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5 Ways Analytics and Conversion Tracking Can Help Your Online UK Business Here are five ways analytics and conversion tracking can help your online business.

By Dmytro Spilka

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Lead generation is a crucial facet of identifying prospective customers that could be interested in your online business' products or services.

With leads arriving from multiple different sources across the web like search engines, email campaigns, PPC ads, and social media, it's vital that you adopt an informed approach in order to optimize your marketing efforts and focus resources on the most effective sources for leads.

By adopting web analytics you can help to prove the return on investment (ROI) within your marketing strategies to justify budget spending, while conversion tracking is vital for measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns in achieving their designated goals.

Analytics and conversion tracking can carry many benefits for businesses that operate largely online, especially when you consider the fact that a lot of European businesses have moved online. Due to multiple lockdowns and closures of many businesses, Europe has been hit hard economically. Analytics could ultimately prove vital in helping new online businesses to better engage prospective customers and encourage them to shop with your business ahead of competitors.

Marketing Budgets

(Image: WSJ)

As the chart above from the Wall Street Journal illustrates, marketing can account for a seismic chunk of the overall budgets for businesses. If you're operating a small business, it may be that such generous levels of budgeting simply aren't possible. However, various tools can aid you in stretching your finances further and operating in a smarter manner.

When effectively utilized, these approaches can be highly effective in outperforming competitors that may have larger budgets to work with. Let's take a deeper look at five ways in which analytics and conversion tracking can supercharge the marketing campaigns of online businesses.

Win more customers

Recognizing your best sources of leads and converting them into opportunities allows businesses to drive on and target more customers effectively.

Whether your leads are won via the likes of Google, PPC campaigns, or Facebook, understanding how potential customers are being attracted to your website through your marketing channels is perfect for optimizing your campaigns.

Related: Why Every Marketing Channel Won't Work for Your Business

By utilizing analytics and even call tracking software, it's possible for sales teams to calculate which specific sources are best converting leads into opportunities and allocate resources and proportions of the budget to ensure that the business gets the most from more lucrative revenue streams.

By doing this, sales teams can prioritize their time in a more resourceful manner and focus primarily on the sources that typically produce the best quantitative and qualitative outcomes. For instance, a search engine campaign may result in a higher number of arrivals on your website's "Contact Us" page. Without the help of analytics software, this form of traffic may be undervalued as a means of generating leads simply because it's not directing users to a landing page. But the software can look into these high volumes of visitors and link them effectively to the marketing team.

Related: Entrepreneurs Need to Make the Transition From Intuition to Evidence in Business Decision Making Through Analytics

Specifically, data platforms like Google Analytics can help to identify the most effective marketing sources through a range of traffic source metrics, which can clearly show the journey that visitors have made in arriving from cyberspace on to specific pages.

Google Analytics

Similar analytics tools, like Finteza, enable you to access the quality of incoming website traffic and identify areas that need to be improved.

Quality of traffic

The above screenshots illustrate how analytics software can comfortably accommodate advertising and banner campaigns to display forensic levels of insights towards the effectiveness of each ad and their respective click-through rates (CTR).

Boost your ROI

With the use of conversion tracking, it's possible to gain an understanding of precisely how much each prospective customer costs your business prior to making a purchase.

Fundamentally, by utilizing software that tracks conversions, you can find data-driven guidance that can aid you in making the right marketing decisions, reduce your levels of wasted spend, quickly identify the channels that are driving better conversion rates and invest your money in more rewarding avenues.

Platforms like Funnel.io are designed to offer users intrinsic ready-made datasets that can visualize a wealth of information about each customer's journey towards your sales funnel. It also performs automatic ROI estimates to provide more tangible insights. This is particularly significant because while web analytics can help to show which platforms are leading more visitors to the front door of your website, conversion tracking can illustrate what they do once they come in.

Get more from geographical custom

As well as learning about who is arriving on your website, it can be very useful to gain insights into which geographical regions and areas are generating the highest volumes of traffic for your business.

Marketing teams can use local information for more concentrated SEO purposes, for example, if your SaaS company is based in the UK but is gaining more interest among users in South America, you can create more engaging content that focuses on statistics that are relevant to South American markets in order to transform higher levels of interest into sales.

Sales departments can also use the location of prospective leads to great effect. They can make their campaigns better targeted while maintaining a stronger outlook in order to plan for future projections.

There are plenty of great lead location tools available for businesses, and Cognism is a strong choice that's capable of tracking leads from logging and identifying patterns among visitor IP addresses.

Learn more about your on-site user experience

With a well set out sales funnel in place, it's possible to precisely pinpoint where visitors abandon your website and in what stage of their journey it occurs. Coupled with a fair level of tracking for your pages, which can be comfortably undertaken by Google Analytics, it's possible to see how effective each of your pages can be for your traffic in guiding them towards a conversion.

Here, data can show if any of your pages are overtly complicated or lacking in user-friendliness. By analyzing your sales funnel, anomalies in cart abandonment, or the widespread loss of potential sales can show you which pages are the most troublesome and in need of review.

Whether you're missing some vital links, lacking important information, or subjecting visitors to confounding levels of data, identifying spikes in abandonment can quickly help you to remedy the situation and keep conversions flowing steadily.

Identify your lead generating products and services

Another key facet of how analytics and conversion tracking software can aid your conversions is by providing insights into which specific products are performing better than others. This can work wonders in allowing marketers to tailor their message to make the most from potential interactions with customers online.

For instance, if a lead navigates on to the website of a law firm, browses pages related to conveyancing, and later fills out a form to request a quote, a sales representative can quickly start a conversation with the user by using information about the content that was viewed.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics isn't heavily detailed in this form of user data, but the right software can effectively allow businesses to view reports on visitors that show which page leads were being browsed prior to making a conversion - whether the goal is the act of filling out a form, signing up to a mailing list, making a purchase or even making a call.

Google Analytics Behaviour Flow

The data-rich analytical platform Supermetrics can be a highly useful resource for finding out more about leads and their actions prior to clicking certain buttons or taking further action on-site.

The brilliance of analytical and conversion tracking services is that they can seamlessly tap into the vast swathes of data that users generate with each of their visits onto your websites and convert the metrics into actionable insights.

In a hyper-competitive and dynamic online marketing landscape, it's these insights and their interpretation that can provide smaller businesses with an edge over more established competitors.

Related: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the Landscape of Digital Marketing

Much of modern marketing relies on businesses using their budgets in a smart way to make their money go further. If you're in the stages of establishing yourself online, focusing your resources in the right places, and minimizing waste can be the key to your longevity.

Dmytro Spilka

Entrepreneur Leadership Network® VIP

CEO and Founder of Solvid

Dmytro is a CEO of Solvid, a creative content creation agency based in London. He's also the founder of Pridicto, a web analytics startup. His work has been featured in various publications, including The Next Web, Entrepreneur.com, Huff Post, TechRadar, B2C and Business.com.
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