A R Website Design
We have lots of client‘s who ask this question..... They approach us for a specific service, or perhaps ask the more generic question “my budget is £xx/£xxx a month, how should we be spending it”?
The thing is, there is a step before this in which some key data needs to be obtained in order to answer these questions. It would be super for us to just sign everyone up on a specific service and away they go, however we pride ourselves on offering a personalised service and this would completely go against the grain of how we work.
So Where Do We Start?
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools a website design company can use, we ensure this is installed onto all of our customers websites as standard as it can provide more valuable data than any other “tool” out there. There are some drawbacks…due to Google‘s privacy policy / data protection, we don‘t get to see all of the data but 95% of what we need is right at our finger tips.... and the best part about it is that it‘s FREE!
From here we can delve into all sorts of interesting and important data that can determine how and where you should be spending your online marketing budget.... just a few examples of this are:
1) Traffic source – where is your traffic coming from? Is it direct to the website? A referral link from other websites? Social Media? Or most importantly, organic searches?
2) Demographics – we can find out your current audience demographic including location, gender, age bracket and more.
3) Behaviour flow – how are your current users interacting with your website? Are there certain pages that could be improved due to a loss of user retention?
4) Average page statistics – how long are your users staying on your website for? Are they browsing many pages or dropping off quite quickly due to a lack of engaging content?
This is just a small snippet of what can be obtained using Google Analytics but this information can shape how you spend your online marketing budget.
Therefore, when you approach your website design/marketing company with a specific requirement, have an open mind as to the direction they might point you in and insist on having a meeting regarding your analytics. If you would like to spend your online marketing budget on social media but you find (due to looking at Google Analytics) that your social media interaction is already very good, however your organic results are trending in the opposite direction, then a split budget of a small social media campaign might be worth considering and a larger portion goes into improving your search engine visibility.
Alternatively, social media might not be working so well for you and instead you decide to put 100% of your budget into campaigns across various platforms in order to maximise your exposure and not worry so much about the organic reach of your website.
That‘s just one example and a very important reason why it‘s essential you review your current traffic to your website. It will allow you to see whats working, whats not working and where to spend your online marketing budget.
If you have any questions about your website or wish to delve deeper into your Google Analaytics, we are more than happy to help and can provide you with the right information to push your website forward.