Business Decision Making: Using Data to Get it Right

Question: Do you know what makes Internet Marketing so effective?

The answer is DATA.

The information gained from measuring your online marketing is the catalyst for establishing benchmarks, understanding trends, and above all, making better decisions with your marketing budget.

Think of it this way: how much easier is it to track the number of people that visit your website as opposed to how many people took action on your recent direct mail campaign?

[pullquote_left]Internet Marketing separates itself from the traditional forms of marketing and advertising with DATA. [/pullquote_left]

When you send out a piece of direct mail, your ability to track the effectiveness, let alone the ROI of your efforts, is very finite. But through analytics, you are not only able to view how visitors reached your website, but what keyword terms they used, if they came via organic search, direct traffic, referrals, or even through PPC. You can drill down even further and determine which pages they visited, how long they were on that page, and even view the conversion rate of traffic to your site. Let me repeat that: You can actually monitor leads converting on your website!

Data through analytics is extremely effective in making decisions, but what specific data points do you need to focus on in determining which decisions to make? Let’s use the following parameters to help us decide which metrics to focus on: Website Acquisition, Traffic Behavior, and Conversion Rates.

Acquisition via Sources

A great metric to focus on is your website's traffic sources. Typically, you are going to have a few traffic sources to explore. Organic, direct, and referral traffic are going to be areas that you will want to break down to gain insights into how people are finding your site.  This identifies your "money" sources and is useful for understanding how to invest valuable budget moving forward.

So for instance, let’s say that your organic traffic accounts for 60% of your website traffic, you will want to dig deeper and determine what keyword terms people are using to find your site in search engines.  Then you could run a few PPC (paid ads) for those very same keywords.
Now you are able to analyze your data more effectively. What percentage of the keyword terms listed are a reflection of your service or product offerings? What percentage of the terms are just your company name? If the terms listed are more about the name of your company as opposed to the services you offer, then perhaps you need to invest more resources in creating content focused on your services. You have now uncovered an opportunity to gain more visibility in search engines because of your source data.

Using Customer Behavior to Improve Lead Generation

Another important metric to measure is the behavior of the traffic on your site. Tremendous insight can be gained from analysis of your content pages. What pages are traffic visiting most often, second, or third? Knowing the pages that receive the most traffic will allow you to focus on these pages to optimize. Let’s say that your homepage is first, but your Blog page is second, and your Contact Us page is third. Are these pages optimized in a way that allows you to capture their information and convert that traffic into leads? 

Another important metric here is your bounce rate. If your Contact Us page is the third most frequented page, but your bounce rate is 66%, then that means something is wrong on your page! Maybe the conversion form you have is not effective, creating friction or anxiety, and is not doing it’s job in sending leads to your inbox. Again, you are able to use behavior data to pinpoint an opportunity that needs improvement.

Conversion Rates and Goals Completions

Conversion is the last metric area that we will cover, but this is where the true power of your data will come to play, because your conversion goals are tied most closely to your bottom line. If you are not seeing conversion on your conversion pages, then you will most definitely need to spend time testing the effectiveness of those pages. Conversion goals can be set up for wide range of pages, but need to center around what you deem is most important. Is it building email followers and growing your email list? Is it your Contact Us page, or perhaps even your eCommerce shopping cart? All of these goals, assuming they are installed and reporting correctly, paint a very clear picture into how well your site is converting the traffic to your site into leads.
If your conversion goals are low, then perhaps you need to perform a split test on a specific offer and see what version converts at a higher rate. Maybe you are not offering enough incentive for someone to give you their information, or perhaps your contact form creates too much anxiety or friction because you have too many form fields to fill. Regardless, the point is that the data from your conversion goals offers insight into what is working, and more importantly, what isn’t working.

Marketing Takeaway -

Use the data from your analytics to help you determine what your metrics are. Make corrections, test your improvements for effectiveness, and implement what works on your site. Don’t forget to add annotations in your analytics to help track the changes that you made. This is how you can leverage the power of your data to make effective decisions and help your company become more successful.

What other data metrics do you use to base your Internet Marketing decisions? Leave us a comment and let us know! We would love to hear from you!