Enhance Your Association’s Google Analytics

Data analytics can be both simple and detailed. Using Google Analytics, your association can get serious insight on where to put its efforts in order to drive up future success. It’s a free service that can offer a wide variety of tools.

Let’s take a look at some of the most helpful tools that Google Analytics can provide for your association.

Individual website tracking
The analytics tracking features on Google Analytics is a great way to extract data from marketing efforts. And with the website tracking tool, associations can get even more specific results.

  • To begin, you want to create a property in Google Analytics.
    If you’re tracking a website, you only want to have one property. However, if you’d like to track multiple websites, you need to create a property for each website you want tracked.
  • Once you create a property, you should be able to find your tracking id.
    Google makes it simple to find your tracking id. Your tracking id will serve as a plugin for the overall tracking code snippet, giving you precise analytic results.Within your tracking code snippet, you want to replace the tracking id placeholder code with your unique tracking id.

URL building
Organizing analytics into categories will make it easier and save time when it comes to analyzing the results.
This is why Google Analytics’ URL Builder tool is perfect for associations. It makes creating UTM parameters a breeze for anyone, even people with little to zero knowledge on campaign tracking.
The online tool allows to add UTM parameters onto any website link. All it takes is a copy and paste, and you’re on your way to better tracking. It also gives you options on how to track your link. You can track from a campaign source, which deals more with platforms that you host your link on. Or, you can track using a Campaign medium- what format you’re using to host your link (like a banner or even a well thought out email).
So, how do you choose your method of tracking? You have to take into consideration what will work best with your association.
If your association does a ton of email campaign work, it might be best to set UTM parameter tracking based on a campaign medium. This is because you’re focusing more on the medium of promotion, rather than the source.
However, if you promote a lot of your links on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or other social media channels, using campaign source tracking would be best for you.

Real-time reports
The real-time reports option allows an inside look at your association’s audience. It gives you a live count of active users currently on the website you’re tracking, as well as helpful demographic information about these users. You can view your top active pages on your website, showing what your audience is currently interested in seeing from your association.

You can also view exactly where your viewers are from throughout the world. This is great for associations looking to know more about where their traffic comes from.