By Marah Morrison
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – When people have insights to drive their business, it can give them confidence to move forward, said Jeff Herrmann, CEO of The Business Journal.
In a free webinar hosted March 4, Herrmann and Anthony Cornejo, search engine optimization specialist at iSynergy, walked viewers through the tool they can tap into through Google’s suite of services.
Business leaders can define their traffic using Google Analytics, track their digital campaigns with Google Analytics Goals and Google Tag Manager and optimize for success by interpreting their website’s traffic by using Google Search Console Setup and Connection with Google Analytics.
“Google Analytics is necessary when wanting to measure the success of your website and who’s coming onto your website,” Cornejo said. “Without it, you’re going to be blindly guessing on who’s coming there and what they’re doing when they get on there.”
Google Analytics can be set up by placing a code onto your website, which can be done several ways, Cornejo said. The code can either be manually coded into the website or by using available plug-ins based on the website builder being used, he said, but the recommended way is by setting the code up through Google Tag Manager and creating a Universal Analytics tag.
Google Tag Manager does the same thing as the other two methods Cornejo mentions, but it’s recommended because users will use it to track their digital campaigns eventually, Cornejo said.
“You might as well already be using that,” he said. “That way, you don’t have code in a bunch of different places and you don’t know what’s where.”
Once the code is in place on the website, the next step is to create two separate views under the property, Cornejo said. A filtered view is to exclude employee IP addresses, so when people within the business are accessing the site, they are not showing up as hits to the website.
The unfiltered view allows for a raw version of data just in case it needs to be referred back to, Cornejo said.
Google creates five prebuilt reports: realtime, audience, acquisition, behavior and conversions. While the names may be confusing at first, it all boils down to how users are interacting on the site and where they’re coming from, Cornejo said.
The realtime report is going to show current or recently active users on the site; the audience report is going to show who is coming to the site; acquisition is going to show how users are reaching the site; behavior is going to show what users are doing on the website; and conversions are going to show if the website has captured them, Cornejo said.
He offers up a hypothetical example of a blogger developing their content.
“You have two types of blogs, let’s say food and music. If you see that some of your highest viewed pages are food blogs as opposed to music, what does that tell you about your site?” he said. “Does that tell you that food blogs are the way to go or should you be stepping up your game on the music blogs?”
There’s a lot of insights leaders can extrapolate from the pages report because it helps to drive content creation and things alike, Cornejo said. Checking Google Analytics periodically can tell you if there’s been any shifts in user behavior, he said, allowing you to make changes to your business as needed.
“You don’t want to just see the data and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ ” Cornejo said. “You want to try and extrapolate insight and make sure you’re taking action on that insight once you connect the data with your knowledge and additional perspective.”
The Business Journal and iSyngery will be hosting more webinars throughout the year. For more information on iSynergy’s work, check out Digital Success Stories on The Business Journal’s Business Strategies network.
Copyright 2020 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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