Over the years, website analytics has evolved and grown in power. Before, marketers only had access to a few numbers about visitors on their website.
As you’ll agree, these numbers usually painted an incomplete picture and made it difficult to take the right step to increase conversions.
One of the good news with website analytics today is that it provides so much more useful data. Marketers can keep poring over numbers for days at a time if they want to – but when they we ever have that much time?
At the same time, this is also one of the downsides. In a nutshell, the main strength of website analytics is also its main weakness: the fact that you can get so much information about your visitors, it can get very overwhelming even for an experienced marketer.
After all, what do you do with all that data? How do you use it to not only evaluate your success but also to generate more leads and generally, get better results from your website visitors?
That’s why knowing how to leverage your website analytics can truly transform your marketing and sales results – you can better understand:
- Which marketing campaigns drive results so that you can focus on the right channels
- Where your leads and prospects are coming from
- What your leads and prospects are doing on your website so that you can use that data to convert them into customers
And generally, the more you understand about your visitors, where they come from and what they’re doing on your website, the better equipped you will be to convert them.
The challenge today is how to focus on the right numbers to generate more leads and conversions. In this blog post, discover the 7 essential steps you need to take in order to fully leverage your website analytics.
1. Specify your KPIs
It’s easy to get confused and lost in the vast numbers. That’s why it’s vital to specify key performance indicators (KPIs). When you do this, all other metrics are analyzed based on how they affect your KPIs.
Considering the aim of this blog post, important KPIs would be:
- Conversion rates
- The number of generated leads
- The number of acquired customers
Using Google Analytics, you can set up goal tracking to track the number of leads and conversions. More so, you can assign a value to these conversions.
Beyond these, there are other KPIs you can add that will be unique to your business. For instance, many marketers believe traffic is a vanity metric – and I agree. Simply getting traffic is not enough – in order to get genuine results for your business, you need traffic that converts.
But what if you found that referral traffic from LinkedIn to your website has by far the highest conversion rates? Suddenly, traffic from LinkedIn stops being a vanity metric. Because, all things being equal, increasing traffic from LinkedIn will also increase your leads and customers.
2. Capture more details about your visitors and ideal customers
Even though website analytics provide numbers, the aim of analyzing those numbers is to understand your visitors. By understanding them, you can design pages, create content, and make offers that are likely to convert them.
Normally, you should have buyer personas that contain details of your ideal customers. However, these documents are far from rigid.
With website analytics, you can refine your buyer personas. And in some cases, you might discover new ideal customers.
When it comes to understanding your visitors, a tool like CANDDi provides a lot of insight. You can get details such as name, location, name of employer, number of visits, duration of visit, number of activities, and more.
Even more, you can see the number of pages viewed by a visitor and their entire buyer journey through your website. By acquiring these details, it becomes easy to discover quality leads and send personalized, more effective offers.
3. Analyze traffic sources
While getting a huge amount of traffic may be good for your website, having quality is even better. In many cases, traffic from some sources will convert more than others.
Your aim is to identify the best traffic sources for your website and generate more conversions through them. As Neil Patel said when he bought the KISSmetrics website: “When I am looking at sites to buy, I am only looking for one thing … traffic. And of course, the quality [and relevancy] of that traffic.”
Traffic sources to your website will usually be grouped under these channels:
- Search engines
- Social media
- Other websites
- Direct
- Other referral sources
Apart from these traffic sources, there are other demographic details (such as location) you can use to segment your visitors to analyze their behavior. For instance, if you run a local business, you’ll want to pay attention to how traffic from your locality behaves on your website. After all, this is where the majority of your customers will come from.
4. Pay attention to landing pages
Since we’re talking about leads and conversions, inevitably, we have to talk about landing pages. First of all, you have to create many landing pages for your various marketing campaigns.
For example, a HubSpot study found that companies that increased the number of their landing pages from 10 to 15 had a 55% increase in leads acquisition. But even beyond quantity, your landing pages have to be quality.
While creating your landing pages, you have to follow the best practices. With a tool like Instapage, you can build simple and fast landing pages for your campaigns. Ultimately though, you have to track conversion rates for your landing pages as best practices might fail for your audience.
Therefore, you’ll have to perform many A/B tests. However, forming arbitrary hypotheses will lead to poor results in your A/B tests.
In a tool like Crazy Egg, there are features such as scroll maps and recordings that let you see how users navigate your website. Do they see your call to action button/lead capture form? This tool will provide insights that will help you form the right hypotheses for your A/B tests.
5. Track visitors’ behavior flow
The way visitors navigate your website will provide a lot of insight into how to improve conversions. You can easily track your user journey.
Through the behaviour flow, you’ll find entry pages, exit pages, and others. Does an important page have a high exit rate? You can further analyze to understand why this is happening. Then, you can make changes to the page and track its metrics.
Google Analytics provides the User Flow report for your website.
Another tool that provides the Flow report is Mixpanel. With Mixpanel, you can even segment your Flows further. For instance, there are Flow reports for top conversion paths.
This way, you can improve conversions by driving more visitors through these high-conversion paths.
6. Analyze your top keywords
During their product research, many of your customers use search engines (most notably Google) to find the right products. Are you showing up for the keywords your ideal customers are using?
Showing up for the wrong keywords might get you a lot of organic traffic, but you’ll end up with poor conversions. With a tool such as SEMrush, you can analyze your search traffic and your top keywords.
You can also find keyword ideas for your future SEO and PPC campaigns. Furthermore, the keyword gap feature allows you to find keywords your competitors are ranking for that you’re not.
7. Conduct A/B tests on website elements
There are no two ways about it, you must perform experiments on your website pages to acquire more leads and customers. However, to perform the best A/B tests, you need to base your hypothesis on metrics you gained from your website analytics.
After this, you can test different page elements such as page copy, position of CTA button, colour of CTA button, etc. and track your results.
A tool like VWO makes it easy to create page variations while building your experiments. You also get metrics about these tests to gain more insights. Even more, you can segment your landing page visitors to further analyze your test results.
With A/B tests, you can test hypotheses and find what works with your audience.
Conclusion
Leveraging your website analytics is both a science and an art. You have to find the right numbers and their underlying meaning.
Through these, you can get better conversions from your current traffic and attract more of the right quality of traffic. Having gone through this guide, ensure you implement these steps to get the best out of website analytics.
About the Author: Lilach Bullock is an award-winning social media expert who is listed as a Top 20 Social Influencer by Forbes and has been featured in Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today, HuffPost, SEMRush, and other esteemed publications.