FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL MARKETING: MODULE 22/26

Find success with analytics

Analytics tools provide loads of data, but they don’t always give easy answers.
Dive a little deeper into web analytics, and you'll soon be able to measure organic
search analytics, understand SEM data and master segmentation techniques.

1. Web analytics and organic search

Key Learnings
Web analytics is great for measuring all kinds of traffic to your site, including
traffic from organic search results. But you can do much more than just count up
your website visitors. In this video, you'll learn: * what kinds of data web analytics
can give you about search traffic * how to evaluate trends in your search traffic *
how to discover opportunities to make your website more relevant to searchers.

Video Transcript
Hi! Are you curious about how you can use web analytics tools to see how you’re
performing in organic search results? In this video, we’ll touch on monitoring
organic search traffic, using data to gain valuable insights about how your site is
evaluated by search engines, and how you can troubleshoot SEO issues uncovered
by analytics.
OK, let’s jump in.
Search engines are an important source of traffic for most websites. In fact,
they’re very often the single biggest source of traffic to a business’s website. But
are you getting more or less of that traffic from search engines over time? What
do all of those searchers actually do after they get to your website? And most
importantly, how can you improve your website to make sure the search engines
are sending you people who are interested in your products and services?
If you’re thinking that web analytics has the answers to these questions, you’re
spot on.
No matter which web analytics tool you’re using, you’ll be able to monitor how
many visitors are coming to your website from organic search results from the
different search engines. If you’re paying an agency or consultant to maintain your
website for you, you should ask them for access to your website’s analytics data.
Once you’ve got access to that data, one of the first things you’ll want to check out
is how your traffic from search engines is trending over time. If you’re getting more
visitors from search engines, that’s great. But, if your traffic is trailing off, you’ve
probably got some work to do. Either way - before you can make any decisions,
you’ll need to know the “why”, and that means we need to dig deeper.
If you’re using Google Analytics as your web analytics tool, you can dig deeper by
learning which keywords people are typing into Google before they reached your
website. That data doesn’t necessarily come from the analytics tool itself, but
because Google Analytics can integrate data from Google Search Console, you get
to see that kind of information.
Remember our example of the guesthouse? You might see that people are
searching for things you wouldn’t have expected, like “luxury guest houses in
Glasgow” or “cheap Glasgow bed and breakfast” to find your website. This can
help you get a sense of what your visitors are really looking for, and you can
respond to that by building the right content and pages to fit their needs.
You’d also be able to see whether you’re getting more or fewer visitors from any
given keyword theme, as well as whether or not visits to those pages end up with
actual bookings.
Let’s say you’re noticing that you used to be getting more traffic for a certain
search term, but that traffic has been gradually declining. What can you do to turn
things around? Well, you might start by taking a look at some of the content on
your site. How can you ensure that your content is as relevant as possible to users
who are looking for that luxury guest house? Could you rewrite some of your text
to focus on the fact that you’ve got a high-end guest house? Remember, you’re not
re-working your content to suit a search engine. You’re working on it to make it
match your existing business better. And to make it as relevant and useful as
possible to people who are searching for luxury guest houses. If you want to know
even more about optimizing your pages, check out some of the other videos on
SEO.
Now, what about the opposite scenario? Maybe you’ve found that you’re getting
more traffic from people searching for keywords around that luxury guest house
theme. That’s great - but how can you build on that? Again, you want to focus on
what’s relevant to the people who are searching. What are some of the exclusive,
high-end features of your guest house? Have you included content on your website
that talks about your gourmet breakfast? The fancy cocktails you’re offering on
Saturday afternoon?
Adding more useful content about the luxury aspects of the guest house could
help search engines point more relevant users to your website.
If you’ve invested some time in improving your content, you’ll want to know what
the impact is, and web analytics can show you this. If you’re expecting your
content to be more relevant to people searching for luxury guest houses, Google
Analytics can show you whether that effort is translating into more visitors
reaching your website. Pretty smart, huh?
So far, we’ve been focusing on analyzing the amount of traffic, or visitors, that are
reaching your website after searching. That’s really important. But keep in mind
that even more important than the amount of traffic you’re getting is the quality of
the traffic that you’re getting.
After all, what’s the use of attracting loads of people to your website if nobody’s
going to book a stay at your guest house? Remember, analytics doesn’t just tell
you where people are coming from, it also tracks what they do on the website.
So take a look at the themes that are driving conversions on your goals, as well as
visits. If all this work on luxury themes has got you more traffic, but people aren’t
engaging with your content, they’re not signing up for your email newsletter, and
they’re not reserving their rooms, you may want to investigate why, or even
consider shifting your focus somewhere else.
Web analytics can be a great tool for your SEO efforts, helping you measure how
much traffic you’re getting from search engines, where you might be able to make
improvements, and the impact of changes you’re making to your website.
So if you’re focused on SEO, put on that analysis hat and start digging into your
data!

2. Tools to measure SEM

Key Learnings
When it comes to SEM, you’re paying real money for every click that brings visitors
to your website. Here’s how you can use web analytics to make sure you’re getting
the most out of your investment. We’ll look at: * which keywords are paying for
themselves * how to understand which ads are working * how to use analytics to
help you bid smarter.

Video Transcript
Hey. It’s time to talk about using analytics to get the most out of your Search
Engine Marketing, or SEM, campaigns.
We’re going to look at how you can use analytics to figure out which keywords are
the best ones for you to bid on, how to tailor your ads to make them more
effective, and how to decide how much to bid for the spots that are the most
cost-effective for you.
Let’s get started. With search engine marketing, you’re spending money. The good
news is, with analytics you can track what you spent where, and understand where
it was spent most effectively.
Remember that guesthouse we’ve been talking about? Well let’s take this a bit
further and pretend that it offers three themed rooms: King Arthur, Modern
Romance and Football Fanatic. To promote each of these, let’s say you decide to
run separate search campaigns with the goal of getting people to visit your
website and take a video tour of one of these rooms.
Business is pretty good, but you’d like to take it to the next level.
With an analytics tool, you can check the keywords you’re using for each of your
campaigns, and immediately see which are the most effective.
Let’s say you’re looking at your “Modern Romance” campaign. You notice that
when your keywords, ‘romantic guesthouse’ and ‘guesthouse for a romantic
weekend’ were used, the visitor took a video tour of that room about 5% of the
time. This is known as a 5% “conversion rate” for the goal of taking the video tour.
But, when people search for keywords like ‘luxury romantic guest house’ or
‘luxurious romantic guest house’ the conversion rate drops to only 1%.
You’ve just found something you can improve, and there are lots of ways you
might choose to do it.
First, you might look at the relevant pages on your website and see if there are
changes you could make.
Take a look at all your luxury adverts and test some different messages that might
really highlight either the video tour itself, or the luxury aspects of the guest house.
Whatever you decide to do, the key is that you’ll still be tracking what happens
after you make your changes, and that means you’ll be able to see if your fixes
raise that conversion rate from 1% to something better!
That covers a few different ways you can measure the keywords you’re bidding on,
but that’s just one part of it. Analytics can also help you understand the impact of
the actual ads you’re running.
You know that you want to write ads that are clear and compelling to the user, but
ultimately, those users will decide what clear and compelling means to them. And
that’s where analytics can help.
Sticking with this Modern Romance campaign, let’s say you have two different ads
with two different headlines. One reads “Lockhart House” and the other reads
“Romantic Weekend Accommodation”.
Analytics tools can show you how these compare, side by side. You can see which
one is more likely to get a click and send someone to your site, and which one is
more likely to get the visitor to take that video tour. This will tell you which one you
should be using. And you can even use the insights you learn here across other
campaigns and other areas of your website!
Last, analytics tools can help you understand just how much you should be
bidding for ads, to make sure you’re getting a good return on your SEM
investments.
By using Google Analytics, which integrates deeply with Google Ads, you can see
the keywords and ads driving people to your website and what they do when they
get there, but you can also see quite a bit more. For example, how much you had
to pay for each of those clicks, and how high up on the results page your bids put
your ads. This gives you a lot of clarity into both what you’re getting for your
investment as well as if it makes sense for you to bid higher or lower, to reach
different positions that work for your business.
Let’s say you’re not the only guesthouse in town, and you’ve got some competition
from “Stuart’s Guest House”. You might see that when you bid enough to out-do
Stuart and your ad is in the top spot, it results in a conversion rate of 2%.
But, if you keep digging, your analytics tool might also tell you that when you bid
lower and end up underneath Stuart, you get a little less traffic, but your
conversion rate jumps up to 4%!
Of course, the ideal position and bid for you will depend on lots of things, and you
might find that it’s better to be higher or better to be lower, but the key is that by
using analytics, you’ll know exactly where you perform the best, and that means
you’ll be getting more out of your investment than your competition.
Whether you’re analyzing your keywords, your ads, or how you’re bidding in your
campaigns, analytics tools are essential to get the most out of your SEM
investments. So before you make another update to your campaigns, make sure
you drive those decisions with data!

3. Breaking down your data for insights

Key Learnings
Analytics tools provide loads of data, but they don’t always give easy answers. To
understand why things are happening differently for different groups, you can use
a simple technique called segmentation. Here you’ll learn: * what segmentation is
* why it’s valuable * how to do it.

Video Transcript
Hey! In this video we’re going to take a look at a web analytics technique called
“segmentation.”
Segmentation helps you break down and understand the data you get from web
analytics in smaller chunks to help you get more insights and improve your
website’s performance.
Let’s go back to the guesthouse example, where one of your goals is to get people
to book a room at the guesthouse.
If you use your web analytics tool and look at your high level data, you might learn
that only 3% of all your website visitors are indeed signing up.
To understand this a little better, you can use segmentation to break down all
those visitors by different groupings.
First, let’s break it down by geographic segments, starting with country. As it turns
out, when we look at our visitors by where they live, there are some big differences
in whether or not they book a room, and that makes sense.
People in the UK, for example, represent a big percentage of our visitors, and
they’re converting at 6%, which is twice the average rate! When we look at visitors
from the US, though, we see a fair bit of traffic, but a really low conversion rate of
1%. Immediately, you’ve got a good idea: adding a bit of content tailored to
American visitors could help you get more bookings. For example, adding some
information about the best ways to get to the guesthouse after landing at
Heathrow would help.
Let’s dive deeper. We’ll break down the UK segment even further into specific
cities.
Here, we can see that London and Leeds stand out as more likely to make a
reservation. Perhaps running some local advertising campaigns in those cities
could help you get more bookings.
So what’s the big deal with segmentation? Well, as you’re starting to see,
segmentation gives you some insights you can action.
Fun, right? Let’s back up and segment by something different. How about the ways
people are getting to our website.
This can help us answer questions like: “Are people who come from social media
more likely to book a room?”
When you break down your visitors by where they came from, you can see the
differences between your organic search traffic, paid search traffic, social media
traffic, and more.
And this can help you decide where you want to invest your time and resources as
you build up your digital marketing campaigns across lots of different channels.
Let’s do one more. This time, we’ll chop up our visitors by the kind of device they’re
using, and we’ll be able to see any differences between things like desktop
computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Here we get more valuable information. People on computers and tablets are
booking to the tune of 4%. But people on smartphones almost never make a
reservation.
To improve things, you could work on making your website more mobile-friendly or
see if there are issues with how your online booking process is working on
smartphones that you can fix.
And that might help increase the number of bookings that you’re getting - another
impactful insight!
So that’s segmentation. Of course, you can slice and dice by just about anything
that piques your curiosity, but the general idea is this: break things down into
smaller groups and find insights that can help you figure out how to improve.
So dive in, start segmenting, and see what kinds of answers you can find!