Applying Web Analytics to your digital marketing the cornerstone to creating a healthy business. Building a strong online presence is a vital part of almost every business’s strategy. For a roofing business, this prominently means driving more traffic to your site and capturing more leads.
As with every business, information is key to success.
In the online digital marketing space, this means working with web analytics if you want to measure exactly how your business is performing online. Besides, 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years. That’s a lot of information!
Do you know how much search traffic you got last month? Were there any leads generated through your online marketing efforts? Small businesses spending money on marketing activities must be able to justify costs.
In this article, I’m going to take you through why applying web analytics to your web analytics is crucial to the success of your business online. We’ll discuss how you can start, the best web analytics platform to use, and the critical KPIs you should be monitoring.
What Are Web Analytics?
Web analytics, also called digital analytics, is essentially the process of translating customer behaviors and interactions with your website into actionable data you can work with.
That may sound complicated, but it’s’s not. If you want to start building marketing campaigns online, analytics can help you make real-time, data-driven decisions.
There are some great (free) tools you can use. Most notably, Google Analytics, which I will be digging deeper into this post.
The best thing about analytics is that the available tools provide you with everything you need to analyze every aspect of your website to a micro-level. You’re only limited by how you use the information.
Why should you use web analytics to improve your online presence?
Simply put, without analytics built on real data, you have no idea how well your site is performing.
Furthermore, the better you are at monitoring and using web analytics, the greater insight you’ll have into how visitors are finding you, their actions once on your site, and how well your content is converting.
With this kind of insight comes the power to make informed decisions that’ll make a noticeable difference.
With the majority of online searches made through Google, it makes sense to take a closer look at the Analytics Google provides for digital marketers.
This is going to be particularly important for local roofing businesses with a Google My Business profile and those relying on local searches to direct traffic to their site.
How to Set up Google Analytics
The most popular web analytics tool for digital marketers is Google Analytics.
Start by setting up an account and link your site to Google Analytics. Google provides some easy-to-follow instructions here. In summary, you’ll need to:
- Set up a Google account if you don’t already have one
- Set up a Google Analytics account
- Add your domain property and fill out all the details of your site.
You’ll get a unique tracking ID and some HTML code to add to your site. This code effectively enables Analytics to gather all the information they need from your website to populate the Analytics data.
Critical KPIs to Focus on Within Google Analytics
When you first open up Google Analytics, don’t panic. There is an overwhelming amount of data to work with, various reporting features, graphs, and more.
You’re never going to need to use all of it, though.
To help you get started, here are a few of the most essential KPIs every roofing business should monitor:
Number of Sessions and Users
Every business is in the continual process of trying to drive more traffic to their website. The more traffic you have visiting your site, the more conversations you should be making.
The two key metrics that tell you how many visitors are coming to your site are sessions and users.
The difference between these two metrics are:
- Users are the number of individual people who visit your site.
- Sessions are a group of interactions a user takes within a set time frame.This is set at 30 minutes by default within Google Analytics.
These are probably the best key indicators of how your digital marketing is going. If there are any signs of new users trending down, this is cause for concern.
Your Top Landing Pages
If you’re applying web analytics to your digital marketing, it’s essential you know what your top landing pages are on your site. This gives you insight into which pieces of content are performing best, how people are finding your site, and what information they are first seeing.
If you have several landing pages, for example, you can make some tweaks based on how good or how bad they’re performing.
Or, you might find that some of the informational blog posts you’ve published are working well, which opens up some opportunities.
For example, if you have informational content around “How to identify a leak in your roof,” you could better optimize this page to convert visitors into customers.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate metric shows you how many visitors are leaving the page they arrived at your site on without clicking through to other pages in your website.
There are two reasons why it’s crucial to have a low bounce rate:
- A low bounce rate is good for SEO. It’s a key metric Google uses to determine if the visitor to a site found what they’re looking for.
- The higher your bounce rate, the lower your conversion rate will typically be.
For example, if you know that a visitor has to click through to a form to fill out their details for a quote, a high bounce rate shows they’re not converting well.
On the other hand, you may have your company phone number at the top of every page. If you don’t, we recommend doing so). This means a customer can call, then bounce without clicking through to another page.
Conversion Rate
Under the Conversion Rate tab, you can set defined goals based on user interactions, then see all the analytics associated with that goal.
This is probably one of the best features of Google Analytics, as it enables you to set data parameters based on actions specific to your website.
Some examples of common goals are:
- Purchasing a product
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Filling out a form (like a request for a quote)
This enables you to measure, monitor, and adapt specific goals within your website. This is an incredibly powerful tool, and there’s no other way to gain so much insight into the actions of an individual user.
Traffic Sources
If you look into the tab, Google calls “Acquisition,” you’ll be able to see where the traffic to your site is coming from.
If you’re active on social media, paying for ads, or featured in listings, the only way to know where all your traffic is coming from is by using analytical data.
The most encouraging sign is a steady increase in organic traffic over time, as this means you’re SEO efforts are paying off.
If you’re active on social media, you’ll be able to see which platforms are sending traffic your way. You will also be able to identify the days/times most visitors are coming from social media to help you narrow down the best times to be active there yourself.
Geographic Location
An important KPI metric for local roofing businesses is where their website visitors are coming from.
Ranking blog content or having a post go viral on social media and bringing in loads of visitors is excellent. But if those visitors are from another country, it’s not going to turn into paying business.
Within Google Analytics, you can drill down on the country>region>city>metro and see where all your visitors are coming from.
It even has a world map where you can click into your local area and see how many of your visitors are local.
How Should You Be Using KPIs?
When applying web analytics to your digital marketing campaigns, marketing veterans will tell you there is a 3-step formula to follow:
- Define your goals
- Measure your results
- Adapt accordingly
You must first define which KPIs, goals, and targets are important to you and your business.
This is going to vary from business-to-business. For most roofing businesses, it’s likely going to be either increasing local traffic, improving conversions, or both.
As I covered above, Google Analytics gives you the ability to set custom goals and see your traffic numbers. You can then start implementing a digital marketing strategy and measuring your results with actual data.
The data Analytics provides goes deep into the details, and you have all the information you need to find out precisely what’s working well for your business, and what isn’t.
If you’re serious about improving your online presence, web analytics is a must. Without using Google Analytics, you won’t know how your website is performing in the search engine results. Nor will you gain insight into the behavior of your visitors.
Does applying web analytics to your digital marketing efforts sound too complicated? At My Roofer SEO, we use Google Analytics and several other marketing tools to measure performance and get qualified leads to roofing websites. Learn more about getting more traffic to your website by calling us today.