How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
By Carrie Cousins
Thank you to Valley Business FRONT for featuring our Vice President, Carrie Cousins, in their April 2025 issue.
This question arose because I could tell from marketing and advertising channels that conversions of yellow widgets was not strong. Most customers never put a yellow widget in the cart on their e-commerce site!
This insight came from Google Analytics. This free tool can be connected to any website and gives you more insights into your digital house than you can probably think about. What it is great for is helping you understand your online presence and how people – shoppers, users,
content digesters – are interacting with and using the information you put online.
What pages did they visit? Are they from locations where you are running ads? Are they reading the content or buying the things that you think?
In this instance, we could see from analytics that plenty of the users came to the website when there was a yellow widget in an ad. (So, this client was on the right track.)
But when you look deeper less than 1% of those people actually bought the widget in yellow. Almost every purchase of the item was in a color other than yellow.
After talking about this for a few minutes, the client admitted to having a lot of yellow widgets in the storeroom. So, we dove in a little deeper to Google Analytics to see if there was a better marketing story to tell.
We found the bright color helped people see the widget through all the digital clutter online, but when it came to purchase, blue and gray options were far more popular, selling at nearly 50 times the rate of the yellow option. That concept solidified our marketing strategy to sell more widgets – use bright, fun color options to get attention. (And have a limited number for people that want them.) But reinforce and make it super easy to
purchase more popular colors quickly.
A few months later we met again, and sales were up for black and gray widgets. And the client was thankful that we used data they already had to prevent a giant inventory blunder.
This is just one reason I love data in marketing in advertising. What might seem like simple insights can have huge business implications. And that’s a win for everyone.
Carrie Cousins is the Vice President at LeadPoint Digital in Roanoke. For 15+ years, she has helped businesses tell their stories and get better results online with practical digital marketing strategies. She is also an active leader in AAF, serving on the local and district boards, and is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.
