How Google Analytics Can Help You to Increase Leads and Sales

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you to grow your business further and to make smart decisions. In this article we will discover how Google Analytics can be used to improve the performance and increase sales or leads for your business.

Holistic overview of the performance

First and foremost, Google Analytics allows you to review your digital marketing performance across a variety of channels including paid, social, direct, organic and referral traffic. This is very convenient as it gives you a holistic overview of the performance of your website across all channels. For example, if you only look at Google Ads reports, they will only tell you part of the story. With Google Analytics in place you will be able to see the full picture.

Experiment and observe correlation within your digital ecosystem

There can often be a correlation between the various activities that you undertake within your digital marketing strategy framework. For example, if you send marketing emails you might notice an increase in people searching for your services. Similarly, you might want to observe what happens to your organic keywords when you advertise with them on Google and what happens when you stop. Do your organic search listings pick up some of the clicks you would have gained through paid search? These insights will help you to make decisions on where to invest your resources. As a consequence, this will help you to generate more leads as well as improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Identify which products might sell

If you are a retailer, Google Analytics could help you to increase the sales of your products and understand what sells well. Whether you are interested in organic or paid results, you will be able to see how many conversions you are getting on a product level. Perhaps some products will get a lot of clicks but no conversions. This could suggest that people are interested in a product but maybe the price is a bit too expensive, so they hesitate to make a purchase decision. At the same time if a product has zero impressions it might suggest that the landing page is down or there is another technical issue. If technically everything is fine with the landing page and you are still not getting any traffic, it might mean that there is problem with the product. Perhaps your company is not known for this type of product or maybe a product does not fit well with your audience.

It’s also useful to see where people drop off within the purchasing journey. If a lot of people are adding products to their basket but abandoning their cart at the last page, you could consider why this is – is your delivery charge too expensive, for example, or is the checkout process too cumbersome?

Analyse seasonality

For many businesses, seasonality is very important and securing maximum sales during a peak season could even make or break a business’s year. For example, if you sell electronics, Christmas could be the top season for you. If you sell plants or garden accessories, then you might want to focus most of your marketing efforts in spring. Find out more about why seasonality matters. In Google Analytics, you will be able to find out which products performed well last year and what should you push.  It’s good practice to check sales from the previous year two months in advance in order to give yourself enough time prepare.

Identify new customers

With help of Google Analytics, you will be able to identify new customers visiting your website. This data will be very useful in your marketing efforts. If your marketing objective is to attract new customers, you will be able to generate an audience for new customers only, import it to Google Ads and target new users. Based on Analytics data, you will be able to see where the new customers are coming from and use this as an additional KPI to assess your marketing efforts.

Notice when customers start to leave

While it is nice to know when new customers appear, it is equally important to know when they leave. In Google Analytics you will see graphs and charts that tell you when you start losing clicks. It might indicate something simple. For example, if you decreased your advertising spend, then naturally you will see fewer people coming to your website and that’s fine. However, if you see a sudden decline in traffic or in new users, then you will want to investigate whether there is a problem with your website.  A decline in traffic or new users could also mean bigger branding problems. If that is the case, then it is useful to have an internal discussion with your team about dispatch issues, negative reviews or any wider business problems within your business.

Understand the customer journey

With smart use of Google Analytics, you can learn more about your customers’ journey. In digital marketing we recognise different decision making stages of the customers: awareness, interest and acquisition. With the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to better understand where your customers are in the purchasing channel. It will guide you to improve your marketing efforts and deliver the right strategy to guide your customers towards making purchases.

Make PPC decisions faster

For some businesses, if you use Google Ads to monitor ads it can take up to few months to get proper revenue data, due to conversion delay. However, due to a different methodology within Analytics, you will be able to see your revenue on the same day. Therefore, if you launch a new campaign you will be able to tailor your marketing efforts to get more sales faster.

Easier to forecast

If you run your Google Analytics account for a year or longer, you will be able to use existing data to forecast future sales and decide your marketing spend. This is very useful for any QBR(s) or financial year plans that you might have within your business. You can analyse annual growth figures and make a prediction for next year. You should always treat forecasts as guidance only. Especially if there are any extreme events such as Coronavirus, YoY forecast might have little relevance.

Summary

In this article, we reviewed how Google Analytics might help you to generate more sales. It can be a complicated tool to use depending on how in-depth you would like to go with it, but if you know how to use it, it could help you to understand your audiences better. You can see which products are most valuable to your business, whether you are getting new customers and how your customers are using your website.

If you would like help with any aspect of your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with SilverDisc.