The ultimate question for every business: How do I increase my sales?
Regardless of industry, I’m pretty sure you will encounter bad sales in certain months of the year.
In this blog post, I will share the 6 insightful data that you can use to catapult your sales. In fact, every business should check these data from time to time.
So let’s see how we can utilize these data to the fullest!
1. Search Volume
If you dealing with paid ads such as Google Search Ads, the search volume is considered the bread and butter factor to get higher reach.
The issue is human behavior is constantly changing, so does search volume.
Keep in mind the mobile search volume has already exceeded desktop for certain industries.
If you still using the Desktop search volume only to optimize your mobile campaigns, stop doing that now.
By right, you should split desktop and mobile search volume to further optimize different platforms.
I suggest to first check the Device Category of your Google Analytics:
If the number of mobile users is very high, it’s time to switch your main focus to optimize mobile experience.
Furthermore, I think many online business owners still do not appreciate the data from Google Search Console.
Do you know you can actually view all the organic keywords that attract traffic to your website?
From there, you can continue the search volume analysis based on real data from the Queries section.
If you need more in-depth analysis, feel free to filter by Pages. You might see new insights that cause low sales for certain categories in your e-commerce store.
2. Traffic
No traffic = no sales.
Everyone knows this, and the next step is to jump into paid ads, as it’s the fastest method to gain traffic.
Whether it’s Facebook Ads or Google Ads, it really depends on your consumer intent, budget and business model.
While you can invent the best product and service in the world, without traffic they will just stay underground forever.
What is the monthly traffic to your website? What is your website daily traffic? Are you aware of those figures?
Has your website been experiencing a decrease in total traffic since couple of months ago?
I suggest to prolong the duration to 3 months, 6 months or even 1 year. Next, check the Pageviews if it shows any sign of decreasing or not.
Many business owners ignore this data as they are too focused on sales and revenue.
The overall Pageviews should show a healthy long-term growth rate.
When you realize your Pageview/Traffic is experiencing a significant drop, you should check the individual platform.
Compare the same duration for monthly or quarterly within Google Analytics to check for any suspicious trend.
For example, maybe in the previous month you had decided to cut down on the budget for paid ads, and hence the drop in traffic.
Furthermore, if you only rely on Facebook Ads or Google Ads as your primary source of traffic, the difference can even be bigger.
Not to forget other common reasons that can cause your website traffic to drop, such as tracking code implementation, change in Google Search Algorithm, website uptime.
*Wish to learn all other Free Google website tools? Click Show Me now.
3. Bounce Rate
A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site.
Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off of your site.
I know some business owners are really obsessed with bounce rate. They are just unable to accept a high bounce rate for their websites.
The truth is, the benchmark for bounce rate varies across industries and types of websites.
According to Hubspot, the following are the realistic expectations for bounce rate:
- Content Websites: 40-60%
- Lead Generation: 30-50%
- Blogs: 70-98%
- Retail Sites: 20-40%
- Service Sites: 10-30%
- Landing Pages: 70-90%
If you running Google Ads, bounce rate plays an important role in maintaining higher relevance score.
Lowering bounce rate is one of the long-term wars for digital marketers. To do this, you need to keep doing AB testing, tests and experiments, and fine tune the important landing pages.
Some tips to lower bounce rate: improve UI/UX, speed up page loading time, provide quality content and attract the right visitors.
4. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (opt on/key in their details/complete a purchase) out of the total number of visitors.
I’m pretty sure all bosses know their revenue numbers. The higher the better, right? Who doesn’t love high revenue?
However, in the digital marketing world, you should focus more on conversion rate.
For example:
Case A
Complete Purchase: RM 10,000
Website Traffic: 500,000
Conversion Rate: 2%
Case B
Complete Purchase: RM 10,000
Website Traffic: 50,000
Conversion Rate: 20%
Which is is better? Same amount of complete purchase revenue but different website traffic.
Do you notice a very obvious message above?
More traffic is useless if it doesn’t translate to higher conversion.
You might spend 4-5 digits of media spends per month and gain million of impression or reach. The question is how about the conversion rate?
Nevertheless, you should be aware that conversion rates vary widely by industry and business model.
If your business does not achieve the average conversion rate in your industry, you should start to find out more about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
The main message? Don’t rely completely on the revenue as the main indicator for your business growth.
The conversion rate is a better benchmark, and a more indicative and realistic figure!
Now you can understand why some selected “unicorn” e-commerce sellers have high revenue, even they just started with low website traffic.
This is because they fully focus on their target customers, provide the best content for clients and avoid fighting with those giant marketplaces.
5. Competitor Pricing, Ranking, Strategies
Still using the traditional method to browse your competitors’ websites and spy on them? I have a better solution that makes it easy for you to track them all, for free!
Use Google Alert. Simply type any keyword or brand name, choose how often you want to receive new alerts. “At most once a week” should be where you start if you hate numerous spamming alerts.
This service is totally free. Feel free to setup any brand or topic that matter to your business. Usually, I would create a new folder in my mailbox and put all these alerts in.
Thanks to Facebook update, now you can publicly view the active Facebook Ads of your competitors on their Facebook pages.
Just click into their Facebook Pages, click on “Info and Ads” at the bottom to view all the active Facebook Ads.
Have low sales this month? Maybe your competitors are running some crazy promotion on Facebook.
Not only that, in order to receive instant posting from your competitors’ Facebook pages, you can opt-in and change the above setting to “See First”.
This would make sure you get the latest published news feed from your competitors’ Facebook pages.
Next, I would recommend a tracking tool from https://distill.io.
You can get instant alerts when the website have changes. For example, website revamp, change in pricing, new section added in page and so on.
The free plan is a good starting point where you can monitor 20 pages and 30 emails per month.
This tool helps me save a lot of time browsing multiple competitors’ websites.
6. Latest Market Trend
Before starting a business, we need to research the market. Everyone understands that.
However, are you still exploring and researching the latest market trend? Or are you sticking to the existing “old-school” method all the time?
To survive or excel in this rapidly changing digital era, it’s not about how big of a budget/team you have.
In fact, it’s the ability to adapt and improvise by following the latest market trend.
There are many free and quick methods to know the current popular topics, like Google Trend, Twitter Trend or YouTube Trending.
Google Trend is another free tool from Google to let us know the current popular news or topics.
It can even show the “Real Time Search Trends” and let us know the exact news that people care about.
Regardless if the news are relevant to your business, the data can provide good insights for you to find out the public trend so that you can plan well for your current or future digital marketing campaigns.
Twitter’s “Trends for you” also provides the latest topics or hashtag in Twitter database.
Since the Twitter community in Malaysia are mostly Malay people, if your target market is Malay customers, you should definitely find out the latest trend on Twitter.
Occasionally, something happens thus certain new hashtags become popular for a short period of time. If you manage to grab the opportunity, you might be able to enjoy some free marketing on this social media platform.
Not to forget the YouTube Trending section.
It will automatically show which videos are the most popular at the moment.
If you creative and innovative enough, you can create some parody videos or content that are based on the most popular videos on YouTube.
Many businesses are late in joining the “viral” bandwagon and grab the opportunity for extra brand awareness. For example, the brands that I love to follow, such as IKEA and Nando’s, are always very fast to create innovative posts on social media.
Other than content, you should learn to adapt and accept new technology as well.
For example, the majority of Malaysians still prefer to use direct bank transfer or cash-on-demand payment method when purchasing online.
While e-wallet is booming, like WeChat Pay, Touch ‘n Go eWallet, Boost Pay, Fave Pay, Razer Pay, Grab Pay are still growing. So who would be the major players in the future?
What’s next?
The above mentioned are just plain simple points, but humans are always the ones who give many assumptions.
Ego is the strongest enemy for business growth.
For me, I’ve always preferred data-driven methods which are well supported by facts and analysis reports, because data would not lie.
