Get to Know Your Customers
Understanding your customers, current or future, can be critical to your online success. Whether it's your website, social media platform, or one of the many other business platforms knowledge about the people that interact with your online business, who they are, what actions they take, and whether they book an appointment or buy a product helps you identify underperforming content and allows you to optimize your online business and improve sales.
Google Analytics is not limited to tracking information from your website. You can connect your Google Search Console account to gain additional in-depth knowledge of your website performance on organic search and what keywords are used when you showing up in search results.
Understanding your customers: where they are, how long they visit your website, how many pages they view, whether they purchase something or not, is critical to the success of your online business. This information allows you to determine what works and where you need to adapt and improve.
Need to know more? If you have a Gmail account, you can check out Google's free Analytics account and see the wealth of information that's available.
You can also connect your Google Ads account to Google Analytics for additional metrics on your ad performance.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an awesome free service that tracks customer activity on your website or web apps.
All these platforms have separate analytics solutions for you to better understand your engagement with people on these platforms.
You can view the information captured for your business on each platform, though sometimes not all information captured is displayed on the platform solution.
It can also be challenging and time-consuming to login to each platform to review reporting from each platform. If only there was a better solution.....
Platform Analytics
Information about website visitors, organic search, and ad performance is great but your business is also represented on other platforms, business and social.
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a great tool to help visualize analytics data from your website, organic search, and other platforms where you have a business presence.
Google Data Studio is a free service, though to truly gain the maximum benefits from the tool you need to connect data from all your online sources for one-stop reporting.
With all your analytics data in one location, you can now review and compare your business performance and customer connection across all platforms providing you with a holistic view of your online business.
Have a look at the examples I've created of Google Data Studio reports that I could build for your business. These examples should give you a general idea of the possibilities. Reporting for your business would be specific to your business information and business needs.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console has some great information on how your business ranks for organic searches, what search terms people use, and what your click-through-rate (CTR or the number of times your business showed up in search results and someone clicked your link). Connecting Google Search Console to Google Data Studio allows you to view this information in a way that makes sense to you. You can also include charts and filtering not available in Google Search Console.
Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is a great way to improve the online presence of your business. Google Business Profile Insights provides you with information on when your business shows in Google Search results and when people click buttons or posts on your Google Business Profile listing. Importing this data into Google Data Studio allows you to better understand when people view your business listing and how they engage with you.
Facebook / Instagram
Both Facebook and Instagram may be important channels to promote your business and engage your audience. Facebook Business Suite provides you with an easy way to manage your posts and ads to both channels from one tool. Insights from Facebook Business Suite allow you to compare your audience, reach, and post engagement between the channels, providing you with a greater understand of where to focus your attention to improve market penetration.
Website Statistics
Google Analytics has all sorts of information, though sometimes it's hard to get a holistic view due to data being spread out over multiple reports. Google Data Studio provides a powerful way of consolidating that information and presenting it to you in a visually impressive manner.
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These report examples are using data from the Google Analytics demo account. The summary report provides information and insights on website visitors, while the page-level report provides detailed information about each webpage.
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If you've got an eCommerce site, detailed information on sales, revenue, and visitor activities is available, including the ability to drill down by geolocation, how visitors got to the site (search, ads, etc.) and whether they are repeat buyers or not.