You probably love your jewelry store and your career. If you're like most passionate business owners, you would love to spend all day helping your customers. Let the bookkeeper do their job and the bench jeweler do their job so you can work one-on-one with every customer that walks in the door.
Of course customers won't walk in the door unless you advertise. You could dabble in their own marketing or you could hire an agency to do all the hard work while you happily do what you do best.
A marketer's job is to look at the dynamic of your industry and figure out what messages will get the attention of your customers. It's not good enough to just pay for an ad and send it out, you actually should be figuring out where your customers are so you can put your ads in front of them. The marketer should be able to figure that out for you if you give them enough information.
That information needs to be collected everywhere in your business. When you pull data together from sales figures, customer addresses, locations where you advertise, email statistics, and of course website tracking, you can develop a holistic view of how you acquire customers and what the return on your advertising is.
When analyzing the data you collect, you need to focus on analyzing the customer and not how they found you. You might spend a lot of money on Facebook marketing, but you'd be wasting your money if the target customers you really want are not on Facebook.
On the social web, and on your website, you need to measure how people are interacting so you can make a continual improvement for your business. The recently improved Google Analytics gives you a lot of new methods to collect data and analyze data.
If you already have Google Analytics installed on your website then you are collecting a ton of information that you might not even be aware of. A hired agency will help you figure out how to sift through that data and find what's important for you.
As the store owner, you need to look at this data so you can make better business decisions.
Google Analytics can be confusing, but there are ways to create and customize Dashboards with all your important information on it. These dashboards can help you access bite sized sets of information that keep you quickly informed of your website's status. Google analytics allows you to email yourself these dashboards every month too.
I've created 6 different dashboards to help you squeeze some valuable information out of your own Analytics account without asking for your agency's help. You can click the following 6 links and install them right into your account.
Make sure you are logged into your Google Analytics Account before clicking any of these links. When you click the link you will see the "A Dashboard configuration was shared with you" message. Select your Analytics account from the drop down menu and click the create button to install it.
Local Visitors
This dashboard will show the 10 most popular pages on your website. Ask yourself why they are popular. Your answer will help you understand what your local visitors are looking for. I've also added local town traffic and local social traffic information to this dashboard.
http://bit.ly/1gT2tHk
Wedding Website Referrals
For this one I'm pulling together all your visitor traffic from the popular wedding prep websites. Included in the report are:brides.com, weddings.com,weddingwire.com, mywedding.com,thefind.com, and theknot.com. I've also included a map so you could see where those visitors were coming from.
http://bit.ly/18rL1iY
Trade Sites Referring Customers
I'm always seeing trade sites referring customers to jewelers. Some of these include AGS and JA. I've included as many as I could think of in this report, but it will only show you the top 10 referring sources.
http://bit.ly/HnrUBq
Vendors Referring Customers
Your vendors can be a gold mine for you as long as you are included in the "Find a Jeweler" feature on their website. Make sure you have yourself included in their database. On this dashboard I set up a box called "Vendor's Locate a Jeweler (set 1)" and "Vendor's Locate a Jeweler (set 2)" with 20 random vendors that had zip code searches on their website.
I also included a "Your Custom Vendor List Locate a Jeweler (set 3)" widget for you to customize. You can click the pencil icon to edit the settings. In the settings you will see a filer option where I have included the expression "VendorDomain1.com|VendorDomain2.com." To add you own vendors you need to replace those dummy domain names with your vendor's domain names. Make sure to include the pipe character ( | ) between each domain name.
You can clone the widgets to include more vendors.
http://bit.ly/1eXQns4
People in the Jewelry Trade
I thought you might find this interesting. This dashboard will show you the number of people who visited your website from one of the trade websites. These visitors are probably other jewelers or trade professionals.
http://bit.ly/1c9R7J9
Site's Technical Performance
I put this dashboard together so you could monitor your website's overall performance. It shows you which pages are popular and how long it takes them to load. It also shows you the list of the slowest loading pages on your website. Use this as a guideline to improve your website's overall speed.
http://bit.ly/1eXQown
If you take the time to review these reports at least once a month you can get a small idea of how your customers find you. From there you can think about how to increase your advertising in those areas to attract more of those quality customers.
