EVEN BASIC DATA CAN HELP YOU MAKE MORE SALES
So you’ve invested in an e-commerce site – that’s great! So how do you get the most out of your marketing dollar? Data can help you understand how you are driving traffic, what your customers are doing on your site and where customer objections are creating drop offs in the purchase process.
Google Analytics is a first step in collecting data and can be a powerful tool – if you use it correctly. It can give you powerful insights into your customer behaviour from the top of the conversion funnel, all the way through the purchase process and beyond.
Google Analytics (GA) can give you powerful insights into the overall performance of your digital marketing spend.
At its most basic, GA can tell you where your traffic is coming from – giving you insights into the relative success or failure of your online spend including digital display, SEM, social media and other forms of brand awareness activities.
Armed with this information, you can change the mix of your spend, conduct A/B split testing of marketing messages and track the results in near real-time. Over time, this will lead to significant efficiencies in your spend and help to identify gaps and opportunities.
GA can identify objections in your conversion funnel.
Once traffic arrives on your site, setting up events and goals in GA can help to identify objections in the purchase process. These objections could include (but not be limited to):
- Incomplete or faulty search results
- Complicated search results
- Insufficient product information
- Difficulty adding products to shopping cart
- Not providing companion products
- Lack of comparison tools
- Too many clicks required to purchase multiple or additional products
- Account setup requirements to checkout
- Complicated checkout process – too many unnecessary details
By identifying the objections on your site, you can start to make small changes (sprints) to tackle them and overcome the drop offs in the purchase process. By measuring the changes to the drop offs over different time scales, you can see the impact these changes can make in your overall conversion rate.
Measuring loyalty and retention behaviour
Post purchases, measuring repeat customers, incentivising referrals and extending your brand awareness through customer advocacy can also be measured through various CRM tools. Measuring the effective channels, tools and incentives to drive further efficiencies to your business.
This is a very broad view of data in the current digital marketplace. This is only the first of many steps, but something every business should – at the very least – be implementing. Of course the key to all of this is ensuring that you have the right people in place to setup, manage and interpret the data collected.
Ben Shapira
Digital Marketing Consultant | Strategy, Creative and Production | Small Business Advocate | Speaker
www.benshapira.com