If you haven’t yet done your 2024 planning, this is your friendly reminder that taking the time to review your 2023 metrics is a good place to start. You likely have good idea of who your top customers are and what your best sellers are, but do you know what motivates someone to buy from you?
As you look forward to next year it’s a good idea to take the time to do a deep dive into your metrics in order to figure out what worked for you in 2023 and what didn’t. Here’s a list of some of the things that you can review and learn from:
What’s driving traffic to your website?
If you use Google Analytics, they classify website traffic into a handful of different categories:
- Direct traffic: Someone typed your website into their browser and navigated directly to your site. This is often a sign of repeat customers, or may come from people typing in your website after receiving a business card.
- Organic Search: People found your site through a search on Google or Bing.
- Referral: Visitors came to your website through a link from another website.
- Social: Traffic driven to your website by social networks.
- Email: Visitors clicked on links in email messages (if your company does not have email marketing campaigns this will not be applicable).
- Paid Search: Traffic driven to your site through PPC campaigns (applicable only if you have paid search engine advertising).
Use your 2023 metrics to explore how people are finding your website and what that information means to you. For instance is there a particular website that is sending a high amount of traffic your way? If so, can you leverage that relationship? Can you also think about how to get a placement on similar websites to bring even more traffic to you?
On the flip side if you are not getting very much traffic from search engines, you may want to investigate your SEO strategy in order to bring more visitors to your site.
Is your social media effective?
We just covered that social media can drive people to your website, so be aware of which social media sites are sending people your way and take this into consideration when planning for 2024.
For instance if you spent a bunch of money on Facebook ads, but it only brought 20 people to your website and created one sale, that may not be a strategy you want to repeat.
That said, it can be super hard to tie sales directly to social media. For example, Pinterest is the social network that creates the most sales, but takes an average of two and a half months to convert a customer.
If your social platforms have a growing fan base that is interacting with your content, you are exposing people to your brand and sales will come; even if they never directly convert from the social platform. However, if a certain social platform has limited engagement and drives very little traffic to your site, that may be a sign you need to concentrate on other places.
Are there trends to your sales?
Take a look at your transactions and see if there are any trends you can spot that will help you sell more in 2024. For example:
- Are people buying from you at a certain time of the month or year? If you have certain products that had seasonal spikes, make sure that you leverage that in the year ahead by planning promotional campaigns around those spikes.
- Do people buy certain products or services together? If five out of 10 customers are buying two products together than you’ve discovered a great upsell. You may even want to consider creating grouping your certain products/services together for an easy sale.
- Is there a product or service that gives you a greater profit margin? If devise a promotional campaign to sell more!
Taking time to look at your year-end metrics can help uncover a wealth of information that will make your 2024 numbers even stronger.
If you need help doing this audit, or even figuring out what to do with the information, reach out and we’ll talk strategy!
