One would think that print marketing should have died a quick and unceremonious death when the internet came into existence. Not only is it still around, but it also looks like it’s actually here to stay. While digital advertising has its many obvious advantages, doing things old school still has its charm. Let’s run through some of the reasons why print will never go out of style.
1. Just Like Diamonds, They Can Last Forever
Well, maybe not forever, but they certainly last longer than their digital counterparts. Sure, producing printed materials can be more tedious and time-consuming, plus tracking its results can pose a much bigger challenge. But the problem with digital ads is that once your marketing campaign is done, that’s the end for your ad as well. And you know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. As for printed materials? They tend to stick around until your customer decides to throw them out.
2. Print Marketing Can be More Physically Engaging
Yes, digital ads can be fun and engaging, especially the interactive ones, and encourage the viewer to participate in an activity. Print marketing, on the other hand, can be a multi-sensory experience when done right. Think of those perfume ads in magazines or a brochure with beautiful embossed letters. How about that business card that’s printed on lovely paper stock? Printed materials like these leave a more tangible impression on customers and create more brand recall.
3. Print Marketing is More Trust-Worthy
Be honest, when was the last time you let one of those pesky ads finish playing when it plays while you’re in the middle of watching a video on YouTube? When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad on a website you were browsing? Let’s face it; digital ads tend to become a little spammy. And what do you do with spam? You ignore them. You refuse even to look at them, almost out of spite. This is not to say that digital ads are not to be trusted. A thoughtful combination of print and digital ads often results in a more successful campaign.
4. Not Everyone is Online
Almost every aspect of everyday life can be done online. Shopping? Malls have become obsolete thanks to online shopping. Work? Some people don’t even have physical offices anymore. School? Covid-19 forced both teachers and students to adapt to home-schooling. Food delivery? There’s an app for that. But what about your 70-year-old mom who still insists on going to the bank and filling out deposit slips instead of using the bank’s app? Alternatively, how about your grandpa that still keeps the phone book right beside his landline? Or your elderly neighbor that collects all the flyers for food delivery services? So you’ve migrated your entire life online, but let’s not forget about those who still rely on old media to get things done.
5. You Can Get So Much More Creative with Print
A digital ad is restricted to stay within the confines of a screen and is at the mercy of an internet connection. Without those, your ad is that proverbial tree in the forest. Print media, on the other hand, has the flexibility to be placed anywhere. The best part is, you can get even more creative with the use of space where you place your ad, the material you use, etc. Print media lets you think outside the box — or, in this case, outside of the screen.
So now that we’ve established that print media is still very much alive and well, that doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels and call it a day. For any marketing campaign to succeed, one cannot simply do the bare minimum and expect the maximum impact. Here are just some ideas on how you can launch a successful and effective print campaign:
- Have a clear marketing strategy that’s based on data
Launching a marketing campaign without a clear strategy is like going to war without knowing who the enemy is. It could also be likened to going to Target without a list of what you need to buy; you know you’ll just be wasting your time and money on things that you’re not even sure you need. The most effective and memorable campaigns have always been the ones that had a straightforward objective. - Know your audience.
Once you have the data about your customer base, this will single out your target demographic. And once you know who you’re talking to, the next important thing to do is know what you want to tell them. Once you figure out what you want to say, you figure out how you want to say what you want to say. After you have figured all of that out, you find out where they get their information and put your message there. - Print + digital = perfect combination
Nobody ever said there could only be one. A marketing campaign that perfectly blends print and digital media can have an even bigger impact than one that only relies solely on a single platform. A highly creative printed material designed to pique a potential customer’s interest instantly can drive up traffic to a company’s website. QR codes are another example of seamless integration between digital and print media that lets you explore more creative ways to engage with your audience. Adding your social media accounts to your printed materials plus posting meaningful content on these accounts also help create a more cohesive message.
Even though the internet has forever changed the way we consume information, print advertising has still found a way to survive the digital gold rush in all its varying forms. If you want your materials to stand out, we at Stack Mode Marketing Group, one of the best marketing companies in Reno, Nevada can help. We can come up with high-quality print advertisements such as postcards, flyers, business cards, and a lot more! The best thing about Stack Mode is that, their service is so affordable! Also, everything they do is 100% customized to your business.
Just when we thought that the new way is always the best, we’re constantly reminded that there are still certain things that can withstand the test of time. Perhaps it’s a testament to our sentimental nature to hold on to the old ways, or perhaps it’s just simply a case of ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broken.
Any business today that doesn’t have an online presence is missing out on such a valuable and efficient way of creating a meaningful relationship with their customers. It’s practically unheard of for any company to not have a website as part of a strategic marketing plan. Virtually anyone — whether they be an organization or even an individual — can have their own website.
However, not all websites are created equal. Some serve as an effective platform to strengthen a brand and create a fuller and more immersive experience for its users; then, some are just glorified landing pages. This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes in. It has significantly transformed how developers and brands control and boost their online presence by streamlining their approach to connecting with their target demographic.
Some may consider SEO a magic trick that’s a sure-fire way of attracting clicks and visits, eventually leading to the site’s success. While search engine optimization can be a truly effective tool in driving your site’s visitor count up, it is most definitely not the miracle solution that would bring your website back from the dead. Simply put, if your website sucks, no amount of optimization can bring it back to life.
Stack Mode Marketing Group, one of the leading SEO companies in Reno, provides several reasons why a website can become a massive failure. Chris Foti, the founder of Stack Mode, shared with us the 7 things unsuccessful sites have in common:
1. It’s Unclear What The Goal Of The Website Is
For example, your boss suddenly comes up with the idea that your company is in dire need of a website. He needs it up and running well and good as soon as possible. As the head of marketing, your boss is now demanding you to start developing the site without laying out a strategic and comprehensive plan for the end goal for the project. However, you start anyway because you were given an insanely tight deadline that leaves you with zero time to figure out what the purpose of the site is. You end up with what seems like a digital brochure without any meaningful information and nothing new to say.
Would this meet the purpose of creating a website in the first place?
Definitely no.
2. Your Page Titles Are Boring
Ever heard of click-bait? While it’s generally frowned upon, there is a reason why people are drawn towards clicking these kinds of links. The headlines are enticing, catchy, and sometimes just downright controversial. This is not to say that you should turn your website into a sleazy tabloid, but there is value in creating an engaging and appealing copy.
3. Your Business Website Is Confusing
If visitors find it difficult to navigate your website, chances are they won’t stay and try to figure it out. The internet is home to many other sites that can give them what they’re looking for without solving the riddle that is your website is asking them to do. A well-designed website is always worth the investment. Not only will it make navigation easier for your users, but it‘s also a way for you to showcase what your brand is all about.
4. It is Not Mobile Friendly
Smartphones have shifted the way people access information. It’s also given us the patience of a toddler left in a candy store. A visitor with a limited data plan won’t have the patience (or the bandwidth) to wait until your site fully loads up if it takes too long. Is your text too small when viewed on a mobile phone? Only a fraction of people would be willing to zoom in on your business website and read your content. Is checkout a tedious ordeal if done through a mobile device? Imagine the sales you’ve lost because of that.
5. You Don’t Update Your Website
Does your website look like it was created using clip art? Are you still using Flash? Does a “not secure” notification appear before the site loads up? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, then it’s most definitely a good time for an update. If your website still uses stock templates, then don’t expect your visitors to take the time and effort to explore your site when you can’t take the time and effort to put more thought into it.
6. Your Website Hasn’t Had New Content In More Than A Month
Google has algorithms that browse through the “freshness” of a website. It considers new pages and blog posts added to the content, and it uses this information when ranking sites. It doesn’t have to be an endless barrage of daily posts (you might end up spamming your page) for your site to stay fresh. Posting a meaningful and relevant post at least once a month is enough to show that you’re updating your site consistently.
7. You’re Not Taking Advantage Of All The Ways You Can Optimize Your Site
A data-driven approach to designing your website is the absolute best way to improve your unpopular page. Your website should be your central marketing asset from which all of your other marketing campaigns revolve. Growth-Driven Design, also known as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), can help you streamline your site’s structure and content by learning from user data and applying this knowledge to make more informed and targeted updates to your business website.
There are a plethora of other reasons not mentioned above that could be the culprit for an ineffective website. Technical issues can also be just as damaging (perhaps even more so) if left unaddressed. The point here is that, there is often no quick fix that could save a floundering website without having to dig a little deeper. You might even have to start from scratch, God forbid. The good news is, there are a lot of new tools available now to help guide you towards building a successful and thriving website. The internet is an ever-evolving concept, and all we can really do is try to keep up.
If your goal is to make your business grow, your website should reflect that. Working with an SEO company in Reno, such as the Stack Mode Marketing Group, can make things easier and ensure you get the results you set out to achieve.
Many brands capitalize on people’s heavy reliance on web-based solutions by offering their products and services online. Indeed, an online presence creates many opportunities. If you want to attract traffic, make sure you have an attractive website and a functional one. If you want to keep leads on your site, you must invest in your website’s design and development.
Creating a business website may sound like an easy task but do not get fooled by this because no matter how much you think you can create your own site, professional web developers will definitely provide better results. Having a website created by a professional is more beneficial for your business. In this post, we will explain why you should find a reliable website developer.
Hiring a Web Development Company is Time-Saving
Even if you already have an idea of how your website will look like or of what it will contain, chances are, you do not have enough resources and time to create a functioning one that is well-optimized. Figuring out the intricacies of how a website works is time-consuming. It is okay if you do it yourself if you intend to save money; however, in the end, you might end up creating a less reliable site, so you might not be saving anything ultimately.
Why not spend your time on your business’s more important tasks instead of squandering it trying to figure out how your website should work? Many web designing or development companies can provide your company with a competitive edge to the platform. The products they come up with make the most out of your money in the big picture. When your website is built with a development team’s ultimate experience, you have an outstanding advantage when it comes to sending your messages across your target market.
Having a team dealing with updates and maintenance is also an advantage as it can keep your business on top of the competition. Also, to keep your customers glued on your platform, you must give preference to a functional yet visually pleasing website – a thing only professional web developers can create. By working with a web development company, you can incorporate all the necessary tools to update and improve the website performance.
Stack Mode Marketing Group is one of the best website development companies in Reno, Nevada. They assure clients of providing unique and customized websites to make businesses look great. Their team designs sites with the client’s business in mind.
Websites Created by Professionals are More Reliable
Make sure your website is not only strategically designed but also optimized to provide results. Nothing turns web visitors away quicker than a poorly designed website. However, you should also keep in mind that a good website should be beautiful and responsive to be reliable. If you are not a web development expert and you insist on creating your own business website, you will not realize until it’s too late that what you created is not suitable for your business. Then now, we go back to the first reason – you wasted time and effort for nothing.
Another advantage of commissioning a web development team is the assurance of having an incredible website right away without worrying about breaking or crashing it.
A Professionally Created Website Helps Your Business Stand Out From the Competition
What is your reason for having a business website?
Is it because you want to connect with your audience?
Is it to sell your products and services online?
Is it so people can learn about your business?
True enough, a website can accomplish many things for your business and so much more!
Having a website cannot only help you connect with your target audience to sell your products and services, but it can also make your business stands out from the competition!
Having a unique, well-composed, and functional website creates a memorable experience for your audience. This is achievable only if you seek the help of a professional web developer. While site builder templates make it easier to build a website on your own, the output will be mediocre. It will not help to make your business stands out from your competition. Instead, you will blend in with thousands of other sites that have the same templates as you.
One of the most certain promises a web development company can give is beautiful, personalized designs for your business with a user-friendly interface.
Website Developers Create Websites with Better Functionality
Developers, especially the front-end developers, work with JavaScript, CSS, HTML and other technologies to do three fundamental things for your business site:
- Implement the designer you want for your business website
- Work on any design functionality your website will have
- Work on any functions that your business site requires
Understanding these things can be quite difficult for a non-technical person to understand, but it comes down to how modern websites are built. Developers are paid to set up and implement functionality to be incorporated into your site. Considering the statistics, users search for websites using different devices; thus, your business site must be compatible with various devices being used by end-users. A professional web development company, like Stack Mode Marketing Group, will provide you with a website that has the potential to take advantage of the latest tools and technologies.
Professionally Created Websites Drive Better Results
It is not enough that you have a website created for your business. What’s more important is having a working website that drives excellent results.
Different elements on your site can provide various experiences for your audience. Simple ad-on such as a video clip or a certain call-to-action (CTA) button can impact the users’ experience. If you have an idea on how your website should look like but do not know everything you need for your site to do its purpose, find a website developer to help you figure it out.
Stack Mode Marketing Group offers website development services in Reno, Nevada. Their team aims to stay one step ahead of the competition by producing extraordinary results. Stack Mode is a one-stop marketing shop that can assist with just about all your marketing needs! Whether you are starting up a new business or established and looking for marketing strategies to help grow your business, we've got you covered!
As a small business owner, you’re probably well across the fact that Google is the world’s number one website. So when it comes to choosing between Google AdWords and Bing Ads, the choice is easy, right? Actually, it’s not that clear-cut. While Google does have the US search market covered, Bing is not as far behind as you may think. It also publishes some interesting data on user demographics and industries that can help inform your decision of where to get the most bang for your buck.
Search estimates for Bing and Google
As stated earlier, Google is the number one website in the world, and there are a staggering 3.5 billion Google searches per day worldwide. By comparison, Bing has about 160 million searches per day worldwide. However, in the US, Bing actually holds a 33.5% share of the search market. It also claims to reach 68 million US searchers who do not go search through Google – so if your ideal customer is in that group, you’d best be paying attention to Bing.
Who uses Bing? Who uses Google?
According to Bing’s own research, its average user is female, with a family income of $100K, about 45 years old, educated, and married with children. To break the data down a bit further, 30% of its target audience is on $100K family income. The gender split is 51% female, 49% male. Half of the audience is married or living with a partner, and nearly 40% is between 35-54 years old. Over one third of the audience has a degree.
Apple only holds about 14% of the PC/Mac market share, so of the 67 million units of computers sold worldwide last year, 90% of them are using the Windows operating system, which comes with Internet Explorer or Edge installed – and Bing is the default search engine. So unless a user is interested or savvy enough to change their default browser or search engine, they’re likely to be using Bing.
There is a lot of data out there on Google’s users, but as most of it is at least three years old, we’re not including it. It doesn’t publicize its own demographic information, though the general consensus is that Google’s users are likely to be younger, more tech-savvy, and white-collar.If your business is targeting customers under the age of 35, or tech consumers, you’re likely to want to focus exclusively on Google AdWords for your search budget.
Major Differences Between Bing Ads and Google AdWords for Small Business
REAL ESTATE (NUMBER OF ADS DISPLAYED)
There are more options for Bing Ads to display ads, as it still includes ads down the side of the search results page, whereas Google got rid of their sidebar over a year ago. So if you’re in a highly competitive industry, you’ve got more chance of your ads actually creating impressions on Bing than AdWords – but of course conversely, it shows more of your competitors’ ads as well.
CAMPAIGN TARGETING
All in all, the ad set up is more flexible in Bing, and allows you to make changes at an ad group level, which is more targeted than AdWords’ campaign level changes.
You are also able to adjust campaign time zones in Bing, which you can’t do in AdWords – if you’re in one time zone, you can’t specify that an ad appears in a different time zone, which can make campaign time targeting confusing (particularly if you’re working across multiple time zones).
While both AdWords and Bing Ads offer location targeting, in AdWords this must be specified at the campaign level, which would then apply to all ad groups. In Bing, you can specify the location at an ad group level, which means that you could potentially look at a state-wide campaign, but with city or region ads (to different landing pages or offers).
BUDGETS
The set up of spending limits was, until April 2017, slightly different too – you were able to set a monthly budget in Bing, but it has since dropped that ability and now both AdWords and Bing Ads have daily limits only.
IMAGES
Visual sitelinks are currently in beta (testing phase) for AdWords, but essentially, it’s going to be a mobile-only carousel of images that relate to sitelinks advertised in the ad itself. Bing’s own Image Extensions are currently live across both desktop and mobile, and allows you to add up to six images. There’s no specific data for its effectiveness, but inclusion of “rich snippets” or images is generally known to increase click through rate – anything that makes your ad stand out from the crowd.
Google AdWords Image Extensions
Bing Ads Image Extensions
NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
Within Google AdWords, adding in negative keywords means that searches that include those keywords will not trigger your ad to appear. This makes sense, as it means that you can exclude irrelevant searches and therefore they don’t cost you money. However, in Bing Ads, if a target keyword and negative keyword both include the same word (bearing in mind that a keyword can also be a phrase), your ad will still show – it’s as if Bing is giving your keywords the benefit of the doubt, whereas AdWords takes a more hardline approach.
CONVERSIONS
Both AdWords and Bing offer options for tracking users’ actions after they click on your ad – AdWords lets you use your Google Analytics defined goals, which is quite straightforward, or you can use specific AdWords-only goals. But if you do go with the AdWords-only goals, you’ll need to create a tracking tag and place that on your destination page. With Bing, you need to add a site-wide tracking tag, then create the conversion itself within the Ads interface (which is useful if you’ve got multiple goals). This Universal Event Tracking tag also helps with remarketing, as it’s automatically set up within the tag itself.
REMARKETING
Remarketing, which is when ads appear to users who have already visited your site or a specific page or product on your site, on Bing Ads is simple to set up, but it does require that you develop a list of at least 1000 people in a segment before your ads will be served to them. AdWords has a superior remarketing product. In addition to using its Display Network (showing ads on other websites as well as its search network), it also has more options than Bing Ads for remarketing. This includes customer list remarketing, video remarketing (for people who’ve interacted with your videos on YouTube, for example), the standard and search remarketing, and dynamic remarketing, which adjusts the ad headline based on what the user has searched for.
Which one is easier to use?
Google has recently updated its user interface, and it’s a lot more user-friendly. It’s clear, easy to use, and its Overview screen has all the information you’d want to know about your campaigns at a glance. It makes ad creation straightforward, and reporting and settings are in a more obvious section of the site than they were in the old interface. By contrast, Bing Ads is very much a mirror image of the old AdWords set up. With so much data to display, it can be difficult to design an interface that makes sense and brings the most important information to the fore, but hiding campaign information “under the fold” as Bing Ads does when there are alerts provides a subpar experience.
Does Bing Ads or Google AdWords produce better results?
Large US online advertising firm WordStream recently produced an infographic that shows click-through rates, cost per click, conversion rate, and cost per action across Bing Ads by industry that will be useful to benchmark your results. A year prior to that, they produced the same data for Google AdWords, which is included here.
Overall, though, their results show that Bing “wins” by having a higher click-through and conversion rate and lower cost per click and action. Its biggest downfall, is, of course, its reach – Bing just can’t compete with the sheer weight of numbers of Google searches. However, at about one-third of all US searches, it’s certainly worth a percentage of your total search budget, even if it’s just for testing purposes.
| Click-through rate | Cost per click | Conversion rate | Cost per action | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google AdWords | 1.91% | $2.32 | 2.70% | $59.18 |
| Bing Ads | 2.83% | $1.54 | 2.94% | $41.44 |
Source: WordStream (Based on a sample of 1,242 US-based WordStream client accounts in all verticals (representing $6 million in aggregate Bing Ads spend) who were advertising on Bing Ads between July and September 2017. Average figures are median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD.)
Hallam Internet in the UK also recently ran a comparative study with a large client and used the same ads across both advertising platforms. Their results are below:
| Spend | Conversions | Cost-per-acquisition | |
|---|---|---|---|
| £29,319.81 | 919 | £31.90 | |
| Campaign 1 | £25,518.49 | 771 | £33.09 |
| Campaign 2 | £2,516.03 | 97 | £25.94 |
| Campaign 3 | £1,285.29 | 51 | £25.20 |
| Bing | £1,935.75 | 165 | £11.73 |
| Campaign 1 | £1,723.34 | 143 | £12.05 |
| Campaign 2 | £136.41 | 15 | £9.09 |
| Campaign 3 | £76.00 | 7 | £10.86 |
According to the data, it was 67% cheaper per acquisition through Bing than AdWords. The main difference was in the conversion rate, and the author posited that it may have been the characteristics of Bing’s users that was actually causing the differentiation in conversion rate.
Conclusion
In the end, what the results show is that if your target demographic isn’t a youth market, you should be paying attention to Bing. While Google dominates the search market, Bing’s published data shows that targeting the particular industries or demographics that are already using its search engine can lead to lower costs and higher conversions than using AdWords.
If you’re in a very competitive industry, or have a low budget, it’s worth taking a chance on Bing Ads. Your ads won’t reach as many people as they could using AdWords, but there is potential for improved results. Bing Ads also have more options for adjusting campaigns at an ad group level, so if you need to get really granular within your campaign (e.g. two different ads going out to one particular region but with different budgets), you’ll fare better with Bing – AdWords just doesn’t have the same functionality.
If you definitely need to reach as many people as possible (for example, you’re in a niche industry), or your audience skews younger, you should focus on Google AdWords. Similarly, if you want to use remarketing, Google has a much broader range of features than Bing, so you should stick with Google.
A time- and cost-effective way to test is to use the same ads on both Google AdWords and Bing Ads (you can import your AdWords content into Bing Ads), with your Bing budget being about 25% of your Google AdWords budget, and advertise on both for 30 days. It needs to be at least that long in order to give the ads a chance to work and settle down. After the month is up, analyze the results, and adjust your marketing. If you found that you got better results from Bing, put more of your budget into it and optimize for the Bing Ad experience (e.g. with image ads). If not, and AdWords was clearly outperforming Bing Ads, then at least you’ve tried it, found that it didn’t resonate with your audience, and you move on.
And although the user interfaces are now quite different, if you’ve used AdWords in the past, you won’t have any trouble navigating around Bing Ads. And the actual process of setting up an ad is very similar – you need a budget, targeting, content, including headlines, and extensions, so you’re likely to pick up how it works quite easily on either platform.
Your website is one of the most valuable sources of marketing, but many small businesses under-utilize it as a tool and simply “set and forget” – after it’s built, it’s got your phone number and address on it, so that’s all you need, right?
Wrong. More than one-third of internet users in the US said they first find the small businesses that they use by researching online. And nearly 40% said that they will visit a store’s website first before they go to the actual bricks-and-mortar shop. If your website isn’t up to scratch, you could be losing customers before they even contact you or visit a storefront.
When you set up your website, it’s vital that you install analytics tracking to be able to measure and optimize its performance. Google Analytics is free, easy to set up, and widely used, which makes it ideal for small business. Here, we look at the ten reports that are most important to small business, and that can really give you valuable insight into how your site performing.
1. Acquisition Overview Google Analytics Report
This report tells you how people found your website – whether they came via organic search (using a search engine like Google), referral (they clicked a link from another website), direct (essentially, a pool of “unknowns” – it can be when a customer inputs your URL into the address bar, or when a link isn’t properly tagged, or someone goes from a private, secured website to an unsecured site), social (from Facebook or Twitter, for example), or paid search (which is advertising, like using Google’s Search Network).
By understanding how customers found your site, you can look at where you need to focus your attention. If a lot of people come to your site from Facebook, you can look at ramping up your activity there, and perhaps doing some Facebook advertising – your efforts on Facebook are obviously working. By contrast, if you notice that you’re getting very little traffic from organic sources, like Google, you might need to look at some search engine optimization (SEO) – essentially, making your website as attractive as possible to Google.
2. Mobile Overview Google Analytics Report
One of the most definite insights into internet use over the last decade is the rise of mobile devices to access the internet. In 2017, 73% of the entire population accessed the internet through their mobile phone, and roughly 60% of all traffic to the top 10,000 sites is mobile traffic. By 2021, mobile internet usage will reach penetration of 86.5% in the US.
What this means is that if your site isn’t mobile-ready, your customers will have a hard time visiting you online. Using Google Analytics, you can find out how many people visit you on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. You can also see (as you can in almost every GA report) how long those people stayed online; whether they left after only visiting one page; and what percentage of people “converted” (hit one of your predefined goals). If you’ve had your site set up for a while, it’s likely that you’ll see similar data to the chart below – a definite growth in mobile usage, and a decline in people accessing your site by desktop.
3. Demographics Overview Google Analytics Report
The introduction of demographics reports has been cause for huge excitement in the analytics community. Through this, you can see the gender split and age ranges of customers on your site (usually a subset of the data). Google gathers this data through the third-party DoubleClick cookie, and looks at things like Google Account details, social media profiles, and browsing activity to determine demographic information.
You do have to enable the collection of the demographic data within your Google Analytics account, but once you do, it can be invaluable in informing your marketing activities, and giving you the scoop on exactly who your online customer is – and this may differ from your instore or face-to-face customer. By learning more about the people who visit your site, you can adjust it to better suit them.
4. Search Console Queries in Google Analytics
One of the most commonly-asked questions about analytics is “what do people search for to get to my site?” Unfortunately for many site owners, about six years ago, Google encrypted the search data so that search terms are replaced with “(not provided)”. They did this to protect the privacy of a site’s users, but it also encourages people to sign up for Google’s AdWords product – search terms are easy to find in Google AdWords.
Fortunately, there are some workarounds. Within Google Analytics’ admin section, you can link another of their products, called Search Console (it used to be known as Webmaster Tools), to your account, and it will bring in search information for your domain. This includes search queries, which shows the number of times Google served up your site as an option to a particular search term, as well as your site’s average position for that term, your click-through rate, and the number of clicks to your site.
5. Content Drilldown Google Analytics Report
This report really starts to get into what customers are actually doing on your site – you can see your most popular pages (or products), how long people are staying on each page, whether it’s the last page they visited on your site, and how many unique pageviews of each page occurred. And within this particular report, it also shows you the information from a “category” level – so if you have various sections on your site, you can see which of those are resonating with your customers.
The report presents as a table, and where the Page Path shows a folder, it means that there’s more information within (i.e. that row is a category). For each category, you can also see important data such as unique views, time on page, exit, and bounce rate. Using this data, you can start to get a gauge on how customers are interacting with each page – do they spend an unusually long amount of time on a page? Perhaps it’s hard to read or navigate. Too short an amount of time to take it all in? Perhaps the page is throwing an error, or can’t be seen on mobile. Do a high number of people leave your site from one particular page? Maybe they’re getting kicked off, or the content is all wrong.
6. Top Events Google Analytics Report
One of the limitations of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t automatically set up tracking of important data like PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or banner clicks. This needs to be set up separately from the basic GA install, and can either be added to each link or click, or (more easily) via Google Tag Manager. Once it’s done, however, you can access the Event reports and get information on how many downloads of product manuals you got in a particular week; how many people clicked the first banner on your home page versus the second banner; or how many people clicked on your referral links.
The Top Events report divides the events into Category, Action, and Label, which are all determined during set up. You might have a category called PDF, one called Videos, and one called Links. The Action may be Download, or Play (Pause/Stop, etc); or Click. The Label is generally the File Name or some variation that makes the event easily identifiable. Most important is the total events, but unique events also tells you how many unique events occurred within each session.
7. Goal Overview Google Analytics Report
One of the most important (and often overlooked) aspect of Google Analytics is goal set up. Even if you don’t have ecommerce facilities on your site (in fact, especially if you don’t have ecommerce), you will still have specific actions that you want your users to take when they visit, like creating an account, making an enquiry, registering for a free trial, or even something based off an event, like downloading a particular paper. You can (and should) still set up goals for purchases as well.
Adding a goal value to each of your goals will also “unlock” some great insights in other reports too, like giving each of your pages a value, showing how important (in a monetary sense) they are to your business. It can also show which of the acquisition channels (e.g. organic traffic, social networks) are having the greatest effect on your goal. For each goal, you can also set up a funnel, with its various required steps, to give you insight into where users are dropping off. Again, this isn’t just for ecommerce conversions – it can be for sign ups (is the process too complicated?), quizzes, free ebooks – anything where there are a number of pages as steps to follow.
8. Day of Week / Time of Day Google Analytics Report
This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard work is already done for you.
With this report, you can get an understanding of the most important days and time of day for your online customers. Knowing when they visit the site can help you with advertising (target your advertising to the times when people are already logging on to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, as well as the effect of other marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email newsletters, or referral site campaigns.
| Day of Week | Sessions | Pageviews | Pages / Session | Bounce Rate | % New Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 2,333 | 7,333 | 3.14 | 63.44% | 58.29% |
| 4 | 2,079 | 6,620 | 3.18 | 64.89% | 53.44% |
| 6 | 1,964 | 6,323 | 3.22 | 63.75% | 53.41% |
| 0 | 1,877 | 6,542 | 3.49 | 61.37% | 53.06% |
| 2 | 1,782 | 5,815 | 3.26 | 64.48% | 55.50% |
| 1 | 1,710 | 5,495 | 3.21 | 64.04% | 54.27% |
| 3 | 1,574 | 5,498 | 3.49 | 63.60% | 51.72% |
9. All Campaigns Google Analytics Report
When customers click on a link to come to your website, you should add parameters on to it that tell Google Analytics what the link is about. For example, if you set up Facebook advertising, it will ask you at some point to include your destination URL – the page link that customers will end up on. Best practice for doing this specifies adding some information to the end of that URL that passes information along to your website that includes the source (Facebook), the medium (ads), and the campaign name (Spring_sale). Some services, like MailChimp, do this for you automatically.
When people have come to your site using a properly tagged link, that information will appear in the Campaign report. Within this, you can see how effective each campaign has been to your website performance. By default, the report shows Campaign Name first (useful if you’re running the same campaign across different mediums – like a Christmas sale across Facebook, a newsletter, and a banner ad on another site), but you can also select it to show Source or Medium. The report also shows how many users and sessions happened on site due to the campaign; the pages and time on site for those sessions; and if any conversions occurred as a result of the campaign.
10. Behavior Flow Google Analytics Report
The Behavior Flow chart shows how customers move through your site, which works as a fantastic snapshot of the user journey. Beginning with the landing page (the first page a customer visits on your site), you follow the most popular user paths, with less popular journeys available as an minimized group of pages. This chart also shows the number of sessions that ended on each page as a percentage, to give an “at a glance” view on where you’re losing your customers.
Summary
These ten reports give you a fantastic overview into the performance of your site, and checking in with them on a regular basis means you will begin to spot areas that could be improved or modified in order to achieve your business goals. Within small business, every tool that can be leveraged to give you the jump on your competitor needs to be used, and knowing just how your site is working for you is paramount in today’s online world.
Is Google Analytics Helping Your Business?
If you aren’t currently using Google Analytics to optimize your marketing efforts, your missing out on free analytic data that is extremely valuable to your business. You can start tracking things like where your traffic is coming from, which marketing efforts are working, what pages were viewed, when your website is busiest, and more. Get in touch for a free consultation!
