5 Ways Data and Analytics Can Improve Your Ad Performance

 

If you’re one of the many ecommerce professionals who use online ads to push your products, I am sure you feel the pressure when competing for consumers attention. The good news is that there’s a strategic way to capture it: analytics.

Use them wisely, and they’re an effective way to boost your return on ad spend and drive up sales across the board. Here’s what you need to know!

5 Big, Huge, Very Exciting Benefits of Data and Analytics for Ad Performance

If you’re looking to drive better results from your advertising program, focusing more on analytics is the obvious first step.

In addition to helping you target your ads to drive clicks and brand awareness, analytics also give you the insider scoop on what you should be doing to drive sales. Here are five of the top perks of using analytics as part of your advertising strategy:

1. Analytics can Reduce Your Abandoned Cart Rate

According to Baymard Institute, people abandon their carts for a variety of reasons, including high shipping costs or fees, the requirement that the customer create an account, or a long, complex checkout process. Baymard also reports that the average ecommerce site can boost conversion rates by 35.26% just by streamlining their checkout design.

If that’s not a case for good analytics, we aren’t sure what is!

When you know why people abandon their carts on your site, it’s easier to develop a plan to address the issue and reduce bounce rates. This puts money back in your pocket and makes conversions easier and more frequent. What’s more, real-time metrics monitoring allows you to pivot quickly and ensure ease for all your users.

2. Analytics Make Demographic Targeting Easier

Marketing is most effective when it targets a specific audience. Luckily, good analytics can give you some insight into who visits and buys from your store. From there, you can generate customized reports, or even export customer data to target them later.

Create audiences based on characteristics of your most engaged visitors and customers. If women, between the ages 25-25, who are married and live in the US are the most likely to buy from your store, then focus your efforts on finding these customers. Casting a wide net is never a good idea when it comes to advertising, so get to know your customers by doing a little digging in your Google Analytics or using a tool like Vantage to easily identify common characteristics of your current customers.

3. Great Analytics Boost Your Repeat Customer Rate

Analytics can do more than just prevent customers from ditching their carts and leaving you – they can also increase your Repeat Customer Rate. If you know your Customer Frequency Rate (average time between purchases), you know when it’s time to re-engage your past customers. Getting the timing on this right can translate to huge savings in ad spend and a major increase in conversions.

Let’s break it down. If you know based on your Customer Frequency Rate that customers make purchases on average every 2 months, then you know to only include them in your advertising audiences after this amount of time has passed. Doing so will ensure you’re not wasting ad spend on customers that aren’t ready to make another purchase, and your ads will be much more likely to perform since customers will have had some time in between purchases.

4. Analytics Can Help You Discover Your Top Products

Do you know what your top products are? While you may be tracking sales manually, analytics give you an accurate and simple way to track sales electronically and scale your revenue as a result. From a prospecting perspective, this is the best approach to capturing new visitors attention.

Your top products are best-sellers for a reason! If they are a hit with your current customers than they are sure to be with prospective ones. Create a prospecting campaign advertising your top products to find new customers sure to fall in love with them too.

5. Metrics Help Identify Your Top Customers

Identifying your top customers can be a critical step to driving ongoing revenue. In addition to allowing you to run effective top customer retargeting, identifying your top customers also makes it easier to streamline your ads and ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right people.

Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible (especially in large ecommerce operations) to identify your top customers without analytics. After all, it’s not nice to play baseless favorites. Knowing who these customers are will assist you in creating highly-targeted campaigns focused solely on what a top customer would want to know: new products, promotions and even customer loyalty incentives your store may offer.

Analytics: The Key to a Treasure Trove of Sales

Think of analytics as the secret code that gets you into a magical world full of information and insight. Don’t you want to go there? If so, now is a great time to start!

In addition to allowing you to run more effective advertising campaigns, analytics makes it easier to do business in a much more strategic, intelligent way. Plus, you’ll bang your head against the wall way less when you give yourself permission to stop guessing who is buying from you and why.