So, last week was quite a week…I worked with 5 new business supporting them to review their digital marketing; looking at what didn’t work, what did and creating a strategy for future social media campaigns.
One of the main things that came out of the session was people’s aversion to looking at their analytics. They either didn’t know how to interpret them, or didn’t want to look lest they be ashamed that the figures were a bit poor.
I worked with 2 clients, in particular, that stood out:
One lady was spending £60 a month on google ad words. Now she thought it wasn’t working, but felt a sense of pride at having her business at the top of google search for her field. And I get that, but in business we always want to be checking out our ROI – that’s return on investment. Is it working? If I spend x, how many clients or customers do I need to pay it back?
So, we took a look at her google analytics. And at first it all looked good, people were visiting her site, her bounce rate (more of that later) was good, so it was smiles all round. It wasn’t until we looked at the location of her visitors. Not one was from the UK, let alone Nottingham where her ideal customer lived. All her visitors came from either the USA, Russia or Ukraine. Not good. We took a look at her google ad words and it was set up to be advertised in the right geographical region – but clearly it wasn’t working.
We deduced that her strategy going forward was to stop spending the £60 a month on google ad words and looked at how to make Facebook advertising work for her business.
The second person who stands out didn’t want to look at her analytics because she was worried they would a bit embarrassing. She had the best statistics I’ve seen in a long time. In fact in December following a feature in the Guardian she had over 3,500 unique visitors to her website. The problem here was that she wasn’t ready for those numbers and had sold out of stock quite quickly, so these potential customers were getting lots of sold out images and hardly any product choice left. We worked out that if 50% of those visitors had bought her product she would have made £60,000 profit in one month.
Now that’s a lot of money, so we ended up creating a plan to increase the capacity of her company.
Do you know your google analytics?
If your business is an online business – not knowing your google analytics is almost as bad as not knowing how much it costs you to run your business. Knowledge is power, it helps you plan, create strategies and give your customers a fantastic experience.
So turn your google analytics on, leave it alone for a few months to gather data and then go back and take a look at what people are doing when they come into your online shop.
The top 4 things you should be checking out are:
Bounce rate – this measures how quickly people come to your site and instantly leave. A bad bounce rate is above 50 (unless it’s a squeeze page).
Geo – check out that your customers are coming from the right part of the world!
Users flow – this is a wonderful flow chart of how your customers move around your website. You can find out which pages they go to first, where they leave and what pages they move onto. You can use this information to explore your customer journey and make tweaks to ensure they end up on your sales pages.
Acquisition - learn where visitors come from. Is it social, if so what platforms? Is it search engines, email marketing, referral from other websites? Use this information to alter your strategy so you can capitalise on areas that you are winning in already – for example if most of your traffic comes from Facebook, what can you do to increase that? If you are spending a lot of time on pinterest but that doesn’t drive much interest, how could your time be better spent?
I love looking at analytics for everything. You can get them for your Instagram, Facebook, pinterest, linkedin, email marketing and a few more places. Being able to understand what they mean and how to use this data is essential to you growing and maintaining your online business.
"I would just like to say how AMAZING Debbie Clarke from debbiedooodah is. Just got back from a 121 session, worth every penny. Would highly recommend. FANTASTIC. Wish I'd met her sooner." Facebook Review.
