You created a great product/newsletter and the problem is not a lot of people are buying it or downloading it. What is the exact issue? Want some respite? Lets see how leveraging analytics such as Google Analytics 4 can light the path forward.
As John Wanamaker quotes, "Half of my money spent in advertising is wasted and the trouble is, I don’t know which half”. This is just one of the biggest reasons why we need analytics to be part of our business.
You put your hard earned dollars behind marketing, you want to ensure you are getting a return. Otherwise you are just spending money with no direction as to how it's affecting your business. Is the newsletter you spent 15 hours creating going to drive sales that make that time worth it or was it 15 hours wasted? If you don’t know that answer then you can’t decide whether it’s a good business decision to keep creating those newsletters or pivot into doing something more profitable. Analytics is putting the hard evidence behind your marketing efforts and showing you whether it's worth the investment of time and money.
No Room for Low ROI Campaigns
Gone are the days when marketers were just creative people and were granted huge budgets to carry out campaigns. Nowadays, marketers need to justify each and every penny spent in marketing. With the amount of data available, it becomes all the more important for management to understand how best and efficiently they can acquire a customer and keep the acquisition cost absolutely low and lifetime value really high. Terms like ROMI (return on marketing investment) and ROAS (return on ad spend) are increasingly being used to justify the marketing spend. Marketers are having a hard time getting sleep the nights before the management meetings. For small business owners it is no different as the budgets are limited and positive cash flows are absolutely critical.
Customers tend to convert if they see an ad that relates to their problem and leans towards the solution. Irrelevant ads are a waste of time and money for both advertiser and consumer. In the age where consumers are leaving huge data trails behind for advertisers/businesses to track them and target them, there is no difference between a blind person and a marketer not using this data.
A Bigger Picture
Just to share some insights from the book Data-Driven Marketing by Mark Jeffery
- 57% of companies don’t use a centralized database to track and analyze their marketing campaigns.
- 70% do not use an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to track customers' interactions with the company and its campaigns.
- 71% do not use an EDW and analytics to guide marketing campaign selections.
- 80% do not use an integrated data source to guide automated event-driven marketing campaigns.
This is not to scare anyone rather it just highlights the level of opportunity to generate revenue from the campaigns when analytics is put into action.
Analytics help answer what, when and where questions related to the customer journeys/interactions. Which also forms a basis of Why questions as we dig deep into the reasons behind the events. Campaigns without putting analytics into use are like shooting with closed eyes and hoping bullets hit the target and yield desired results.
The reason we share this with you is to actually excite you! Analytics is an opportunity that most businesses are not capturing. This gives you a unique opportunity to apply it to your own business and become laser focused on only spending marketing dollars where you see profitable returns!
Our Favorite Analytics Tool
There are number of tools through which analytics can be incorporated into marketing and to name a few are as mentioned below
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- HubSpot
- Semrush
- Optimizely
- Woopra
- And more…
Google Analytics is a free tool by Google to understand the complete customer journey on the website and enhance ROAS of campaigns in Google Ads. It also happens to be the best free analytics tool in our humble opinion, as well as that of other analytics experts such as Jeff Sauer of DataDrivenU. The new version of the tool popularly known as GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is the upgrade from Universal Analytics and is an event based model. This tool at the very basic will help you answer the following questions
- What sources are driving traffic to the website?
- What pages are getting maximum traffic?
- What do users do when on the website?
- How do users move towards conversion or what does a user journey look like on the website?
- Which content is engaging maximum users?
- How to segment the audience based on their interest and target similar users?
- What device category gets maximum conversion?
- What location has maximum users?
- What channels are driving the most conversions?
- And more…
Based on answers to these questions, campaigns can be modified to yield maximum conversions and better ROMI.
Have You Heard About Conversion Rate Optimization?
The most important activity that happens on the website is regarded as conversion. It can be a contact form filled, a purchase, a subscription to a newsletter, or a call. These can be regarded as goals of the website. The whole purpose of having the website is to move maximum users to the final step and convert them. Analytics can help understand the hindrances in conversions. These can be regarded as drop off points where users leave the website after losing the interest in products or service. Once you know the drop off points, you can always work on them and ensure a smooth journey for users to convert. And ultimately, remove those barriers and increase the amount of conversions, that is the essence of conversion rate optimization (CRO).
A perfect example can be users dropping off at the checkout step of purchase. So, once you know that the checkout step is a big hindrance, you can check if the shipping cost is making people cancel the purchase. Try experimenting with free shipping for a few days and see if that makes a difference in conversion ratio. This way data will show exactly what was the pain point of the user and help eradicate that. This is just one of the many ways that data can be utilized to understand the problem areas and then working to soothe the journey of the user.
Imagine not having any uptick in traffic yet the number of leads you are getting from the site increases. That is conversion rate optimization at its finest.
At this point in time it is important to understand, What is a good conversion rate? According to Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, the average landing page conversion rate across industries is about 2.35%. However, the top 25% of companies have a conversion rate of 5.31% or higher. And the top 10% are converting at a rate of 11.45% or higher. So, one can always keep on optimizing to reach higher conversion.
Use CRO to Your Advantage
As per Digital Marketing Institute, you can use these eight tactics to improve your website performance and increase conversions:
- Optimize the user experience (UX)
- Optimize your messaging
- User buyer personas to understand your customers
- Optimize based on hard data
- Use SMART goals for CRO
- Test your CRO strategies
- Conduct competitor research
- Conduct user research
Last Thoughts
Analytics is not just a tick mark for online presence, rather it is a tool to be utilized well to gain advantage over those who are not using them. Using analytics effectively can mean moving more and more users through the funnel and converting them to high value customers. After all, revenue is the most important KPI for any business and analytics gives evidence to show where improvements need to be made and how to increase conversions.
GA4 is a free and powerful tool to start your analytics journey. This tool is powerful yet easily accessible to everyone looking to use data for taking better business decisions.