How Boring Is Data!

Anyone that knows me will know that even hearing the word Data bores me to tears.

However, it's funny how things change and I've built a business around that very thing.

The one thing that has completely turned my business on it's head is knowing what is working and what's not. When I first started out with this company I will be the first to admit that I just spent money on anything and everything to promote my business without any real structure or direction.

Then I discovered Google analytics and that has changed absolutely everything about how I run things.

Let's take last month for instance - May 2019.

We can see the results here along with how we are tracking compared to the previous month. Now I know it's a little blurry but we can see there has been 212 users visit our website which was an increase of 96.3% with 252 sessions which was a rise of 84.76%.

Why is this the case?

Well it was the month of Easter & Anzac Day long week in April & we did take some time off so we were not producing as much content drawing people to us during that month so that would probably explain such a dramatic difference.

So now I know how many people visited my site I want know where did they come from. We spend quite a bit of money on marketing ourselves and by knowing where our audience is gives us the tools necessary to adjust our marketing accordingly.

Here we see that 69.57% of our audience came from our social media platforms, 16.6% went looking for us and 13.83% came from other sources.

So what do I learn from that? Well we are certainly going to continue with our social media marketing. I would like to see that number a little bit higher so we will look a the content that was viewed most (a little further down the page) and the least. This will show us the kind of content our audience was interested in and what we should scrap moving forward.

It also shows that our organic search could use some improvement. We don't do a lot of print marketing but it is something that moving forward we are going to increase to capture a large percentage of an audience we are missing out on.

Ok, so know we know where they are coming from but where are they ACTUALLY coming from and where are they seeing us?

Here we see that our biggest audience is coming from Australia of course which is great and by breaking it down further we can really narrow down to the most engaging states and then cities which gives us a really good understanding of who is watching us and how we can target our content and ads more effectively.

It also shows us what device our audience is looking on. Why is this important? As you can see the majority of our users are on their phones. So we need to be making sure that our content is suitable for such devices and take note of the layout & how they appear on smaller screens.

There's a long list of information you can get from your analytics.

I've found that our blogs are really starting to pull a lot of new viewers to our page with the top three visited pages being our articles. Then they filter out through our about section, our success and so on. We can also see the average time on a particular page and marry that up with the length of the article to see if our audience is reading in full or skimming over our content. We are pleased to see that the majority seem to be interested in what we are saying and are spending around 2 minutes on the pages.

There is so much more we could go on about when it comes to data but I don't want to bore you too much.

While I agree it can be tedious and boring it's essential that you and marketing team understand your analytics or at the very least - the basics so you can make more informed decisions about how and where you put your marketing and where you spend your advertising dollars.

Please get in touch if you would like to know more about Analytics to monitor your marketing results.

Written by Nic Fren

Founder of Bespoke Media Management