For corporate event locations and event planners, optimizing your website, sharing content, and building links isn't enough if you want to maximize the success of your digital marketing campaign. When it comes to marketing, you need to measure your efforts in order to gain a better understanding of what's working and what's not, and to learn how you should adjust your strategies to accomplish the best results.
Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytic service, which provides marketers with the invaluable knowledge and insights they need to maximize the potential of their efforts. With the information you gather from Google Analytics, you can improve your website's performance and user experience to grow your conversions. Read on to learn how you can utilize Google Analytics for your business.
Track User Engagement
Your website needs to be engaging in order to achieve its intended purpose, whether that's to provide information or sell products and services. Therefore, user engagement is one of the most important metrics you want to measure. In order to measure engagement, you want to look at the time spent on your site. According to HubSpot, 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website. With engagement insights, you can discover how to improve your website to make it more user-friendly and encourage conversions.
To track time on site, go to Audience then Overview to see the average session duration. Click on Acquisition, All Traffic, and Source/medium to track time spent on each traffic source, or Channels for time spent on each channel.
Identify Your Worst Performing Pages
You likely look at your best performing pages, but what about your worst? Your worst performing pages require your attention too. Your worst performing pages can help you determine issues with your content and marketing strategy. Go to the Behavior tab, and click on Exit Pages under the Site Content menu. This will tell you the pages that were exited most often. Based on this information, you can rework the page content and design to provide what users are looking for, as well as include a call to action to facilitate a purchase, download, or email signup.
Create and Monitor Your Goals
Though important and easy to use, the Goals feature in Google Analytics is often overlooked. Create goals by clicking Admin, Goals, and New Goal. Once you set up a goal, monitor its progress regularly to see if you're close to achieving it. If you aren't accomplishing your goal, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve your results. You can add annotations to show the actions you have taken to enhance the results.
Measure Your Site Speed
Site speed is a very important marketing element that's often neglected. Slow page load times can hinder user experience, and users are likely to exit your site in frustration if it doesn't load quickly. Additionally, a slow site speed can affect your search engine rankings, as site speed is a key ranking metric. For an overview of your site speed, go to Behavior, Site Speed, and Overview; or click Behavior, Site Speed, and Page Timings to see how your individual site pages are performing. This can help you determine how site speed is affecting your conversions, as well as identify any back-end issues that are affecting your site's download speed.
With Google Analytics, corporate event locations, event planners, and related businesses can improve their success online and optimize their conversions.