Google Business Tools Every Digital Marketer Should Know

Sometimes, the difference between an effective marketing and the not-so-successful one is just the ability to combine and utilize the right tools.

Google plays host to tons of digital marketing tools that could help your efforts. Unfortunately, not many people know about them or using them as actively as they should.

So, in this article, I’m going to dig into some of these tools you can use to take your online marketing to the next level.

Google Analytics

Of course, this is very popular. GA, as commonly called, crawls your website and gives real-time update on visits. It provides detailed analysis of sources of visitors, which could be direct, social media or referral.

You’ll agree with me that without understanding such dynamics on your website, you can’t be sure of where to direct more of your efforts. You won’t know what’s working, or what’s not.

With features like the ability to bounce rate, you get to understand what’s putting people off, so you can make the necessary corrections.

While there are many tools out there (premium and free), which lets you analyse your website’s traffic, Google Analytics has the best to offer for free. You’ll be glad to know it could gather data from mobiles apps as well as it does for web pages.

Now, how do you get started? Go to the Google Analytics platform to create your account.  Then, you set up the items you would like to track. We call these properties. It represents your website or app, and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.

GA has different views, but for digital marketing, the most essential to you is the reporting tool. I recommend you see this guide from Google on using Google Analytics.

Google Places

Have you searched for a company on Google, and it brought you expanded details that include address, contact, reviews etc?

That’s Google Places. If you’ve been wondering why it doesn’t pick up your company as such, you can correct it by simply setting it up.

How sweet will it be when people search for your industry in your area, and you pop up?

So, you can easily fix that and get up there too. Visit this page to list your business on Google.

However, this could be easier if you have a Google+ Page for your business. In the same way it works on Facebook, your page represents your business, and Google lists it in response to search queries with all your information.

Google AdWord Keyword Research Tool

From content marketing to SEO and search marketing, we’ve learnt that right words are as important to your marketing as any other effort you put into it.

Google Keyword Research Tool helps you find out how a particular word is getting attention and clicks.

It’s available to everyone with an AdWord account, but not necessarily running ads. Before you use that word in your search campaign; before you optimise your content for that keyword, you should go here now to use the keyword research tool.

Google Insights

Why allow your marketing to fail with poor ideas when you can have a view of everything your customers do online on with Google Insights?

Google Insights pull data on words use in searches, and gives detail analysis on location, frequency and influences. You could also use Shopping Insights to check on what people buy with full details of the buyers. However, this currently covers the United States.

Consumer Barometer

Since digital marketer should rely entirely on data to make every decision, Consumer Barometer is a tool you can’t do without.

It analyses consumer behaviour on the internet, over the years and touching every part of the world. The data are from Google’s proprietary research projects, and represents the best approach to meet people on the internet.

It’s easy to use, and you can get started now.

Google Trends

Google Trend is your #1 place to start your marketing plan. You could search for keywords, and track the volume of queries they get within a particular period and in specific locations.

You’ll be surprised you can dig down to states and cities. This could go a long in helping you with what people are looking for online in your community.

If you had gone ahead to create campaigns for what people are not expecting to find online, it is likely to fail.

Google Webmaster Tools

While Google Analytics deals more with traffic, Google Webmaster Tools let’s you see through every bit of your website. It’s a free toolset provided by Google that helps you understand what’s going on with your website.

First, you should sign up here. Once you’ve added your website, you can use the dashboard to configure your website, update sitemap, give access to Googlebot and do a couple of other things.

This guide by KissMetrics explains more.

TestMySite for Mobile

Google’s TestMySite helps you track the speed of your website on mobile.

It’s a free service, and you could optimise for mobile as necessary.

There you go!

Get the hold of your digital marketing efforts today with these data-centric tools. If used well, they will validate your approach and helps you keep to what’s right.

So, let’s keep the conversation going, what tool have you found helpful to your digital marketing efforts?