It is important to measure how successful your inbound marketing efforts are.

One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use and it allows you to learn more about your website traffic, track where your visitors come from and why they are visiting your site.

Here are a 5 ways to use Google Analytics effectively to make sure you are getting the most out of this extremely useful tool.

1. Tracking Email Campaigns

Google Analytics allows you to track your email campaigns. To do this you will need to go to the admin page and then to custom definitions and to custom metrics. Here you will create a metric called email opens. Make sure that this is active and then create the email in your email software program. Use the given code to track your email campaign.

2. Creating Custom Campaign URLs

There is a free tool that you can use in order to customize URLs for any of your marketing campaigns. This tool will allow you to identify 5 parameters, your medium, source, content, term, and the name of your campaign. Once you have set up the custom link you can use the full link or a shortened form created by a tool such as bitly.

3. Analyze Site Searches

You may use behavior/site search if you have the search function enabled on your website. This will allow you to analyze the data of what users typically search for. A user that performs a search on the site is more likely to convert to a sale than the ones who do not. If you see what your users are looking for you will know what they want, which allows you to publish content that is related to those searches.

4. Weekly Reports Email

There is an option to have reports emailed weekly or monthly to provide you with a snapshot of the most important metrics of your site. This is perfect for those who do not want to use Google Analytics manually.

5. Watch for Updates

It is important to make sure that you watch for any updates to Google Analytics. Consider following the Google Analytics twitter page so that you are up to date on these new functions and features as they come about.

Take the time to implement these tips and you will be able to fully track your website traffic to learn more about what works and what does not.