4 Ways Smart Marketers Are Using Web Analytics To Grow Their Businesses 

Since the business world has migrated into the digital age, we see many changes in how marketers apply their trade. 

The old tried-and-true methods that once served previous generations of marketing professionals are no longer effective. 

And there’s a good reason for that … 

Information. 

Marketers today have far more data available to them than ever before, and we leverage that data into useful insights that drive traffic, conversions—and, ultimately, profits.  

For example, Breadcrumbs can integrate with product analytics tools like Pendo and Mixpanel that allow you to use in-product actions to create lead scoring models for:

• PLG and sales-assisted motions
• Upsell/cross-sell scoring models 
• Retention 

At one time, this level of insight was unheard of, and marketers had to make educated guesses or work off outdated information. But today, with powerful tools like Breadcrumbs, we can have up-to-the-minute data to work with. 

Web analytics can be a useful data source for marketers that can inform and guide their actions. Determining how users interact with your website, including how they’re arriving, where they’re coming from, and what they do once they reach your site, can give you unrivaled insight into your most valuable customers’ wants, needs, and behaviors. 

This article explains how smart marketers use web analytics to guide their marketing plans toward revenue acceleration.

What Do We Mean by Web Analytics?

When we talk about web analytics, we’re specifically referring to analytics pertaining to your website, which can be a potent sales tool. That means gauging how people arrive, what they do once they’re there, and, perhaps most importantly, what causes them to leave.

The ultimate goal of any marketing plan is to push customers toward your website. But if there are issues on the site, like slow load times or an unclear path to conversion, you could be pushing customers away in droves. 

So, for the purposes of this article, the term web analytics will solely apply to data derived from users arriving at, interacting with, and leaving your website. 

4 Smart Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business with Web Analytics

You can use web analytics to help facilitate business growth through marketing in several ways. Below, we’ve listed four of the best web analytics strategies smart marketers use today. 

1. Working with marketing tools

When you’re a digital marketing professional, you’ll use many tools as a part of your marketing tech stack. These automated platforms typically help undertake some of the more repetitive tasks associated with marketing campaigns, like organizing leads or sending out email marketing blasts. 

One of these tools is your customer relationship manager or CRM. This is an essential tool for any business that allows you to maintain your lead list and track each potential customer as they make their way through the customer journey. This takes them all the way through conversion back to retention. 

By syncing your CRM with your web analytics tool, you can track what specific customers do when they arrive at your site. When a visitor to the site converts into a lead and requests new information, you can tell where they came from and what they did on the site and add this data to their CRM profile. You can use automation software to set up a workflow that automatically takes care of this information sync. 

Understanding this valuable data can help you determine how you should approach the lead, what they’re looking for, and what marketing campaign brought them to you.

2. Identifying industry trends

By examining web analytics, you can observe and accurately predict shifting trends in your industry. 

Let’s take healthcare as a prime example. 

Though far it seems, the pandemic shifted most things in our day-to-day lives, with telehealth the biggest change. Telemedicine evolved into an industry that grew into high in-demand service seemingly overnight.

The options to now easily schedule a virtual visit with your doctor online resulted in accessibility from nearly anywhere, but of course, with a market comes competition. With so many players in the health market, smart marketers need to stay ahead of the game to stand out from the crowd. One of the most effective ways to do this is through web analytics. 

If you discover that more of your converting prospects are coming from Google PPC campaigns than social media, you’ll quickly realize that the trend for your industry is leaning against social media.

Smart marketers that work for a marketing agency also understand the nuances between industries and adapt their knowledge and experience to accommodate the best practices for the specific niche over time. 

For example, marketers working in the real estate industry know their stats—like that 41% of homebuyers’ first step during the buying process is to look at properties online.

Because they recognize this trend, they appreciate and respect the importance of visibility in the online real estate market. To capitalize on this trend, they’ll utilize SEO services for real estate to improve their website’s search engine ranking and serve their listings in front of that 41% of online homebuyers to pique their interest. This allows them to serve unique and appealing listings, such as a tiny house for sale in Hawaii, in front of 41% of online homebuyers to pique their interest.

3. Discovering website flaws that counteract marketing efforts

If you see that customers are leaving your website in droves without converting, then there’s obviously something going on that you’ll need to address. It could be that the layout of your site isn’t appealing or easy to use for your target audience. 

Perhaps they can’t figure out where your shopping cart is or how they’re supposed to check out. It could also be that they get to the checkout screen, and something about the process turns them away. 

Of course, it could also be slow speeds or some kind of significant error that makes the browsing experience impossible or frustrating. You can get to the bottom of this by examining session replays and heat maps. These data-driven insights will allow you to see how people interact with your site, including where they’re falling off and what actions they took right before. 

With heat maps, you can even identify instances of rage-clicking, which is a surefire sign that something is happening that’s upsetting your audience. But without these valuable web analytics, you’d never know. 

4. Learning where leads are coming from

Web analytics can help you determine your best source for quality leads. For example, you can determine where your prospects are coming from and have those analytics broken down into a chart. Then, you can see how many visitors from each lead source actually converted. 

It could be that Facebook is bringing in more viewers than something like Google PPC, but more of those coming through Google is converting and becoming customers. When this happens, you can immediately shift your budget, throwing more power behind Google since it provides more motivated and profitable leads. 

Which web analytics can help marketers grow their business?

Now that you understand how analytics can help inform your marketing plan, let’s take a quick look at the various web analytics that can help you grow. 

• Bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors that come to your site and leave quickly without taking any action. It could be that these people found your site through an irrelevant search result or ad, which means your targeting is off. An especially high bounce rate may mean there’s an issue with the site itself.  
• Session replay data. Session replays show replays of a customer’s interaction with your site. It’s a full video replay of their entire session from beginning to end, tracking every mouse movement, click, and scroll. You can use this data to determine how your customers use the site and see firsthand why they leave. 

• Cart abandonment. Cart abandonment rates can tell you a lot about your customer journey. Specifically, the end of it. If you sell products online and customers place items in their carts and then abandon them, you need to figure out why. It could be that you’re asking for too much information, or perhaps your shipping or service fees are too high. 
• Traffic by device. This analytic will show you what devices people use when visiting your site. If you notice that you’re getting more mobile traffic than traditional desktop usage, it might be time to re-evaluate your marketing campaign to target mobile platforms specifically. 
• Traffic by channel. Traffic by channel shows where your users come from and which marketing channels produce the best results so you can allocate your budget more effectively. 

Other forms of helpful data you can use to grow your business

You’ve seen how web analytics can help you grow your business. But there are other data points you can examine to improve your company and its growth as a whole.

Let’s quickly review three other areas you can focus on to grow and improve your business. 

• HR data. HR data reveals hiring needs and ways to enhance the work environment. Review HR policies, employee performance, and team dynamics. Consider 360 reviews for comprehensive insights from supervisors, peers, and subordinates. Send a company-wide questionnaire to gauge employee and manager satisfaction, support, and feedback. Do they have any specific feedback they’d like to share? Do they feel supported by your current HR staff and the rules they enforce?
• Email data. What percentage of recipients are opening your emails? How many are taking action or clicking through? By examining email marketing data, you can get the most out of this valuable marketing channel and work smarter to grow your email list.
• Customer satisfaction scores. Your customer satisfaction scores tell you a lot about how people view your business. Your customer service scores speak to the overall satisfaction level of specific customers. If you start to see these scores fall, something isn’t working and needs to be corrected. Reach out to these customers to ask for specific feedback. Send over polls, questionnaires, and surveys to uncover their CS pain points and work to provide solutions. Doing so can help you encourage detractors and passive customers to become brand promoters. 

Accelerate Revenue with Web Analytics

We now have access to more customer data than ever, and we’re still scratching the surface. Web analytic data is just one of the data sources you can use to grow your business through marketing. 

Product analytics is another huge opportunity for improved operations through data. You can use Breadcrumbs’ scoring model to integrate with popular product analytics tools to make the best and most profitable experience possible. Click here to get started with Breadcrumbs for free!