Google Analytics is the best free tool available for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. It allows you to see the amount of website traffic coming in, as well as track where your users are coming from.

Using Google Analytics can be simple or complicated based on your needs. If you truly want to get the most from your marketing efforts you may need to dig deeper than you have before. Here are some tips you can use to improve your marketing efforts through the use of Google Analytics.

Create Goals

One of the easiest features to use with Google Analytics is goals. To set up your first goal, go to admin – goals-new goal. Conversion is typically the most important goal for most sites. There are many templates that you can choose from to effectively track your conversions. Once you have set up your goals you can quickly monitor your conversion progress.

Customize your Dashboards

To do this, go to your dashboard and then to new dashboard. You can have up to 20 dashboards at any point. Once your opening template has been selected you will be able to add widgets. This can be very useful for getting consistent reports and high level views of the overall progress of your campaign.

Setting Custom Alerts

Most of us do not have the time to check our Google Analytics page each day for any type of unusual activity. This is why setting custom alerts is useful. To do this, simply go to your admin page then to custom alerts and then create new alert.

You can apply these alerts to all of your traffic or just different segments. You can then set the alert to go off when a certain metric either goes up or falls (within a set amount of time). When the conditions are met you will receive either a text or an email.

Stop Visiting Your Site

Chances are that you visit your website often to make sure that everything is working. While this is good, your visits can actually skew the information provided by Google Analytics. You can set up a filter in the admin panel so that traffic from your IP address is excluded.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

Setting up google webmaster tools for your site is highly recommended as this will provide you with further insights that are not offered through Google Analytics. These insights include impression data, spam actions, and organic keyword search.