Understanding data is the key to growth.
The debacle within the Victorian government this week has shown us the great importance of data and record keeping within your own business. Solid data can help you make informed decisions that will contribute to business growth, but if you don’t know where your starting point is, how do you know where you’re heading? https://stewartmedia.com.au/webinar/
What I learned
- Fax machines were cool. Once.
- Data helps you make informed decisions.
- You need to know where you are before you start a journey.
- There’s always room for improvement.
- Understand why people transact on your site.
- Don’t miss out on our webinar!
Transcript
Welcome back Rankers. Here you go. Melbourne’s still in stage four, lockdown for the foreseeable future. The community is really, really divided into splits, and that’s what Google Trends is showing. I’m going to stay completely away from the politics, just talk about technology and how it applies. Hey, you can take some of these lessons that we’re seeing in the real world and apply them to your own business. The good news is that the Victorian government is switching from pen and paper record keeping for contact tracing and fax machines. They’re going with Salesforce, or CRM, whatever you like to call them.
The importance of data
Wow, that’s got to be good news. Right? For those of you who don’t know what a fax machine is, it was something we used to use in the eighties to transmit documents before we had things like databases and spreadsheets and email. Anyway, I believe the Victorian Police, and this is not a joke, I’ve spoken to a few police and there’s a similar thing that happens with Victoria Police, where they have to write everything out. Then they have to get faxed and then it has to get entered in a computer. There’s quite a delay, from anecdotally what I’ve heard, about the way that we manage data in this state. It’s probably been going on for a long while.
Nothing to do with red team/ blue team, but that’s the situation six months into a pandemic. I now know that there’s a lot of Melbourne businesses really, really hurting. Some of them I’ve spoken to. If you need any, once again, like I said, back in March at the start of this when it hit, if you need, want 10 minutes free advice, if you’re doing online or whatever, just hit me up on LinkedIn and I’ll see if I can help. It just made me think about what we go through on a daily basis with data and clients’ data and knowing everything that there is to know about it so we can make informed decisions, right?
As I’ve said before, if you don’t know where you are on the map with your data, how are you going to know where you’re going to go? If you pull out Google Maps, it tells you where you are, right? Then you’re going to, “Oh, I have to go up there.” If you don’t know where you are, how do you know where the place is that you have to get to? Right? That’s why having great data at your fingertips and understanding that data is key to growing an online business. This is just a case in point. These numbers look great, but I’ll be telling the client, “No, you need to be doing better,” because let me see …
This client is up nearly 200% in revenue year on year. Their traffic goes up 43%. This client’s been with us probably six or seven years, something like that, but switched across to a revenue focus late last year. This is great and ads is going good. I think it’s about 900% return on ad spend at the moment. It needs to be higher. The thing is with this client, is that whilst that looks good, there’s huge room for improvement because we understand where the holes are. If you look at things like e-commerce conversion rate in isolation as an overall metric, it doesn’t really tell you a lot. We tend to use things like e-commerce conversion rate, channel against channels. If you go into Google Analytics and this assumes you’ve set it up properly, and you’re running Google Ads and you’re running organic. Well, obviously you’re running organic. Hopefully, you are, if you’re not blocking Google. Check your e-commerce conversion rate between your paid and your organic.
They might be very, very different. Quite often, paid is a lot higher. That can tell you things about your site. Other clients that we have, it might be really low because a lot of the traffic they get is people just looking for information, not looking necessarily to transact, because they’re very big community builders. They might be doing instruction videos or eBooks or all sorts of things. They will get a lot of traffic that isn’t necessarily going to buy from them on that day. You need to understand those things.
Don’t miss our webinar!
That’s why you will also need to understand what we’ll be teaching in this webinar on the 17th of September at 11:00 AM, Australian Eastern Standard Time. www.stewartmedia.com.au/webinar, is how you can decipher and understand what the best things are to focus on straight away. For instance, if you’ve got a client like this at the moment where 60% of their traffic is mobile, but it’s only delivering 20% of their revenue, even though the revenue was doubled year on year, because it’s doubled on desktop, but it hasn’t really doubled on mobile and mobile is the main channel.
There’s still plenty of room to move and you can look further into things like how do they move throughout the site in Google Analytics? Obviously, things like your checkout and your cart and all those sorts of things, but is it difficult for them to find things? All of that stuff is inside Google Analytics and you can see it. That’s some of the things we’re going to be going through on the 17th. A lot of the time when you’re confronted with all this data, you just don’t know what to look at. You just don’t know where to start. Google Analytics is such a massive base. I don’t use probably 70% of the stuff that’s in there, wouldn’t even know what it is. I have to go look because we find what we need and it works.
If it was not broken, why are you going to fix it? That’s changed what we used to do, five years ago. I never used to look at the things I’m looking at now. The main graph I have at the moment is revenue graph. Five years ago, that would have been a traffic graph. Okay. I would advise you as a business owner, to regularly look at a revenue graph inside Google Analytics rather than a traffic graph, because it can tell you a little bit more about the sales effort. You might see things happen like, this client’s got spiky revenue. We have that with a few clients, where they’ve got big ticket items and small ticket items. It can go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It can be very stressful for the owner, but as long as you’re looking at the long game, the big picture ,you should be right.
If you want to get more of a handle on your data, if you want to find out how you, even as a very old business, can rapidly increase your revenue, then please join us on September the 17th at www.stewartmedia.com.au/webinar. We’ve got 10 spots left, I think. Be quick because they’re filling up fast and thank you to everybody who has already registered. Start sending in questions, if you’ve got them, because I need the material. No, not really. I’ve actually done … I haven’t written anything yet, but don’t tell my general manager. I have been practising and rehearsing this presentation to every client and every new inquiry that I’ve spoken to over the last two weeks. What I’m doing is, I’m speaking to these people and speaking to these retailers, finding out what are the common threads, what are the common things?
They seem to be, “Oh, we need SEO.” Okay, we’re going to talk about that and what it is and how it affects your revenue and how you can use it to grow your revenue. What’s a good return on your ads? Well, we’ve gone over that, but it can vary, based on the client. These are the sorts of things we’re going to be getting into, demystifying these things with business owners and getting ready for the sales season. Hopefully, that’s helpful. I hope to see you there on the 17th. Please like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, hit me up on Twitter, LinkedIn, and we’ll see you there. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
