ThoughtShift Co-Founder | Data-driven digital marketing strategies supercharging digital performance for sustainable success
How can I get more new customers like my best existing customers? ✨️ Is not a question, I get asked very often. I think possibly it's because CEOs, marketers and digital specialists aren't aware of the data gems you can find in your own Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. Even many Google Ads professionals stick to analysing data in Google Ads. When I first started in digital back in 1999, Google Analytics had yet to launch and we'd have to rely on server log counts to get traffic numbers and checkung in with the sales team to learn what leads converted to sales. Fast forward 20 years and we could track conversions and revenue in Google Analytics if set up correctly until GDPR arrived and we needed to gain consent via cookie banners to enable user tracking for marketing and remarketing purposes. Meaning up to 50% of our user data vanished due to declining cookies. Ouch 🥺 Now I think perhaps it's because I like to explore a new platform. Every time a new platform or version or update arrived, I go systematically through every screen, pressing all the buttons to see what happens. I must admit, GA4 was the steepest learning curve, my brain had to go through for a while but thankfully our Certified GA4 Specialist, Anne Charlotte Fleury made a 1 day GA4 course and tested it out on the ThoughtShift team back before the switchover from Universal Analytics in July 2022. What I found was that my favourite reports, the channel report, landing page report, Google Search queries report and Google Ads query report were all still there (even though Google has also unhelpfully moved their location since launch). So in GA4 you can still see: 👉 marketing sources driving traffic, leads and revenue 👉 landing pages driving traffic, leads and revenue 👉 search queries the website is found in Google search results for by impressions, clicks, leads and revenue 👉 Paid Google Search queries driving traffic, leads and revenue Armed with this data, my favourite approach is to slice and dice the data by highest volume of leads/revenue and highest conversion rate/highest average order versus highest traffic with no leads or revenue to identify where my best customers are coming from and what marketing I can test pausing to fund the best opportunities to gain more best customers with the saved budget proven not to deliver leads or revenue. Testing is critically important in making data-driven digital marketing decisions as if you do only have half the data reported, you need to consider having a statistically significant sample to begin with and know you can always reverse engineer the changes you made if you are carefully monitoring the impact and see a down side. Of course seeing an uplift is when you can do a little dance and go looking for more data gems to leverage 😎 How do you use GA4 and other data insight tools to bring more of your best customers to you? #GA4 #GoogleAnalytics
