We’re fortunate to be living in an era where it is easier than ever to collect data and use it to identify consumer behavior patterns. We can then take those data mining insights and use them tactically in our marketing campaigns.

In my business Carrentalbuddy.com.au, we invest a percentage of our marketing budget into learning about our audience and customers, so we can understand their intent and buying behavior. This allows us to generate better conversions and to acquire the right customers at a lower cost.

We tend to work to the 80/20 rule, whereby we focus on 20% of actions or behaviors that drive 80% of traffic, leads or revenue. We will show you how we identify these using the following data metrics below.

5 Easy Data Metrics You Can Use to Increase Leads and Grow Sales

1. Interest intent

If you want to get into the mind of your customers, you need to know what it is they are searching for. To get the exact information, we run a Google Ads campaign and collect the data from the keyword search query report. We can get a list of all of the keywords that were used to trigger the keywords in our campaign.

We then use those list of keywords to build out our web and sales copy. We also build out our other campaigns.

For example, we noticed that people were searching for cars with different seat numbers (i.e. 9 seat car hire Melbourne). So we setup a separate campaign targeting those vehicles that offered more spaces for passengers.

2. Browsing location

You can pinpoint the actual location where your best customers are coming from. You can then target prospects based on postcodes, city names or regions. We have implemented this on some of our campaigns after we learned that some of our best customers were located in Asia or in major Australian cities.

3. Latency

We want to know how long the time is between people searching for a product or service and when they buy it. Thankfully, we can get this sales data in Google Analytics if we setup the tracking correctly. We can then get data and understand the factors that influence their buying decisions.

It might be that additional marketing gets implemented to speed up the customer’s decision-making process. This could be by addressing some of the questions, reservations or trust issues that the customer might have with the product or service being offered, or potentially the offer itself.

Optimizing the latency should also lead to an improvement in the volume of sales.

4. Demographics

You can configure your analytics to provide you with the demographic data of the customers that show intent or that purchase your products or services. You can then improve the targeting of your campaigns to the exact audience that will be interested in the products or services that you offer.

For example, we found that in one of our campaigns that targets the Gold Coast, the audience that converted the most were women aged between 24 to 35. We then setup demographic campaigns specifically targeting this market. We also used this insight to find other marketing platforms that could reach this demographic.

5. Engagement metrics

Analyze engagement metrics on your site such as bounce rate, amount of pages viewed, and conversion data to see how things can be improved to increase leads and sales. On Car Rental Buddy, we’ve been successful at reducing the bounce rate, however we are still optimizing the website to increase conversions through the website.

For example, we are implementing a mobile-friendly user experience (UX) on the site to drive more click to calls on the site. We are also optimizing the booking process so that we can improve the amount of bookings through the website.

Conclusion

Utilizing the data that your business collects will help you to better optimize your business’s digital marketing campaigns and performance. It will lead to improved user experience and interaction, as well as a lower cost per customer acquisition. Use the data mining examples provided in this article to uncover sales opportunities that will grow your business in the next 12 months.

Our guest author Peta Daniels is the founder of the car hire comparison website Car Rental Buddy.

She enjoys delivering positive customer experiences through creative offers.

When she isn’t working, you can find her participating in her local gridiron community in Queensland, Australia.