How To Make Google Analytics Work for B2B Companies

If this is your first time learning about Google Analytics, we have it all covered in this article. We’ll go over essential questions such as:

• What is Google Analytics?
• Why should you use it?
• How do you use it? and;
• How can you leverage your data?

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analysis service provided by Google. It allows B2B companies to track customer behavior on websites and mobile applications. This information helps you understand who visits your sites, where they came from, and what they did once there.

According to BuiltWith, 28 million websites use Google Analytics; also, that it is used by 74% of the top 10,000 websites in the world as of April 12, 2022. 

With this tool, a B2B company of any size can see which pages on the site get the most traffic and which ones get the least.

You can also view which pages on your website convert best (lead or contact form button clicks, phone calls, etc.) and which ones convert worst.

With proper strategizing, you can leverage the data to come up with a better decision in matters of conversion optimization as you get a deeper understanding of your buyer’s journey. 

How Does It Work?

When someone lands on your website via a link from another site or through a search query, they’re referred to as “visitors.”

Typically, visitors come from these traffic channels: organic, direct, social, and referral. 

• Organic visitor traffic refers to those who arrive at your site when a user clicks directly from a search engine result page via search query terms. These are users who arrived to your site through an organic search. When your website has a good position in the search ranking, you can expect an increase in your organic traffic.
• Direct traffic refers to visitors who manually type in your URL by finding it on other multi-channel platforms, or click on a bookmark. 
• Social traffic refers to any referrals from other social networks. Social traffic makes up around 20-30% of total online traffic.
• Referral traffic comes from links shared on third party websites. For example, if you are listed on a popular blog, then their users may visit your site. It may also come from an email newsletter, and more.

Why use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about the people visiting your website, when they arrive, and how long they spend there.

With this information, you can create a better user experience for your audience.

You can also use Google Analytics to determine whether your website is optimized for mobile devices, where it places in the search ranking, and other additional insights about your active users.

Google Analytics lets you monitor your site’s performance and identify any problems before they become major issues.

For example, you may notice that some pages on your site take longer to load than others. Or maybe you notice that certain pages aren’t converting as well as they used to.

By identifying potential problems early, you can quickly find solutions and prevent them from becoming bigger issues down the road.

Another benefit of using Google Analytics is that it lets you compare your site’s metrics against other sites in your industry.

This gives you an idea of how your competitors are doing and gives you a competitive edge.

Google Analytics: The Basics

To get started with Google Analytics, you must first sign up for an account using your Gmail account. Once you’ve signed up, you can log into your dashboard.

Make sure that your are “Home“

Next, select the account “Settings” [the gear symbol]

Next, select “+ Create Account.”

Then, just follow the prompts as you to set up.

You can learn more about it here via Google.

Analyzing Your Website Traffic

Google Analytics gives you access to data. These allow you to see exactly what happens when people land on your site, as well as how they behave while they’re there.

Each group of data has its own set of metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators).

The following sections go over each grouped data and explain what you should be looking at.

Google Analytics Realtime

The Realtime shows you real-time statistics about visitors who come to your site. It includes things like page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, referrers, landing pages users, and more.

You can even drill down into specific events such as visitor traffic, page views, user engagement, and time spent on individual pages.

You can also create custom reports based on these stats. For example, you may want to compare the number of page views between two dates, analyze the source of referrals, or find out how current traffic events differed from your previous traffic events.

Google Analytics Audience

Audience shows you demographic information about users who visit your site.

You can get a broad overview of your audience demographics, including gender, age range, location, language, and more. You can also view detailed information about the traffic sources that brought those visitors to your site.

Google Analytics Events

Events show you which actions occur on your site. They include clicks, form submissions, video views, and more.

When someone performs an action on your site, this event gets recorded in the Event section.

For example, if someone clicks on a link, then that action will be recorded. If someone fills out a contact form, then that action will also be recorded.

You can use events to track customer behaviour throughout their journey on your site. With event tracking, you can set up event goals and understand what drives your conversion rate.

Google Analytics Social

Social shows you which social media platforms bring user flow to your site.

It includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

If you want to know whether a particular channel is driving traffic to your site, you can just check the network referrals to find out.

Then, you can see how much traffic comes from that channel.

Google Analytics Acquisition

Acquisition tells you where users came from when they visited your site. You can learn things like the referring domains, referring URLs, and IP addresses.

You can then use this information to create acquisition reports and determine if your website is optimized for search engines, social media sites, traffic sources, email campaigns, etc.

Google Analytics Behavior

Behavior provides a snapshot of your users’ browsing habits. You can see things like the most popular pages, average session duration, exit pages, and other types of customer behaviour. Here, you can see which actions drive most of your site’s current traffic events.

For example, if you notice that most of your traffic comes from social media shares, then you can start creating content specifically designed to attract followers.

You can also use this view to track how long your B2B audiences spend on your site, and where they drop off.

Google Analytics Conversions

Conversions view shows you conversions on your site. You can see things such as the conversion path, conversion rate, and revenue per visitor.

You can then identify areas of your site that are driving conversions and improve them accordingly through consistent conversion tracking.

Here, you can also find out which types of content lead to higher conversion rates, and which ones don’t work so well. You can use this section to create conversion reports and set up conversion goals.

Using Google Analytics for Your Content Strategy 

You should also look at your content marketing efforts. If you’ve been posting regularly but aren’t seeing any significant increase in traffic, it could mean that your posts aren’t resonating with your audience.

You can do a demographics analysis of your active users and buyer personas.

To figure out why your content marketing strategy isn’t working, you can use the Audience Overview report. This report will show you the demographics of your audience, their interests, and even their buying behavior.

This information can help you decide whether your buyer personas would benefit from reading certain types of content, or if there are other ways that you can reach them.

Analyzing your content strategy is important because it helps you understand how visitors interact with your brand. It’s also helpful to determine where you can make improvements.

For example, if you notice that people are leaving your site quickly after they land on a page, it may indicate that your pages aren’t engaging enough.

If you see that most of your conversions happen within a few days of publishing a blog post, it means that you may have to publish more frequently.

Using Google Analytics for Your B2B Social media marketing campaign

Finally, Google Analytics offers many ways to analyze your B2B marketing effort. 

Google Analytics provides insights into what types of content are popular with your social media audience and how effective your social media campaigns are, and so much more.  

This information can help you make informed decisions about what type of content you should be creating in order to increase engagement with your current customers and prospects on social networks.

It’s important to note that Google Analytics doesn’t provide any direct insight into the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

However, it does give you some valuable information that will help you decide whether or not to continue using social media for your next campaign.

How can you use Google Analytics for your B2B social media campaigns?

Here are three things you can do with Google Analytics to measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns:

1. Analyze the performance of your social network pages

There are metrics in Google Analytics that can tell you a lot about the health of your social media marketing channels. 

One way to measure the success of social media pages is to see how many people visit them.

To get more insights into the performance of your social pages, you can look at other metrics such as the average time spent on each page, the bounce rate (which measures the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page), and the number of sessions.

For example, if you notice lots of bounce rate (the percentage of visits that end up as “page views”), then you know that your social media audiences aren’t engaged with your content.

In addition, you can compare these numbers over time to get an idea of how well your social media presence has performed.

2. Analyze the performance of individual posts

Once you’re familiar with the overall performance of your social media channels, you can start looking at specific posts.

Analyzing each post individually gives you a better understanding of which ones were successful and which weren’t.  

You can use this information to improve future posts by making sure that they are more likely to perform well.

3. Analyze your social media traffic using Google Analytics

Your goal when it comes to social media isn’t just to reach new people; it’s to convert them into paying customers.

To do this, you need to understand where your audience is coming from.

You can use Google Analytics to determine who your visitors are, where they’re located, and how often they visit your website.

You can also see how long they spend on your site before converting to a lead or customer.

With this information, you can create targeted ads that are specifically designed to appeal to your audience.

For instance, you might want to target users based on location, gender, age, job title, or other factors. 

Why As A Social Media Marketing Team We Use Google Analytics

Naturally, as B2B marketers, we wanted to know that our social media B2B marketing effort is really contributing to the overall goals of the B2B businesses we are serving. Did the audience buy, read, download, etc?

So, in spite of the valuable insights from social media networking sites, we can’t neglect the information we gain using Google Analytics.

Why?

Because it provides a more in-depth look into how our client’s target audience is behaving on their site. This helps us better plan future campaigns as B2B marketers.

• We can analyze what their audiences are clicking on, where they’re coming from, what keywords they’re searching for, and the destination URL, etc.
• We can track the success of specific advertising campaigns.
• We can also compare the effectiveness of different social networks. We can learn which one is performing best and why.
• And, finally, we can compare the effectiveness of various social media networks

Now that you have all of this information, you’re well on your way to becoming a data-driven company. But if your team needs our team’s help, let us know!