The first thing you need to remember is that your domain is the backbone of your digital brand. To effectively understand and answer questions about whether or not your marketing tactics are successful, you need to set up a measurement tracking system. The answer is in the data. This post will help you learn how to use Google Analytics for marketing measurement.
Always Start with Your Goals
What are your marketing goals? What are your company goals? Or, what are the goals for the campaign? Everything you do on your website should have a goal. Once you understand your goals, you can begin to measure success. Define the goals in analytics via the admin section. It’s important that goals are set up correctly so that the tracking is meaningful.
Let’s say your goal is to collect leads via the contact us form on your website. The easiest way relies on your form redirecting to a custom thank you page after successful completion. Note the custom URL, and head into Google Analytics.
- Create a goal
- Give a descriptive name
- Choose goal type “destination”
- Add the custom URL
- Make sure to verify the goal
If that custom URL has been triggered in the past 7 days, you will see a verification percentage. And if it’s a new thank you page, let’s say a form that’s specific for demos, then you want to make sure that you go back within a week and check that the goal is functioning. Or, run a test by filling out the form and see whether the goal registers. One of the biggest mistakes people can make is in forgetting to verify the goal or to identify whether the goal stopped working.
Once set up you will notice conversion metrics within your data in the column to the right. You can set up 20 goals, which means there is room to set up goals for most of your campaigns. The conversion data empowers your ability to measure digital micro-expressions which show where marketing efforts succeed, fail, or fall somewhere in-between.
Go from the end, back to the beginning
Now that we can track the audience of converters, let’s find out where they came from. By understanding the acquisition sources for those visitors, you can optimize the experience and increase the number of quality leads.
It is a good idea to dig into referral traffic. Biopharm Guy is a popular source of referral traffic for life science industry websites. Baidu is another popular one, referring from a Chinese search engine. Whether or not you recognize the referring domain, it is good practice to investigate the site. What is it saying about your brand? In most cases, you can contact the managers of the site to correct any misinformation.
How long did converters stay on the site? How many pages did they visit? What pages are important to them? This helps identify engagement metrics unique to your target audience. The audience section contains the answers to these questions and more.
You can look at geography to see whether efforts to increase market share in a particular region are successful. You can also evaluate the technologies that people are using, and optimize site layout for the platforms important to them.
Understanding the Experience of a Single User
Most of the information in Google analytics analyzes your audiences as an aggregate. However there is a section called User Explorer which allows you to look at the activity of an individual. It will show the exact journey of a single user through your site. Use this to hone in on the interactions your converters had with the site.
You may also want to look at people who spent a long time on the site or people who came back to the site multiple times. In addition to the pages visited and the time spent on each page, User Explorer will show interactions with events, campaigns, or any e-commerce features on your site.
We hope you appreciate this dive into Google Analytics for marketing measurement, and that it helps you better understand your unique life science audience. If you want to learn a lot more about the tools within Analytics there is a free beginner’s training course Google offers. To learn more about marketing measurement and tracking the success of your life science marketing please feel free to contact us.
