For many financial services marketers, Google Analytics is ‘somewhere’ on the list of things to get across, and probably close to the bottom. But if you’re keen on getting the most out of your website, or understanding where it’s letting you down, we think getting to grips with Google Analytics should be closer to the top of your list.
In fact, here at The Pure Agency, we’re on a mission to get more financial services marketers comfortable and familiar with Google Analytics. We know that there’s a lot of hesitation, and part of that relates to the apparent scale of the task.
One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen for financial services marketers when it comes to Google Analytics is that people feel like they’re looking at a big scary hill of data, and don’t know how to start climbing. Beyond the standard user data on the home screen, things do look a little complex. There’s a lot of stuff in there.
So where to start?
A little strangely, perhaps, we think the place to start is with questions. Data exists to provide answers; but you can’t get an answer before you ask.
Recognising this, Google has built a framework into their platform to help users navigate the data. This is known as the ABCs: Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.
Audience: Who & where are they? What are their interests? What devices do they use?
Acquisition: From where do they come? What brings them?
Behaviour: What do they read and do on your site? What parts of your site fail to impress?
Conversion: How many users take a desired action on the site? What characterises these people?
Grouping functionality in this way, with an overview for each section, makes Google Analytics quite browse-able and less intimidating. Framing your questions in the context of the GA ABCs will help you gain a sense of purpose when you log in, giving you the confidence to sort through the different sections, framing questions and looking for answers.
So why not dip a toe in? Here are eleven reasons you’ll be glad you did:
1. Google Analytics data can verify or disprove assumptions about your target audience, helping you to flesh out your personas.
Everyone loves a good marketing persona, right? And you get extra points for a good stock shot. But they’re not much good to your marketing efforts if they’re utter works of fiction. Google Analytics allows financial services marketers to go beyond ‘location, gender, age’ with data on Affinity Categories and In-market Segments.
This is data that Google collects about your site visitors while they’re browsing sites other than yours, and it tells you a lot about what they’re interested in, and what they’re currently looking/shopping for. It’s invaluable information that will help you refine your campaign targeting. You can also tell what software and devices they’re using to visit your site, which can help you make decisions about the user experience you provide for certain groups.
Navigate to Audience > Interests > Affinity Categories or Audience > Interests > Segments to learn about these areas.**
Navigate to Audience > Technology or Audience > Mobile to learn about software and devices.
2. Google Analytics can tell you exactly where your site visitors are coming from, and what part of your site they arrived in.
People make a lot of assumptions about where their website traffic is coming from, and they sometimes rely on data from external sources. Google Analytics can break down where web traffic comes from during any given period, right up until the day prior for the eight key channels (organic search, direct traffic, social, display ads, paid search, referring websites and email). With a little bit of linking set-up for some of the channels, it can break this down even further (i.e. In the case of email, exactly which email, and exactly which link in that email can be tracked).
Navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels or Audience > Interests > Source/Medium
3. Google Analytics can be used to track and measure many different actions on your website, and assign them a monetary value.
In Google Analytics, the main way of tracking important actions is through users completing ‘Goals’ which you have defined. This could be opening an account, filling and submitting an enquiry form, or downloading an eBook, for example.
For the most part, goals are quite simple to set up, and can be done in your site’s admin area (access this at bottom left of screen – goals appear in the third column along). Some goals might need to be set up within Google Tag Manager (for instance if you’re tracking conversions that relate to a digital display campaign with a publisher other than Google, you will need to implement tracking tags on your site. This can get complicated, so getting help from your IT department, webmaster or friendly advertising agency is advisable.
Every goal can be assigned a dollar value within Google Analytics, which makes calculating its contribution to the bottom line more straightforward. Choosing a dollar amount is something that can be based on known numbers.
For instance, if you know that each new personal loan customer makes your organisation $2,000 over the life of a loan, but only 5% of website enquiries convert to a new lending customer, then your dollar value for a new enquiry could be set at 5% of $2,000, which is $100. This can be a useful way of assessing the benefit of an action with no immediately obvious monetary value.
Google Analytics can also be used to track ‘Events’ on your website. An event can be any user interaction, from a video play or expanding a section, through to a user scrolling to a certain point on a page. Events can be useful in determining what needs to happen within your website to make a conversion more likely.
For instance, if you end up proving that only 15% of people download an eBook, but 100% of the people who download the eBook sign up for a financial advice session, then you know that you need to focus on getting visitors to your website to download the eBook. This means you might move the CTA and the button to a more prominent place, and/or feature it on more pages within the website.
4. Google analytics can tell financial services marketers which channels deliver on KPIs.
Once you have your goals set up, you can then see the sources of the website traffic, right down to an individual email link, Facebook post, or ad placement, that lead to a goal being completed. The latter is important for financial services marketers when you’re having discussions with your media agency. More about this later.
Navigate to Conversions > Goals > Overview and select the goal name from the drop-down menu.
5. Google Analytics can tell you how engaged your site users are, using criteria beyond bounce rate.
Lots of people focus on bounce rate as a key metric for engagement, but there’s so much more to it than that. For instance, you might think that an 89% bounce rate is terrible, but what if people spent an average of three plus minutes on that page? And what if that page was most frequently visited by repeat users to your site? This tells you that page is, in fact, a valuable one. It might prompt you to see what you can do to that page to encourage users to visit other pages as well, or to make an enquiry or sign up for something.
In addition to the example above, Google Analytics can tell you top landing pages, top exit pages, where new visitors spend the most time, how recently and frequently repeat visitors return to the site, how many times a user came to your website before they completed a goal, and what path people take to get from one section of your site to another. This is all valuable data that helps you make decisions about your site, and your customer journey.
Navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages (or Exit Pages) to see where people arrived and left.**
Navigate to Audience > Overview and change add the segment ‘New Users’ at the top to see how much time a new user spends on your site vs a returning user. You can keep this segment switched on when you’re looking at your content drill down to see how user new vs repeat users differ.
Navigate to Audience > Behaviour > Frequency & Recency to see this data on repeat visitors to your site.
Navigate to Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels to see the time elapsed in days between first visit and goal conversion.
Navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths to see how many visits occurred (and to what pages) before a conversion occurred.
Navigate to Behaviour > Behaviour Flow to see how people travelled through your site, and where they dropped off.
6. Google Analytics data can show you where your website fails you.
Wondering why you get a load of people coming to your site, but only a handful of them become leads or customers? By looking at the behaviour flow data mentioned earlier and implementing funnels (i.e. constructing within Google Analytics the series of steps you know someone must take within your site to complete a goal), you can tell exactly how many people you’re losing at each stage of their journey through your website. After your momentary panic, you can then work out what you need to do to fix it.
Depending on what your goal is, there are a few different types of funnels in Google Analytics – you just need to choose the one that suits your scenario best, and set it up.
Navigate to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path to see what people are currently doing in the lead up to completing a goal. This information can tell you how you set your funnels up. It can also help you identify undesirable paths that are commonly being taken, so that you can fix them.
To set up a funnel, you must first have a goal set up:
Navigate to Admin > Goals (third column) > +New Goal (red button), then choose the goal you want to set up from the range of ‘templates’, or you can create a ‘custom’ goal. Ensure that when you get to the ‘goal details’ area, you turn on the ‘Funnel’ switch. You then name each step of the funnel and add a URL for that step. You can also specify whether a step is optional (flexible) or required (strict).
Once you’re finished all the steps, you have a functioning goal and funnel.
7. Google Analytics can tell you what content has helped people find you, and what content generates conversions.
As a financial services marketer, you know that content for your website takes a huge amount of time and energy to produce. If you don’t write it in-house, it can also cost a lot of money. Great content can keep people coming to your website long after its written, which has many benefits beyond just eyeballs on your website. But how do you know what content brings people, how they find it, and whether that traffic results in leads or sales? Google Analytics can answer these questions and more.
Navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages to see what pages people are landing on. In this area, you can also see which goal conversions resulted from those visits.
Within this same area, select ‘Source/Medium’ as a secondary dimension to see where the user came from.
8. Google Analytics allows you to directly compare your website’s performance between one period and another, in a graphical way.
Many marketers only bother with current user data, but comparing current data to past periods can yield valuable insights. The way to do this is by using the Compare to Previous Period tool in the date range dialog box.
You may be surprised to learn that your previously male-dominated audience has evened up, or that more users are located interstate or overseas than ever before, which could change many assumptions and decisions. You may also see patterns emerge across months or years.
Navigate to the top right corner to change your date range, and the ‘compare to’ checkbox.
9. Google Analytics data can be used to verify media and publisher reports. It can also prove what media dollars lead to conversions (not just site visits), and what a single conversion cost you.
Without your own data, you’ve got to believe someone else’s. Sometimes, and mostly for technical reasons rather than nefarious ones, external data isn’t accurate. Google Analytics data can quickly and easily verify the data that’s in reports generated by other parties, for instance click data.
It can also tell you what mediums and ads lead to goal conversions. Sometimes, the shine comes off a report that boasts huge click through rates (CTRs) when you realise that 0.001% of them converted, and it possibly means that campaign you thought was going so well is bringing all the wrong people to your site, or that the user experience on the page they’re landing on isn’t quite right.
Navigate to Conversions > Goals > Overview and select the goal name from the drop-down menu to see what traffic is contributing.
Navigate to Conversions > Multi-channel funnels > Top Conversion Paths to see how people are completing goals.
Navigate to Behaviour > Behaviour Flow and switch the drop down to ‘Source/Medium’ to see where people from different channels are dropping out of your site.
10. Google Analytics can be used to flag trouble, or capitalise on an extreme event.
By setting up ‘Intelligence Events’ you can ensure that you’re alerted to unusual activity on your website. In some cases, this can avert disaster, or create opportunity. For example, if you have a sudden drop in traffic, it may be that your website has been hacked and rendered inaccessible. If you have a spike in your bounce rate, and it coincided with the launch of a new campaign, you might need to reconsider your message, your audience or your user experience.
Get a feel for what is normal, and then set up some alerts based on changes to traffic, changes to bounce rate and drops to goal conversions, to begin with.
Navigate to Customisation > Custom alerts > Manage Custom Alerts > + New Alerts to set up alerts, which will result in an email if they’re triggered.
11. With a little set-up, Google Analytics can generate customised reports and dashboards to summarise data that would normally take hours to collate.
What some financial services marketers find frustrating when they first start with Google analytics, is the repeated steps you need to take to get to the same information, week in, week out. What many don’t realise is that you can create customised reports, which compile your go-to stats for a data range of your choice, in just one or two clicks. You can also set up dashboards, giving you at a glance metrics on your most important data points.
Setting up the reports will take an initial time investment, and a bit of trial and error, so it’s our recommendation that you experiment with this after you’ve been using Google Analytics for a little while, so that you’re familiar with the way Google Analytics works, and some of the language that’s used. After you’ve tackled reports and dashboards, you might also want to investigate Google Data Studio **
Navigate to Customisation > Dashboards or Customisation > Reports, to have a mess around.
It’s time to dust off that login, and remember your password.
If you’ve read down to the end of this post, we hope it’s resulted in you feeling more confident about what Google Analytics can tell you, and about how to extract the answers. We encourage you to get in there and try things out. We’re just a phone call away if you need some advice, or some help setting up some of the more complex things.