Unlocking Holiday Profits:
Data-Driven Strategies for All Businesses
There are many different perspectives on this time of year. The messaging conveyed by much of the media is that it’s a perfect time of year for gift giving and celebrating the holidays together. While this isn’t the experience for everyone, it certainly is a great time for a deal, whether for someone else or simply something you need for yourself.
For retailers, automating marketing and sales strategies to improve business conversion this time of year, is crucial. I would argue that no business is too small to reap the benefits of utilizing data, automation and analytics. According to a report by Score, “small businesses that leverage data analytics tools can see an increase in sales by 15% compared to those that don’t.”
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are undoubtedly great opportunities for commercial shopping and driving the last major push for revenue for the calendar year. With the addition of Small Business Saturday, shoppers can also support small businesses, both locally and online. Regardless of business size, industry, or messaging, looking at customer behavior in order to predict and prepare for increased shopping is an opportunity to learn more about shopping trends, purchase behaviors and customer segmentation, and ultimately drive sales.
Using analytics platforms, and the data contained within, gives the ability to understand customer behavior, sales numbers, and marketing output, lending to a data driven approach for optimizations and increased sales.
While I talk a lot about the idea that driving conversions isn’t all there is to effective data-driven marketing, it’s obviously an important way for businesses to thrive and reinvest profits into capital improvements, marketing, etc…
For this week’s blog post, I’ll be showcasing an overview that will demonstrate how to use Analytics and configure your site for successful holiday sales.
Step 1: Configuring Analytics on Your Site.
- Report Suite: The first step you should take when using an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, is creating a report suite. It acts as a basket for all reports and data collected over time.
- Understand and Configure Marketing Channels: Leverage out of the box, pre-defined marketing channel logic, that will assign traffic based on source. You can also customize the rules to include specific tracking codes. If you’d like to better understand how to utilize marketing channel attributes (via UTM parameters), you can check out my other post here.
- Set Goals and Key Events/Performance Indicators: It is important for a business to establish ways to measure success such as: revenue, average order value, visits, etc… Additionally, one can determine events such as product views, add to carts and purchases. This is a comprehensive guide on KPI’s and the ones that may help your business get the visibility it needs into performance.
Step 2: Adding Tags for Key Events
- Configure Analytics Tags: By adding a Tag Manager to your website (like Google Tag Manager, Adobe Tags, Tealium, etc…), you can allow for better ease of use and security than adding code directly into the code base. There are free and paid options.
- Add Analytics Tags to Site Events: Tags are code snippets (pixels or javascript) that can be attached to elements on a site, such as a button click or page load.
Step 3: Custom Reports and Dashboards
- Create Reports: Most analytics platforms have out of the box reports that can be used to track traffic sources, conversions and sales. You can also create custom reports, often by utilizing drag and drop actions. Use them to identify trends and to help make business decisions backed by data.
- Create dashboards: Make use of dashboards to help visualize your data which can also make it more digestible to a larger group of stakeholders. This is important as it helps to spot problems and opportunities.
In another post, I’ll show ways to analyze the reports and dashboards to recognize key trends and insights, as well as the time periods that are especially useful to compare. Setting up analytics platforms in advance of the holidays is a great way to ensure you collect data that is helpful in driving your sales. Also, adhering to best practices, and initially utilizing out of the box capabilities will enable you to be in a good position to collect and interpret data in a consistent and accurate way.
If you have questions, or just want to talk analytics, activation, and anything in-between, reach out to me at Katie@DataOnTrend.com.