Your international marketing campaigns hinge on one crucial element: how well you have understood your audience.
As with all marketing, insight into the user behavior, preferences and needs of your market is a must. However, if you do not have feet on the ground in these markets, you may be struggling to understand why your campaigns are not hitting the mark.
Thankfully you have a goldmine of data about your customers’ interests, behavior, and demographics already at your fingertips. Wherever your international markets are, Google Analytics should be your first destination for drawing out actionable insights.
Setting up Google Analytics for international insight
Google Analytics is a powerful tool but the sheer volume of data available through it can make finding usable insights tough. The first step for getting the most out of Google Analytics is ensuring it has been set up in the most effective way. This needs to encompass the following:
Also read: An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms[1]
1. Setting up views for geographic regions
Depending on your current Google Analytics set-up you may already have more than one profile and view for your website data. What insight you want to get from your data will influence how you set up this first stage of filtering. If you want to understand how the French pages are being accessed and interacted with then you may wish to create a filter based on the folder structure of your site, such as the “/fr-fr/” sub-folder of your site.
However, this will show you information on visitors who arrive on these pages from any geographic location. If your hreflang tags aren’t correct and Google is serving your French pages to a Canadian audience,