Get to Know Your Customers Using Analytics

• Demographics – Age and Gender: Use this data to target ads and create content for the most popular segments of your audience.

• Geo – Language and Location (country, city): Location and language data help you determine if you should offer translated versions of your site, multiple currency options and laws that must be upheld (like GDPR if your customers are in Europe).

• Technology – Device, Browser, Operating System, Networks: Use this information to test your site on the most popular environments used to view your website to ensure an enjoyable customer experience. Knowing the devices used by your customers helps you budget social media ad spend accordingly between mobile and desktop. 

• Interests – Affinities, In-Market Interests and more: Use this information to target ads and create content that combines the mission and/or product offering of your organization with the top interests of your visitors.

• Direct Traffic – Users type your URL into the Web Address Bar: These visitors are familiar with your organization enough to recall the web address without searching for it, or they have it saved in their browser bookmarks.

• Organic Search – Users find your site by typing keywords into a search engine: These visitors type a term related to your business in a search engine and click a link to your site when it appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Optimize your site for search engines by using strategic keywords on your webpages in the URL, page title, meta description, throughout the content and in the image alt tag. If you track this metric over time, you can see if your efforts are boosting this metric and check Google Adwords for terms used to find you.

• Email – Users click on a link within an email sent to them: Having an effective email marketing strategy will help maximize this type of traffic. Segment your contacts to send the most relevant information to each group and direct them to your website for more information, like supporting blog articles or product information.

• Referral Traffic – Users click on a link to your site from another website: Visitors click a link on another website to get to your site. This data helps you to validate your spend on placing an ad on a partner website, guest blogging and co-marketing partnerships.

• Social Media Traffic – Users click on a link found on social media: Viewing this data can help identify which social channels are used most by your website visitors so you can validate your time, effort and ad spend accordingly. Keep in mind that it takes time to build an audience on these channels.

• Advertisement Traffic – Users click on a link found on a paid ad: Tracking your traffic from PPC ads helps you determine if your spend was worth it and if you should adjust your budget for the next duration of your campaign. Be sure to track your conversions from all ad campaigns to truly measure their effectiveness and ROI.

• New & Returning Visitors: See how new and returning visitors differ in their bounce rates, session duration and goal completions. You may try to invite new visitors back through email campaigns or reduce bounces using personalization or exit intent pop-ups. Perhaps you can boost goals completed by returning visitors through improving your content strategy and providing incentives to return.

• Pageviews, Top Pages, Session Duration & Bounce Rate: Use these reports to see what pages or forms get the most attention, what pages hold the attention of visitors the longest and what pages are producing the most bounces off your site. Using this information, you can make changes to improve the customer experience on your site in terms of usability, content, relevancy of landing pages leading to content and more.

• User/Behavior Flow: This report presents a tree diagram of the visitor’s journey on your website. View the pages browsed by visitors from the moment they arrive on your site until they leave. Filter the report using many variables to see how different user segments view your site by country, language or acquisition channel. If most people drop off your site on the same page, there may be problems causing this that can be fixed.

• Lead Score: First, assign values to the various ways visitors can engage with your organization online. When a lead score is generated for a customer, you can track how likely they are to convert and prioritize your efforts on paying attention to the hottest leads.

• Customer Profiles Automate personalization at scale using the customer data and activity data gathered since that customer's first interaction with your brand.

Goals & Conversions

Goals can be set up to track how visitors are converting into customers. Think of the desired outcome for your site visitors and set up goals to track these events and evaluate your success.

You can track goals by:

• URLs

• Pages / Visit

• Time Spent on your Site or Page

• Events

• Customer Segment Churn: Segment your customers and see if you can find a pattern in certain types of customers that do or do not come back for repeat business. Can you think of a way to resolve their issues to prevent them from leaving or perhaps sales is targeting the wrong customer segments in the first place?

• Study your eCommerce Analytics: If you have purchase information, you can easily view your customers based on how many purchases they’ve made over a certain period of time. Filter through to see if you can find any commonalities between those who purchase frequently and when they purchase, and segment them into groups to determine how you can better meet their needs or communicate your benefits.

• Look for Brand Advocates: While you can look at Google Reviews or reviews on your site individually, one way to study brand advocates at scale is by looking at social analytics. You can sift through your engaged list members and uncover any patterns to see how you can improve upon your content and how you portray your organization and communicate your company culture, products and services.

• Filter Specific Customer Profiles: Tracking specific behavior of your customers lets you segment them into useful categories, such as how they behave towards your products, services, content or communications. Some customers may be triggered to purchase upon seeing recommendations, whereas others may purchase when they see product comparisons. Other customers may purchase when the content is personalized to them and they don’t have to search for information. Seeing what triggers certain customers can help you decipher if there is a pattern in other demographics as well. The more you know about your customers, the more effectively you can predict their needs and how to address them.