Nowadays, in an increasingly digital-first marketplace, the customer journey often begins with a web search. Yet it’s only when consumers connect with channels that we control—unlike search engines—that we can start tracking, analyzing, and understanding them. Right?
Wrong. It’s much easier than you may think to get at least some idea of what kind of people are looking your brand up online, where they come from, how old they are, and when and why they search for you. Anyone can do it – ready to find out how?
If you have a LinkedIn account, you’ll find a link labeled ‘Who’s viewed your profile right under your profile name. This will give you all kinds of information on LinkedIn members who’ve shown an interest in you, including their name, company and position, mutual connections, how they found your profile, and more.
On Twitter, you can choose ‘Analytics’ from the list below your name to instantly see your top follower and the general performance of your tweets. Selecting ‘View followers dashboard’ will take you to a page of user demographics, like the gender breakdown of your followers, household income percentages, and levels of interest shown across various tweet categories.
Google Analytics
If you have a website, simply embedding Google Analytics in it can net many data about the people who’ve visited your site. You won’t get their names—and rightly, if perhaps frustratingly—but you can view their age, gender, country, interests, frequency of visits, and the search terms they used to find you.
Alerts
You can set up alerts on Google and services like Mention to let you know whenever their search engine spots your brand name on websites, news pages, social media, forums, or blogs. These won’t give you the names of the people who’ve been talking about you, but you will get a list of links you can follow back, to see the context of the discussions.
Of course, customer experience (CX) experts can supply you with much more profound, richer analytics and derive valuable insights from them. If just anybody can learn this much with these widely-available tools, imagine what genuine CX analytics can deliver for your business!