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3 Google Analytics Basics for MSPs

by Dan Tomaszewski on February 15, 2022

As a managed service provider, you offer more to your clients than just great service. From improving operational efficiency to maximizing productivity while maintaining IT security, you help clients deliver better customer experiences. However, if your clients cannot find you, how can they hire you?

Increasing your website’s visibility should be one of your top priorities when it comes to driving higher lead conversions. Any online business thrives on quality traffic and the majority of businesses wish they could drive more traffic to their websites. In that regards, Google Analytics is an incredibly effective tool that can boost your online presence if you know how to leverage it.

It can be overwhelming once you’ve installed the Google Analytics tracking code on your website because there are so many different metrics you can use to analyze and enhance your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or paid search campaigns. However, you are not required to examine each and every data point.

It is crucial to your success that you know how to navigate Google Analytics’ complex platform and get beyond the basic vanity metric reports. Concentrate on the metrics and insights that deliver actionable business insights and aid you in identifying the right growth opportunities.

Here are the top three ways MSPs can use Google Analytics to improve sales and marketing outcomes:

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1. Start with the basics to track organic activities on your website

When you start using Google Analytics to study your website, the amount of data that affects your MSP website’s visibility may astound you. Conversion rate, bounce rate, user return rate and the overall ratio of new versus returning visitors are some of the things you need to look at to map the organic activities on your website. Then you may decide which of them are the most crucial and useful for your company.

Your MSP website’s page views are one of the most crucial pieces of information you should be aware of. With Google Analytics, you can discover significantly more about your page views than you ever could previously.

The analytic tool will provide you with real-time data on how many visitors visited a specific page, where they came from and how long they stayed on the page. After reading your page, you can also observe where the user went next. In general, this will give you a fair idea of how well the website was received by visitors.

2. What metrics matter most?

It is essential to keep a close watch on which source channels bring in the most and least traffic to your site. This will help you make informed decisions about where to direct your efforts to achieve the greatest return on investment (ROI) from your marketing tactics and budget. Here are four metrics to check on a regular basis:

The Google Analytics Social Media report compiles all of your social traffic statistics into a unified, easy-to-understand dashboard, allowing you to evaluate how your social media content and paid initiatives affect visitor growth and conversions. You can assess:

Your current bounce rate
Traffic across channels
What pages your audience is looking at
Which social channels attract the most monthly visitors

All of this data can assist you and your marketing team in determining which channels to prioritize, which require further attention and which may require paid advertising to attract more visitors. This should ensure that your audience continues to grow.

Mobile Conversion Rate

People today are increasingly utilizing their mobile devices over desktops to conduct research or make purchases. That’s why understanding how mobile customers engage with your website is critical. A terrible mobile experience can reduce a customer’s likelihood of engaging with a company by 52%.

If your conversion rate is substantially higher on desktop, it might mean your mobile experience needs some work. Enhancing the mobile view of your site will help you boost the user experience for mobile users.

Visitor Behavioral Flow

Regardless of how good your content is, most of your website visitors will not convert right away. They will most likely take their time and look over your website to see what you have to offer first. To enhance the possibility of conversion, you need to analyze user journeys from the Google Analytics Behavioral Flow and make them seamless.

Using this data, you can assist users in navigating your website by including call-to-action (CTA) buttons in your content to urge them to take the next step. You can also track where visitors leave your site and improve those pages to boost engagement and conversions.

Goal Reporting

The metrics that really matter to your business and marketing plan are sales – or impressions, or unique page views. Using Google Analytics to create goals allows you to keep track of your conversions and figure out which marketing channels are the most effective.

A goal might be anything from product purchases to email signups to any other action you wish to track. You can find out which channels are providing the best return on investment, which ones aren’t and which ones have room for improvement.

3. Evaluate the quality of your website

Finally, one of the most useful features of Google Analytics is that it may provide you with an assessment of your website’s general quality. All websites are graded on a number of parameters, including content quality, frequency of updates and refreshes, and other elements. Your website will appear lower in the search engine results pages for your keywords if it does not have an exceptional rating.

You can figure out what is working and what needs to be improved with your website based on the information you receive from Google Analytics.

3 Mistakes to avoid while using Google Analytics

There are several common blunders that prohibit MSPs from gathering reliable data on Google Analytics, appropriately understanding data and making effective changes based on that data.

#Not using Google Analytics: The biggest error you can make with Google Analytics is not using it to its full potential. Even if you have the tracking code installed on your website, you may not be using the platform correctly if you aren’t logging in on a regular basis to check for changes in website data.

It isn’t necessary to log in every day, especially since you’ll want to look for long-term trends rather than short-term data fluctuations, but you should check in at least once a week to see what’s changed and what hasn’t, especially if you’re in the middle of a big campaign.

#Relying on a single report: Logging in and merely checking only a specific section of the platform is a mistake. Updating, expanding and reviewing reports on a regular basis gives a fuller picture.

#Not filtering out internal traffic: By default, Google Analytics tracks all traffic to your site, including visitors from your own internal team. If you have a team that visits your site on a frequent basis through numerous channels, you may be reporting false data based on those visits.

Set up filters to prohibit internal visitors to screen them out. You can also use filters to exclude data sources from your metrics that you don’t want to include. This can be extremely useful in assuring the accuracy of your data.

While using Google Analytics isn’t a magic potion that can boost your conversions overnight, it is an important tool that helps MSPs develop a solid digital marketing strategy in the long term. It helps you generate high-value traffic that has the potential to lead to more new and recurring engagements.

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