Digital Lead Generation: Analyzing Your Website Traffic
September 24, 2018
If you’re like many marketing professionals, your day is filled with trying to manage a range of online content. Press releases, monthly eNewsletters and paid search campaigns can feel like a tangled mess. On top of churning out new and exciting content, you’re also responsible for directing leads to your sales team.
Sound familiar? Don’t worry. You’re not alone. The overwhelming number of marketing channels to manage, content to create, and sales goals to meet is enough to leave any marketing nerd looking for answers.
Luckily, there are a few things that you can do to uncover valuable insights and get the most out of your efforts.
Analyze Marketing Channels
One of the first things you may find helpful is reviewing each individual channel. All too often, basic performance metrics like clicks and impressions are the only focus. Peeling back the layers and going beyond the surface for analytics is essential.
If you advertise on Facebook or even use Google Ads, dig deeper to find your real audience and learn how they engage with your content. sift through the demographics reports each tool provides and focus on things like age and gender. It’s really easy to assume you know who your target audience is and how to reach them. Taking a second look might surprise you.
For example, you might think your target audience is Baby Boomers when in fact, Generation Xers are the ones searching for items like retirement homes for their parents. Know your audience. The worst thing a marketer can do is insult the very people they are attracting organically. If you deliver messaging to a Generation Xer on retirement living, they are likely going to be insulted.
Learning how your audience engages is important. It shows you what they care about and what interests them. Knowing when and how users interact will give you a leg up when planning. Hourly performance reports for Facebook and Google can show you which ads are most successful and when. If you’re engagement rates are highest at 2:30pm on Saturdays, make changes to get the most out of your budget.
No two reports are the same when it comes to analytics. Reports can seem overwhelming at first, but by taking the time to look at them individually, you will find the value in each one and know exactly where to look next time.
Understand How Your Channels Connect
While looking at each channel separately is important, learning how each piece completes the puzzle will help you reach your long-term goals. Ask yourself “Why?” when looking at things like Click Through Rates (CTRs) and conversions. Be curious why your ads on Google are getting clicks and impressions, but no conversions. Try to see how it all fits together.
The Landing Pages section under the Behavior tab in Google Analytics gives you a better idea of how users behave when arriving on your site. It includes which pages have the most New Sessions, highest Bounce Rate, etc. It will also show how many users completed one of your set conversions (like filling out a contact form or making a purchase).
Taking Bounce Rates and New Sessions into account will help you understand how your paid ads might receive clicks, but no conversions. Maybe your landing page doesn’t have clear Call-To-Actions? Maybe the content and messaging aren’t relevant to your audience?
Learning how each of your channels link together and what makes users convert is essential to making performance improvements. By digging deeper, you can uncover what is working and what needs to be improved. This will put you in a better place to plan your strategy moving forward.
Set Clear Goals & Measure Your Growth
Now that you’ve looked at each of your channels and how they connect, it’s time to overcome the hurdles and establish some goals. Make a detailed list of problem areas you found during your analysis. Are your ads not getting clicks? Are your eBlasts not opened? Is the overall performance not what you want it to be?
Identifying the problems are only half the battle. You need to setup clear goals and a calendar for the future. For instance, lowering your bounce rate. If the bounce rate for your site is over 80% and you aren’t running paid ads, it’s a problem. Simply saying you want to lower your bounce rate isn’t enough. You need to outline detailed steps along with a timeframe.
This could be refining the user-experience of your internal pages. This could be adding Call-To-Action buttons for contact forms. This could even be removing bad backlinks that are sending spam to your site. All of these can affect the bounce rate of your site. It all depends on your site and your situation.
With this you can begin to put together specific goals and a schedule for making improvements. Splitting the timeline out into monthly, quarterly and yearly goals has worked for me. Sitting down at routine times and checking your progress is a great way to measure your efforts.
The world of digital marketing can seem like an ever-changing monster. Understanding your traffic and connecting the pieces of the marketing puzzle isn’t easy. Setting up clear goals and a timeline to tackle obstacles takes work. By continuing to break things down into their simplest forms, we can begin to understand how users arrive on our sites and how they become loyal customers.
If you’re interested in taking your marketing initiatives to the next level but aren’t sure where to start, Think VIG!