Are you looking for a way to grow your business based on the information you already have at your fingertips? If so, you're in the right place. Business owners and marketing teams have a host of strategies at their disposal, all designed to get more conversions and sales.
Sometimes, their efforts are not enough. If this sounds like your business, perhaps it's time to take a look at your Google Analytics account. Google Analytics is the most popular way to check engagement and traffic on your website, because it tracks consumer browsing habits and behavior, among other things.
All of Google Analytics' features make it easy to look critically at your website for ways to improve the design and visitor flow. You can also use it to plan out your marketing campaigns, which allows you to make smarter decisions about your company.
The best part about this tool is it's free to use. You can sign up for Google Analytics and link your site in just a couple of minutes. It's even possible to look at data directly on your website.
Below, I show you exactly how you can use some of these strategies to improve your business.
Monitor your marketing funnels
One of the best ways to use Google Analytics is as a way to track your marketing funnels. There's a good chance you're running sales pages and promotions across your website. Wouldn't it be great if you could see the exact path consumers take before they accept your offer?
With Google Analytics, you can! There's a feature called Goals, which is under the Conversions tab. Under the Goals section, you'll see that there's a way to create your own goals that summarize how you want consumers to navigate your site and what you hope to achieve from their interaction.
For example, it's estimated that 60% of people read a blog post about a product before buying it. With this in mind, you might create a funnel that follows this trend. When a consumer lands on your company blog, they start to read your post and finally get ready to leave. You stop them with a limited time offer on a product that matches their needs based on the post they clicked. If they click through on your offer and make the purchase, the funnel is complete.
When you use Google Analytics, it's easy to see how your various funnels are performing. If you notice that one funnel is seeing dramatically fewer conversions, it might be worth reexamining your strategy for a way to improve.
Curve your bounce rate
Odds are, you've had an unusually high bounce rate on your site at one time or another. Your bounce rate represents the number of people who land on your site but never navigate to a second page. Many people fail to realize that all bounces are not necessarily bad.
If someone landed on your website but left because they didn't find what they were looking for, that's a bad bounce. However, if someone finds a helpful answer to their question on your blog post, then leaves after, that's also a bounce. But it's not a bad bounce because you helped the person who landed on your site.
The average bounce rate across all industries is estimated to be 50 to 70%. There's a little wiggle room there, depending on what you sell and your business's size. Look on your Google Analytics accounts for pages, and your site as a whole, for abnormal bounce rates.
You can reduce the number of bad bounces by making smart decisions on the affected page. Let's say you have two sales pages. One features a video, and the other is a text and one image. If the page with the video has a drastically lower bounce rate, you could assume that making the change will result in more conversions.
Shorten URLs for off-site tracking
If you're like many business owners, you use social media marketing to reach your audience. Sponsored posts and organic shares are both great ways to grow your social brand while getting more traffic directed to your website.
Google Analytics can help you field that traffic that comes through, which will show you what campaigns are most effective. When you create links back to your website within a promotional post, you have to choose the redirect URL. Visitors use this link to get back to your website.
Link shorteners are handy tools that can help you make custom URLs, even if they link back to the same place. If someone runs two social media campaigns, they can use the shortener to make two different links that lead back to the same landing page. You can use Google Analytics to track the hits on the ads you created with the shortened links.
Using this strategy, you can closely monitor your marketing campaigns across all social media websites. When you consider that Facebook has 2.45 billion users, it's easy to see why getting your marketing campaigns as optimized as possible is one of the keys to success.
Split test marketing and design ideas
It's possible to dramatically change your sites by making small changes to two different pages. These experiments are known as split tests, and they are extremely common in the marketing world.
When business owners or marketing teams run split tests, they make adjustments to different aspects of a similar page, or sometimes even the same page. The changes are sometimes subtle, such as moving a call-to-action button up a couple of inches. Other changes are more noticeable, like color, font and text changes. The goal of these tests is to see if you can get more conversions by tweaking the different aspects of your website.
Google Analytics has an added platform called Google Optimize, which lets you run your own A/B tests. If your Analytic's account is linked to your website, you'll see how users are responding to the changes you've made. Take this information and fine-tune each of your pages for maximum conversions.
Track performance and evaluate
Finally, Google Analytics gives you the option to review your site data from other periods in time. In other words, if you're using Google Analytics properly, you should be reviewing last year's sales and traffic reports so you can use that information to plan this year's big holiday sale.
You can also review blog post data for your content marketing team. Let's say you want to create more content that will perform well with your audience. You could look at your page history and see which posts generated the most traffic and conversions.
Once you have this information, you can start connecting the dots and looking for connections within your top-performing posts. Ask questions like, "Are they all linked to one subtopic within the niche?" Finding the points where these articles intersect will help you write more content your audience wants to read.
As your business grows, you'll find that the possibilities with Google Analytics are virtually endless. You can use it to develop every aspect of your business if you have the right tools and resources in place.
Google Analytics is a tool that every business owner and marketer should use to grow their website. You can learn about your target audience, track consumer behavior and find new ways to forge powerful connections with your customers.