Google Analytics is an excellent free tool for discovering how your audience has found your website, and is a great tool to get maximum return on your marketing budget. This is important for startup companies, where this budget maybe extremely limited. However, the sheer amount of information that is available on Google Analytics can look overwhelmingly confusing, and it can be difficult to work out the best and most efficient ways to use it.
If you have recently set up an ecommerce website, then the “Campaigns” feature in Analytics enables you to track the source of your website traffic by using special tracking URLs. Once the Ecommerce tracking has been enabled, if you have a compatible ecommerce website, and you have set up some tracking URLs with the URL builder here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?rd=2 you can even determine how much revenue has resulted from specific marketing campaigns for which you have set up the tracking URLs.
Say you have set up some banner adverts, several Facebook posts, Facebook adverts, and an email signature, a different tracking URL would be created for each using the URL builder, which can go to the same webpage on your ecommerce website. The unique link for each marketing medium contains the tracking data. This link can be shortened using a URL shortening service, to make it look more presentable. After 24 hours, the data about the clicks on these tracking links will become available to view in the Google Analytics account, found under “reporting”, in the aquisition section, under “campaigns”. Changing the date range allows you to see different time periods.
in the event that you are selling a product online on an ecommerce site, you can now see how much revenue is attributed to clicks on the facebook posts, the email signature and the banner adverts, allowing you determine which form of marketing is likely to be most cost effective and worthwhile in the future. For larger companies who might be using several marketing agencies, each agency can set up their own tracking URLs, and the revenue that their work has generated becomes easily measurable against each other and the budget that has been spent on their services.