Google offers many free tools which are convenient to use and most importantly accessible from a single login and remains the top priority for many digital marketers. Their platform is expanding continuously to enhance the user experience and keeps on bringing new benefits and features for advertisers.
Following are the 10 powerful free Google tools for digital marketers to maximize the success rate of the online marketing campaigns.
1) Google Analytics
Google Analytics has both free and premium web analytic tools. It lets you keep track of detailed visitor metrics, for example – visitors’ demographics, visitors’ behavior, traffic sources, conversions and sales. On a whole it gives you the access to adequate information about your website visitors.
Google analytics allows digital marketers to do the following:
- To measure SEO.
- To track direct, organic, paid, referral, email and social traffic.
- To sync Google AdWords with Google Analytics and monitor the visitors’ behavior and results.
- To monitor what’s working and what’s not.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Analytics.
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Sign up or Sign in on Google Analytics.
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Follow the steps adding your website and get the Tracking ID.
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Copy and paste the Tracking ID into the Header section of your website.
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Start tracking the analytics of the website.
2) Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an alert tool which helps you to stay updated with the latest information and breaking news related to your industry or business. It sends you emails of the alerts you created. This is very essential for a digital marketer to stay updated in the market and it helps you do so keeping you updated with all the current happenings.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Alerts.
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Enter the topics in the search box for which you want to create an alert about.
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Enter your email and click on create alert.
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You will start receiving email alerts about the latest news of the topics.
3) Google Trends
Google trends provides users with information on trending topics all over the world and works as an insights tool for competitor analysis. This lets you see how often search queries/keywords have been searched for over a specific period of time and helps in evaluating the popularity of terms and suggests new blog topic ideas. This benefits the digital marketers in finding the right insights to plan for a promotion on popular searches.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Trends.
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You can see the current trending stories in the home page.
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Enter the search terms/topics in the search box (Explore topics).
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Get the trend graph for your search.
4) Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a tool that helps you track the past performance of particular keywords along with the forecast performance so that you can explore new SEO strategies for blog posts with keywords having good performance as well as decide with bids and budgets if you are to run Google Adword campaigns.
How to use:
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Sign up or Sign in to your Google AdWords account.
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Once you login click on the Tools option in the top menu bar.
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There you go to the keyword planner and start exploring.
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You can also add filters to your keyword searches for various targeting options.
5) Google Webmaster Tools
Google webmaster tools or Search Console is a primary tool to communicate with the webmaster which provides you an in-depth view of what’s going on with your website. It helps you in taking the right decisions to optimize the website and also keeps you updated with the warning error messages that could prevent your site from getting the right search results. You can also understand the visitors’ behavioral patterns with this tool.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Search Console.
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Add your website by clicking on the ADD A PROPERTY tab and verify the same.
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Start exploring the dashboard by clicking on your website link.
6) Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is an important tool by Google for digital marketers which is used to test the loading speed of your website/webpage. It also addresses the issues which hinder your speed ratings and solutions to resolve them as well. This helps a lot for the digital marketers as page load speed is also an important aspect in SEO perspective UX as well.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google PageSpeed Insights.
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Enter the website URL and click on ANALYZE.
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Click on Mobile and Desktop for respective results.
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Below the rating, you can find the suggestions summary which helps you resolve the speed hindering issues.
7) Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool which allows you to test the mobile friendliness of your website/webpage which is very important for any digital marketer as the current generation is the mobile generation and mobile ready website is very important for SEO.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
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Enter your website/webpage URL to test and press enter.
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Results will be fetched which shows whether your page is mobile-friendly or not.
8) Google Structured Data Testing Tool
A Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT) is a tool which analyses the structured data, i.e., the kind of data with a high level of organisation, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured, search engines can more easily organise it and display in creative ways. This tool generates a preview for the structured data of your webpage. Moreover, it helps you discover any errors or warnings in the webpage.
How to use:
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Navigate to the Structured Data Testing Tool.
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Enter your URL and click on the RUN TEST button.
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The markup code from that page are loaded displaying the URL you typed on the top.
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Address the errors & warnings and make required customizations.
9) Google URL Shortener
Google URL Shortener is also known as goo.gl. It lets you create a shortened version of the URL (Universal Resource Locator), so that you can share it easily. A dashboard of all the URLs you shortened will be listed out in the dashboard with the analytics to track the number of clicks, where the clicks are coming from, etc. for that particular links.
How to use:
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Navigate to goo.gl.
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Enter the original URL.
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Click on the SHORTEN URL button.
10) Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a latest tool currently in Beta stage which is very useful for digital marketers as it helps you to create reports of the Google Analytics data, Google AdWords data, YouTube Analytics data, and many more in a creative way that are easy to read, understand, share and fully customizable through data visualization.
These reports will be more engaging, live and interactive which helps to drive better insights.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Data Studio.
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Sign in or Sign up for free. (You can sign in using Google Analytics account).
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Click on Blank (Start a new report) or the + button.
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Click on CREATE NEW DATA SOURCE button.
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Select the report you want to create from the left side panel.
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Start exploring and create reports by just selecting the data element you want to represent in the report and click the cursor on the blank space to draw the same. You can also resize and format the report with different font styles and colors.
BONUS TOOL
11) Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool
Suggested by Mr. Kristof
Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool is a new tool from Google powered by PageSpeed Insights. It helps you to find out how your site performs across mobile and desktop devices. This tool tests your site for mobile friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed. The special feature in this tool is that it sends a detailed report of your website performance along with the ways to improve them. You will really love its beautiful and astonishing UI and UX.
How to use:
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Navigate to Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool.
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Enter your website URL into the search box and hit TEST NOW button.
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Check out the scores on the beautiful dashboard or
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Hit the GET MY FREE REPORT button and select the option Yes. Enter your email address and submit.
These days digital marketers have access to more tools than ever before.
So, if you wish to reach your goals and excel in digital marketing, then you must add these Google tools into your toolbox.