Earlier this week, I met with the owner of a small chain of jewelry stores. Business has been good, but not great, and she wasn’t exactly sure why. “We’re doing everything we’re supposed to – or at least I think so,” she told me. “We’ve got a website, we’re on social media, we place sponsored content, the whole bit. But I’m not sure how this is translating into actual sales.”

This is not an unusual situation. Jewelry retailers often have difficulty assessing how the many different marketing vehicles they’re using impact their bottom line. In part, this is because there’s a pervasive tendency out there to treat each online marketing tool as a separate, distinct entity rather than as part of a cohesive integrated whole; another problem is a lack of familiarity with Google Analytics.

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Google Analytics is a free tool Google provides to website owners. It generates many useful reports you can apply to grow your business, but if you’re just starting out with it, you’ll want to concentrate on the reports that tell you the amount of website traffic you’re getting, where that traffic originates, and what your web visitors are doing while they’re on your site. In Google’s terms, these reports are called Audience, Behavior and Conversions.
Assuming all of your different marketing platforms drive traffic to your website (and if they don’t, they should be!) you can compare the amount of visitors coming from each to determine effectiveness. This in itself can be an eye opening experience. In the case of the jeweler I met with, it turned out that while Pinterest and Instagram were driving people to her site, she was getting virtually no traffic from Twitter. This insight allowed her to assess the amount of resources she was devoting to each platform to make sure her team was concentrating on the platforms her customers enjoy the most.

Successful jewelry retailers check their Google Analytics fairly frequently in order to keep on top of which tools are working and which ones aren’t. Be aware that these numbers can – and do! – change over time: customers can and do travel between platforms, sometimes switching with surprising speed. Maintaining awareness is one of the best things you can do if you want to sell more jewelry.