Analytics is,
Frustrating! When you don’t know
what the data means
Does the haiku we whipped up describe your experience (to date) with Google Analytics?
Perhaps we should stick to digital marketing instead of poetry, but you get the gist. While you understand that Google Analytics helps glean insights, prove marketing efforts, and track conversions, you also may feel overwhelmed when you log in to see so many available reports to slice and interpret data.
Whether you’re sitting in monthly/quarterly reporting meetings with your agency and want to expand your understanding to contribute to conversations, or if you see the transformative power to leverage GA to meet occupancy goals, but don’t know where to begin – one things for certain – there’s a LOT to unpack, but even more opportunity there within.
So, to save your team time, we’re covering the ‘ABC’s’ of Google Analytics for the busy senior living marketer. In future posts in this series we’ll provide Google Analytics tips to aid your team with each respective report. For this post, you’ll learn:
…is what you might have said if you’re a cookie monster marketer, but we encourage your senior living marketing team to delve deeper in Google Analytics to glean acquisition insights that impact your community.
What is it?
Acquisition reports detail your website traffic, the channels people are using to visit your site, where users are before they access your site’s content (a search engine or another website), and how users arrived at your site’s content to begin with (email, referral traffic, etc.).
Your senior living marketing team can use the acquisition reports to drill in on the following sections, which each provide additional dropdown options:
Why Acquisition Reports Matter:
When your senior living marketing team uses Acquisition reports to inform its strategy, it will be able to adjust messaging, content, and tone to increase site traffic, or could make tweaks to increase quality traffic with key performing channels your team has identified.
What is it?
If your senior living marketing team wanted to understand what your prospective resident or site visitor did when they were on your website and was curious to understand which pieces of content are performing well, then Behavior reports will be your communities best friend.
Your team can use Behavior reports in Google Analytics to view the following:
Why Behavior Reports Matter:
Your senior living marketing team can’t create content that compels if it doesn’t understand which pieces of content are performing for your community. Aside from measuring the performance of content marketing efforts, your community can also use Behavior reports to chart the path of the site visitor after they click on a piece of content. This data is critical to understanding how users are interacting with your community online, so your senior living marketing team can optimize that experience to nurture conversions.
What is it?
Conversion reports will detail the success of the goals your community has set up. Your community can set up multiple goals simultaneously in GA to test different conversion elements with varying intent. You’ll be able to track the number of completions for a specific goal, (tours booked, users clicking through to an ‘about us’ page, the number of downloads on a premium piece of content, etc.) set a first or last-click attribution to add weight to the first or final click before a conversion was made, and track which pages assisted a user along the path to a conversion.
The Conversion Report provides the following dropdown options for your community:
• Goals
• Ecommerce
• Multi-Channel Funnels
• Attribution
Why Conversion Reports Matter:
Ultimately, all the traffic in the world does little if that traffic doesn’t convert into an inquiry, tour, or resident for your community. So, it’s vital to know which pages on your site encourage visitors to reach the goals your senior living marketing team are tracking in GA. You want your site to provide a seamless path for site visitors to convert without friction, and the data that your community can pull will help your team refine its strategy and adjust to user behavior to increase this crucial metric. GA will also provide the data to gauge if the conversion elements your team are testing are successful.
After reading, your senior living marketing team should have a better grasp on Google Analytics, and where to find the reports that contribute to insights your team wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. By combining Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion reports, your community will be armed with enough data to carve out truly memorable insights that will set it up for success this year, and for years to come.
Your senior living marketing team doesn’t have to write us a haiku as a way of showing thanks, but we’ll certainly welcome questions if they arise. Contact our team, and we’ll shed light into ways your team can leverage Google Analytics to meet your specific goals.
