Week 15: Google Analytics for Business

Google Analytics is a powerful and useful tool to track information about a website.  It is a means to gain insight about all current and potential customers, understand your web traffic and the great thing is that it is a free tool!

The features that Fily Willy Auto Care will use in the future are: 

1. Social Media Performance:  Google Analytics collects data for reports to see social media referrals and how the visitors interact with the website.  One can determine which social media is referring by setting up advanced segments based on keyword source, e.g. Twitter, Facebook.  This metric would be checked regularly to so that we can evaluate where resources should be focused for improvement, enhancements and terminate (or deactivate account for) under-performing social media accounts.

2. Custom Campaigns: This Google Analytics feature is useful to measure the efficacy of campaigns.  For example, we intend to run a summer A/C special for vehicles, we would create UTM parameters that would track to unique landing pages and from there, conversions (submitting contact information).  From Google's Q&A section:

"By adding campaign parameters to the destination URLs you use in your ad campaigns, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of those campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. For example, your Summer Sale campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you're running the campaign in several different social apps, you want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue. Or if you're running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective." (REF: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863)

It is imperative to keep a watchful eye on campaigns.  Campaigns whether it be through email, website referrals or social media will help create a better understanding of what interests customers and drives them further to engagement or conversion.  Again, this data can offer ROI on resources spent creating marketing campaigns for our business.

3. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant for Fily Willy Auto Care: number of visitors, returning visitors, organic traffic, page views, traffic from campaigns and sources.  KPIs will help Fily Willy Auto Care understand where traffic is emanating from.  Since we are not an e-commerce business, creating conversion funnels and the like are unnecessary.  Our (future) website will be to create brand awareness and an information hub for any campaigns, location information, reviews, thus more of an informational site.

4.  Configuring Goals:  One of the most important uses of GA for our business are goals.   For us, submitting contact information and generating a lead from the website is a measurable goal.  We would check this frequently to measure the success of a social media or email marketing campaign.  

Successfully using GA requires careful planning and a fundamental understanding of how it works.  Since we do not anticipate a large volume of visitors (< 1K/month), we need to be mindful of how interpretations can be skewed with smaller numbers.  It is imperative to install the tracking code properly, be aware of bots, and mindful of spam traffic.  Overall, a great tool to help shape business models and decisions, but definitely not the sole resource of all our analytics.