HVAC and Plumbing is a highly competitive industry. Today, digital marketers looks at a website as their primary source of traffic and insights. Nobody finds your website unless they want to know or learn about your offers. By understanding their intent, you can create compelling adjustments. By doing so, you can create content that will retain their interest in your website and offers.
Any successful digital marketer can make accurate predictions through careful analysis of Google Analytics. This is a free tool the search engine giant offers to help businesses measure key performance indicators (KPI), which reveal audience insights for future campaigns.
Although highly customizable, Google Analytics can be difficult at times. If you’re new to using it, it can present overwhelming amounts of information, that can be confusing and frustrating to understand.
However, you won’t need to mess with most of its features and data collection returns. You just need to be concerned about these five important Google Analytics reports.
Audience
As we’ve mentioned in most of our blogs, the key to successful digital campaigns is a complete understanding of your buyer’s profile or target audience. Google Analytics plays a huge role to help you determine the demographics, attitudes, consumer behavior, and everything else that helps you determine what is valuable to your audience. In addition, GA’s features help you see which part of your website or online campaign gets the most reactions and engagements.
Within Google Analytics, you will find seven sections that will help you gain insight on audiences. These are the following:
- Overview: Shows you the user sessions on your web page. From here, you can access information about your website page views, pages per session, and more.
- Demographics: Audience data classified by age, gender, and other parameters you may want to add. This is helpful when making targeted advertisements and campaigns.
- Geo: Shows you the language and location of your visitors. Exceptionally important when trying to know the majority of visitors your site receives.
- Behavior: Google Analytics can note the frequency of repeat visits, the time spent on a particular website page, and more.
- Technology: The browser, Internet service provider, operating system used, and other technical information resides in this section
- Mobile: Shows you the number of audiences accessing your website through mobile. If you’re not convinced yet that you need mobile-responsive themes, then data from this section is a powerful motivator.
- Users Flow: The customer journey or path the audience takes upon visiting your landing page or a service page. Helpful when trying to optimize your website for navigation and creating a memorable brand journey.
The Importance of Audience Data
All websites rely on relevance — if audiences can empathize and relate to the content, then they’ll get “in tune” with the content and continue reading it. Fully analyzing your audience data helps you know the right language, appeal, aesthetics, and other elements that can help you improve your traffic with an exceptionally-made website.
In addition to websites, audience data is helpful in creating productive, lead-generating email campaigns through personalization. These include greeting audiences on their birthdays (through an automated email) and greeting them using their first names.
Mobile and Desktop Conversion Rates
Google predicted this as early as 2013: many Internet users will shift from desktop and laptops to mobile devices. With the boom of smartphone and portable Internet devices, Google was right to impose “Mobilegeddon” despite the trouble many websites took during the time.
With this in consideration, a mobile-first website strategy has the highest probability of success. However, it doesn’t guarantee it will generate exceptional results, which is why it is important to check if your strategy is working.
Google Analytics is helpful in this aspect because the data you collect will help you shape your web strategy for mobile.
It’s particularly easy to access mobile and conversion reports. First, you can head to “Mobile” in the Audience section. In the Overview category, you can select Average Session Duration and Pages/Session. The metrics will show you whether the audience had a pleasant or poor mobile experience with your website.
Traffic Channels
Your website is one traffic channel. Social media accounts, electronic direct mails sent to contacts, and other digital communications you connect with Google Analytics are all traffic channels. Therefore, it is worth knowing which of these communicative tools are directing the best or worst flow of traffic to your website.
In doing so, you determine if people are clicking on your advertisements or following your blog posts. It’s very easy to procure traffic channels reports on Google Analytics.
By going to the Acquisition section, you can select “All Traffic”, then “Channels.” You’ll find a report with eight channels:
- Organic Search
- Direct Search
- Paid Search
- Display Advertising
- Referral
- Social
- Others
These eight help you see if users are clicking on the links you provided in different campaigns. This is helpful when it comes to lead generation and planning new campaigns that rely heavily on one of these traffic channels
Additionally, traffic channels reports are helpful in making paid advertising decisions on different channels. For instance, by seeing huge traffic coming in social media, you can confidently bolster a paid ads campaign to gain more leads to your website and minimize the risk of losing ROI.
All Pages
From Behavior, you can head to Site Content and access the All Pages report. This feature of Google Analytics helps you measure content performance.
Content performance relies on the time users spend going through the content. The actual time in minutes determines whether your content is effective (engaging, value-adding) or not (lacks in certain sections to provide value). In doing so, you gain insight on your content and can create a list on which items to update and modify for performance improvement.
You’ll find the following metrics in this report:
- Page Views
- Unique Page Views
- Average Time Spent on Each Page
- Entrances (or repeat user sessions on a particular page)
- Bounce Rate
- Exit Percentage (one-time user visit)
- Page value
If you want to alter your existing poor content to perform better, you can use data from Audience and Behavior to guarantee a successful result.
Audience overview will help you gain insight on what adds value to your customers, the language they can read, their pain points, and more.
Next, the Behavior section will help you know your audience’s likes, dislikes through the content they react or engage with frequently. In addition, this section’s report will help you know whether the customer is taking great interest (through repeat user sessions and average session duration), and bounce rates. You can then predict the topics most audiences focus on and create topics to answer their lingering questions.
Adwords
Paid advertising is always a part of any website campaign. AdWords had once an independent reporting platform. Now, it integrates its reports with Google Analytics. Most successful HVAC and Plumbing companies understand that an advertising budget is necessary to stay at the top of the market niche in their local area.
The AdWords report helps you understand paid advertising efficiency in different marketing channels. In the report, you’ll see Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion cycles. Just like your Content and Traffic Channels report, the Adwords report helps you find the most successful AdWords campaign and the efficiency of the keywords you’ve paid to use.
In knowing the most efficient advertisements in your arsenal, you can then improve conversion and traffic through the use of AdWords ads. The information is initially overwhelming, but once you get the hang of using it, you can utilize it to improve lead generation and conversions.
Google Analytics: Gain Insight and Better Campaign Efficiency
Analytics is all about helping marketers know how their recent adjustments and new campaigns are flourishing. With a birds-eye-view on everything, they can make precision advisories to business owners when it comes to their next move in their campaigns. Learning Analytics can be a steep learning curve — but is definitely one that is value-adding and worth learning.
If you own or manage and HVAC or Plumbing company, and would like a free analysis of your website and marketing plan, visit our website at: https://onlinemarketinghvacplumber.com or call us: 888-910-1958. We are happy to assist you in mastering the winning marketing strategies in your field!
