HOW TO USE GOOGLE ANALYTICS WITHOUT OWNING A WEBSITE FOR DATA DRIVEN MARKETING

Kingsley Ihemere
5 min readJan 18, 2021

As the biggest search engine in the world, you can be sure that Google is one stop place for any form of data.

One would ask, if this is so, how come marketers and data analysts who want to use Google Analytics most likely need to own their websites and drive either paid or organic traffic in order to have enough data to make some good data driven decisions for their marketing?

Well, that time is over. Right now you no longer need to have a website before you can learn or even teach Google analytics. In this article, I will walk you through how to start your data driven marketing without owning your website.

So, for the purpose of clarity, I will divide this article into two sections.

1. Data Driven Marketing

2. Google Merchandise Store & Google Analytics with Real Data

Data Driven Marketing
As the name goes, the meaning is in the name. Data Driven Marketing basically means the collection and usage of data to drive marketing decision.

Marketing, before now, use to be heavily reliant on “spray and pray” method.
A situation where marketers advertise to everyone with the hope that the right audience will find it informative and simply call to action.

While it worked at the time, it wasn’t efficient and sustainable. This method of marketing is simply capital intensive yet with less conversion.

The big question is, instead of throwing the campaign open to all, how about having a system of marketing that targets the audience who are truly interested in our brand and products?

This is one of the questions that birthed the era of Data Driven Marketing. It is the method of using data generated from users for optimal and targeted media buying and creative messaging.

Before sending messages to your audience, you need to know the type of message and the right audience that will consume and appreciate the message.

Appreciation of marketing messages often results to conversions.

This type of marketing helps you target the right audience. I will highlight briefly three main sections of data driven marketing.

a) Collecting Data.
Data collection ask three main questions:
>>> What tools should be used to collect data?
>>> Which data and metrics is relevant for my project?
>>> Is my data reliable?

b) Understanding and making sense of the data you have collected

c) Preparing report and communicate same, based on the data you have collected

With the above brief knowledge of data driven marketing, it is time to put into practice the knowledge you have. Let’s dive into the other two sections.

Google Merchandise Store & Google Analytics with Real Data
According to Google Analytics website, it is a tool that lets you measure your advertising ROI (Returns On Investments) as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications. (Please this is not an article on how to work with Google Analytics).

One of the major challenges of learning Data Driven Marketing through Google Analytics is the availability of real data integrated into Google analytics.

Google Analytics on its own is only a web application that depends on data from users to perform the beautiful and insightful visualizations you see.

Most times to have access to a Google analytics with real data, you need to have a fully working website with paid or organic traffic or you use a client analytics account.

But the later will likely not be possible without a sound knowledge and experience of the platform.

If you are onboard this boat, don’t worry, because I came with solution to your problems.

Google always finds a way to understand both end users and third party service providers. Thanks to the power of data.

An integration of Google merchandise Store into Google Analytics Demo helps provide us with a dashboard populated with real data that you can also view in real time. Isn’t that amazing?

I will carefully walk you through on how to access this demo account and start learning Google Analytics without a website.

According to Business Teacher, Google Merchandise Store is an affiliate of the holding company, Google and an e-commerce business site that deals with marketing and selling of Google-branded merchandise as well as YouTube brands, Android branded

apparel, Google merchandise brands such as stationaries, bags among other products. Google Merchandise Store has grown considerably with its estimated revenue as $2,031,670,000 with an e-commerce conversion rate of 0.15% as of September 2019.

Now to have full access to all Google products, you need a Gmail account. You can get a free Google account here.

Now, having gotten your Gmail account, let’s go to the browser and type “access demo account google analytics” click on the link as shown in the image below

You will need to sign in with your Gmail then click on “Access Demo Account”.

When you click on Access Demo Account, it will take you to a new tab showing the Google Analytics Demo Dashboard.

Wow! Here we are viewing the amazing Google Analytics dashboard with real data from Google Merchandise Store.

Make sure you are connected to the “Master View”. At this point, you are good to explore and analyze.

This article was inspired by the need to encourage freelance analysts who don’t have access to websites that can generate data for their analytics account.

You may not have a full time job right now, trust me, freelancing can help you pay your bills if you are hardworking and prudence with your finances.

A lot of blog and website owners don’t really know how to make the most of their wonderful audience.

They will need you to help them analyze and make decisions that will help grow their brands. This article can help you perfect your Google analytics skills while you work on clients’ jobs.

Happy Analyzing!!!

You can follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter and here on Medium so you don’t miss any of my articles.

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Kingsley Ihemere

A Data Analyst/Data Engineer, I build and analyze with Python(Django & FastAPI), JavaScripts(Vue.js), SQL, Excel, Google Cloud Platform, Power BI & Tableau.