Good decisions can only ever be made when they are led by good data. Should you invest more money into paid ads? Should you write a blog that covers a certain topic? Should content be removed from a website?
In order to answer such questions, data is key - one wrong move and you could do some serious damage but if you have data to hand, you can make accurate hypotheses that could unlock serious growth opportunities. This blog aims to look at the various Google Tools available to you and provide ways in which your internal teams can use them for insights.
This free tool is a must-have for monitoring your site’s SEO performance. Google Search Console will give you great insight into how Google is perceiving your website and also reasons for not being able to index certain pages.
A great use of this for your internal team is the performance report. There are a lot of filters where you can filter by query, page and type of feature and you can utilise more than one of these filters together.
Use case scenario: If you’re seeing a drop in traffic from a particular page in GA4, it would be worth having a look at GSC to filter by the page and then compare the period after to before the drop and then look at the queries to see which have seen the largest drops in clicks. You can then see whether Google has decided to rank you for an alternative query/keyword that might have a lower search volume. Alternatively, you’ll be able to see if the average position for individual queries has dropped. It can be quite time consuming so focusing on the pages that matter most to your website will be best for teams short on time and resources. You will however, be in a better position with this new insight, to decide on next steps.
Whatever Analytics platform you use is entirely up to you but Google Tools play nicely (most of the time) with other Google Tools and GA4 is our preferred choice. Technically it is another completely free tool to set up but you may need a little help to set up tracking and sort out the configuration based on your needs. Data is only as good as your tracking set up, so ensuring this is in a good place is essential for you to be able to draw any insights from it. Our top three areas to familiarise yourself with are as follows:
Deciding on what is most important to monitor is really down to each business and the marketing strategy but once that’s nailed, the stuff you need to be reporting on will be very clear. Not everyone can read data from tables, so if you need to be able to show others and regularly review certain bits of data, it can be extremely beneficial to consider building a custom Looker studio Dashboard.
Looker Studio is a free tool where you can connect an extensive range of data sources. Here’s the truth: You cannot simply rely on a single tool to give you the insights you need. Using just one tool is like listening to one side of the story in an argument and making a decision purely based on that…doesn’t sound like a reasonable or great idea does it? Looker studio allows you to combine and blend your data from a variety of sources to display the data you see directly in the platforms/tools and to display it in a way that makes sense to people.
Some people are very visual oriented and therefore seeing a pie chart or a line graph can help them understand data better, whereas others might prefer a table - it can be made entirely how you need it to be. If your manager is always asking you for a website performance report, creating a Looker Studio report that you can share with them, means less admin for you! They can log in whenever they want, simply update a date or data control and see period on period and year on year comparisons. If you have offline later that you need to combine with online data, you can connect Google Sheets and blend it together. There is a lot you can do with Looker and it’s particularly useful for displaying the data that you need to see on a regular basis.
Paid Media is a great option for increasing leads relatively quickly but when you’re running ads of any kind, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of each campaign and ensure they are as optimised as they can be or you could quite literally be throwing your money away.
Keep an eye on your average cost per click as well as your spend and your cost per conversion. Are there any stand out campaigns that seem to be eating the budget but not attributing any conversions?
Your keyword types should also be reviewed and should be very specific to your campaigns. Broad match type is the default keyword type but because it allows for very broad searches, sometimes there are instances where a different type will be required, particularly if you don’t have a huge budget for Ads and need the ads to trigger for more specific searches that are likely to result in a conversion on your website.
Keep an eye on Organic Search performance too if you’re using Branded Search campaigns. A drop in Organic Search would be expected if your Branded Search Campaign has a large budget against it because people are more likely to click on your ad rather than your Organic Search Result.
The keyword planner in ads is very useful for in-house teams, since you can use it for both Paid Ad and Organic keyword research.
This is applicable to all Ecommerce websites running Google Ads. Google Merchant Centre. Google Merchant Centre is great for automatically collecting Google Reviews for your products.
But the feed will also help you identify any issues that can be a contributing factor to ad performance. For example, image urls could be missing but GMC will tell you what needs to be improved and you can see what needs fixing.
Google Trends may not be as well known as some of the other Google Tools but it’s definitely worth a mention. If your business is looking to expand into a different area, it can be really helpful to look at search queries in particular locations and over time to get an understanding of whether keywords are likely to see traction, are affected by seasonality and also whether the search intent has changed and a different search query is emerging.
If you’re thinking of writing a blog or looking to write a social post that draws current interest, you can also use the trending now section to look at popular searches to get ideas.
There’s a fantastic free Chrome extension that you can use with Google Trends called Glimpse. With Glimpse, you can set up alerts for interest spikes for keywords, be able to export data from Google Trends, forecast interest and see a breakdown of channels for the keywords.
If you’re completely new to Google Tools but eager to learn, we can offer bespoke training sessions with our team of experts based on your level of experience.