It's difficult to improve anything in life without an accurate, self-aware perception of performance. If you want to become a chef, you need to know what other people think of the taste and presentation of your food. If you want to write a best-selling novel, you should seek an honest assessment of a shorter sample before you start. Improvement and iteration are the markers of success in most endeavors, and digital marketing is no different.
Since we've established that you can't improve anything without first analyzing current results, the first step to leveraging web analytics is getting in tune with the 3 Ps of your digital ecosystem. Honing in on the purpose of your digital properties and defining a path to conversion will help you make more sense of the data you're collecting.
Once you have clear goals for your website, you'll have a better understanding of how Improving Sales Using Web Analytics can take your brand to the next level. Here's a short video in which we outline 5 key methods to understanding and improving your customers' buying cycle:
1. Identify Your Best Traffic Sources
Hopefully, you've got people from all the lands visiting your website (and of course by "all the lands," I mean every corner of the Internet). But no matter how many incoming traffic streams you have, some will be more valuable than others. Once you have an idea of where your visitors are coming from, determine which sources are converting at the highest rate and devote more of your attention to those visitors. Begin segmenting your audience, and create special offers for the traffic sources that are bringing you the most business.
2. Better Understand Customer Behavior
The more you know about your customers' wants, needs, and tendencies, the better service you'll be able to give them. And it's never been clearer that delivering exceptional customer service is one of the keys to unlocking your brand's digital potential.
The people who land on your website will like certain pieces of content more than others; they'll spend more time on three specific pages than the rest of the site combined, and they'll come to you with the same few questions over and over. It's your job to use all this information to create a more personalized (and effective) customer experience.
3. Improve Website Conversion Funnels
Keeping with the theme of understanding the behavior of your customers, look through your web data to determine how and where the "buying action" is taking place on your site. Are more purchases happening on your homepage after a social media referral, or is it the landing pages for your PPC ads that are turning visitors into customers at the highest rate? Not only should you ramp up activity for the funnel that's churning out the most conversions, but also begin to replicate that same funnel in underperforming areas of your site. What you initially thought was a traffic source problem could actually be a conversion issue, and there's only one way to find out - web analytics!
4. Perfecting Landing Page Performance
If you aren't tracking and tweaking your campaign-specific landing pages, then you aren't using landing pages to their full potential. Landing pages give you an in-depth view of the actions taken by potential customers from a specific traffic source, which is incredibly vital information! Without increasing your traffic by a single visitor, modifying your landing pages based on web analytics can immediately boost your sales and increase your bottom line. Changing the color of a button, switching up a call to action, providing a new offer - none of these changes cost you any money, but they can help significantly.
5. Making it Personal
Don't focus on clicks, visits, likes, and shares because, at the end of the day, those metrics are about you. And as we've consistently harped on over the last few years, digital marketing is about your customers. Make sure your customers know it's about them by understanding them and, more importantly, listening to what their actions and reactions are telling you. You can also take personalization one step further by segmenting your customer groups and emailing special offers to each one based on their preferences. Your customers will reward you for making things personal and treating them with exceptional service.
