Your competition already built the digital foundation needed for success. Have you?
It takes more than a website to build your brand online. Think of your small business website as the hub of your business’s digital ecosystem. Creating a robust digital environment around your website is more likely to drive traffic to your site as well as brick and mortar location, ultimately leading to your goals and objectives.
Combining your site with affordable and productive paid social media and Google search advertising opens the opportunity to collect additional consumer data. You can use this data to improve the content on your website and even print marketing materials.
When correctly set up, analytics within each social network shows how users interacted with campaigns and ads on that network.
But that’s only half the story.
Combining that information with free services such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, when someone clicks on your ad, we can track how they interacted with your website. Are mobile or desktop users more engaged with your site? What campaigns, messages, images, or offers not only delivered the most people to your site but how long did they stick around? Did they interact with your website? Did they sign-up, contact you, or make a purchase? What content was most interesting to them? What countries, states, or cities were the most engaged with your site? We can use this information to fine-tune your campaigns, organic posts, and even what content is featured on your website.
For example, experimenting with a low-value campaign, we followed the Facebook Marketing team’s suggestions to the letter.
We felt their suggestions were going to miss the mark because they seemed too focused on mobile users. Knowing the content was best consumed on desktop and not glancing at a phone, we had our concerns but decided to follow their advice anyway.
Afterward, looking at just the Facebook analytics, we would have thought the results where acceptable but could have been better.
But as expected, looking at Google Analytics, we could tell that mobile users had a much higher bounce rate than desktop users. The bounce rate was problematic because the vast majority of the Facebook ad placements were on mobile. If we were relying purely on the analytics within Facebook, we would have missed the traffic generated by our campaign was of very little value, and we needed to change what devices viewers saw our campaign on.
That being said, we will continue to test some of these automatic placements from time to time. But for high-value campaigns, we think going with your gut and trusting the resulting analytics is the way to go.