Using Google Analytics to Avoid an Economic Downturn

The old saying goes that if America sneezes everybody gets a cold and with the US economy teetering on a recession and the Australian reserve bank pushing up interest rates to fight inflation we are bound to see a significant downturn in the Australian economy and consumer confidence.

General theory suggests that in periods of economic slowness businesses need to be a lot smarter with their advertising budgets.  With less overall work to go round businesses need to fight a lot harder to bring in customers.  Smart business owners do not cower to the circumstances and stop advertising, they just become a lot more prudent and take out any guesswork in their decision-making by carefully analysing their campaigns and focusing their investment on the marketing strategies that work, eliminating the strategies that don’t.

Online advertising allows businesses to reach a wide audience of potential customers.  The advertising options are numerous, and Internet usage is becoming more a part of everyday life.  Consumers are actively seeking information about products and services daily whether it be through a search engines such as Google, reviewing products on a comparison shopping site, or engaging with fellow Internet users through an online community such as Facebook.  Online advertising allows you to place your business in front of all these people.

Engaging in any type of advertising successfully requires a series of steps that include identifying your target audience, targeting their needs through a clear and concise message, and monitoring the success of your campaign through analytics. 

Traditional offline advertising marketing campaigns require a great deal of discipline and a little bit of front when it comes to monitoring your campaign success rate.  Mostly, you need to be diligent in continually asking your customers how they found you, which for some people can be quite difficult, or have alternate means of identifying where a customer has come from.  Monitoring online advertising is less obtrusive and a lot more accurate.  It is almost like operating in stealth mode,  with a range of tools available that allow you to track the success of your website and more importantly any advertising campaigns that you are taking part in.

Using Web site analytics will empower your decision-making.

Not so many years ago investing in Web site analytics was quite an expensive and somewhat confusing process.  These days you can take advantage of extremely powerful analytics software such as Google analytics absolutely free.  Even the most basic analytics software will give you basic information such as:

• Where your visitors are coming from
• What words and phrases they are typing into search engines to find you
• The length of time they are spending on your website
• The amount of pages that they are looking at, and
• The pages that are receiving the most traffic.

While this information is important when gaining an overall indication of how your website is performing it is some of the more advanced analytics tools such as Google analytics that can give you a real good perspective on what is actually going on. 

A tool such as Google analytics will let you identify a website goal such as conducting a successful e-commerce transaction, filling out a contact form, or even signing up for a newsletter.  By identifying a goal you can then segment your user data to further identify which marketing campaigns are actually producing positive results for your business.

A website owner who is able to successfully use an analytics program can arm themselves with the factual data that allows them to confidently make decisions on any online marketing campaign.  Having factual data allows you to step back and totally take any emotion out of your decision-making.  If a campaign is not successful you need to investigate why and make changes.  If it continues to be unsuccessful the data will tell you so and for the sake of your business you need to CAN it.  More importantly, when you are able to identify a successful campaign you can use this same data to confidently increase your spend and try to identify similar opportunities to expand your reach.

Through using a couple of simple techniques and some discipline you can confidently wade your way through any type of economic downturn by using smart marketing techniques backed up by solid technical data that helps you make the correct decision on your marketing spend.