CREATING A DATA-DRIVEN SEARCH STRATEGY

SO, YOU’RE UP AND RUNNING WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS. YOU’VE MASTERED THE BASICS AND YOU’RE UP TO SPEED WITH WHAT MOST OF THE DATA INDICATES. (CLICK HERE IF YOU MISSED WAVE 1 OR NEED TO RE-CAP ON THE PREVIOUS EPISODE) THE NEXT STEP IS TO MERGE YOUR FINDINGS WITH YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN TO CREATE MORE SUCCESSFUL OUTCOMES AND INCREASED ROI.

TRAFFIC IS TERRIFIC

The obvious go-to at this point is trying to increase traffic. The issue you’ve got here is that traffic only really equates to window shoppers. Your website traffic means nothing if you aren’t converting. The footfall at Harrods in London is ridiculous, but as busy as it may seem, who is buying and who is browsing?

You could argue that the people spending at Harrods spend more, so therefore the £1900 teddy bear is super profitable. But what if Harrods focused on getting more people to spend instead?

Use your analytics data to work out how to increase conversions first. Then after you’ve maximised that, turn up the heat on the push for traffic. Now you’ve got increased traffic with maximised conversions.

Let’s have a look at some simple enough techniques to maximise conversions.

SHOOT TO SCORE

When looking to increase your conversions it’s all about setting goals, and we don’t mean the metaphorical setting of a goal. During your adventure into GA you should hopefully have come across ‘goals’. Goals are measurable activities like clicking a link or making a sale. These should represent your conversions.

Regardless of whether you’re an eCommerce site, a blog site, an information service or a conspiracy website, conversions are the end game.

It is up to you to set your goals up in GA. You can attribute them to specific pages or actions on your site. You’ve got the options to use GA’s templates in revenue, acquisition, inquiry or engagement. These should cover most end games for most sites.

Once you’ve created your goal, you can name them and attribute a value. This will now start to provide you with data on the conversion rate of the traffic through any page or action you set a goal for.

WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME

Another success story for increasing conversions is behaviour tracking. There are multiple platforms and programs that you can use for this, but if we stick to GA for now, you can make a start within the familiar.

Using GA’s in-page analytics you can see what activity on any given page prompts traffic to become a conversion. This function will display click-through rates on the site page. You can then modify the settings to show which rates performed the best with ‘show colour’. Download the Google Chrome Plugin for this awesome tool here.

This now presents you with something similar to the heatmap platforms available. Seeing where the conversions are happening presents you with the opportunity to capitalise on your successes. By replicating or making these click-through points more prominent, you can increase conversions.

Whilst we’re in in-page analytics, you may as well look at browser size. This handy little tool lets you see how much of the page is usually seen by visitors. Feed this back into your pages layout and you can get all your essential information into the most seen areas of your site.

Couple in-page analytics with browser size to unlock god-mode conversions.

EXPAND YOUR DATA SET

As great, free, and powerful a tool as Google Analytics may be, never limit your options. The obvious go-to would be other Google programs such as their Webmaster Tools platform now called Google Search Console. Webmaster Tools and GA can be linked to give additional reports in GA. These are generally SEO related figures such as impressions, click-through rate and ranking.

Outside of Google, you can find several premium heatmap & CRO tools such as HotJar and Mouseflow, these tools help with site behaviour tracking and data segments from your site. If you want to take your conversion data to the next level and sharpen up your conversion funnel we strongly recommend checking these out.

Finally, our absolute stand out hot tip, is to link your Search Console and AdWords accounts. This then gives you access to the Paid & Organic report and gives you a more comprehensive view on Paid vs Organic keywords. This allows you to make even greater decisions on where you wish to bid and where to focus your SEO efforts, we’ll cover this in more detail in the next volume of the wave series so stay tuned for that! Hope you enjoyed reading and check back soon to ride the next Digital Wave!

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