Replacement contractors and home remodeling companies live and die by a steady lead flow. If you’re like many contractors, you probably sort every lead in your CRM into channels like “website” or “showroom” or “TV.”
But, have you ever dug deeper into that “website” channel? Where exactly did those leads come from?
If you’re like many successful contractors, you’ve probably done your homework and partnered with an agency that specializes in the home improvement industry. And, if you’ve partnered with an agency like FatCat, then they are:
- Managing your PPC advertising campaigns
- Improving your website’s SEO
- Building your email newsletter lists
- Monitoring and managing your social media
Now your leads are up. You’re making more money. But, do you really understand what your agency is doing? And which parts are working?
Your agency should be providing you with detailed reports on this info. But, if you’d like to know how to find some of the answers on your own, Google Analytics can help.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free-to-use web analytics service that’s part of Google’s larger Google Marketing Platform. It allows you to monitor your traffic, see how visitors interact with your website, make data-based decisions, and much more. The platform provides macro and micro insights into everything ranging from “how many people visited your website last month” to something like “which type of device had the lowest bounce rate on our roofing service page in the second week of July.” In short, it’s an incredibly powerful tool.
How do you install it?
If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll first need to create one. If you do, you can use that to set up an Analytics account. Google’s documentation does a great job of outlining this process, so we won’t go into the details here.
Once your account is set up, you’ll need to install the tracking code on every page of your website that you want to track data (this should be all of them!). Ask your web developer (or marketing agency) to help set this up.
Use Google Conversion Goals to track your Remodeling Web leads by source.
In the next section of this article, we explain how Google Analytics can help you see which channels (social vs organic search, for example) drive traffic the overall traffic to your site. But what we know what you care about most is LEADS. So, we’re going to show you how to figure out your web leads by source.
You can use Google Conversion Goals to figure this out.
Here’s a screenshot from Google Analytics that shows us the total number of leads that filled out a form for our client’s Special Offer in June.
From this chart, you can see that 46 people filled out a form on a page promoting a time-limited special pricing offer for a bath remodel.
If you look in the “source/medium” section you can see the breakdown of which channels drove those 46 people to the Special Offer page. Take a closer look….
Using this data, we can see that in June, 32% of all of the leads generated by our monthly promotion came from Facebook. About 22% came from organic google searches, and so on.
If you’re a savvy business owner, we know you already look at your leads by source in your CRM.
We’re now encouraging you to challenge your internal marketing team, or agency, to dig deeper into those web form submissions to find out where they came from.
In this example, the biggest source was Facebook. And only 1 came from Yahoo search. This info helps guide our efforts and energy. Why would we spend any time on Yahoo, when it’s the weakest source of form submissions on our “Special Offer” page? We wouldn’t.
But, we did take this data and double-down on our Facebook efforts. And guess what? It paid off!
By the way, this example is ONLY ONE of 17 GOALS that we have configured on our client’s site.
If you, your marketing team, or your agency doesn’t have conversion goal tracking set up on your website, you’re missing critical data that will help you guide your marketing dollars and energy.
If you don’t know how to set this up, contact us, we’d love to help!
Now you know where leads come, what about the rest of your website traffic?
So, you’ve taken a deep dive, and you see which sources help generate form submission. But what about the rest of the traffic? Probably 95% of visitors to your website don’t fill out a form. Where did they come from? Again, Google Analytics shows you the info.
From your Analytics account, click Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. From here, you can see which of your marketing channels are bringing in the most traffic. If you have goals set up for your website forms (hint: you should!), you can also determine which channels are bringing in the most leads. Pretty neat, right?
What does each channel represent?
So, now you can see which channels are driving traffic to your website, but it’s not valuable information unless you have a clear understanding of what each channel means.
Direct
This is when someone literally types your website’s URL in their search bar and hits enter. A high percentage of direct traffic means that people know your business and chose to seek you out immediately over competitors.
Organic Search
If someone searched for “Roofing Contractors in Boston” on Google and found your website, they would be considered organic traffic. When you have high numbers and percentages of organic traffic, it means that people are finding your website easily. This is an important metric to pay attention to if you’re looking to improve your company’s SEO.
Paid Search: Paid Search traffic refers to traffic that comes from Google or Bing PPC advertising campaigns. These are the ads that show up at the top of a Google Search Results Page. This gives you a quick glance into how well they’re performing.
Display
Unlike PPC search ads, display ads are shown on other websites in the form of banner ads.
Social traffic
This is traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media platforms. This will not include social media advertising such as Facebook Ads, however.
Referral
When a visitor clicks on a hyperlink from one website and is brought to yours, they’ll count as referral traffic.
Note: Traffic is a great metric to monitor, but it doesn’t always tell you the full story. It’s important to dive further when it comes to assessing your channels.
The power of Google Analytics for Home Improvement Contractors
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool that can help you better understand your marketing efforts and allow you to make smarter, more well-informed decisions. This article just begins to scratch the service of everything Google Analytics can offer remodeling business owners.
There’s a lot here, and we get that it can be overwhelming at times, so if you want to get back to focusing on your business and let someone else handle your marketing, let’s talk!
