Emerald talk Web Analytics the next chapter at Cornwall Chamber of Commerce – Festival of Business week
A website is the heart of the business and face of your brand!
The Cornwall Festival of Business, in association with the Cornwall Chamber of Commerce, returned as a hybrid virtual and live venue event in June. Designed to help support local businesses, allowing them to benefit from the Chambers extensive network, Emerald Thinking joined to talk about the next chapter of analytics and how this is important to businesses.
The role of online has become so much more important since covid, ecommerce has doubled in the last 5 years and by the end of 2021 a third of all retail sales were online. With 76% of UK shoppers researching online before purchase it is essential for your business to have a strong online presence. Your website needs to be at the heart of your business and face of your brand.
The Cornwall Chamber of Commerce event launched itself into the calendars of the business community in Cornwall for the first time in 2019 and was an instant success. With over 60 events taking place over 5 days in venues from Sports Halls to Breweries and Offices to Distilleries it has now become a successful annual event, helping businesses develop valuable relationships and grow supply chains all for free.
Emerald talk about what web analytics are and the role Google Analytics plays
Delving into what insights Google Analytics can give.
You don't need to be an analyst to get the most of your website
There are many web analytic tools, once of the most used is Google Analytics as Google search drives 93% of all website traffic and this platform can track it simply by connecting your website and switching on tracking. And the best thing it is free! Web analytic tools help brands to understand their website visitors in an insightful, simple and strategic way.
Without web insights your marketing activity is just a guess.
Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High Tech Products to Mainstream Customers once said: “Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer onto a freeway”
Google Analytics is a platform aimed at everyday marketers and business owners. If you have never used it before, once you are linked up and connected it will start tracking your website visits. Providing functionality to just type in a question, with Ask Analytics Intelligence, it will quickly get to many questions about your business. From best month for visits, to top search terms or more detailed insight around best page views and conversion.
And how you can use web analytics differently
And if you are more analytical you can use web data to give you richer and deeper audience insights. With the ability to export customized data reports or connect directly to your own analytical tools.
At Emerald Thinking we use Google Analytics for our clients to analyse all user behavior’s to build audience personas on the content viewed and journey’s taken. We help clients to create digital persona segments and identify what content works and doesn’t, assigning it to the relevant part of the customer journey.
So what is next... Come 1st July 2023 the current universal google analytics is stopping and launching an improved version
At the start of July it is important for all businesses to be ready for the launch of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and to know what the differences are. With GA4 not being able to collect historic visits, if you haven’t started already you will lose your web visit history. In general the new platform release offers a more single focus tracking to get a better view of the customer journey, with cross-channel visibility, better reporting and a lot more insight opportunites.
So in summary what we want businesses to be doing as a next step...
1. Review the role of online and maximize how you're using it
2. Connect your website to google analytics, if not already using GA4 alongside it
3. Use Ask Analytics Intelligence to give you insights on WHO is visiting, WHAT their journey is, HOW they find you, WHAT they engage with and ROI.
4. Contact us to ask any questions on how you can use web analytics
We use Talkwalker as our social listening tool. To find out more about it or if you want to explore other reports that Talkwalker have used to show the power of social listening have a look at their comprehensive site
