The internet has gone through a metamorphosis! New algorithms, trends to discuss, strategies and a great number of utilities centric to the digital marketing community. One of the bigger updates in recent years was Google Analytics audience and programmatic data.
“The data provided by Ad planner would be making its way Google Analytics” After it finally became a reality, I could easily see how this information could influence the way customers engage with my client’s. Flash forward, data influences so many aspects of digital marketing including organic, paid, mobile and social media advertising.
Have you taken a good look at Google, Facebook or Twitter ads lately? That category, behavioral, demographic and even programmatic data now shapes the way we do business online.
Fine-tuning your existing strategy to incorporate new technologies is a great way to safeguard your client’s and company’s positioning. One such change is the way I analyze the information provided by Google Analytics.
Define Goals:
Setting up conversion goals is a great way to understand sales funnel. The vast majorities of companies I have worked with had no idea of the valuable insight to be gained by utilizing some of the basic and advanced functionality Google Analytics.
In this example my assignment is increasing sales, I want to identify who represents my most profitable customer segment. From the home view in Google Analytics, navigate to the admin tab, select goals from the third column from the left. There are 11 predefined options, let’s choose the ‘make a payment’ option.
Provide a description, our goal type is ‘Destination’ as we make an effort to analyze an action taken after the user has completed a purchase. Established a destination page, this is the page where a user is taken after they submit payment by way of your shopping cart (i.e. thankyou.html or upsell.html).
Once you have created the goal, confirm that it is active by using the ‘verify this goal’ function. This way you can see how often this Goal would have converted based on your data from the past 7 days.
Demographics:
Now that we have our goal setup, our task is finding a key indicator of our audience. Getting to know the basic demographics of your audience is crucial to how you market your content to them. For example, an audience 18-25 would be more open to you being informal in your sales copy where an audience 45-54 expect a certain level of professionalism.
Navigate to audience menu and select the demographics, from here let’s get an idea of the top performing age groups. Utilize the secondary dimensions to overlay age groups, geography with genders of your top performers.
A descending sort in your goals column provides an idea of age groups and genders who purchasing my product or service.
Interest:
Behavioral targeting has made it possible for me to reach click-thru rates of up to +200%, Increase organic traffic by 275%, Increased local search traffic by 592% and increases to online sales +22% within a 4.5-month span. More important than what you are trying to sell, is improving the path your user takes to find your product.
In the left column Navigate to the audience menu, then to interest from the menu select affinity categories. Let’s get an idea of the top-performing category, utilize the secondary dimensions to overlay categories, age groups, geography, and even technology.
Locations:
Get to know the locale of your customers, if the most profitable segment involves 18-24 male, technophiles who live in Boston this is invaluable Intelligence to help craft a genuinely engaging user experience.
From the ‘audience tab’ navigate to Geo and select ‘locations’ from the accordion style menu. Overlay your goals by either selecting the conversions dropdown to your far right. Additionally, you can overlay genders, interest and more via the secondary dimensions drop-down menu above the first column.
Hours:
These are all vital indicators into who is purchasing your product or service, does your target user visit your website via mobile vs desktop devices. What behaviors are displayed 7am-7pm vs. 8pm-11pm? Don’t know! Perfect time to find out.
This exercise revealed the most profitable Persona is ‘Ingrid’ she is 25-34, from NJ she is a small business owner, movie lover and avid reader who likes to travel. She is an amateur photographer who spends 93% of her time online engaged in mobile activities. Our second most is ‘Sam’ a real estate broker from New York, he is also between the ages 25-34. Sam’s a technophile, during work hours he is mobile and posts 8: pm surfs the web via a desktop device.
Remember to keep your Conversion Goal in mind when running each experiment! What did you find?
