We’re all watching our metrics, from our CRM or our POS system or our market research or from other sources. Are you watching your web analytics?
It’s easy to think of web analytics as something for the marketing department or the IT department. The website is, for plenty of business owners, something like a billboard or a TV ad — a marketing device. We pay attention to the sales or the leads and otherwise ignore it.
The difference is, your website is a marketing device that also gather information for you. Here are just a few of the sources of data your website can offer:
- Do you have product pages? Which ones are more popular online? If the pattern is different from your sales in stores, you may be seeing the beginning of a change. Or you might be seeing evidence of a potential market you’re not serving.
- How do people reach your product pages? If they’re coming from Pinterest, you may have a female audience you should be catering to. If they’re flocking to a blog post that deals with a particular problem they’ve Googled, then a product expansion that answers that problem might be in order.
- Watch the traffic to your seasonal product pages. People start looking online sooner than they ask a store associate. This can be a heads-up that lets you get your seasonal product into the right hands at the right time.
- Do you have a store locator? You can tell the cities that send traffic to that page. What percentage of those cities found a store in their area? If these visitors — who are showing a clear intent to purchase — aren’t able to find a store in their area, you have a distribution problem. Is it time to add ecommerce?
If you’re not sifting through your web analytics to find actionable business intelligence, you’re not getting full use from your website. If you need help finding the actionable data, call 479.966.9761 or email Rosamond@HadenInteractive.com.
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