How To Guide For Web Analytics

Your club probably has a great website, complete with beautiful pictures showcasing your club, up-to-date information about your various membership options and club amenities, and you might even be doing some specific campaigns to drive members and potential members to your website.

Is it working?  Are you asking yourself and your team a few fundamental questions?

• Do you know how many visitors your website receives each month? 
• Is it higher or lower than last year? 
• Where are they coming from?
• What part of your town/region are they coming from?
• If you have any paid campaigns to drive web traffic, are they working?
• On what page do they start their visit?
• Once they arrive where do they navigate to?
• During their visit, how many pages do they view, how long do they stay?
• Do you have a page that seems to be the common place where their visit ends?
• How many unique visitors reviewed the membership options?
• For clubs with Wedding services, these questions above and more apply as the details and data can significantly alter your advertising campaigns and advertising spend.

If these questions are not currently a part of your regular review process, and if you’re not evolving your approach to creating website visitation and then managing the experience and evolving your content, you might want to consider implementing a foundational Google Analytics account.

Google Analytics is a free product from Google that you can use to measure and analyze web data, getting answers to all the questions above, and a lot more information for those inclined to dig deeper.  As you can see, Analytics is a powerful tool that will allow you improve your member digital experience and, with time, increase sales in many different lines of business. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Google Analytics, but you might not know if you have it currently installed or know how to get access to these valuable data points.

Google Analytics - Basic Terminology

Once installed and given time to produce some data, your Google Analytics reporting can be summarized in two broad categories: dimensions and metrics:

Dimensions: describe data. They are things like country, channel, location, age, gender, and device used. Common dimensions: Channel name, Month, Country, Device (mobile/ tablet/ desktop).

Metrics: measure data. Metrics include visitor numbers, goal completions, etc… Common metrics: Sessions, Users, New sessions, Page views, Avg. session duration.

What to analyze in a Golf Course Website?

Audience: First, we recommend you to visit the audience tab within Google Analytics. This tab will provide you important information such as the number of visitors you are receiving in a specific period of time. You can also look at the number of new vs. return visitors to give you an idea of how many new people are visiting your site. Depending upon your unique club demographics, your goals for new and unique visitors might vary dramatically.  For example, a club with a large wedding or special event budget, or a private club looking for significant growth in membership, would ideally like to have a larger distribution of unique visitors, because that would translate into prospective clients for weddings and events, and prospective new members.

On the other hand, if you are a property that is focused heavily on member service and member experience, having a larger number of returning visitors means that your members are engaged and like to navigate through your website. This is very important because here is where, ideally, members book tee times, make dining reservations, buy items from the pro shop, and read important information of your club.

Acquisition: It is very important for you to visit the acquisition report tab. Here you are able to analyze where your website visitors are coming from. For example, you may be receiving visitors from Social Media channels or Google search and if you are not aware about this information it is very difficult to optimize the best performing channel.

It may be a good strategy for you as a club to promote your events, courses or amenities via Google PPC ads, if you see that there is a good amount of traffic coming from Google. Conversely, if your Google organic search is not high and you are seeing a lot of people visiting your website directly from Facebook, you could launch a Facebook Ad campaign to strengthen this channel. In either case, you’re ability to confidently increase or decrease your advertising spend is driven by the ROI you’re receiving from reviewing your Google Analytics acquisition reporting.

Behavior: You understand now the importance of the audience and acquisition tab, but do you know which pages are your website visitors opening? Do you know which pages have the highest bounce rates? Do you know what is the most visited page within your website? – All these answers and more can be found in the behavior tab. As the name describes it, in this tab you can find relevant information regarding your website visitor’s behavior.

Being able to analyze which pages are being visited the most will help you improve your member’s digital experience. All of us know that time is limited and when it comes to digital marketing there are always areas of improvement, so it is crucial for you to understand what are the KEY areas to optimize that will give you the highest ROI.

Analyzing Data

One of the best reports to look at is the “real-time” tab. It provides you with a live snapshot of the activity on your website related to visitors, content, traffic sources, and goals. It helps you understand in real-time how a recently launched campaign is performing. However, it's not useful for historical reporting, because it only shows data in real time and it can't be downloaded. It provides you with an overview on what's happening at the moment. Understanding traffic spikes both in real time and in reports can allow your marketing and sales team to understand the ROI of awareness-generating campaigns like Facebook Ads, Google PPC, and event promotions.

Furthermore, by evaluating how many additional online sales occurred as a result of a campaign, versus the cost of generating that same amount of sales using offline channels, it is possible, for you  to assign a ROI value to your online offline marketing investments.

We will be discussing further methods for creating full circle campaigns and digital marketing strategies that can define your ROI, and help your team feel confident about your marketing activities and success.  If you want some help, we are always available for a free consultation or review of your plans.  Just send us an email, or give us a call!

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About Total e Integrated

Total e Integrated is a leading provider of end-to-end business management solutions for recreation, retail, hospitality and community organizations. For over 20 years Total e Integrated has helped organizations to integrate departments, automate marketing, streamline operations and boost revenues with our innovative solutions and expert consulting services team.

Lance Merrihew
707-779-2592

Lance@totaleintegrated.com

www.totaleintegrated.com