How to get the most out of Google Analytics

If you have a website for marketing purposes, you should be using a tool like Google Analytics (GA) to guide that entire investment. GA is a powerful service that combines information and statistics from Google’s search engine with analytics tools to assess and optimise your business’s online marketing spend.

While understanding and optimising how your marketing pounds and dollars are allocated is always good practice, when the shadow of recession looms firms must inevitably work harder to win customers. Therefore knowing where your customers come from and which are the most valuable becomes essential for business continuity, let alone growth.

To achieve this commercial goal, QuantSpark regularly works with clients to unearth insights from their marketing data that drive revenue and cost optimisation. Our teams can work end to end, ensuring our clients are collecting the correct data to support their objectives, integrating GA with their systems and structuring models correctly.

How does it work?

Organisations can create insights from two sets of data: user acquisition (data about users before they visit your site) and user behaviour (data about users while they’re interacting with your site). These insights can range from characteristics such as age, gender, and interests to how long they spend on your website in each session.

Google Analytics outputs this data to a set of visualisations and charts to make it easier for the user to understand and interpret the information. The tool provides 20 custom dimensions including session ID, client ID, and user ID.

Although custom visualisations may be created using these dimensions, as with many similar analytics tools much of this data is typically high-level information which alone doesn’t always provide the quality of insight that is needed to drive business decisions.

How does QuantSpark use Google Analytics?

Our approach combines the data GA provides with other sources to build a more complete picture of how our clients’ customers interact with their business. For example:

• We can combine GA user IDs with transaction history data, linking them with encoded emails to ensure the purchase is connected with the right customer.
• We can combine session data with a client’s marketing data, such as channel key words or advertising channels to attribute customers and their purchases to specific initiatives – allowing our clients to accurately assess the impact and ROI of their marketing.
• We can use client and user ID to find repeat sessions from different customers, understand how they interact with the website, and ultimately identify their ‘first click’ where they first engage with your site, and their ‘last click’ which represents the very last channel they interacted with before making a purchase.