Many small businesses I work with find it difficult to understand what is working and what isn’t.  Often, we get stuck in the trap of just focusing on traffic, when it isn’t too difficult to dig into the data a little more and make better measurements that lead to better decisions.  Sites selling goods directly online can see a straight connection between traffic and a sale, but those looking for phone calls or appointment buttons might find it a bit tougher. With Google Tag Manager, you can set up events to fire when the appointment button is clicked or submitted, or even when someone clicks on your click to call button on their phones.  Though it is important to measure traffic as well, a local business with a blog post that “went viral” and got lots of traffic may not be traffic that has any potential of making a sale. This has value on its own as it builds site strength and helps in other ways, but it is important to try to get a feel for your key performance indicators and the activity around them so you can make proper decisions going forward on pay per click, SEO, social, and any other traffic that comes to your site.  If you are investing $1,000 per month in social media and it turns out that none of that traffic actually leads to a sale, you may want to spend that money elsewhere.

Focus On The Important Actions

Website Events via Google Tag ManagerI work with many companies that offer services or appointments.  For them, the bottom line comes down to whether someone calls for an appointment or clicks their form to get an appointment online. Different people do different things, so it is important to offer both, but both can be measured with a little work with Google Tag Manager and analytics. When you can specifically see which keywords, traffic sources, or even pages, lead to the actual appointment requests, you can make the right decisions to invest more in those marketing techniques, or make changes to the ones that aren’t working. Sometimes a website does a great job of selling one type of service but not so well on another. The data can tell you that story if you are measuring the right things.

I have seen businesses get huge spikes in traffic from a blog post, but traffic from other parts of the country or world when they are a local business. When only focusing on traffic, you may think that page or source is driving your sales, but when you see the real numbers, the sales may be coming from somewhere else.

If you need help setting up the right goals to measure going forward, we are here for you.  Give You Can Be Found a call. Once we get you found, we can focus on the metrics to get not only more traffic but the right traffic.