You already know that one of the best ways to get customers to learn about your products and services is to have a website. Your website is your digital foundation, one of the best ways to attract new and returning customers. But there’s much more to a website than providing information or even making sales.
Your website collects important information on consumer behavior that can help inform not only best practices for your web design and points of sale, but also how to convert users through your marketing funnel into loyal customers and long-term community members.
Anytime we begin a digital marketing audit or consult with a new client, we start by exploring where your customers invest their time when they find your business online. The more you understand each customer’s online journey, the stronger decisions you can begin to make on how and where to spend your online budget. No matter if you’re running campaigns through email, social media, or paid ads, being able to understand your metrics and data from your website will help inform decisions across all your online marketing strategies.
Set Up Smarter: Extracting Data About Customers From Your Website
It’s likely that the platform you use to host your website will have some basic analytics available to you, such as the number of website visits over a period of time, bounce rate (number of visits in which only a single webpage was viewed), engagement rate, and percentage of visits from different devices. However, in order to get a thorough, detailed look at your website data, we recommend setting up a free web tracking tool like Google Analytics.
We like Google Analytics because it’s a common industry standard, totally free, and filled with excellent data when you know how to use it. It also offers the most comprehensive set of reports and the deepest level of control for digging into your website data.
We come across a lot of business owners and even small marketing teams who have access to a Google Analytics account set up by their web developer, but no idea how to use it. Let’s dig deeper into how it can help you when you know what to look for.
Analyze Smarter: Understanding Google Analytics Reports
Some of the most helpful reports in Google Analytics are the “Pages and Screens” report, which lets you see which pages are most visited on your website, and the “Traffic Acquisition” report, which shows how visitors got to your website (i.e. from Google search, Facebook, Instagram, email, etc.). These are crucial metrics to learn from because they can indicate where your call-to-actions are working or where you should shift more attention.
Traffic Acquisition
Pages and Screens
For example, if you recently promoted a product sale on your Instagram and your Traffic Acquisition report shows a spike in social media visits that month, that could indicate your Instagram ad strategy is reaching its intended audience and that your budget is well spent. On the flip side, if your website visitors spend a lot of time on your educational Blog but not as much on your Services page where they can actually book your business, then that could be an opportunity to meet them where their interest lies by inserting graphics or a contact form widget onto your blog posts that promote your services and lets them book right from there.
We recommend reviewing the Google Analytics reports that are important to you on a weekly or monthly basis to identify trends in user behavior. Here are a few other metrics you may want to keep an eye on. (Even if you are using another tool to measure your website data, you’ll want to make sure you search for these key performance indicators on the regular.)
- Mobile Traffic. More and more people are using their smartphones to research, shop, and browse products and services. Mobile traffic can be a significant revenue source. You should know what percentage of site visits comes from your campaign’s ability to attract mobile visitors.
- Engagement Rate. This is is the percentage of “engaged sessions” on your website, meaning website visits that last more than 10 seconds, navigated to 2 or more webpages, and/or performed a “key event” (actions on your website that you’ve marked as important to the success of your business, such as a sign-up or purchase). Essentially, the engagement rate is the opposite of a bounce rate!
- Time On Site. How long do visitors spend on your website? Some visitors will immediately “bounce,” but the time other visitors spend on your site indicates whether your site is relevant and engaging. Aim for 1-3 minutes as a goal.
- Page Views Per Visit. When visitors come to your site, how many pages do they view? More page views per visit indicate higher engagement with the site. In turn, engagement is a strong indicator that visitors will become leads or active customers.
Search Smarter: Search Engine Optimization
If you want your online marketing to work smarter, not harder, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should be a primary strategy. We recommend ensuring that you have Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) connected so you can review the Search Terms people type into Google that lead to your website being found—hidden keywords that even Google Analytics will not show you.
If you find that a lot of visitors come to your site through other search engines, such as Yahoo or Bing, Bing has its own version of Webmaster Tools, and you can sign up and do the exact same thing.
Google Search Console is also a helpful option for improving your team’s understanding of what keywords to add to your website. Tools like SEMrush and Google Ads Keyword Planner can also help you build a list of relevant keywords for your website.
Plan Smarter: Digital Marketing Assessments
Beyond the weekly or monthly review of Google Analytics reports, we recommend that all businesses conduct regular Digital Marketing Audits that encompass all of your online marketing strategies, which includes assessing your analytics and SEO. Whether that’s annually, every six months, or quarterly, you’ll go through all your digital marketing arenas and data just like you would a 360-degree employee review. Look at the consistency of your branding across channels, what types of content are doing well there, and whether and where people are converting on your website and social media platforms.
The insights from your collective social media metrics, email campaign open and click-through rates, and website analytics, such as SEO triggers and traffic acquisition, will help you determine whether your online marketing decisions are backed by data. Are there areas for opportunity to align your strategies with what data shows is most successful with both your audience and marketing budget? For our full tips and instructions on conducting a digital marketing audit, download our free “7 Step Guide to Running a No-Fluff Digital Marketing Assessment.”
Train Smarter: Book a Google Analytics Training
Learning how to easily navigate Google Analytics and determine which reports are most informative for your brand’s online marketing strategies will help your digital marketing team make more successful decisions for both their workload and your marketing spend. Go Getter Marketing Group can be booked for virtual or in-person custom workshops to get your team up to speed and your digital marketing working smarter, not harder. Our Google Analytics training is typically a 1-2 day deep dive into helping teams understand how to use it more effectively.
