Practical Ways to Leverage Both Google Analytics & HubSpot

Practical Ways to Leverage Both Google Analytics & HubSpot:

from Business 2 Community by Sam Lowe

Let’s say that you’ve created a great new website and  gone through hell and back to optimize everything for search engines. You were an alt-text wizard with every image and you researched keywords as if your life depended on it – not to mention that your meta descriptions rival Hemingway’s best work. This sounds like quite the site and it probably is.
But wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly how people are using this site and where they’re going? Wouldn’t it also be awesome to know where these visitors are from or if they’re browsing your site on an iPhone or Android device?
If you’re an existing HubSpot customer (or looking to become one) and still want to leverage Google Analytics, here’s some practical ways to leverage both to get a complete analytic view of your website’s performance.

HubSpot – Lead Tracking

If you’re a HubSpot user then you’re surely aware of the analytic tools (referred to as “Reports”) that accompany your license, which allow you to dissect your traffic sources and where your various leads and customers are coming from. Another powerful component of HubSpot’s analytics are the Contact tools. These tools are what marketers dream of since you can track the activity of specific prospects and leads without making things too complicated.

Lead tracking/nurturing is really the golden part of HubSpot’s analytics in my opinion. Google Analytics allows you to track leads as well, but this involves goal setting which is less intuitive than HubSpot’s tool. The lead tracking in HubSpot can easily go down to the IP Address level making it very specific and lucrative from a conversion standpoint. Google does not do this and provides information in an aggregate form instead. HubSpot’s analytics allow you to nurture a lead and see exactly what they’re doing on your site individually and can alert you each time they visit your site.

Google – Site Traffic

Google Analytics has a huge amount of customization for your reports, especially in the way/how users are viewing your site. This analytics tool allows you to see things such as what percentage of visitors/pageviews/etc. come from mobile devices. You can even go one step further and see what operating system a user is on such as iOS, Android, and Windows just to name the main ones. Another related nugget of information that Google Analytics provides are the range of internet browsers that are being used on your site.

Hold on now: you might be thinking that this stuff is not very relevant compared to HubSpot’s lead tracking and is just analytics mumbo-jumbo. If you know how people are using your site then you’ll know how to better tailor your site’s functionality and where to apply your limited resources and finances. Let’s say a huge percentage of your site is viewed on mobile devices and specifically iOS devices. This means that you should look at your site and make sure that it’s optimized for iPhone and iPad. Also, since iOS is a large percentage of mobile traffic, you want to think about getting rid of that nasty Flash rotator you have on your homepage and invest in an HTML 5 plugin instead.
Bringing It Together
This is a brief overview of some of the differentiated aspects each analytics tool offers. If you’re trying to pick which one to go with I can help you out. Go with both of them. Google Analytics is free to use and will complement your existing HubSpot analytics tool nicely.
Both Google and HubSpot provide much of the same information, like number of visits, page views, etc., but the two tools can show different results in each category. One might say that you had 2,345 visits this month while they other says you had 2,756. Don’t be alarmed: each tool is relying on completely different algorithms. The best thing to do is not to report on one specific number since each has its faults; instead look at overall trends on your site. These trends should be replicated in both HubSpot and Google Analytics.
At the end of the day think of using HubSpot as more of an “internal” tool for tracking activity on your site such as leads and the sales process because that’s what the tool is designed for and does a great job at. Use the free Google Analytics tool to track what’s going on “externally.” You can see analytics such as the bounce rate of your individual pages plus the aforementioned mobile and browser information to better tailor your site.
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