Monitor Your Entire Ecommerce Sales Funnel with Real Data

Monitor Your Entire Ecommerce Sales Funnel with Real Data

 

When it comes to monitoring your online business, the list of so-called “critical metrics” is constantly expanding. Things like social media engagement, keyword ranking, email open rates, conversion rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and more all compete for your attention.

All of this data can be overwhelming.

The question is: what metrics really matter?

In the world of ecommerce – whether you sell products or services – the hands-down, undisputed, heavy-weight-champion metric … is your sales funnel.

Why? Because at the end of the day, nothing but sales pay the bills.

So, to enable you to monitor your entire sales funnel, here are four sources of data and exactly what you should do with them:

  • Your Traffic
  • Your Leads
  • Your Sales
  • Your Competition

Your Traffic

Let’s start with the widest point of your sales funnel: your traffic.

sales funnel

Image Credit: Prosar.com

What is the temperature of your traffic: warm or cold?

Frost-bitten traffic or sizzling traffic is a major consideration you should take into account as you embark upon your ecommerce model. First, warm traffic is when the public saw your marketing messages and now have a favorable opinion of you because of it. Cold traffic consists of spending a lot of time and money to generate traffic.

Now, there are all kinds of web traffic, including:

  • Organic: searchers type in keywords and phrases related to your company, product or website.
  • Paid: visitors arrive at your website because of paid advertising.
  • Referral: an Internet surfer comes across your website from a link at another webpage.
  • Direct: people access your website by typing in your URL or clicking on a bookmark.

The key question is: what is your traffic actually doing for your website right now? Is it making any positive contribution? Are you stuck in cruise control?

Enhanced ecommerce tracking will help a business understand the onsite behavior of visitors and will help identify the measures that should be taken to get the action you desire from these visitors.

By starting with your traffic, you’ll be able to identify where your visitors are coming from and what sources are the most profitable.

 

Your Leads

The success of any ecommerce business is dependent on how effective it is at converting visitors into customers.

By monitoring your sales funnel, you can quantify the number of leads at each stage of the sales process and, based on your strategic direction, predict how many of these leads can be converted into actual customers.

Google Analytics remains the most popular dashboard to monitor your conversions.

This is done by creating “Goals” for every page a conversion is possible. Your home page and landing pages are great places to start.

Your “Goal” can be just about anything, from a sign-up to a play button to a form submission to a download. Just select one specific goal for each of your critical pages to measure exactly how many of your visitors actually become leads.

Increasing the number of conversions is a challenge that all sites faces. This can be achieved by performing A/B testing, writing clear and concise language, and, most importantly, creating trust a simple-to-use website.

The real power of creating Google Goals is the ability to not only see what’s working – your best performing pages – but what isn’t. Where are your visitors leaving your funnel and where do you need to improve?

 

Your Sales

Keep in mind that while revenue data, sales data, and transaction volumes are important, there is still a lot of information that can be derived from real data that can help you see the much bigger picture. Monitoring and tracking of your sales themselves provides this information and can give you detailed reports about your ecommerce operations every step of the way.

Most notably, you’ll be able to see how often your product or service is added to a shopping cart, how frequently it is converted, and which type of users abandon the transaction midway.

Identifying the pages that are hindering your sales as well as the pages that sell well are both key. This way, you know what elements you need to change to optimize your site’s performance as well as help you figure out or alter your marketing strategies for products that are not doing so well.

Moreover, this is also a good way of determining which products should be on your homepage.

Conversion Rate Experts, for example, wrote a case study explaining how they made $1 million for Moz in just one year with a single landing page and a handful of emails.

The landing page was designed specifically to track and promote sales:

  • Long-form copy to tell a story.
  • A curiosity-driven headline.
  • Clear explanations of what user would receive at each conversion point.
  • Highlighted what customers cared about.
  • Incorporated video into its strategy.
  • Made comparisons with other companies.

 

Your Competition

Your traffic, your leads, and your sales are all about you.

But, keeping track of what your competition is doing is also an invaluable way to gain insight into their websites and analyze critical data. This can include their traffic rankings, daily visitors, and search engine and keyword rankings.

Monitoring your competition not only keeps you up-to-date with the market but will also enable you to compare your website with that of your competitors so that you can capitalize on their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses.

It is understandable that with so many operations to manage, it can sometimes become overwhelming for businesses to find the time to monitor and analyze their competition. This is why there are several organizations that offer comprehensive services that can help immensely.

For example, Cyfe offers a wide spectrum of effective and useful features to help enhance your competitive analysis and marketing strategies:

  • Monitoring of individual departments and multiple websites
  • Real-time monitoring reports and historical data
  • Custom data sources and widgets

funnel monitor

It’s simple: you can monitor your own brand as well as your competitors and other online rivals all in one easy-to-use dashboard.

Fusing Your Sales Funnel with Real Data

The reality is … competition is tough.

In order to succeed, it is important to not only be aware of your strengths but to have the knowledge about the areas where you need to improve.

So, the four data sources to keep in mind are your traffic, your leads, your sales, and your competition. With these data sources, you’ll be able to monitor your entire ecommerce model effectively.

Monitoring and analyzing real data is the only to dramatically improve your market position and increase your sales. So get started today.

Ethical Marketing with Shel Horowitz

Shel_Horowitz-profileShel Horowitz is an author, international speaker, columnist, and marketing consultant. He believes that businesses can succeed by embracing principles of honesty, integrity, and environmental responsibility.

The first of his books on marketing was published in 1985, and since then he has written several other award-winning books and hundreds of articles on marketing. His focus has been primarily on ethical, green, and frugal marketing. Stressing values-based, big-picture marketing that tends to be less expensive than traditional approaches, he develops marketing methods and materials based in such guerrilla marketing techniques as forming partnerships, attracting media publicity, and using social media effectively.

Shel was still a teenager when he started doing publicity and marketing for grassroots environmental and community organizations with zero promotional budget. There wasn’t even money available for stamps, so he hand-delivered press releases on a three-speed bicycle. Trained as a journalist, he first became aware of the power of the news media when a local paper refused to print meeting notices he wrote for a controversial group—but gave extensive news coverage to its refusal. Now, for over thirty years, he’s helped businesses, nonprofits, and community groups identify their key message and get it out to the public with little or no expenditure.

He has been quoted or cited in over 70 books, and blogs at GreenAndProfitable.com. His eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, was #1 Environmental category bestseller on Amazon, and has made the category bestseller list at least 30 times.

Popular Business Internet Radio with Warren Whitlock on BlogTalkRadio

 

Leverage Marketing with Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins

d4f532ac59a40ad8976f47.L._V365349706_SX200_Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins has served as a business coach and online marketing trainer for thousands of coaches, entrepreneurs, and business leaders around the world. He loves helping coaches impact more people with less effort through leveraged online marketing strategies.

He’s the author of Take Action! Revise Later, 21 Ways To Grow Your Coaching Business, and over a dozen online training courses. He also co-facilitates Hotseat Holiday Business Growth Retreats with Therese Sparby.

For ten years, Bob taught U.S. History to freshman and World Religions to seniors at a public high school in Maryland. That sparked his online nickname, Bob The Teacher, which is much better known than his real name.

Listen To Social Networking Internet Radio Stations with Warren Whitlock on BlogTalkRadio

 

John Lynn Proves Blogging is a Business

JohnLynn - smallJohn Lynn, @techguy on Twitter, is an avid blogger and online entrepreneur who runs 25 highly trafficked blogs across 3 niches: Healthcare IT, Reality TV, and Vegas Startup companies.

He has a broad range of IT skills and the ability to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical groups due to his strong experience in healthcare IT (specifically electronic medical record), social media, and SEO. He recently acquired a Healthcare IT Career company to compliment the existing Healthcare IT blogs.

He has a range of skills in marketing, blogging and SEO along with a strong ability to create compelling content quickly. He teaches others how to do what he does at Slow and Steady Blogging.

Find Additional Social Networking Podcasts with Warren Whitlock on BlogTalkRadio

 

 

Get LinkedIn to New Leads with Lori Ruff

Lori RuffLori Ruff is known as the LinkedIn Diva. She’s a trainer, speaker, author and CEO of Integrated Alliances Social Media. One of the most connected women on LinkedIn, she specializes in B2B sales and marketing and credits passion, persistence, and courage for her success.

She has been ranked as an AGBeat Top 50 Industry Influencer of 2014, Forbes Top 10 Women Social Media Power Influencer of 2013, Top 23 Social Media Power Influencer of 2012, and Moody’s Top 50 Favorite People of 2012.

She’s the author of the upcoming “Keep It Real: Living Life Fearlessly” and co-host of “RockTheWorld with LinkedIn” radio. She offers free training information at RockLinkedIn.com.

Discover Social Networking Internet Radio with Warren Whitlock on BlogTalkRadio

 

Perform at your Best with Greg Arnold

Greg ArnoladGreg Arnold is an empowering speaker, trainer, mentor and success coach. His unique leadership style is based on his years of business building and highly successful experiences. He has been involved in the home-based business industry for 40 years. During that time he has built successful businesses in the financial industry and network marketing, and teaches others how to effectively build online subscriber lists.

Greg has built teams of several thousand distributors, starting from scratch, with three different companies. He also has 5 years experience as a successful Network Marketing company CEO and he is the author of the wildly entertaining book; The Multi-Level Mangler In King Arthur’s Court which was in Amazon’s top 1% of best sellers for over three years.

With a background as a winning high school football coach, Greg is able to help people bring our their inner champions — including the drive to move forward regardless of what stumbling blocks stand in the way. Greg can show you how to perform at your absolute best, no matter what else is going on around you.

Find Additional Social Networking Podcasts with Warren Whitlock on BlogTalkRadio