Using Google Analytics for Your Pet Store Website (Pt. 2)
No doubt about it, Google Analytics can be a lot to handle when you don’t know what to look at, what to look for, or how to take action based on what you find! Having already gone over the benefits, how to set up, and a mini glossary in Using Google Analytics for your Pet Store Website (Part 1), today we’re going to go a little bit deeper into the world of Analytics to cover what to look for, how to look at it, and what to do with the information provided.
Don’t forget to check out our other resources for pet store owners in the Blog, which is full of tutorials, tips, strategies, and advice for a variety of pet store marketing categories: pet store websites, pet store social media, and so on. You can also subscribe to join our email marketing, or join THE Group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses on Facebook.
No more talk, more action! Let’s get started.
What To Look At in Google Analytics
There are a number of key areas that you can look at to diagnose your pet store website traffic, acquisition, behavior, and metrics. Google Analytics can help you answer questions such as:
How many people visited my pet store website this week/month/quarter/year?
Are my website visitors using a desktop, tablet, or phone?
Is the majority of my audience male or female? Younger or older? Local or far-flung?
Which of my pages are the most popular?
How long do people stay on my site?
How many new users vs. returning users visited me in the last week/month/quarter/year?
Is my web traffic up, down, or steady Week Over Week (WOW), Month Over Month (MOM), or Year Over Year (YOY)?
What’s the rate of conversion on my website (subscribe, contact, purchase, etc)?
These are all important questions to ask when it comes to your pet store marketing strategy. By digging into the four major areas of Analytics (Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion), we can being to answer these types of questions about our audience.
To learn about your audience’s demographics, interests, and geography, you would navigate to the Audience tab.
To understand how your audience arrives on your website, you would dig into the Acquisition tab.
Don’t forget to adjust the date in Google Analytics to get accurate data.
To know what people do on your site once they arrive there, you can look at the Behavior tab.
And finally, to see how many of your visitors convert, you would look at Conversions.
When you go into these areas, you’ll see a widget in the upper right corner that allows you to toggle the date that you wish to see data for. You can look back until the very day that you first installed Analytics on your website up to the present, and you can also compare time periods for WOW/MOM/YOY learnings.
What To Look for in Google Analytics
So, now you’ve got all of this data and numbers at your fingertips. What’s important, what’s not? How do you use it? You can look at all of this stuff, but do you know what to look for?
Sounds fancy, but the truth is… it depends! Your business is going to have its own unique metrics, goals, and parameters for this kind of thing, and every business is different. However, you’re in luck, because there are some fairly standard indicators of positive/negative growth/decay. The most important thing to do is to begin tracking and paying attention to these numbers, and positive green up arrows and percents indicate growth while negative red down arrows indicate the opposite.
Start by adjusting the date widget in the top right corner to start comparing some of your metrics. Then, let’s start by making some deductions.
If your traffic is down MOM, find out where the missing chunk is. It could be coming from your pet store social media (or lack thereof?), your inadequate pet store SEO, or ineffective Google Ads.
If your conversion rate is high, that’s generally a good thing and an indicator that your intended audience is finding and using your website. But, where are they coming from? You can use Google Analytics to find out if more of your conversions are coming from different marketing tactics: social media, SEO, Google, email, or referral traffic. Once you know that, you can start to push more budget/time/effort into those tactics that are bringing you more ROI. Makes a lot of sense, right?
Are you getting consistent growth in web traffic, but not getting conversions? That’s an issue with the way your site is laid out functionally or aesthetically, your messaging and branding, or another issue that is causing a lack of trust between your business and your website visitor.
Seeing a steady decline in traffic through various marketing vendors? Might be time for a chat to hold them accountable, or possibly making a switch! Take a look at the Pet Engine Marketing services to get an idea of how we can help promote your pet store.
The numbers won’t lie!*
*Google Analytics is not infallible and is certainly susceptible to being fooled by bots that might visit your site for one reason or another. If you have a huge influx in users all coming from a random country, it’s good to know that as the data will be inflated. You can filter that data out!
Taking Action Based On Your Findings
Well, we’ve already mentioned some of these things, but reasonable courses of action based on your data include continuing to push in marketing areas where you are strong and growing, holding your vendors or third parties accountable, or working out the kinks in whatever is going wrong (website, campaign, landing pages, etc).
Our resources in the Blog can help you find almost anything you’d be looking for when it comes to improving your pet store marketing assets.
Best Practices:
Make sure that your data is correct. Double-check.
Don’t make rash decisions. One bad week or month doesn’t mean the store is on fire.
Most marketing takes time. There is no magic bullet, no one-stop solution.
Yes, you have to test things so that you can learn from them. Analytics is a place where testing is brought to life and learning is turned into action.
Using Google Analytics for Your
Pet Store Website (Part 2)
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a part 3, we suggest scheduling a call with us to start making sense of some of these numbers on your computer! We have helped many pet store owners gain a better understanding of their pet store marketing strategies through tracking, analysis, and gamifying growth. It’s what we do best.
Contact Pet Engine Marketing today to set up a free 30-minute consultation and marketing audit.
