Grow Your Online Book Sales with Google Analytics, Part 2

Grow Your Online Book Sales with Google Analytics, Part 2

Aerio Staff

In part 1 of this blog post series, we explained the basics of Google Analytics, to take your website to the next level.

Following is a more in-depth look at how Google Analytics can improve your book sales & marketing strategy, and in-turn improve your bottom line.

Use Google Analytics to Enhance Your Marketing Budget

Armed with all of the information about who your readers are, where they’re coming from, and what they like, you can make really smart decisions about where to spend your marketing efforts and dollars.

  • If most of your visitors come from search engines…

Then you know you need to beef up your SEO strategy and optimize your website to support the search terms that are bringing people to your page. Or, you could invest in some PPC advertising around those keywords if you have the marketing budget.

You can even run A/B testing on those platforms - say to test one ad design over another, or to promote a few different genres - and track the results in Google Analytics to see which approach outperforms the other.

  • If most of your visitors come from social media…

Then you know that you need to spend more time bulking up your social media strategy.

Try to post more on the channels where people are clicking through to your content, and pay attention to the posts that are getting the most engagement (clicks, likes, replies, shares). Once you know which ones are generating the best results, you can replicate them and repeat the same success.

Use Google Analytics to Reach Your Marketing Goals

Google Analytics offers a variety of "goals" you can create, which can tell you how many people are buying your books, clicking through to your e-commerce store, subscribing to your newsletter, contacting you, or taking some other action that helps reach your marketing goals.

One of the easiest ways to execute this is to set a “Thank You” page as a "destination goal" (you can find Google's instructions here). The “thank you” page is the page a user will see once they take the desired action.

For example:

  • A user enters their email address on your website to receive your email updates. You can set up a thank you page for when they click “submit” that tells them thanks for their email address and here is the frequency they will be hearing from you, etc. This page can then be used to set a “Goal” in Google Analytics, so you’ll know how many people signed-up for your email updates in a specified period of time.

Other examples of goals you may have for your website include:

  • Gathering more subscriptions to your blog
  • Increasing your book purchases
  • Seeking registration sign-ups for an author event

You would create a “thank you” page for each of these “Goals” or actions, and Google tracks that as a “Goal Completion.”

If you want to get really savvy about it, you can assign a dollar amount to those Goals. Say One book is worth $25, and a newsletter subscription is worth $5 (because 1 out of every 5 of your email subscribers goes on to buy a book), etc. Then you can look at your Goals and see exactly how much money you’re making from each page on your website, and connect the dots about what’s working for you and where you need to improve.

Once you spend some time with Google Analytics, you will start to see how the data can shape and define your marketing strategies. This in turn will help you learn more about your audience and improve your customer relationship, which will lead to more sales.