5 ways Google Analytics is great for franchising

The inside track from Adam Blackford-Mills, digital sales & marketing director at MRS Digital

Whether you’re a franchisor or franchisee, Google Analytics has a suite of powerful tools that can help you grow your business.

By analysing various website metrics, you can make more effective, data driven business decisions.

Whether it’s at a micro or macro level, the insights you need to drive your business forward can be found by digging into your franchise website’s data.

So if you want to know:

• Who is visiting your website.
• Where they’ve come from.
• Where to channel your marketing budget.
• How many conversions your respective franchise stores are making.

Analytics has the answers. Here are just five ways you can use analytics to help your business:

Measure your traffic

Analytics gives you a single platform to measure the web traffic across all your franchise sites. This will allow you to see which of your franchises is most popular, of course. But it can reveal other things too.

For example, by digging into your traffic data, you can identify which parts of your site visitors enjoy. This gives you a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t work on your sites.

Many franchise websites are built from the same template, so you might think all users like the same things on every franchise site. But when you examine your site traffic, you may find audiences in different locations prefer different things.

View referrals

You can use Google Analytics to discover how people are finding your site. Whether it’s from organic search, pay per click or social media, you can discover the source of the majority of your traffic.

This can give you a reliable measure of how effective your franchisees are managing social media at a local level. In turn, this reveals any additional social media training requirements your franchisees might need.

Manage budgets

At its heart, analytics helps you spend your money wisely.

Access to your referral channels and customer journeys allows you to optimise your marketing budget. You can reduce funding in your weak performing areas and reinvest it in marketing channels that are performing well.

Attribution modelling in analytics allows you to follow the path your customers take. You can also use historical data to forecast sales across your franchises, depending on what avenues you choose to go down.

Having access to analytical insights allows you to make the best marketing decisions for your budget and find the strategies that work best for you.

Tracking codes

In order to get the data you need to measure your marketing success, you need to set up tracking codes.

Tracking codes are snippets of JavaScript that collect and send data to Google Analytics from your website. You can use them to measure conversions, track traffic and more.

For franchisors, it’s often advantageous to use the same tracking code across multiple sites. Implementing the same tracking code on multiple sites and gathering data across them gives you the broadest possible picture of your franchise overall.

This is ideal for presenting a big picture view, but cannot give you a franchise by franchise picture.

In order to see how individual franchises are doing, you have a few options. One would be to use individual tracking codes for each site and aggregating the data yourself. Another is to use custom reports.

Custom reports

Custom reports give all stakeholders within your business, from franchisees to head office managers, the data they need when they need it.

Franchisees only care about the metrics for their own franchise. Their keywords, conversion rates and traffic can be isolated via filters. This enables you to create custom reports that allow stakeholders to access the data that means something to them.

There are plenty of ways of getting the numbers you need via filters and advanced segments. Having one tracking code with custom reports supporting your data is one of the best ways for franchises to get the best of both worlds.

Google Analytics offers far more advantages than just these five. Businesses of any type and that have an online presence can reap the benefits of analytics to their marketing advantage. So start making data driven decisions today.

5 stats about data & analytics

1. 97 per cent of organisations use data to power business opportunities.
2. By 2020, internet transactions will reach 450 billion per day.
3. On average, businesses capture eight pieces of data about their customers.
4. 57 per cent of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalised offers or discounts.
5. But, less than 50 per cent of marketers understand how data and analytics contribute to profitable growth.

For more information visit https://mrs.digital/