Understanding how your customer acquisition efforts are paying off is essential to a good strategy. When applied properly, the process of lead and conversion tracking provides invaluable metrics on your business performance with every significant interaction. However, people often don’t know what to look for or cherry-pick data, which can lead them down the wrong behavioral path or keep a business from scaling.

In today’s well-developed digital business environment, there are thousands of tools that could be employed for similar effects. Our goal is to highlight the most trusted and efficient ones that create an iron-clad reporting cycle to ultimately positively influence your decision-making around your customer acquisition strategy. In turn, this should create clear metrics for how you assess growth and track your overall ROI in different sectors of your business.

Thus, we encourage business owners and department heads to understand every component of tracking by simplifying them into well-defined bottlenecks. From there, you can focus on which metrics provide the most insight and how each number plays into your plan to scale your business rapidly. This approach is typically led by HubSpot reporting, leads into Google Analytics, and can include SEMRush and other content review tools for a well-developed data suite.

How HubSpot Sets the Stage for Growth

HubSpot’s suite of marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and sales tools are at the center of some of the most powerful strategic scaling plans. For our purposes, HubSpot is typically used to store all leads and marketing data in an integrated format, which then becomes the basis for a Customer Lifecycle.

HubSpot’s partner program provides hundreds of apps and integrations to make this baseline reporting intuitive and flexible to your team. Whether it’s social media, sales, advertising metrics, or project management, the goal is to create a dynamic yet accessible growth dashboard. Ultimately, the goal is to share your company goals for growth via HubSpot integrations and the definition of what those mean for the future.

Using Hubspot to Measure Customer Acquisition and Business Growth

In order to accurately measure customer acquisition and business growth, you will need to define key performance indicators or KPIs. These metrics will allow you to see whether your goals are being met and remove much of the guesswork from decision-making – which can ultimately speed up corrective growth processes.

Depending on your industry and organization, common KPIs might include leads, churn rate, profit per unit, or customer satisfaction metrics. Realistically, you will likely troubleshoot your process to include or remove certain metrics from your dashboard as your business evolves. This sort of troubleshooting allows for you to break through plateaus with clear intentions and direction for your employees and strategic partners.

Automating Processes and Insights

Utilizing HubSpot’s suite of software properly can catalyze quantitative analysis and growth. That’s why we have curated a team of talented and experienced professionals who can help achieve this in tandem with your decision-makers. The upside is that you can dedicate your valuable time and energy to developing your product and team while we help grow your business sustainably.

Next-Level Funnels with Google Analytics

Once you’ve established a customer life cycle baseline via HubSpot, the strategic focus shifts to website traffic with Google Analytics. This powerful software is not only widely used by organizations and businesses, but its zero-cost features make it an incredible tool that anyone can use.

Understanding Google Analytics often takes time, patience, and a bit of practice. There are many intricacies and features that will provide both a wide range and a very granular look at your website and traffic data. Since its original launch in 2005, Google Analytics has proven to be an invaluable tool for marketers, web developers, and anyone looking to gain more insights into website performance.

Keep reading to discover what Google Analytics is and why it’s beneficial for your business goals. We’ll also provide a brief overview of what you can track, how to get started, and which reports are the most beneficial for your specific use case.

What is Google Analytics?

Originally, Google Analytics was an innovative new tracking software available by invitation only. In 2006, the platform became widely accessible as a result of extremely high demand. Analytics offered a revolutionary way to better understand customer and website data in one place.

Google Analytics is nested with multiple sources of data to provide a complete picture of website performance, traffic, and customer data. For example, you can use Google Analytics to:

Understand more about your website visitors
Use machine learning to get the most out of the available tracking data
Easily connect to Google’s advertising and publisher products
Analyze and share data with in-depth reporting features

If you own, operate, or depend on any type of website for business, installing Google Analytics should be one of the first steps you take toward optimizing your content and resources.

Benefits of Google Analytics for Customer Acquisition

At first glance, using Google Analytics might seem intimidating or confusing. Fortunately, when it comes to Google Analytics for beginners, one of the first steps to take is understanding the benefits of the platform. Once you have a strong understanding of how the platform can elevate your business, you won’t be able to resist jumping in.

Both novices and experts can agree on several key benefits of using Google Analytics for customer acquisition and business growth. These benefits include:

The ability to monitor content performance. Have you ever been frustrated that you don’t know what’s working and what’s not? Analytics takes the guesswork out of all your manual measurements by providing detailed insights into specific pages, posts, and pieces of content. You can also link your account to CRM data for a more holistic view of your customers and their behaviors.
The visibility into potential conversion. Google uses special machine learning to deliver data about which users are likely to convert into prospects or sales. If you’re hoping for a closer look at revenue potential, you’ll be blown away by what Google dashboards can help you forecast.
The connectivity to other platforms and services. Perhaps you’ve been interested in display ads or Google AdWords. If so, then Google Analytics is the bridge to launch you into advertising success. Analytics allows users to create retargeting lists, which creates the added benefit of boosting your advertising campaigns.

5 Cool Sources You Can Track with Google Analytics

There’s an almost endless amount of things that you can monitor with this powerful platform. In this Google Analytics for Beginners guide, we’ll highlight some of the top metrics you may want to track from the start.

Organic traffic

Knowing exactly where your website traffic is coming from is helpful in setting benchmarks, developing a content plan, and making adjustments. According to marketing guru Neil Patel, your traffic sources overview is one of the most integral parts of your understanding of Google Analytics.

Why should you monitor organic traffic with Google Analytics? For one, this information tells you how many people are coming to your website who perhaps aren’t familiar with your brand, product, or service. This information is helpful if you are taking a closer look at business growth.

Organic search data also shows the potential of your search engine optimization or SEO. When your content is ranking highly in search results, you can expect more traffic to your website. Unique visitors in Google Analytics, or those individuals who visit your site one time, can also reveal in-depth data about why people land on your site and why they might be bouncing.

You can also use Google Analytics to see if your social media content is effective. This is a measure of traffic that comes from Facebook, L i nkedIn, Instagram, or other social platforms. Even if these users are engaging with your social media posts, how often can you inspire them to visit your website and potentially take further action?

Within Google Analytics, you can use the Source/Medium reporting feature to see social media traffic. Even if visitors are coming directly from a social site like Facebook, Analytics allows you to see how they interact once they’re on your site.

To fully utilize the power of Analytics for social media traffic, you can incorporate UTMs. UTMs are special tags that you add to the links your business shares on social media. These parameters are an extra layer of data that you can use to understand where, when, and how a user is engaging.

Visitors, sessions, and timing

Google Analytics is also helpful for measuring basic data that serves as the foundation of your website efforts. This might include the total number of new and unique visitors, the number of sessions they create, or how long a visitor stays on your site before navigating away.

In Google Analytics, ‘Users’ corresponds to the number of website visitors. A single user may have one or several ‘Sessions,’ which describes a set period of time that they’re actively browsing your website pages.

Information found under ‘Average Session Duration’ can illustrate how long a person chooses to browse your site. What could this timing reveal about your site’s content, user experience, or conversion options? These are important questions to ask if you want to maximize any of these results.

Keywords

SEO and Google Analytics often go hand-in-hand. The building block of that relationship is often found in a website’s keyword usage. Keywords describe the search terms that users are entering to land on your site.

Many times, marketers and business leaders want to know which keywords are leading users to a particular page or post. By taking a closer look at a section of Google Analytics called Queries, you can quickly scan the search terms that are creating the most traffic.

Within the same report, you’ll be able to see how many impressions your website receives for a given keyword. Additionally, you can view information about click-through rates (CTR), overall page ranking (as compared to other websites), and the total number of clicks earned from a given keyword.

Leads and conversion rates

In many scenarios, lead generation is tracked through lead form conversion. Manually following every web form conversion, however, can be time-consuming and tedious. Google Analytics can provide important lead conversion data, and there are a few ways to accomplish this.

The first option is to set up UTM parameters for individual marketing campaigns. In doing so, you’ll be able to better track which marketing campaigns are attributed to the highest profit potential. To do this accurately, you will need to identify a source, medium, campaign, and website URL.

Another option is to track leads with goal conversions. Analytics also allows you to establish goal funnels, which are crucial for spotting any gaps or errors in your lead conversion process. Setting up goals with Google Analytics may also be important if you’re implementing ad campaigns through Google Ad Manager.

How to Set Up Google Analytics

When you’re ready to start collecting website data, setting up Google Analytics is an important first step. Fortunately, Google’s knowledge base can simplify the process even if you’re a beginner. There are four main steps to take when you first get started with the Analytics dashboards.

Create and sign in to your account. When you first access Analytics, you can sign in with an existing Google account or set up a new one. You should always log into your Analytics account with the same Google credentials every time.
Set up a Google property. Google Analytics needs something unique to your account to connect to. Your “property” usually refers to a specific website. This is the collection point for any data that Google will help you see and maintain. (This step involves sharing specific domain information with Google.)
Set up a reporting view. A reporting view is simply a filter that you’ll select for viewing important data. In time, you can establish up to 25 reporting views to keep tabs on your website analytics. For beginners, start small with a view you can easily manage.
Add the tracking code. Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics account information, you need to go back to your website and add a tracking code. This final piece ties everything together and ensures that Google receives continuous data based on your website’s activity and performance.

Which Reports are Most Useful in Google Analytics?

The more comfortable you become, the more you’ll be able to successfully create and share customized reports.

Until you’re able to truly start building upon your Analytics knowledge, there are a few basic reports that are most useful when it comes to Google Analytics for beginners.

Acquisition Channels Report. To access your Channels Report, hover over the Acquisition option. This report allows you to see how your organic traffic compares to your paid search efforts. It also provides basic statistics about bounce rate, time on the page, and other details that shed light on the user experience.
Navigation Tab. This report can be accessed under Behavior and Site Content. It provides a quick glimpse at the paths users take to reach your website or specific URLs. If you notice a few common pages that users access within short windows of time, consider optimizing these pages to offer better answers to common questions.
Goals Overview. This is the report you will use when you want to track form fills, conversions, and downloads. Data about goals can be trimmed to specific periods of time, which helps you compare performance between campaigns. Your sales team may want to know which pages are driving conversions as well.
Site Speed. Site speed information can be accessed under the Behavior tab. While this is a factor that could easily be overlooked, site speed is an important part of SEO and page ranking. A website that loads slowly might repel visitors or encourage them to look elsewhere for solutions and answers.

How Can I Export Data with Google Analytics?

Whenever you need to export and share a report, you can apply certain Google Analytics filters to get the data you need. Within your account, you can easily build and download reports to share with colleagues or to further study a data set.

To export a report, you simply need to:

Open the report you’d like to pull
Click ‘Export’ (this option is accessible from the report title)
Select the file format you want to use for exporting
Open your downloads folder for an auto-generated file to save and share

To share a report with another user, open the chosen report as you would when exporting. Instead of clicking ‘Export,’ select the ‘Share’ option. In the ‘To’ field of the email, list out the addresses you want to send a report. When sharing data with other users, you can add multiple recipients and change the frequency of how regularly to send out a specific report.

For detailed steps, check out this easy guide from the Google Analytics help documents.

SEMRush for Keyword Rankings

A key ingredient of the rocket fuel in your ROI vehicle is the best keyword analysis. SEMRush allows you to see the most efficient ways to improve your visibility via competitor research, market insight, and keyword leverage. In short – it lets you create content and sites that are tailor-made for exactly what your ideal customer persona is searching for.

This allows you to build a dynamic content marketing strategy based on an approach that covers your internal practices, your potential demand, and any inhibitors to them. The more you implement this powerful tool, the greater chance you have of finding new opportunities – we find that often, SEMRush leads to revenue streams that weren’t even on the radar of some businesses until they tried it.

Content Reporting is King for Customer Acquisition

Content itself is the true royalty of the customer acquisition flywheel, and keeping it and your site atop the rankings throne takes analysis. This is why we work to create, maintain, and repurpose quality content that delivers exponential returns – and we track it to back it up.

Not only does this show the efficacy of a full-flywheel approach, but it also lets you understand where your efforts can be spent to scale, recalibrate, or merge your marketing tactics. Even the most successful businesses in any digital niche are consistently tweaking their content based on qualitative performance.

The goal of an analytic dashboard is to segment and simplify each piece of content into its own mini-campaign. Thus, you can keep the great ones in place and replace the underperforming content. In turn, this allows your marketing funnel to represent an elite blend of preparation, presentation, and performance toward spectacular ROI.

Get Help with Tracking Data

Are you ready to begin leveraging these tools to have more insights into the success of your customer acquisition strategy? At Striventa, we understand how these numbers can help inform business decisions and drive growth. Analytics and reporting are a key part of our Business Growth Program because they help us identify the ROI a company is getting through each tactic in the flywheel.