Make Google Analytics data meaningful with Yellowfin Signals

Lots of organizations use Google Analytics and Google Insights to monitor the effectiveness of their digital marketing. While it looks appealing, some of the information it delivers is almost meaningless. It’s so complicated that it doesn’t help you understand what’s happening in your business.

Google Analytics is a great dashboard - it's good for monitoring macro trends. But it's not very useful if you want to discover things as they happen or react to changes that you’re making to your digital campaigns.

Google Analytics has website data that has dimensionality to it. You can see where your visitors are from, the country they live in, their gender and whether your reach was organic or through a paid ad. Even with Google Insights there’s too much data and complexity for you to see what’s working and what’s not working in real time. You can waste a lot of time looking at the data trying to determine whether your strategy is working.

So, we applied Yellowfin Signals to our own Google Analytics data and found that it gave us fresh insights into our business. Signals automates data discovery, providing personalized and relevant alerts as they happen.

Automated data discovery on Yellowfin's own Google Analytics

At the start of the year, we dialed up our Google AdWords with a digital advertising campaign that targeted the regions, cities, and types of businesses we wanted to focus on. When we applied Signals to this data, we instantly saw outliers. We had significant mobile traffic from places like Bangladesh. This was not an audience that was likely to buy Yellowfin. So we were able to react immediately and switch off those ads. We then asked our agency to look into the data.

Because the high-level trends looked good, the agency assumed they had set up the ads correctly and the traffic was coming from the UK, the US, or Germany. It would’ve taken weeks or months before they drilled down into the data and saw what was actually going on.

As Signals told us exactly what was happening quickly, it took the agency just half a day to validate the information and adjust our campaign. By telling us what was happening straight away, Signals saved Yellowfin a lot of time and money.

I believe Google could provide the same type of information to their customers as Signals does but they don’t. So we’ve documented the whole process. This means Yellowfin customers can apply Signals to their Google Analytics data and get the same benefits we did.