The benefits of using Google Analytics for small business – Sugar Spice and all things Nice

During the pandemic many online food offerings have popped up. My personal favorite are the online bakeries who bake that perfect cupcake and deliver it right to your door! What could be better? I recently discovered a company called Sugar Spice And All Things Nice! This is a premier home baking delivery service, specialising in giftboxes of customised cupcakes. As a fledgling small business they want to get the most out of their limited marketing budget. They use Google analytics to help achieve this.

As an online bakery they have the following marketing objectives:

• To identify who their customers are and optimise the online shopping experience to meet their specific needs
• To set overall marketing goals and objectives for the company. These are usually expressed as measurable KPIs
• To identify what marketing efforts are and are not working, and to reallocate emphasis and budget accordingly

Google analytics is an excellent (free) solution that can be used to help! For those new to this area, google analytics is an application that can be connected to your website to provide you with insight into all aspects of customer acquisition, behavior and sales. Lets look at how it might be used in relation to the above objectives

Who specifically are Sugar Spice And All Things Nices customers? 

So Google analytics is made up of a number of different reports. Using the Google Analytics Audience Report, details such as age and gender of site visitors can be established, as well as their interests. This is useful to help tailor website offerings. Language can also be identified ( to establish whether localization would be beneficial). 

The technologies your customer is using can also be identified and used to advantage . For example, this bakery identified that the browser most used by their customers was Google chrome, and their website was tested against this and optimised for it. Google Analytics can also identify whether the customers device of choice is phone / tablet / desktop.

So basically by knowing your customers you can serve content to them in the most effective way. This ultimately should result in more sales!

 How can Google analytics be used to measure if marketing goals are being achieved - and what marketing strategies are working best?

There is little point in spending time setting complex marketing goals if you have no way of measuring them! Luckily Google Analytics can measure just about any online goal. Sugar Spice and All Things Nice set a number of marketing goals which included targets for: new customers; online engagement; conversions -  and more.  

The Audience Report in Google Analytics allows you to see the number of users your site has in a particular date range, as well as new users in that period. Audience behaviours such as their engagement on your site can be examined (see below). A large number of users in the 0 – 10 seconds category for example, might indicate that your landing page needs attention.

The top channels of customers to your business can be identified using the Google Analytics Aquisition Report and their associated conversions measured. Monetary sales goals can be measured here. You can see how much sales revenue came from direct channels versus display ads, for example. This can be used to help identify where to put emphasis and where to allocate budget. The success of your marketing efforts via social networks can also be quantified here.

The above just gives a small flavour of how useful Google analytics is for our featured online bakery - and really, any small business within the food industry! It allows for a customised approach. The company can constantly analyse what's working and what's not and adjust the budget allocation accordingly. Every small business will run on a limited budget and Google anaytics can serve to ensure your investments in time and money are bringing the greatest possible return to the business. 

Anyway - time for tea...and maybe a bun!

Suzanne McCabe

(Picture credits: Google Analytics)