Using Google Analytics to increase enquiries from your website
You put up a promotional offer. You load it onto your website, you post it on Facebook, you send it out in a newsletter and you put up posters in your Salon.
Which one of those mediums gets you the customer – is it all of them, or is it none of them. You need this information.
Not all clicks to your website are equal – some cost and others don’t. Not all clicks to your website generate enquiries. You may discover that you are sending people to your website with advertising dollars, or with smart marketing and networking that gets you web visits with no cost, but you may then find that they do not yield enquiries.
Online advertising is charged per click generally. Each click has a cost either nominated by you or as a result of the amount of competition for the search term and audience. If you don’t know what you are doing it can be an expensive arena to play in, but more importantly – what happens to your people once they have clicked.
This is what Google Analytics is for – to find out how people are traveling around your website and what % of them take the actions that you want them to take.
The first step is to set up a Google Analytics account. Once that is sorted, find your Analytics Tracking Code in the Admin area and have that entered into your website. Each web platform has a slightly different way of doing this, but your web developer will be able to easily install the tracking code.
Now you need to wait a couple of weeks while some data is collected.
Essential to this process is knowing what you want people to do when they arrive on your website. The best idea is to chat this through out loud with someone else, as it’s easy to get store blind and think that something is obvious because you do it every day. Find someone who is new to your site and ask them – is it obvious that the site is telling you where to click to take the action that I want. If it is not ‘slap in the face obvious’, you need to make changes. Make tiny changes, one at a time and wait to see what happens.
You can set up ‘conversion goals’ in your analytics account – just click on the ‘conversions’ area and it’s really easy to see what to do. A good example of a conversion goal is to install a ‘book now’ alongside the promotional offer and track the conversion of ‘people clicking on the book now button‘. From there you play with how the web page is laid out, what the offer is and how it is written and measure the conversions with each change. Setting up conversion goals makes it easy to measure the percentage of visitors taking the action that you want. Now you are proactively working on your site to increase conversions.
Soon you will be addicted to directing traffic on your site! It’s really fun.
Another really excellent way of tracking how your marketing is working and understanding what is driving your customers to your website is to use ‘tracked URLs’.
This is a way of finding out exactly which Facebook post, Instagram link, ad or offsite link generated the click to your website. Using the URL generator you create a customised URL as your link. This link is tagged with all the details of where the click has come from – for example, your customised URL may read as ‘FB post 2 Sept on Vitamin C with link to facials page’.
In the Analytics area, you will see exactly how many clicks came from that link – and whether or not they converted to making a booking or contacting your Salon.
If you run the same offer to the same web page on your Adwords, your Facebook page, on a separate Facebook advertising campaign and in your newsletter – each with a specifically tagged URL, you will be able to see which of those mediums generated the FIRST customer click and which one of them created the conversion.
Remember that customers need to see an ad or offer more than once to be persuaded to take up the offer. Tagged URLs allow you to understand which advertising medium first caused the customers to click, and which one of them caused the customer to convert – and you run the mediums in future in that order, which saves you marketing $ in the long run.
Smart marketing beats Grabones’ and discounted deals EVERY time.