Google Tools for Advertisers/Marketers/Communicators

Most Americans use Google every day. We search with it, we get directions with it, we shop with it and we probably have an email account with it. But when we're not using Google for personal uses, we can also greatly improve our businesses with its many features and tools. I checked out the Google for Advertisers page with my own employer in mind. We're constantly trying to improve our customer's website experience and we'll soon be launching a social media campaign to encourage two-way communication. With that in mind, I found these Google tools especially important to our efforts:

• Google Analytics is probably the most important tool for our marketing efforts. We can learn a lot about our audience through viewing our website traffic.  Google Analytics shows you things like how many new and returning visitors you have, how long people stay on your site, how many pages the average visitor views, what browsers and operating systems they use, top keywords, and much more. The new In-Page Analytics feature is amazing! We can use this tool to actually travel through our site and see how many views a page as had and where viewers typically click next, in percentages. We will use analytics to understand what information people are most interested in and make sure those pages are easy to find and view. We can also market these favorite pages through our blog articles and social media content. We’ll also use analytics on our Wordpress blog to know which articles were of interest to our viewers.
• The Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows us to dig deeper into the keyword SEO competition. We can enter our URLs to see data on keywords related to the content on those particular pages. We’ll check to see how we’re doing against our competition and what keywords people use so we know to strive for them in our SEO strategy. I think we’ll want to use this tool in particular as we increase our digital marketing through social media efforts, so we can assess what progress we are making and see if we’re getting a return on our time investment.
• Google Alerts is another important tool for our digital marketing strategy. This tool will help us monitor news, blogs and other content to see what is being said about us online. We’ll want to do a “MSU Human Resources sucks” alert along with other hot topics going on through our units. We can also keep tabs on our university HR competition and on the HR industry. As we move into the world of social media, we need this tool to help us know what is being said away from our own pages.

There are many other free Google tools out there, but I see these three being the most important for my employer as we increase our online and social media presence. Tools such as Google Analytics can be overwhelming with their robust amounts of data, but by learning and incorporating these tools into our digital marketing strategy, we can increase our chances of a successful social media campaign and truly help our customers find the content they want. Our goal is to improve our communications and customer service, and these tools will help us achieve that goal.

The Google Analytics Traffic Sources Overview shows us what percentage of traffic is direct versus a referring site, which traffic sources people use and what the top keywords are.