Looking for digital revenue growth? You might find it hidden here.
These days there is no shortage of data or reports at hand. And often they are jam-packed with detail.
But there’s a problem with this. Executives or business owners probably don’t care about finer digital metrics, like the bounce rate for a specific page, and they sure don’t have time to worry about the ‘assisted conversions for a specific placement’... But the true power of Analytics is unlocked when it’s used outside the Analytics department.
Can you relate? You too probably care more about ‘bottom line’. About ‘real results’. And about actual business growth.
Most standard reports from the big analytics platforms are too far from that bottom line to be useful, or too tricky to drive without months of training.
Start with the punchy stuff
So, what if we start simple? The good news is there are a few easy ways to use Google Analytics. You can still find new ideas that might help grow the business or meet your team’s targets, without becoming an analytics ninja.
Once you start building up the faith in Google Analytics (GA) as a platform, you'll see it being used and trusted more and more, and with greater use of these platforms comes greater use of data. Close your eyes and use your imagination… can you see your organisation shift to become a data-driven one?
1. Who are your highest value customers?
Where should I start? What should I look for? When we’re new to GA, often trying to understand anything much at all about our Audience reveals little useful insight.
Let’s say your website sells personal grooming products. You discover that 53% of your audience is male; does that really mean you should start advertising more male grooming products and reduce ad spend on female audiences?
Then you go take a little look at ‘interests’, and note that a lot of users belong to the very large ‘30 minute chef’ segment (how many of us don’t want to be a legend in the kitchen?)... Is GA then telling us that we should immediately shift strategies, and starting pushing male grooming products on recipe websites?!
The Affinity Categories report can be a good place to start, but it often isn’t very actionable.
The power really comes with segments. Impressively, there are around 500 ways we could segment data - but this scale can also be overwhelming.
Why not start by looking at your site and understanding points of inflection which might suggest different customer characteristics. For example if someone clicks on the ‘Sale’ page, might they be different to someone who clicks on the ‘Shavers’ page? What about those users who used Afterpay? Why are we targeting all these customers the same?
This concept brings us to one of our favourite segments - our highest value customers. In many cases, every ‘high value customer’ contributes a multiple of revenue of the ‘average customer’. So, this is certainly a worthy place to start unlocking GA insights.
Create a segment of users with high frequency, recency and monetary value to understand the behaviour of your high value audiences
Bear in mind that this view will be limited (due to ITP and other cookie-blocking restrictions) however it can give us an idea of the characteristics of the most impactful customers.. and all with no code!
If you’ve seen any past posts from us, one thing you might notice is that we hate insight without action. So then, what might I actually do with this segment?
Rapid ideas - activating the high value customer segment
Start by importing the audiences directly into any marketing platform; this is useful as a ‘retention’ strategy. We do not want to lose these high value customers! As an example, we worked with a Telco to show them that if those high value iPhone users were searching for a new phone, we need to be front and centre, even if we have to pay more money!
The Audiences tab makes it easy to import the audiences into Google Ads
2. But what else do you know about these high value customers? Understanding the interests they have and the products they buy can be used this to get more of these customers? As an example, with a retailer we noticed that customers that bought the new Dyson vacuum cleaner were likely to be loyal customers and so they increased their budget on this campaign.
As you can see, within about 10 minutes you can develop insights that can easily be shared with senior leaders to be an input into a marketing strategy to drive higher value customers and long term revenue growth.
Overall the goal of the first segment is to find out more about valuable customer segments, and then do something with what insight to increase acquisition of these customers.
2. What are users interested in?
The Search Term report is one of the simplest and most useful reports (assuming you have a ‘site search’ feature on your website).
Suraj: When I was in Google, one of the most powerful data sources that we had was the ability to deep dive into search trends across Google search, and you can do just that… on your own website. What product searches are trending upwards? What are users searching for and what are your results perhaps not helping with? Ultimately, how might you use this intel to drive greater user conversion across top search results?
Rapid ideas - we can take two different paths with this data:
Understand the top and rising search terms. We like to use this around key seasonal events. As an example, if we’re wondering what products to stock up on ahead of Father’s Day perhaps we can look first at last year; what were the top searched for products? Now go pop these on up in lights on the home page! When people have been searching for gifts, what are the top things they then click on, and can you use this data to develop an easy-browse gift guide? Thinking a little bigger, consider working with merchandising teams to understand top product trends and then promoting these (evidently popular) products. Why not create a segment for those customers who had searched for gifts, or searched for ‘Fathers Day’ and use these segments to target the customers in a more relevant way.
Find areas where you are not serving your customers well - One of our clients recently noticed that their drop off rate for their top search term was 60%, scary! When looking at why, by performing the search, we noticed that there was a site indexing issue where the products were not all being populated automatically leading to some blank pages. With another apparel client, we realised that users were searching for scarves in summer, yet 40% of them were dropping off immediately as the client didn’t think scarves were a thing outside of Winter. This resulted in a shift in merchandising strategy and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue being clawed back.
Surprisingly, big volumes of people are still searching for scarves in Summer! Let’s make sure we’ve got those covered in our Summer campaign, shall we?
It’s pretty easy to see the simplicity and usefulness of these insights, so make it easily accessible to the relevant teams. Have a go. Develop a dashboard with three filters: one showing the top searches, one showing the searches with a search increase of 50% or more over the past week, one showing the searches with a search exit rate greater than 50% (vary the exact percentages based on what makes sense for your business).
Using these insights, you will make sure you are relevant and listening to your customers in a world of short attention spans, with multiple media sites competing for consumers.
3. Goals, goals, goals: unlock hidden insights
There is often a huge focus on conversion rate, but by putting the blinkers on, and looking only at this single metric we leave a lot of important data ‘hidden’. With a 4% conversion rate, what about the 96% of consumers who didn’t convert? As a result, marketing often gets the blame when a creative doesn’t ‘convert’, even though it might have driven a great deal of customers to the site. There are so many different parts to your site, from a newsletter, to a blog, to videos: if we didn’t think they were useful, then why include them? By tracking and measuring a small selection of critical metrics we can see where the problem occurs.
Practical Tip: Take a top user journey, and map out the various touch points around ‘Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Loyalty’, then set relevant goals for each. As an example:
Awareness: Visits to the site, spending > 2 minutes
Interest: Visit 3+ pages, newsletter sign up, visit blog
Consideration: Visits to a product page, Add to Basket
Conversion: Complete sale
Loyalty: Returning visit within 28 days.
Perhaps now you can see where the problem is occurring. Those marketing campaigns that you thought weren’t working were probably driving heaps of people to sign up to the newsletter, and you know that users who sign up to the newsletter are likely to go on to ‘convert’ and sign up in the next three months.
Or maybe you find that the challenge is that users who visit from this creative seem to visit a few pages and then drop off, suggesting that they can’t find what they are looking for, and you may need to tailor the ad. All in all, you can now make more informed decisions with these additional data points.
Whilst this company could add in some more ‘Awareness’ and ‘Interest’ goals they seem to have a good range of goals for the lower part of the funnel
Data to insight, to action
Yep, it’s still a little bit technical. But the best things in life aren’t always easy! Hopefully we’ve made it clear just how these types of data points can be turned into useful actions that can unlock impact and growth across the business.
Why not start by sharing a simple dashboard with the merchandising team, or the strategy team and watch how they use it. Give them ownership and watch how they start making decisions based on data and not opinion. And as always, seek feedback for continuous improvement and your own learning - have fun with it!
If you wanted to find out more about the different ways you can use Google Analytics to drive results for your business, reach out to us on LinkedIn for a free consultation.
About us
Suraj is a partner at SingleView, a data consultancy that focus on helping businesses use their data to drive competitive advantage, particualy in the fields of customer lifecycle management and marketing analytics. Having worked in a number of data roles over the last decade, he has developed a bias towards action, and uses this to help businesses drive commercial outcomes without unnecessary complexity.
William is Lead Consultant for Concrete Digital Marketing, and combines strategic marketing consulting with commercial know-how to help pinpoint - and then solve - complex digital problems that may be blocking growth. Combining his senior corporate experience William now brings the best aspects of big-brand thinking to local Australian businesses.
