Developers, business owners, and bloggers all use Google Analytics to track traffic, sales, and engagement on their website. These people use the data they obtain to come up with smart new marketing strategies and make alternations to existing content and campaigns.
There are countless ways you can use the information contained on your Google Analytics account to grow your business. To help you get more value from this data, we are going to show you several ways you can strengthen your brand by using information that’s readily available at your fingertips.
Before we begin, it's worth noting that you’ll get the most value from this information if you have a website that's getting a moderate amount of traffic, and low to fair sales. If you still haven't landed your first sale, that's okay. This information will help you plan for the future and make the most out of your first big campaign.
Tune your checkout page.
After a customer adds your products to their cart, they need to check out to complete the order. There's usually a breakdown at this part of the sale's funnel. We know this because, on average, businesses see a 69.57% cart abandonment rate.
Cart abandonment occurs when someone leaves without completing their order, even if they have a packed cart. The main reason people abandon their cart is the price of the items they added increase at checkout. Aside from that, many potential customers will leave your checkout form if it's long or complicated.
Your Google Analytics account can help you figure out when consumers are leaving during the checkout process. You can pinpoint where they leave by adding a form with multiple steps to your website. Believe it or not, multistep forms have a 300% conversion rate compared to single page checkout.
The reason for this trend is because consumers can see the progress of their purchase, which gives them peace of mind as they are navigating the checkout page. If you notice that a ton of people bouncing from your checkout page at a specific part, you know that you need to improve that section.
It will take time to master your checkout page, but if you're looking at the analytics consistently, you can gradually improve your sales while reducing your cart abandonment rate.
Track the progress of your affiliates.
Affiliates and influencers are two groups of people that will help you grow your business. They both mainly promote your product to their audience in exchange for a commission on each sale. The catch is you have to understand the results each person or group brings to the table.
Imagine you're working with five YouTube influencers, and it turns out that 95% of all incoming traffic was from just one of the influencers. If you're not reviewing your analytics, you could be wasting money by paying for services that are not having a positive impact on your business.
It's always a little discouraging to see that one of your investments didn't pull in the results you were hoping to see. However, it's better to learn about issues like this before they escalate into a severe problem. You'll also see better results from your best influencers if you're tracking their progress and looking for opportunities to promote your newest products or services.
Use your Google Analytics to see how much traffic comes from each influencer or affiliate. It's also worth looking into how much of that traffic converted into sales. You don't want to make a harsh judgment only to find out someone with the least traffic is actually bringing you the most sales.
We know that influencer marketing works. After all, 130 million people click Instagram shopping ads each month. These internet personalities are also extremely popular on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But understanding your results from influencer and affiliate marketing is critical for making this strategy work for your business.
Pinpoint your traffic sources.
While we are on the topic of tracking results, let's talk about pinpointing your traffic sources. We already explained the importance of tracking how people find your site with influencers. The truth is, this metric can help you outside of your social media traffic.
For instance, you can see if your email newsletters are bringing in more conversions. Similarly, you can check to see if your posts on partner websites are attracting a new audience. Depending on how you're promoting your business, you could see a long list of traffic sources.
Your goal is to find where people are finding with your website and focus your resources on that platform. Connecting with your target audience is the hardest part of building a brand new business. If you can find out how visitors are landing on your site, you can take steps to improve their experience.
At the same time, you should look at lesser-used traffic sources and think about ways you can drive new people to your site. Consider adding promotions, new content and interactive posts to these platforms to see even more growth.
Learn from your best pages.
Every website has a list of blog posts that perform better than others. You can say the same for sales pages, lead magnets, and virtually every aspect of a business website. But there's no denying the power of a blog, which can lead to a 126% increase in prospects, and what you can learn by analyzing content interactions with Google Analytics.
There are a couple of different strategies you can use when looking at your best pages. You could work to improve your top-performing content. For example, do you have a blog post that gets more hits than the rest of your website, but doesn't have an offer on the page?
Now is your chance to include an irresistible offer and killer call to action on that page. You can then track the conversions from that page to see if the increase in traffic translates to sales and subscriptions. If you don't see as much engagement with your call to action, you could try split testing it to see if you get different results. The point is you probably wouldn’t see this opportunity if you failed to check your analytics.
Another option is to use what you learn from your best pages to optimize new and existing content. If you see that one topic on your blog consistently sees more traffic, you can start planning on creating unique content with that theme in the future.
We looked at four marketing opportunities you can uncover through your Google Analytics. Ensure that you get the most value from your data by regularly tracking and updating your statistics. It's hard to make marketing decisions if you don't have a baseline.
Spend some time each week tracking the statistics that are important for your business, and consider ways to replicate that success or start something brand new. Before long, you'll begin to notice patterns across all of the information you've documented.
Use the patterns as a framework for your future marketing campaigns, and you will see a steady rise in your engagement and traffic. Take your time and gradually improve the quality of your traffic sources, content, checkout page, and everything in between.