6 tips to use Analytics to improve sales

[HunkyLuke]

I found this article that gave 6 tips on how to use Google Analytics to improve your site rankings and to improve sales. This is the first article I have ever read that specifically discussed leveraging Analytics data, which is something that I personally struggle with as I have mentioned in the past.

Here's what the article said:

Find 2nd page organic rankings to boost
One of the best things you can do is find out what terms result in your site being listed on the second page of Google searches. Getting your site bumped to first page for those keywords can result in a significant increase in your traffic, since upto 90% of all surfers don't look to second page results. Go to Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources > Search > Organic to see your keyword rankings, then look for keywords that send traffic even though you may be listed on the second page of results.

Setup Funnels
Funnels will help show you the weak link in your sales chain. Setup funnels to get a visualization of how traffic behaves and what pages you should focus on improving. Go to Conversion > Goals > Funnel Visualization to view the report.

Enhance and Improve Your Best Pages
Use Analytics to figure out your best converting landing pages then try to increase traffic to those pages through paid ad words, more incoming links and directing traffic from poor converting pages to the better ones. To view goal conversions by landing page, you will need to create a custom report in Google Analytics.

Improve Organic SEO Based on Paid AdWords Results
Play with purchasing AdWords for keywords to see if those convert well. Find the ones that do, then focus on creating SEO based on those keywords

Boost Traffic to Successful AdWords
A no-brainer here, if you have successful adwords that convert better, throw more money at it to get more traffic.

Make Best Seller More Prominent
If you sell many products on one site, figure out your best seller(s) and make them feature products, make them the first result returned on searches, make sure they are displayed on searches for related products, write little reviews and feature those reviews on your marketing areas like blogs, and of course put those products in the check-out procedure as cross-sales.

You can read the full article and check out their graphs and such at: http://www.webpronews.com/google-analytics-tips-2011-05

I am going to try doing some of these tactics and will report back as to how things progress. If you do, please let us know how it works for you too!

[B2BwithJoeD]

Something I've noticed that you probably all know in terms of brown-nosing Google - the more involved with Google you get your sites the more Google seems interested in you - started a minimum adwords campaign on top of all the other efforts and started getting spidered more...makes good business sense I guess...

[HunkyTae]

I was trying the adwords but they didn't seem to want to approve my website...

[basschick]

it can take days to get approved for adwords. also they won't approve your site if you have "adult" terms in the domain or title. when i was promoting handjob sites through adwords i had to refer to it as "Hand sex" for adwords, and they rejected the domain with the term "handjobs" in it.