What kind of traffic and customers do you want to you attract to your website? Now, who is actually coming to your website?
Sometimes, there’s a big difference between those two audiences, and you may be marketing toward the wrong segment if you’re not paying attention to the data coming out of your website.
Your website data is useful not just to learn what’s happening on your website but also for defining larger business goals.
Let’s examine the reasons why data-driven decisions powered by your website data are now the norm.
Define and Refine Your Target Audience
You and your marketing team may have a gut feeling about the audience that resonates with your products or services. However, before devoting marketing dollars or R&D resources to targeting that group of people, use your website data to support your decisions.
Use your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property to parse out demographic data for not only the people coming to your website but also the people engaging with your forms, viewing your service or product pages, and showing buying behavior. You can also create audiences within your GA4 tool to understand how those different audiences interact with your website or even trigger different ads or marketing campaigns based on those audiences.
Set Engagement Benchmarks For Marketing Channels
Speaking of website engagement, are you tracking all of your important contact forms or website features as separate key events? If you’re unaware, “Key Events” is the new name for conversions or goals in GA4. We tend to view key events as conversions directly related to revenue. So, if key events are up one quarter, your revenue should be loosely correlated and seeing growth.
The actual key events you’re tracking can vary based on your industry or type of business. Typically, we recommend setting up key events for contact forms related to sales, product demo calls to action, whitepaper downloads, and even tutorial video plays. Key events can be completely customized based on your tracking needs, but they should help you better decide which marketing channels impact your bottom line.
Create Conversion Funnel Reports and Explorations
If leadership asks for more revenue this quarter, there might be a knee-jerk reaction to simply crank up the spending on paid channels. That might work, sure, but by setting up conversion funnel reports or explorations within your GA4 property, you can drill down into the different stages of your marketing funnel and make smarter decisions about what is needed to grow revenue.
Maybe you need more top-of-funnel traffic, but if your audience is dropping off at your contact form to talk to sales, maybe it’s time to run an A/B test with a different form setup or add in a chatbot to drive more engagement. Your top-of-funnel traffic might be exactly what you need, but with the right data, you’ll know where you and your marketing team need to focus on driving short-term growth without wasting resources.
Data-Driven Decisions Can Save Time and Budget
B2B marketing is always getting harder, with marketing teams required to do more with less. Leveraging your website data to make smarter decisions can make better use of your budget and also better use of your time. Especially if you have a small team, or if you’re a team of one, making data-driven decisions is the only way you’ll be able to stay competitive and drive impact to your business this year.