Business intelligence holds the key to your brand’s performance.
Through business intelligence activities, you can leverage the available data to gain visibility on where you are right now, what is and isn’t working commercially speaking, and how to chart a course for future success.
Now, depending on the suite of analytical software your business makes use of to record, monitor and review relevant data, you may find this illuminating data is scattered across a miscellany of tools.
The data housed within each of these tools tells a part of your business’s story, but you need as close to a complete narrative as you can build in order to arm your business with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions for the future.
This is where every online business’s favourite web data multitool comes in: Google Analytics.
Google’s dedicated data analytics platform provides a vast, sprawling library of useful data on a website’s users, traffic, engagement, sales and more. Naturally, this makes it a Swiss army knife of sorts when it comes to answering business intelligence questions from the minor to the monumental.
Here are a handful of the age-old business intelligence questions Google Analytics has demystified for company owners, marketers and more since its conception.
How are customers finding my business?
Knowing where your paying customers are coming from is essential in order for you to streamline your marketing spending and zero in on the channels that are demonstrably contributing to online sales.
Within Google Analytics’ Acquisition report, you’ll find instant access to granular data on the channels, sources, mediums and campaigns via which users have arrived on your brand website.
This data will answer the all-important question of how your online customers are finding your business, and which channels are pulling their weight when it comes to traffic and sales generation.
Who are my brand’s real customers?
Market research around your brand’s assumed demographic is highly valuable in the early stages of launching your online business, helping you to concentrate your initial marketing efforts on the type of consumer most likely to buy with you.
Once your business has been trading long enough to have generated a bank of historical data on past customers, though, you can trade up from hypotheticals to empiricals.
In Google Analytics’ much-loved Audience report, you can lift the lid on your brand’s customer base and get to know who your audience truly is. We’re talking user age, gender, location, device, internet browser, online browsing behaviour and even interests.
With this combined user data, you can begin to paint a fully formed picture of who your customers are and how they engage with your website.
Is my website incentivising users to convert?
Site traffic is an important metric that speaks to your business’s ability to engage potential customers. However, in a scenario where this traffic is failing to convert into online sales, traffic is essentially a vanity metric that distracts from the real issue: your website isn’t compelling users to convert.
Google Analytics’ Acquisition report includes a breakdown of your business’s web traffic, engagement and sales data, and it’s this engagement and sales data that will shed welcome light on the persuasion factor of your website.
Bounce rate is a valuable metric that reveals the proportion of users who left your website after visiting just one page (without navigating to a subsequent page or performing an action, such as clicking a button or completing an on-page form).
Conversion rate is pretty self-explanatory: the proportion of users who visited your site who went on to buy. Naturally, this metric is vital to understanding the conversion potential of your website.
Where your bounce and conversion rates are performing below expectations for your industry, this marks an opportunity to investigate, further optimise and monitor.
Is my business growing?
As far as traffic, engagement and sales go, knowing where your business is right now is important. But what value does that data really have in a vacuum, without the context of your website’s historical performance?
Measuring not only present performance but short and long-term growth is essential to having a genuine understanding of your business’s trajectory and its performance in the context of your industry at large.
With Google Analytics’ date selector tool, you can compare any two time periods in a matter of seconds to analyse your month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth.
Armed with Google Analytics, business intelligence becomes a breeze.
These are just some of the many business intelligence questions you can answer by getting up to speed with the inner workings of Google’s powerful data analytics platform, or deferring to data analysis experts like the Land Digital team.
Which business intelligence questions do you need the answers to? Get in touch today to find out how we can harness Google Analytics’ plethora of data interrogation tools and shed some light on the metrics that matter to you.