Growing Your Business With Analytics

Drive Value Across the Sales Funnel

At Karsh Hagan, we've consistently focused on ideas that grow our clients' businesses and we’ve closely monitored these results; this commitment to measuring campaign success has naturally evolved into offering more comprehensive analytics solutions for our clients as the digital world has evolved. As a result, we’ve been able to deliver even greater value across the entire sales funnel experience. 

This is only going to continue to grow as the machines are going to take a lot of tedious work out of the analytics process in the future, and it should give us time to focus on really delivering value to our clients.  Although, if you hear the word analytics and reporting and start to feel queasy, here is some advice on how to take action, what to do, and how we are handling it at Karsh Hagan.

Show Clear Value and ROI

First, you have to speak the client's language in simple terms to explain value.  We’ve been doing this with advertising for some time, but we can now do it at all stages of the funnel. For example, we can make an improvement to a website and know exactly what the bottomline ROI of the update will be.  On top of that, we’re getting hard 1st party data points from clients now, showing value more clearly in terms of actual impact in dollars to the bottom line.  Let’s face it: executives don’t really care about how many clicks, leads or even transactions they received — the good ones really want to know how much money you saved them, or how much money you made them. That’s all that really matters.  So, getting the data points that deliver this story to them is critical.

Marketing Attribution With Predictive Modeling

There is a major shift going on: the shift in analytics marketing campaign attribution to predictive AI modeling is now mandatory. Attributing marketing spend to the first or last click, or any other click was never really a great way to measure the impact of marketing. AI modeling will give a clearer picture of not only what happened, but how to predict what will happen next and the good thing is these tools are now here and very accessible. If you are still in the world of static reporting tools like datorama, you need to look ahead —we’re going to need the machines to help us improve our digital experiences into the future.

Find Expert Analytics Partners

And if you are not sure what to do, partner with some experts. Analytics is a complex world; we get out of some analytics meetings and our heads hurt — much like the feeling you used to get from a long late night coding project. You developers will know what we’re talking about. At Karsh Hagan, we’re working with partners like ChannelMix to deliver platform data solutions while the team over at Marketing Science concurrently helps us build better infrastructure to improve our analytics solutions. Since we are a small agency, we can’t staff all the expertise we need to keep up, so we’ve made a conscious decision to find the right expertise for ourselves and our clients to grow and learn along the way.

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Why Google Analytics 4?

A pivot change happening is the evolution of Universal Google Analytics to Google Analytics 4.  Moving away from session and page visit measurement to measuring events or user actions in digital experiences is changing the game. It allows us to dig into the details, and really find out what users are doing and why they are doing it. For example, we can reconstruct everything a user clicked on in their digital  journey and determine the events that are causing the most friction in the experience. From there, we can fix these, measure, and repeat this process.  This was challenging to do in Google Universal Analytics before, but now it’s easy to show clients where the problems are and correct them to show instant value!

Use Data Layers to Track The Details

Detailed event tracking has led us into more sophisticated ways to gather data.  We’re getting more sophisticated with data layer tracking on websites, allowing us to see every event that happens and correlate them. We’re more focused on conversion than ever and data layers allow us to measure everything that is happening in our digital experiences at scale. If you are not using the power of a data layer yet, start researching this and get on it — it’s a life saver in time.

Optimize Your Website For Conversion

All of this has led us to focus more on digital optimization, especially in website solutions.  Sure, you’ve got to get customers excited about your brand with a big idea, but then creating a user journey to lead them to conversion is easier said than done. It takes a lot of testing, trial and error to create a digital experience that really converts.

We’ve been using tools like usertesting.com and Userlytics.com watching behavior of users to get insights. Then, we’ve been A/B testing CTAs and content with tools like VWO and Optimizely to better understand what compels people to make decisions. Overall, we’ve been watching heatmaps with tools Hotjar and Heap to get the bigger picture of where the problems might be. We’re often right with gut instincts but sometimes people do the opposite of what you think they might do — so you have to research and test it. And sure, we still like to make beautiful brand campaigns, but we’re making digital experiences work harder than ever for our clients.

Digital Marketing Tips We’ve Learned

Now armed with all these tech tools and partners we’re learning more and getting better everyday.
But we do know some things for certain.

- Passive calls to actions are best -  By using passive call to actions, it will lead to higher click throughs. We’ve learned people don’t want to be confronted, they want to be helped and led, so passively guiding them through the sales process leads to higher conversions. You can see a 2-5% increase in click throughs with this strategy.

- Engagement tools work - If you can engage and get the user to interact in your idea or product they will be more likely to buy it.  Whether it’s a calculator, a look up tool, a product configurator, these tools all lead to high conversion rates. You can see a 10-50% increase in conversion rates with the strategy.

- Simple forms convert - Shortening or simplifying the lead gathering or check out process forms will increase your conversion rates as well. Right when people are about to give you money, this is the most important step, so it better be good.  You can double your form conversion rates if you just keep it simple. And by the way that doubles the effectiveness of your advertising spend as well.  Who doesn’t want that?

- Guided experiences rule - Involving humans in the online sales process for more complicated transactions can increase your conversion rates by 2 to 5 times. If you are really looking to explode your online sales, consider how you can create a digital collaboration with the customer during the purchase process.  This keeps them in control, but allows them to get their questions answered quickly and guide them through the process to purchase.

Bottom line, if you are going to spend millions in marketing dollars on advertising you better make sure the path you are leading them down converts.

Do You Want To Hear More?

If you found this article interesting, or have any questions we love to collaborate — whether it’s working on a project together, or if you work in the space and just want to talk shop, Let’s chat.

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