How to leverage your website and make smarter marketing decisions

Ok ya’ll I am a TOTAL nerd when it comes to website data. Your website is a gold mine of information that can guide you to smarter marketing decisions and the best part – it doesn’t even need to be that complicated. Using just a few tools like Google Analytics, Gravity Forms and UTM Codes can give you a pretty good view. 

Let’s dive in…

Your Audience

While you may know who you target audience is, that doesn’t mean that is who your website is actually attracting. A good way to confirm that your website is attracting the correct audience would be to add qualifiers. Qualifiers can come in many different forms but at its most basic would be the messaging and story that your website is telling. If the website is done well, the copy should be written to speak and attract your desired audience. One way to test this would be to include forms on your website – if the people submitting the forms are who your ideal audience is, then you’re doing well. If not – maybe it is time to take another look at your website. Additional audience intelligence you can glean from your website includes:

What device your audience is most likely to explore your website on (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc). This can be extremely important as you can tailor your website per platform to optimize overall user experience.

Geographical location can help confirm if your marketing is attracting the correct customers especially if you are targeting specific OEMs or companies. If you don’t see traffic from those locations then maybe it’s time to take another look at your marketing strategy.

Actual audience interests. Many times we think we know what our audience wants but metrics may show otherwise. Having this insight is key to understanding true market demand. One way we can better understand our audience interest is by looking at our top website content. This includes:

• Top web pages  – when uncovering your top web pages both overall traffic numbers and engagement metrics should be taken into consideration.
• Top downloads – what is your most downloaded item? Also consider where this download lives on your website. Is it easily accessible or is it hidden? Will its location on your site affect downloads?
• Top form fills – call-to-actions are key to successful digital marketing. And having various offers can help you understand what your audience is interested in or willing to convert on.
• Top queries – what terms are people using to find your site? If they Googled it, it must be important or of interest.
• Search terms – not all sites have this, but if yours includes a search function, take time to explore what people are searching your site for.

Website Performance

Your website is a very important marketing tool as it is often the first brand impression your potential customers may have. Taking the time to review metrics is extremely important and should be done often in order to optimize your digital marketing. While there are numerous ways to evaluate a website you first need to know what purpose your website serves – what was it built for (educational, informational and awareness, lead generation, etc). Some metrics we use include:

• Traffic numbers – overall traffic numbers (sessions) tell us how often a website is being visited and how accessible your site is. If traffic numbers are low – there may be issues with your SEO or maybe your products serve a niche market and demand is lower?
• Types of traffic – New Users vs Returning Users is often an overlooked metric. But this metric is very telling of your site and the experience you provide users. If your site is only attracting new users then you probably have good SEO but you aren’t providing any content that would keep users coming back for more. Pending your products and services, that may be ok but often times we want our customers coming back for more – or at least keeping us top of mind. 
• Engagement metrics – these metrics are extremely telling of website content. Bounce rate, pages-per-session, session duration, pagesviews, and time-on-page all can help us understand a users overall experience. If numbers are poor then users probably aren’t finding the content they hoped meaning your website may need some revaluation. These metrics can also help us pinpoint which pages capture the most interest to our users – which in turn can tell us which products or services to focus on.
• Behavior flow charts – these flow charts help us understand how our users are navigating our site. Are they following a strategic path we created for them that leads to actions? Or are they mindlessly wandering the site and exiting? Understanding these charts and using the insights to tweak your site may be the difference in your company making a sale.

Marketing Campaigns

We get asked all the time what digital marketing tactics work best but truth is, it depends on your audience and products and services. But this is something that can be easily tested. 

UTM Codes are a great (and very easy to use) tool to help you track your digital marketing campaigns. They allow you to see which campaigns users came from and how they interacted with your site. This is great information as you can begin to see trends such as “more people come to my website after I advertise in magazine X vs magazine Y” or “while ad A had the most impressions, ad B brought in more engaged traffic and submitted more forms”. Having this insight can help you know where to best spend your limited marketing budget and get the most bang for that buck.

Similarly, you can look at trends in your website traffic and see if there are any correlations with marketing activities. For examples, if you see a huge spike in traffic on “May 14” you can look back to see if an email went out, or maybe you were at a trade show? Knowing what causes these spikes is marketing gold and can lead you down the path of really understanding what gets your audiences attention. 

Wrapping It Up

Really, this blog could go on and on about intelligence from your website but for the purpose of the blog we are going to end it here. As always, if you have questions or would like to explore this topic more, give us a call (or better yet complete our contact form so we can track this blogs success). We would love to chat.