ā that's you; it means your code is working.

Do you need to add the Google Analytics tracking code to every page?

You don't need to add the code to every page of your website. If the website is big, all you need to do is insert the tag to every page template in the header module, and it will apply to all the pages. If you have two-page types, insert the code into two separate header modules, and it will apply to the rest of the pages.

Google Analytics Dimensions and Metrics

To understand and use GA efficiently, you need to be familiar with its dimensions and metrics. Dimensions are standard variables such as browser, location, landing page, device, and customer type. Meanwhile, metrics are quantitative variables such as sessions, page views, conversions, bounce rate, and session duration. The GA reporting format has dimensions as rows and metrics as columns.

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

You can create custom dimensions and metrics using Analytics data and non-Analytics data. You can know more about user behavior and the relationship between engagement and metrics such as pages per session and conversions by creating the following three dimensions:

• Advocate: User who shared your content on social (stage 1 in the sales funnel)
• Subscriber: User who subscribed to your newsletter (stage 2 in the sales funnel)
• Customer: User who paid for premium access (stage 3 in the sales funnel)

What's a Google Analytics Audience?

An audience is a group of people with a common element such as region or age group. Google Analytics provides a few built-in audiences and insights on them based on available visitor data. GA also gives the option to create custom audiences. For example, if your target consumer group is female millennials living in Florida, you can easily make a custom audience that includes female visitors from Florida aged between 23 and 35.

Now you need to create a new audience segment. You can use its data for your reports.

What's an Audience Segment in Google Analytics?

When your data is divided into small chunks, each set is called a segment. You can create segments based on different factors such as users, sessions, and hits.

• Users: Someone who has purchased from your site or has signed up for a program or service.
• Sessions: It includes categorization based on the task performed on a website—for example, all sessions when the user viewed a product page.
• Hits: This segment reveals all the website “hits” of a specific event. For example, you can determine all the “hits” of an instant purchase or an addition to the shopping cart.

Like “audiences,” Google Analytics also allows you to fetch data using various “segments,” which can sometimes be highly granular. It means that you can further split the data according to even more specific variables. A report can use a maximum of four segments at a time.

What are the Different Types of Reports in Google Analytics?

Reporting can be a bit overwhelming in Google Analytics as there are numerous options to choose from. Here are the eight major and very important types of reports and their variations that Google Analytics can generate for you:

1. Google Analytics Real-Time Report

It gives you real-time insights into the website's traffic data. It helps you determine the number of visitors and the particular pages they're visiting. This report also tells you the origin of the traffic as well as location data.

However, real-time reports offer little value for strategy-building. But you can use them to track how much traffic you're getting from a new social media or blog post and gauge the success of a sales event.

2. Google Analytics Audience Report

It carries much more weight than a real-time report. It's essential to review it a few times every week to assess your website's performance accurately.

You’ll be able to find “Audiences” below “Overview.” There are also expandable menus for various metrics such as “Behavior,” “Interests,” and “Demographics.” The best way to learn is to explore each of them and see how they can help you assess the traffic.

3. Google Analytics Active Users Report

“Active users” aren’t the users who are currently on your website. It refers to users who visited your website the previous day and remained active for some time.

You can use this report to analyze data in various ways to make informed business decisions. For example, if your traffic includes more one-day users than repeat visitors, you might be struggling with retention. When visitors don't come back to your site or app ā this report can help you find out why.

4. Customer Lifetime Value Report

As a marketer, you are probably familiar with the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and how it's calculated.

The CLV report tells you how much value each customer is bringing to your business. You can also evaluate the lifetime value of customers acquired from paid advertising compared to those attracted through organic search. You can use this information to decide which revenue channels deserve more attention. It's important to note that the lifetime value is measured only for 90 days.

5. Google Analytics Cohort Report

Cohort analysis is popularly seen as “the single most powerful report in GA.” It groups customers by a common characteristic, such as acquisition date — the day someone first visited your website.

You can find the cohort type, which by default is the acquisition date in GA, in the left-hand column. It is further split by cohort size into the day, week, or month.

The first row contains information about all the customers in that cohort. The rows below show the activity on that day, week, or month. The cohort report will tell you how many campaign goals have been achieved during a specific date range. It also includes additional details such as the customer acquisition date and goal completion date.

6. Google Analytics Acquisition Report

It provides traffic analysis by source. It can be direct, organic, referral, social, email, and paid search.

Go to “All Traffic” on the left column, click on “Channels,” and select a category to see the projections associated with that source.

If you want to see the report in graphics format, click on “Treemaps” under “All Traffic.”

GA also informs you which channel is sending you more referral traffic, so you can tweak your strategy and focus your marketing efforts accordingly. Apart from the traffic source, GA also tells you which landing pages on your website are receiving referral traffic.

7. Google Analytics Behavior Report

The behavior reports given by Google Analytics are immensely useful for marketers. They reveal what actions your visitors take when visiting your website, including the pages they visit. You can obtain these reports from the menu on your Google Analytics dashboard's left sidebar, where you will find various sections and tools.

Site Content

This report helps you audit and update your website content based on the performance of web pages, blog posts, and landing pages.

All Pages

It gives you a page-wise report on the traffic and insights about traffic fluctuations, if any, over a specific period. You can get it by going to Site Content > All Pages. It will also allow you to compare page views between different URLs. If you add a Page Title, you will see each page's name alongside its URL.

Content Drilldown

This report shows your site's structure at the subdomain and subfolder levels. If you have a highly complex website, this report can be tremendously helpful.

Landing Pages

Landing pages report tells you how a visitor first interacted with your website. It informs you of the sources (direct, organic, paid, social) that got visitors to the landing pages. You can add "source" as a secondary dimension. It displays the web pages as seen on smartphones and tablets to help you manage the traffic from portable devices.

Exit Pages Report

It shows the last page a visitor saw before leaving your site.

In addition to these reports, there are several others too:

• Site speed report: It gives information about how quickly your site loads. It also includes a site speed page timings report, which provides a URL’s average page-loading time.

• Site search report: It provides critical information about every website view, including usage, sessions, and search terms used. You can use it for keyword research.

• Events report: It provides information about user interactions with content. To get this report, you need to add a code to your website that tracks the actions you’re interested in.

8. Google Analytics Conversion Reports

Every website has one or more objectives for the visitors. For example, an eCommerce site owner may want its visitors to sign up for its newsletter, create a user account, and/or complete the purchase.

Media companies want visitors to spend as much time on their site as possible to maximize ad revenue. Similarly, B2B websites wish visitors to download educational material such as eBooks or reports or sign up for a webinar. With GA, you can measure all these objectives and do much more.

These goals are called conversions. There are four major types of goal-oriented metrics:

• Destination: You can use it when the goal is to reach a specific page, such as a product page or a thank you page.
• Event: It’s when the goal is to watch a video or share a piece of content on social media.
• Duration: This one is when the goal is to stretch a user’s session beyond a preset period.
• Pages per session: You can use it when the goal is to make a user visit specific pages per session.

Once you've decided on the goals, follow these tips to create, edit and share them:

Overview

If you want to assess your overall goal-wise performance, go to “Overview” and get a report. To drive maximum value from it, you should compare date ranges and/or look at segment-wise goal completions.

Goal URLs Report

You must know where a goal was achieved. For example, if there are newsletter subscription opt-ins on three different pages, the goal URLs report will tell you the visitor signed up for the subscription on which page.

Funnel Visualization Report

It allows you to see sequential goals to help you visualize your sales funnel.

In a sales funnel, a customer journey has various stages and corresponding goals.

The first goal: Visitor visited the product listing page

The “goal before checkout”: Visitor added a product to the shopping cart

The “previous goal” just before the purchase: Visitor clicked “checkout”

The last goal (can be): Visitor arrived at the order confirmation page

Try to determine why visitors are leaving at various stages to increase the conversion rate. For instance, if most users leave the session during checkout, you can alter the process to let them check out as a guest without creating an account. You can also take other measures to lower the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Goal Flow

It provides you with the sessions that led to the final goal. However, in Goal Flow, it doesn't matter if the user completed a particular goal. It shares loopbacks and includes sessions when a user moves back to a previous page or refreshes the current page. It helps evaluate various segments to compare conversion rates.

Smart Goals

This report is for marketers who use Google Ads but don't measure conversions. AI and machine learning help identify the "best" sessions or those with the highest probability of generating conversions. Google then uses them to make Smart Goals. You can use Smart Goals in Google Ads to optimize your advertising performance.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a valuable and multi-feature tool that any business can use to get actionable data. If used smartly, it can substantially boost your website's performance.Ā  There is a lot of information in this article, and you can always come back to learn sophisticated techniques for deeper insights. We wish you good luck on your journey with Google's complex and potent analytical weapon ā Google Analytics.