You are investing in digital marketing, and you are starting to see results. Leads are starting to come in, your sales team have a hopeful glint in their eye, and you can smell your growth goals just over the horizon.
That’s a great start. Now, you want to keep an eye on your metrics, to make sure your money is going in the right direction.
This article will give you a quick heads-up on what to look for, and what to do with what you discover in your data.
Google Analytics is very powerful, and you can drill down into any number of levels.
In fact, if you can organise someone to provide a non-stop food and water supply so you don’t have to move from your desk, you can spend your entire LIFE rummaging around in Analytics.
But that isn’t practical. And you’ll get fat.
So let’s stick to something you CAN do that will give you some useful, solid insights about your digital marketing strategy.
To clarify your thinking, let’s break your digital strategy down into the following stages, each presenting opportunities to see important metrics that you (or your digital marketing agency) need to know to make decisions.
They are:
This is a 10-minute read, so let’s just look at the things you need to measure in the first one: acquisition.
We’ll look at that next step, measuring website conversions in another article.
This first step, ‘acquisition’, is all about acquiring traffic. While there are different sources of traffic, (Social Media, AdWords etc), we’re focussing on SEARCH traffic in this article.
One of the key metrics with this part of your digital marketing funnel is which pages visitors to your website landed on.
It is important to know, as it tells you what type of content your potential customers are looking for — and what you should invest more into.
There are many different types of pages that can be drawing traffic to your business. Things like:
They all serve different purposes in the buying process and all take money to create, so you need to know which ones are the most effective.
To find out where people are landing on your site, go to Google Analytics > Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages.
Workplace Health & Safety tip:
To avoid a heart-attack, when looking in Analytics, be sure to set the date range of the data you are looking at the top right. If you forget, and look at… say… just one or two weeks, your data will be very small. Seeing this may give you a fright and cause you to suck the tiles from the ceiling.
Expand the date range out to 12 months or more to get a decent sample. You’ll feel much better!
Looking at your Landing Pages data, sort by the “Sessions” column. To get more data, scroll to the bottom of the page and set it to show “500 rows”.
Now, you’ll see which pages are drawing the traffic to your website.
This is important data as you are now seeing which pages people are landing on when they searched for help on Google or Bing or wherever.
But it isn’t the whole story. (Sorry. With Analytics, it never is!)
Remember, the endgame here is to work out what is bringing in the leads/money.
While Landing Pages are a part of the maths, you must keep in mind that all traffic isn’t necessarily good traffic.
A case in point…
Some time ago, I was looking in the Analytics of a pest control company. One of his best landing pages traffic-wise was about DIY termite treatment kits.
The problem was, his core, most profitable business was providing a full termite treatment, NOT selling DIY kits. In fact, the DIY persona (We’ll call him “DIY Darrel”) was really difficult and drove the pest guy nutzo. It was totally white-anting his profits (sorry!)
DIY Darrel is generally looking for a cheap option. He would waste time on the phone with the pest control guy’s troops… and then, armed with all this free knowledge, scurry off to buy something from the supermarket or hardware store.
Even though the traffic to this DIY page was high, the profit from it was low. Clearly, having a high volume of traffic to that DIY pest control page wasn’t going to bring home the bacon! Ironically, it just attracted more pests.
The pest control guy wanted to reach a different persona, (“Total Treatment Tammy”), who wants a high-quality service from a business that has expertise and advice. She was happy to spend, as long as she saw value in return.
So, he needed to find the pages that were drawing traffic from that persona type so he could do more of what works.
The only REAL way to tell is to set up a ‘closed-loop’ tracking system, so you know exactly WHICH visitors from WHICH pages convert into revenue.
But even without that, looking at your landing page data and making an assessment about the content is a great start. Let me tell you, it will be 99% more than what other website owners are doing!
When you find pages that ARE drawing traffic from the correct market persona, the next step is to look at WHY they are liking them.
What is it about this website content that is so appealing?
By analysing this, you’ll gain insights into what your market is looking for — and how you can give them more of what they want.
For example, if Total Treatment Tammy is reading pages about chemical safety, then it may be profitable to write blog articles about topics such as:
The key to this is to walk in Total Treatment Tammy’s shoes, and think about things from HER perspective. What is she worried about? What does she want to know? What will make her feel confident that your business understands her and what she wants?
As we said earlier, there are many links in the digital marketing chain, and each one contributes to your marketing ROI.
Our focus in this article has been on the top of the funnel, which is Acquisition — particularly from one source: search.
You also need to consider other sources that bring in traffic, such as your LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media campaigns. Other landing pages will be receiving traffic when promoted in your eDM campaigns.
Again, this is a conversation for another day.
But right now, take a few moments to look in Analytics at the landing pages of your site. You’ll get some good insights about how your market personas tick, and what you can do to give them more of what they want from you.
If you require more information and advice about Analytics, or would like to have a chat about your website and digital marketing, please call us on 07 3891 3800. We will be happy to point you in the right direction.