Greetings from sunny Dubai! This is my first blog since I moved over here to be at the forefront of our expansion into the MENA region in February 2012. The region is still some way behind the UK in terms of digital maturity but it is growing at an amazing rate. At a recent Econsultancy event, one of the key findings from their research was that one of the things holding back further investment in digital marketing was the inability to properly measure return on investment. To caveat this, a lot of companies in the region seem to have skipped over the SEO/PPC route and jumped straight on to social media. This raises a question whether companies and their agencies in MENA are making the best use of the user data already available to them?
Analytics packages should be an online marketer’s best friend. The data from a free package such as Google Analytics (or indeed a paid for solution) holds a wealth of valuable information that can help you make crucial business decisions. Take a look at the list below and ask yourself (or your agency) if you can answer these key questions:
Am I creating effective content?
Examine the bounce rate of content pages on your site: are people leaving without viewing anything else? To make this stat more accurate you can create a virtual event that triggers after a set time period (set it for about the amount of time it takes to read the content)and if the user triggers this event and then leaves the page it won’t count as a bounce.
How much of my traffic comes from mobile?
Smartphone penetration in the UAE is extremely high: examine your mobile traffic and look at the trends of how people use it compared it desktop. Do you need a mobile site? Is it worth investing more in mobile advertising?
Where are visitors abandoning my conversion process?
If you set up your goal funnels correctly you can see what stage of the conversion process people are dropping out. Are 60% of your visitors dropping out of the process on the page where you tell them your shipping charges? It’s time to make a change.
Where in the world is my audience coming from and how do they interact with my site?
Take a look at your analytics data and see where your visitors are coming from. This type of data can help you support a business case for changing your international shipping policy or maybe a foreign-language version of your site.
What does my site search data tell me about how people use my site?
Site search data is a goldmine of information as the user is already on your site and telling you what they can’t find. Use the data to help you re-design the site to make your content easy to reach and then compare the impact of the changes.
Are my paid search channels getting enough credit for their role in a sale?
You may see that your generic keywords are giving you a high cost per lead, use the Multichannel Funnels in Google Analytics to see how many conversions these keywords assisted in and get a fresh perspective on your previous “last click wins” data. You can also segment your data to see how many overall conversions on the site started from a paid search channel.
If you can’t answer most of the questions above, you are not making the most out of your existing connections.A good agency will be able to provide you with insight based on your Google Analytics information and much more. If this doesn’t sound like your agency (or they can’t tell you the difference between bounce rate and exit rate) then please get in touch.
