With rapid digitalization across all sectors and businesses, it is hard to find a business that does not have an online presence yet. Marketing functions in these businesses are constantly inventing new ways to engage with their potential customers and convert them.
If you are working in the digital marketing domain, you are bound to have come across Google Analytics. It is almost impossible to imagine running digital marketing plans successfully without having insightful data at hand after generating it from Google Analytics. To check website traffic, Google Analytics will provide you data like geographical origin, device type used while on your website, search preferences of the website visitors, etc.
All this unstructured data will overwhelm you, and you will find it difficult to determine the effectiveness of your digital strategies. Well, Google Analytics has a solution for that too! And the answer is Google Analytics Acquisition. We will cover two important reports that will help you make the decision which digital campaign has worked best for you:
Google Analytics traces the source from where the visitors arrived at your website. A similar category of sources is broadly clustered to form a channel, based on the medium to which these sources belong. If a visitor comes to your site by clicking on an advertisement you placed on LinkedIn, it will come under the category of Social channel. On the other hand, a visitor made their way to your website from a Google search; then it will be categorized as an Organic channel.
This report empowers you to have an overall picture by telling you from which channel your traffic has originated. You can further track the activities of this channel-specific traffic to determine whether it is feasible to keep investing your time and money on a particular channel.
Google Analytics has few pre-defined default channels; let us understand what each of these channels signifies:
This channel includes those visitors who have entered your website address directly in their web browser’s address bar to reach the webpage. This parameter indicates to you how your offline marketing plans have been performing since it is most likely that visitors have learned about your website address from there and used it to reach your website directly.
When a user searches for something they need on search engines like Google, your webpages may make their way into the search result based on their relevance with the user’s search. This parameter indicates if your webpages have sufficient optimization for search engines and can attract visitors by popping up in a relevant search result.
All sources are clubbed together under the Social channel, in which the visitors can be tracked back to any social platform accounts like Instagram, YouTube, etc. This parameter indicates how well your social platform’s marketing plans are getting executed or how engaging your company’s social platform accounts are.
Visitors who arrived at your website from your email marketing plans. The parameter throws light on how well your email marketing campaigning is getting executed.
It depicts the amount of traffic arriving at your website due to affiliate marketing. The parameter helps in confirming the affiliate pay-outs as well as the efficacy of running an affiliate program.
Any visitor that arrived at your website from any other website and could not be categorized under any of these other channels, then you will find them categorized under the referral channel.
Visitors who arrived at your website from paid search advertisements on search engines like Google are categorized in this channel type. This parameter displays the return on the cost incurred for your paid search engine advertisements.
Visitors who reach your website after clicking on any banner or image advertisements placed by you on any website or blog. This parameter gives you an idea of the return you get on running these advertisements.
If none of the above channel descriptions are matched against the visitor’s source, then it's categorized as another channel.
Consider a situation wherein you observe that the Social Channel strategy is not getting executed well. You want to dive deeper and understand if the execution of all the social campaigns is not going well or some specific source issue is faced. You can only understand that if you have a detailed report that tells you, for example, how much traffic originated from, say, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Now you can analyze if the social channel is not performing or if a specific source is. This is essentially the output a Source/Medium report data gives you.
The report is essentially a separate type of representation of the same traffic data collection. The source is the exact location from which the website traffic originated, and Medium is the grouping of traffic sources, identical to those that are observed in the Channel report.
The reports provide actionable insights into the effectiveness of each source or channel, in terms of the following metrics:
There needs to be an optimal limit on the amount of investment in the marketing plans, to make the returns viable enough to sustain the business. You have to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of all your digital marketing plans to determine which ones deserve more focus and funding or which ones need fixing.
You can use these reports to identify the channels or sources that give you the best return, find out what is going right for you in these cases, and then upgrade your marketing plans to increase more visits to your website and achieve your goals.
