What is the most important digital property that belongs only to your business? Your website, of course! You would hope that your marketing team has a solid grip on everything that goes on within your site and would quickly catch anything important falling between the cracks. They should be paying close attention to the data around who is visiting your site.
In case they aren’t on top of this, they can utilize one of the most common free tools out there – they can find out who is visiting your website, how they are behaving once there, and what breadcrumbs they are leaving behind is with Google Analytics data. And a good rule of thumb is to check the dashboard at least once a week. The big question is, are your marketers or analysts checking the data consistently? Do they know how to spot something odd with their website’s traffic and correct it – fast?
In most cases, the answer is “No”!
Two scenarios that I have encountered when reviewing a third-party website that both have a situation involving spam that demonstrates the value of having Google Analytics data available for use –
One client failed to see a sudden hike ten times the amount of normal website traffic from a single source in just one day. The traffic turned out to be bogus, and the third-party sender turned out to be fake. Their website was getting spam traffic! We had to quickly go in and update the outdated WordPress plugins and block the spammers.
In another case, we found that more than ⅔ of the traffic from the client’s organic channels (Google, Bing, etc.) was going to a spam page. This page didn’t even exist on the client’s website. It took the user to an unknown destination, and the client lost potential good-quality traffic.
It helps to take an investigative approach to your website data and ask the right questions about your website statistics. Google Analytics is an excellent and free resource that allows you to get a skin-deep analysis of your visitor data and catch errors easily – before it’s too late.
Now is a great time to collaborate with your marketing team and set up performance metrics for your digital campaigns. Start by setting up the landing pages as “Events” and the call-to-action buttons on your website as “Conversions” in your Google Analytics dashboard. These are the two most important metrics that can help you gauge the performance of your marketing campaigns. Monitor them on a bi-weekly basis and track their progress. By staying on top of the analytics you will be able to correct and realign your campaigns without wasting time and money.
If you would like more clarification on how to understand and take action on your data, reply to this email and we can set up a short analysis on your website!
I’d love to hear from you.
