As a business owner you know how important it is to track key aspects of your business. However, most florists are not comfortably familiar with reading and understanding website date, or knowing which data points are more important than others. If you are not tracking the most critical metrics, you will have no way of knowing how your site is handling and responding to the constant flux of Internet traffic.
With that in mind, here are several metrics that can be easily tracked through Google Analytics:
Leads Generated – Leads are everything in marketing – who else will you sell to? This has always been an important metric, online or off. Leads are people whom we have contact information for and perhaps know something about their taste in flowers. We are ready to nurture them for support. Tracking leads can be as simple as setting up Goals for online form submissions, or you can take a more complicated approach with call and event tracking.
Percentage of Leads Converted – Converting leads into customers is the name of the marketing game. This metric informs our efforts at conversion optimization and can highlight weaknesses in landing pages or SEO content. If leads are closed online (via sale, online form / contract, etc.) then you can use custom segments to determine how many people who were classified as a lead took the next step to close the sale.
Revenue – Marketing teams are obviously very aware of revenue, but not everyone checks up on it as often as they could. Instead of only measuring revenue at the end of the month or quarter, check this metric throughout the month to ensure that you are meeting your goals and aren’t going to receive a nasty surprise. Google Alanytic’s ecommerce tracking provides excellent granular reporting on sales volume, popular items, average sale price and more.
Total Community Membership – This is a measure of the size of your community – the people you have become associated with through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, email, etc. This metric tells us how well our social media outreach campaigns are working.
Percentage of Business by Referral – Reputation is everything in the business world, and referrals are a measure of a company’s reputation. If you provide high quality flowers but don’t receive many referrals, this may be indicative of poor service or an unpleasant customer support experience. Check the primary sources for your ecommerce transactions; if the referral, direct and social numbers are decreasing, or not climbing, and you are relying on new customers via search (non-branded terms) then you may be just churning through customers instead of building a loyal fan base.
Percentage of Repeat Business – Like the previous metric, this is a measure of customer satisfaction. Take this metric into account along with the previous one – if we have a large number of referrals but few repeat customers, it may mean that we need to focus more on extending continuous offers to customers.
There are many aspects of online marketing to study, but these metrics are among the core group of measurements that are most important to ecommerce success.
I’m working on having a list now in marketing. They say that the money is in the list and I didn’t realize it until now. I’ve gotten many leads before and still have the same ones I sell products to.
Thanks for these. I have always wanted to measure my online marketing efforts but have also been clueless on which areas to measure.
Wow. Another great article. I’m so glad I found this SEO resource. I do a lot of researching on the subject but some things I find it hard to comprehend. Well written and well understood!
Increasing referrals or quality of referrals is emerging withing the Online Reputation Management space.
There’s a little bit of psychology involved so it’s interesting to explore; there are so many ways to funnel your users to become an army of sales people that when scaled properly is an invaluable asset to your business.
One way is obviously a monetization incentive; using some kind of affiliate system or commission basis you incentivize the user to make the sales pitch for you.
The other is allocating resources to customer support and customer relationship management to ensure the any risks or waste in the negative service area is decreased. By having a product they can trust, cleints are more likely to refer your business.
The funneling aspect can be a simple form. Send an email to an existing customer post-service (say, 2-6 weeks later). Ask them about *their* experience with your service. If it’s a negative experience, funnel them to an online form. People who have negative experiences just want to be heard, and this is the best to focus the customer relationship management aspect of the business.
If they have a positive experience, funnel them to a page to suggest your services. could be simple as a form to email a contact recommending your work, or perhaps a Facebook or Twitter sharer link with pre-formatted text praising your service. There’s lots of ways you can manage this aspect if you are just creative enough.
Referrals, referrals, referrals. This has been a thorn in my side for a long time now. I would be interested in any suggestions you could give regarding referrals — how to get them, how to keep them coming, how to properly track them. And how do you manage your referrers? Do you have a rewards program? How do you maintain that? Any help would be appreciated.
I have been having an issue with Total Community Membership, I use both twitter and Facebook but they have not been linked to the Google Analytics. Could you provide some steps on how this would be added would be really awesome to see these in my Google Analytics as well.
I fully agree with the leads generated , I am busy trying to set up some nice event tracking and it really does help, provides some good insight. Thanks for the post will investigate which of the others will help me out.
Brilliant!! I am finding this blog very helpful indeed. I have a problem with referrals also. I find converting any leads I have into customers very easy though. I tend to get more customers that way. Thanks for another amazing post!
Total community membership is a great method to look at. I work with a lot of forum owners. They are always concerned about how many members their forum has but they never realize how many members their social pages have as well. I like to look at membership overall as you have pointed out in the great blog post. 🙂
Excellent post. It is all about getting referrals and turning those referrals into paying customers. I have found the best way to do this is through email marketing. Set up a squeeze page with a free offer, send out high valued follow up emails, then promote products to my list. Then it is all about testing and tweaking my website and emails to higher % of opt ins, opens, and conversions.
Thanks to advice that I found here, I’ve been able to reduce my bounce rate, but my percentage of leads converted is just embarrassing. Could you maybe please do a post on getting leads to convert? It’s so disheartening to have leads to search thru the site, but then leave without making a purchase.
Definitely a good read! If someone wants to excel when it comes to selling their product, marketing is key. Promotion provides you with followers, followers provide you with reputation, and reputation provides you with a huge clientele!
Online marketing is opening a whole new set of options for people. It is becoming a lot more demanding for people to explore new opportunities.
Other potential participants include advertising agencies who help generate and place the ad copy, an ad server who technologically delivers the ad and tracks statistics, and advertising affiliates who do independent promotional work for the advertiser.,.,,