Google Analytics: How to Make Smart Marketing Decisions

Do you want to know if your content and social activities are supporting your business?

Are you wondering how you can use Google Analytics to track your progress?

To learn how to use Google Analytics to help make smart marketing decisions, I interview Andy Crestodina for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media (a Chicago-based web design agency). Andy has also written for Social Media Examiner and he's a Google Analytics expert.

Andy shares how to use Google Analytics to help you make informed marketing choices.

You'll discover why analytics are so important to your business success and step-by-step instructions on how to get started.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Google Analytics
Why go beyond the basic metrics of blog comments, social share numbers and page views?

Andy explains that these basic metrics will not give you return on investment (ROI) information. The formula he uses is traffic × your conversion rate = success, which can be leads, subscribers or ecommerce customers.

The more you're aware of how things are connected and the deeper you look down the funnel, the more equipped you'll be to make better decisions. It's just like the dashboard of a car.

You'll hear what happened when I looked a lot deeper into the analytics of a Social Media Examiner article that ranks number one in Google search, and why it made me realize that it wasn't doing as well as I thought.

As a marketer, you need to reprogram your mind to what really matters, and it's not what immediately meets the eye.

Listen to the show to find out why it's so important to pay attention to the conversion rate.

Do you need to be a data nerd to benefit from all of this?

Andy says that you don't have to be a data nerd. The only math you need to know is that anything times zero equals zero.

Andy relates it to a Magic 8 Ball. You can ask a question, shake up the analytics and find the answer. As a marketer, you need to know how to look at these numbers. It gets easier over time. For every action you take, you can measure it and see if it works, and then make improvements.

Listen to the show to find out why Google Analytics is similar to using Photoshop.

Common mistakes marketers make with Google Analytics

According to Andy, it always comes down to the setup of Google Analytics. There are two or three basic steps you need to take in the Admin section of Google Analytics that make your data much more meaningful.

One of the first things you need to do is filter out the traffic from your own IP address. Until you do this, your analytics will be polluted by your own activity. Within the Admin section, you can create an IP address filter.

To find out what your IP address is, just type "What is my IP?" into Google search, and it will give you the number. You'll discover what to do with this number in the dashboard to ensure your results are more meaningful.

The next step (which is important) is goals. Until you set up your goals, you'll only have half of the picture.

Listen to the show to find out what's important if you are a relatively low-traffic site or you're into content or social media marketing.

The definitions of goals and conversions

A conversion is when a visitor takes an action on a website. There are different types of conversions and analytics that you can set up,