Increase Website Traffic with the Power of Google Analytics

OVERVIEW

Set Site Traffic Goals

Implement Marketing Campaigns

Link Management using URL Variations

Tracking your Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

 

Set Site Traffic Goals

Traffic is site visits by a user from any device – desktops, tablets, or mobile phones. As of now, there are four different types of site traffic.

Traffic that can be increased by Marketing Campaigns:

Social Traffic	traffic coming from social media platforms
Direct Traffic	traffic where the referrer is unknown such as users entering the site URL directly into the URL or browser bar or from a link in an email or document (Word, PDF, Excel)
Referral Traffic	traffic from other sites

Traffic that can be increased by Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Organic or Search Traffic

traffic from search engine results

You may be embarking on a new journey, but do not forget your smart goals. Understand what traffic is and set measurable and time-constrained goals.

Marketing Campaigns

A marketing campaign is a vague notion, but typically an organization creates a different marketing campaign for each social or digital platform used in marketing efforts to drive people to your website.

The goal of each campaign is to push more traffic to the website, but each campaign requires different planning and execution methods. What’s appropriate for one campaign is likely not appropriate for another. Once these campaigns are launched, you will want to know which campaign is successful and which are not. You can then make better decisions about where to allocate your resources. To differentiate the success of each campaign, you will want to use URL Variations.

Link Management using URL Variations

Organizing your traffic is top priority when analyzing user behavior. You need to know where the users come from to understand which marketing campaign is most useful or least useful. To track each marketing campaign individually, each campaign should have a different link leading to your website. Pointing different links to the same destination to allows you to track marketing efforts across multiple campaigns. Each URL will have a slight variation, making the changes unnoticeable to the visitor.

Link management software examples are Bitly and PixelMe.

Tracking your Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust software, but you can measure the success of a campaign with two or three key metrics.

1. Number of users that visit the site (‘Users’)

2. Number of users that interacted with the site (Calculated using ‘Bounce Rate’)

3. Number of users that made a purchase (for E-commerce sites only – must use e-commerce plugin)

The URL Variations allow you to track these two or three metrics for each marketing campaign individually. You can analyze if the campaign brings in traffic, but never closes a deal or if the campaign brings in new users but they leave the site immediately. You may notice that referral traffic interacts with you site the most.

You can also track ‘organic searches’ on Google Analytics to measure SEO efficiency.