Written by Matt Bohar, Skyline Exhibits.
In a prior blog post, I explained how exhibitors often fail to measure the website engagement they receive from their email blasts and pay-per-click advertising. Such stats aren’t automatically tracked in Google Analytics, so manually enabling campaign tracking can give you rich insights into the effectiveness of your inbound marketing.
In today’s post, I will discuss three other critical metrics you should be tracking, but probably aren’t: media file views, e-commerce statistics, and the search terms people are using to find your website in Google.
TRACKING MEDIA FILE VIEWS AND DOWNLOADS
While your Google Analytics account automatically tracks views of your html web pages, it doesn’t automatically track how visitors view your other content, such as downloads of your PDF product spec sheets or views of your embedded videos. Such file views are often the sign of highly-engaged website users, so you want to understand how these people arrived on your site, so you can attract more of that type of traffic. To do so, simply use the handy Google Tag Manager to add a tracking code to your website links and click buttons.
ECOMMERCE TRACKING
If you sell products online, it’s important to understand how much each transaction cost you, so that you can achieve an effective ROI on your digital marketing. Shockingly, many exhibitors don’t enable ecommerce tracking in Analytics, and are thus missing out on this data, as well as information on where sales traffic is coming from, which types of visitors are abandoning their shopping carts, etc.
TRACKING YOUR SEO KEYWORDS
If you’ve looked at your Google Analytics account even once, you’ve likely seen the missing, inaccurate, or deeply unhelpful information that appears under All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search > Keywords. To truly see what type of keywords people are using in Google to find your site, you need to first register your site with Google Search Console, and then link your Search Console account with your Analytics account. The process only takes a few seconds, and will immediately show you how many times you have appeared in search results (and for which keywords), how highly you rank in Google for these queries, and how many people clicked on your website in search results.
Google Analytics is a robust tool for understanding your website traffic, but its out-of-the-box setup settings don’t track these and other key metrics. By spending a few minutes doing some manual setup, you or your web team can get a much better idea of the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
About the Author
Matt has been with the Skyline lead generation and customer engagement team for close to 15 years. He manages several campaigns in areas that involve database marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing and website marketing. He is also a certified marketing automation administrator working on several email campaigns for Skyline’s live seminars, webinars and product announcements.
