Understanding where things come from and what to do with all this Data.
This post is the second of 12 posts that I’ll be submitting weekly for the next 3 months.
Understanding where things come from and what you are looking at is the second main important (in my humble opinion) when using Google Analytics. The first is to ask “so what?” every time you see something that might appear important or worth looking at.
In my previous post, I walked you through the basics of constructing an effective foundation for Google Analytics and what should be on or off.
In this post, I want to dive in much deeper on what type of information you — either a data analyst or the owner of a business taking care of your own marketing — should be looking for and why.
Questions where the Information you’ll need to take Actions
aka QIA
Eh.. what? Yes, QIA: Questions, Information, Actions.
If you’ve done your GA audit and you have your traffic coming into your website, it’s time to ask the questions that will lighten up the path towards actions. These are the type of questions that will provide a “so what” insight to move forward and improve your campaign or your site.
If summed up 3 questions that I consider the most useful ones when analyzing and improving my client’s campaigns:
- Who are my current customers?
- Where are people dropping off the sales funnel?
- How can I retarget engaged users?
Finding who is your real Target Audience
Let’s start with finding out who are your (or your client’s) current customers with a #truestory. One of my clients sells expensive dresses nationally. She has tons of competition as she doesn’t have exclusivity with the brands she sells and there are similar stores selling literally the same dresses in the same zip codes. When I started working with her first thing I asked was “who are your customers?”. She said it was women 25–34 that didn’t work but had high income and traveled often but lived mainly in 4 big cities in this country.
I was just starting out this digital analyst path and was pretty naive to believe her and rely only on her experience and thoughts. Oh boy have I learned not to base my decisions on thoughts but on data.
I created a couple of campaigns on Facebook and IG testing visuals, placements, and copy, and even though sales were coming in, they weren’t delivering as expected.
After a couple of months (yes, months) I dived into analytics and created segments to compare all users and people who made a purchase.
The audience making purchases were all over the age of 35, interested in business and related matters and the location turned out to be irrelevant. With this new information, I asked myself: so what? Well, it’s obvious now but so everything! Campaigns weren’t performing because they were not being targeted to an audience that has proved to purchase.
After making the right adjustments, the campaigns have performed waaaay better, with an average of 10.18 ROAS monthly since then. True Story.
Now, if I were reading this I’d be all “ok but how do you do this famous segment that will change my life”. Well, 1) I’m not writing this posts to be all technical but to show some ways on how to get better and much more useful information, but you can find more about that here: https://cxl.com/blog/google-analytics-102/
Where is the leak?
Where are people dropping off the sales funnel?
Before we move on, ask yourself this question: what is the road (or funnel) your customers should follow on your site? If it helps, draw it or write it down. I even invite you to go to your site and pretend to be a customer. What pages would you visit if you were buying or making a conversion? It’s important to have this clear as it will help you have a clear map.
A very important tool that marketers should use more (including me) is the Goal Funnel Visualization. This is where you will see in the most visual way possible where the highest percentage of drop-offs and what your attention should go to. On your sales funnel, you will see a percentage of people dropping off on every step. This is the way it has always worked and will always work. Our job I believe is to decrease that percentage as much as possible with smart tweaks. But how do you know where you should be tweaking?
In order to be able to see this, you should have created a step by step goal, you can use the map you just drew. This will let you see clearly how many people visited the pages, checkout, purchased, and where is the biggest leak. You can also look at what your users (or customers if you are using segments) are doing before and after purchasing, using the Goal Visualization to make this extra visual.
Whichever way you prefer, make sure you have your goals set up before moving forward as it will take 5 minutes now and save you tons of speculating in the future: https://cxl.com/blog/funnels-google-analytics/
Retargeting Engaged Users.
They saw they came, they left. But how can you bring them back?
If you are already using Facebook Ads and everything is linked correctly, you can easily create an audience of people who have added to the cart but not purchased. Well, you can do the same for Google remarketing through the display or using that audience to create a lookalike for display ads as well.
Using the segment tool, simply create the segment with the characteristics you are looking for. In this case, we can use added to cart but haven’t purchased but if this is not e-commerce you can also create a segment of people who visited specific pages like contact or the pricing page. After the audience is created you can quickly send it to Google Ads and that’s it. Easy peasy.
This last part was kind of technical, even though I didn’t go into much detail on how to do it. What I mean to explain is that by knowing the tools you work with on a deeper level you will get more reliable information to base your decision on. If I had never compared the data of my client’s website with her experiences, we would have never jumped into a profitable ROAS.
“No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.”
— John Sculley
I’m not saying we should not listen to our customers based on their knowledge and experience, but it’s good to dive into hard data and compare. It won’t always be the case like mine where the audience was mistaken. Sometimes what your client tells you will be exactly what you see on GA or Data Studio, but then you will be sure you won’t be spending time and effort into working with just opinions.
Biggest Takeaway
Knowing how GA works has helped me in general issues where I wasn’t sure where the info was coming or why my main source of revenue was “paypal”. It has also helped me in specific ways such as improving checkout pages that were taking longer than 15 seconds to load, or fixing 404 pages or even filtering SPAM traffic that could eventually cloud your sight when only looking at the general picture.
Remember, know how the tools you are working with work and always ask yourself what actions will you make based on new information.
See you next week!
-Denisse Gp
Special resources:
- Filter domain referrals
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en - Filtering Out Junk Traffic
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-filter-junk-traffic-google-analytics - Custom reports gallery — answer very specific questions https://analytics.google.com/analytics/gallery/#landing/start/
