How To Use Google Analytics To Better Understand Your Prospects

Using Google Analytics to understand your prospects is the modern-day business equivalent of reading the manual when you buy a new appliance. 

 You have all of the information you could ever possibly need about your new toy right there, but it just seems like too much work, you know? Instead you just use the appliance’s basic functions and silently fume when you can’t get it to do anything fancier than the bare minimum.

 I am here to tell you that when it comes to online engagement of valuable prospects, it’s time to read the manual. Using Google Analytics to understand your prospects is a no-brainer, and once you fully comprehend the incredible return on investment it yields you’ll never go back to an unfounded, hit-and-miss approach to online marketing and digital content creation.

Here are a few ways in which you can use Google Analytics to get to grips with the way your target demographic conducts themselves online:

Find out how your existing customers behave on your website

Behavioural Flow Reporting is an incredibly useful application of the Google Analytics toolkit. It allows you to track how your customers are moving through your site – on which page they enter, which subsequent pages they visit, which call to action they click on and where they bounce. All of this is incredibly valuable if you apply the information correctly. Best of all? You can decide from which vantage point you want to view the information in order to best fulfil your requirements. E.g. you can test the effectiveness of a new campaign by measuring how many leads it generates; see which geographic locations yield the most traffic; or gather information on UX to improve your site’s conversion.

 Find out where you lose your customers on the purchase journey

Enhanced E-commerce allows you to track your existing customers' shopping and purchasing behaviour in order to gain insight into their on-page shopping activity. This includes where and when they add and remove products from their cart; which products are most frequently viewed; which items are abandoned most often, etc. You can also use this tool to see whether your site’s layout is logical; if your affiliate programmes are showing a significant return on investment; and whether your onsite promotion (banners, calls to action, buttons, etc.) are hitting the mark. Used correctly, Enhanced E-commerce can give you all of the information you need to turn your site into a lean, mean selling machine.

 Find out where your customers are coming from

The saying goes that you need to know where you came from in order to know where you’re going, and much the same applies for new customer acquisition – once you know how, where and when your existing customers found you, you can ensure that you maintain your presence in that space in order to capitalise on future prospects. The Google Analytics User ID function has revolutionised the way in which we glean information regarding the origins of our online customer base.

In the past, every device a person used to access your website (personal computer, work computer, smartphone) would show up as a unique user; User ID allows you to track a given user as a single entity across multiple devices. This kind of information is incredibly valuable if you are trying to gauge whether your site’s responsive design is effective. It can also tell you a lot about your target demographic – are they shopping on the go; are they searching for reviews in front of the shelf; could you improve conversion with a site refresh?

 PRO TIP: Ensure that your data-based reports show insight

If you are the person responsible for your business' Google Analytics reports it is up to you to ensure that the data is usable. We recommend that you tailor weekly or monthly reports that are customised for your sales and executive team respectively. Not every person in your company is an Analytics expert, so you have to attach insight to the numbers to elucidate your findings. Instead of printing out reams of numbers, rather type out a report that references the numbers, along with key insights and recommendations. This is more likely to spark a conversation and lead to actionable decisions around the boardroom table.

 These are just a few of the ways in which you can harness the infinite potential of Google analytics to get to know your prospects. Would you like to know more about the applications of big data and how you can use it to safeguard your business' bottom line? Get in touch with Neesh for an obligation-free chat on using Google analytics to understand your prospects. You are sitting on a goldmine of data - allow us to help you mine that information to its fullest extent.