4 Traffic Tracking Tactics To Monitor Sales Performance

All stages of the sales funnel play an essential role in your brand's attempt to convert a lead. Tracking your consumer's venture from impression to checkout is vital if you want to ensure that each phase of the funnel is optimised for your best shot at success.

While the challenges of online commerce continue to evolve, staying on top of your brand's traffic trends could be the key to remaining confident, despite rising levels of ecommerce competition.

According to experts at Commence, "sales tracking is important because it helps you prevent further losses and encourages you into making smart gains." No matter the size or scale of your business, "by knowing the numbers, you don't have to make second guesses; you can make smart decisions based on the numbers you already see, making you a more efficient and savvy leader."

Tracking your traffic is crucial in an online landscape. With demographic trends constantly on the move, taking time to gain insight into your target audience will give you a better chance of jumping ahead of the curve.

Read on as we address the ongoing sales challenges small businesses face today and the four traffic tracking tactics that might just save your ship from going under. 

Addressing sales challenges in 2022 

It's no secret that competition within the e-commerce sector is at an all-time high. After the industry grew by a third in 2020 alone, a global digital shift has pushed commerce giants such as Amazon into the limelight while sending many small businesses packing.

Did you know that Amazon currently has over 300 million active consumers that remain loyal to their online store? In the wake of a growing demand for fast-paced shipping and low prices, it's no wonder that commerce giants such as Amazon, eBay and SHEIN continue to rake in revenue.

However, where does this leave smaller, independent businesses that continue to battle it out for the same consumers?

As we step into a smartphone-centred future, SME retailers must work harder than ever before to secure conversions amongst the unprecedented competition. 

Experts at Oberlo have predicted that over half of all e-commerce traffic now comes from a mobile device, meaning that brands must pour focus into their social platform traffic as well as their smartphone-based site analytics if they want a shot at success. 

The selling strategies of tomorrow revolve around brand awareness. We're talking engagement, impressions and click-through-rates.

"The line between brand awareness and performance marketing is being eliminated, and marketers need to be well-versed in the impact upper-funnel actions have on lower-funnel events," claims Justin Buckley, CEO of ATTN Agency. "This presents a unique challenge for most e-commerce brands, as most are more concerned with lower-funnel metrics (conversions, return on ad spend and cost per action) than they are with upper-funnel metrics (reach, impressions, clicks and views)."

Tracking your traffic sources at each stage of the funnel can highlight what your business is doing right, and, more importantly, which stage could do with improvement. 

How can you monitor your performance? 

There are many ways to motor sales performance, but it is important to choose a method that works best for your brand's specific needs.

Jumping into the world of social listening may be essential for B2C brands that are striving to target younger, digitally savvy Gen Z's, while more traditional forms of site-based A/B testing could prove useful to B2B's looking to increase their site engagement.

Here are four traffic-inducing tips that could improve your sales performance moving forward. 

Consult the analytics 

​No matter the size, scale or industry niche your business slots within, engaging in data-based tracking is essential for every brand looking to improve their sale success.

From top-funnel metrics, such as click-through rates and site impressions, to bottom-level data, such as conversions and return on investment, your sales stats remain the most important source of consumer knowledge that a brand can possess.

Using a number of analytic tools and site heatmaps, sales leaders can quickly track and identify patterns and trends within engagement-based data and compare this to the number of conversions they are receiving from their target consumers.   For example, the go-to-market platform Dealfront draws from multiple channels of data (databases, web crawling, and sales triggers) to help you connect with the right people. It can also pull potential leads from your website, meaning you benefit from Dealfront's data and your own. Sounds like the best of both worlds!

Viewing your sales stats in a visual format can aid your sales and marketing teams in highlighting what strategies are working and which campaigns require improvement.

​ Using the powers of AI-infused analytics, sales leaders can quickly identify specifics such as poor-performing product pages and even the percentage of mobile consumers. These stats all play essential roles in shaping future campaigns, products and services for conversion triumph.

Engage in social listening ​

 Did you know that 56% of sales reps use social media to track consumer trends and discover new prospects?

In the age of social media domination, social listening has become a must-have strategy for ecommerce sellers looking to improve their demographic reach.   It's also one of the most popular B2B sales prospecting techniques since social media is where most prospects spend their free time. Not only can social listening enhance a brand's knowledge of its target consumers and the trends that make them click, but it also opens up a window of opportunity for social selling in a platform-based environment.

As you can see above, experts at Hubspot have reported that Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram remain the most popular platforms for social listening and prospecting for sale success.

The key here is to naturally insert your brand into popular platforms and get the content and conversations flowing. The more you interact with social trends and viral content formats, the more data you'll collect from your social traffic that continues to interact and communicate with your content.

A/B test your UX 

For B2B sellers, your site is your hub for success. When engaging in business partnerships, you want your site to appear trustworthy, authoritative and far up the search string as a top industry player.

In order to keep your traffic levels spiking, your user experience should be your top priority. Pouring focus into your website optimisation is a great way to boost your brand's SEO and traffic engagement levels, especially when introducing A/B testing.

A/B testing is a smart way of tracking your user behaviour on-site. The practice consists of creating two versions of your intended site design/structure and testing them against each other with numerous traffic sources. Comparing the data from each version of the site, UX designers can identify what areas of the website are performing well, and what content needs to be revamped.

This is a great traffic-tracking tactic for brands looking to improve their device-based design. Trialling site structures on a number of different devices could improve mobile optimisation, which is a must-have in a smartphone-centred era.

Listen to audience feedback

Another great way to gather CX data organically is through the channel of consumer feedback. When tracking traffic trends and demographic data, it's easy to miss the most obvious source of feedback that a brand can receive, which is from the consumer themselves.

In fact, a recent poll by Gartner claims that providing consumers with the ability to provide feedback on their experience with a brand's site or services can actually increase consumer retention and upselling by 25%.

As you can see above, there are numerous ways to collect consumer feedback. From surveys to live support, all options gather important data for sales teams to sift through and act on.

A look into the sales strategies of tomorrow ​

Stepping into a digital era of commerce, the sales strategies of the future will continue to revolve around the consumer.

As social media selling continues to rise up amongst the ranks, the monetisation of social platforms will play a large role in the success of e-commerce brands moving forward.

In order to stay on top, smart sellers must stay in touch with their demographic, and be constantly tracking their traffic sources in order to identify trends and patterns ahead of the curve.