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VIDEO: Discover Marketing ROI using Google Analytics

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Marketing can be one of the most fun and exciting fields to work in, but sometimes there’s those times when a campaign doesn’t seem to yield any incremental business. A real buzz kill, to say the least. This might be an indication that the campaign was a wash, however there’s still a chance that it may have had more of a positive impact on your bottom line than you may have thought.

Our lead Web Analyst Brandon Wensing’s latest video demonstrates how you can improve the measurement of those marketing tactics to allow for better insights on ROI. Focusing on the multiple touch points that your customers have with your website can shine more light on campaigns and mediums that you may have written off before simply because they weren’t leading directly to purchases or conversions in the same session.

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Analytics Christmas Carol: 12 Things To Measure

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This time of the year we’re either busy analyzing the past year’s data for the new year or dreaming of great food, presents, and time with the family over the holiday. In keeping with both of those notions, I’ve decided to take a stab at song-writing with this fun cheesy little version of the “12 Days of Christmas” carol/blog hybrid!

Enjoy (or point and laugh profusely. Either way, you’ll have fun)!

On the 12th Month of Service the Client Wants to Track:

12 PDF downloads

In the case of Google Analytics, tagging downloads on your website with Event Tracking can reduce inflated bounce rates and give you greater insights into how supplemental information and deliverables impact the decision process of prospective customers and ultimately your bottom line.

11 Affiliate link clicks

The same methodologies that are used with tracking downloads can also be applied to links to affiliate websites. Tagging these affiliate links with Outbound Link tagging can help reduce those artificially-inflated bounce rates.

10 billboard adverts

Traditional marketing initiatives need not be segregated from your web analytics data any longer! Through a combination of vanity URLs and unique landing pages, you can easily track the effectiveness of initiatives like billboards and radio ads and uncover the insights to improve these campaigns.

9 PPC campaigns

There’s far more to a pay-per-click campaign than just clicks. Though Google AdWords provides cost data and click analysis, you can get the complete picture by tying Google AdWords and Google Analytics together. You can see how well the landing page content and call-outs are resonating with your paid search visitors, identify disconnects between a display ad and your site, and use these insights to hone in your PPC strategy.

8 Tweets-a-tweetin'

Don’t just throw Twitter and social posts out there and hope something sticks! Tag those links pointing to your site using Google’s URL builder so you can use Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of those Tweets!

7 QR codes

QR codes have enabled marketers to easily point recipients to their web assets via a hyperlink in barcode form. As an added layer of measurement, you can add tracking parameters to the destination URL of these QR codes. Another great way to bridge the insight gap between traditional and digital!

6 Customer segments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you’re not segmenting your web analytics data, you’re probably not doing it right. Customer behavior from your campaigns to your website can vary greatly depending on what segment they fit into. Slicing and dicing your data accordingly will help optimize your customer’s experience and improve marketing to those individuals.

5 KPIs!

You can’t measure without a unit of measurement to go by! That’s just a fact of life. When it comes to measuring your marketing, establishing solid KPIs that align with your business goals and objectives is crucial. You want to ensure that these KPIs are meaningful to the decision makers and speak to the success of your campaigns.

4 Vanity numbers

Similar to how vanity URLs and QR codes can be used with traditional marketing, there’s also opportunities to use vanity phone numbers that are integrated with call tracking platforms. This provides another great layer of measurement and yet another opportunity to bridge that digital and traditional gap!

3 Email blasts

Most email marketing platforms allow for varying levels of integration with Web Analytics tools. Platforms like MyEmma offer automatic tagging for links pointing to your web assets. This extends your analytical visibility beyond just open rates and allows you to see whether or not the subject lines, messages, and call-outs are really resonating with your audiences.

2 Subdomains

Perhaps your organization’s site stretches across several subdomains (or even across multiple domains entirely). This is often the case with websites that incorporate a blog, online application system, or 3rd party shopping cart. Seamless deployment of web analytics tracking through the use of cross-domain methods will shine light into problem areas of conversion funnels and other valuable tidbits.

And a CVAR in a tracking cookie!

Google Analytics allows for the use of CVARs, or Custom Variables, which allow you to set specific variables within the tracking cookie. These CVARs can be set when a user performs a specific action on your site, comes from a certain traffic source, or fits other specific criteria.

And there you have it, folks: My half-blog-half-Christmas Carol masterpiece! Hopefully you found it festive AND informative! On behalf of everyone at DaBrian Marketing Group, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy Holiday!

Conversion Attribution: Give Credit Where It’s Due

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In the Digital Analytics space, we are all obsessed with identifying marketing tactics that perform the best and drive the most return-on-investment via conversions. We seek to track all sorts of checkout funnels, application submissions, and newsletter sign-ups and do our best to identify what search phrases and traffic sources ultimately led visitors to those actions. But one of the most common mistakes of many analysts and marketers is to only pay exclusive attention to the assets that led to a conversion in a single session. Many people fail to realize that the conversion process can often span several sessions before a valuable action is taken.

That’s why it is important to consider conversion attribution: Did converting visitors visit the website prior to making the purchase or submitting an online application? If so, how did they initially find your website? There are countless gems that can be found in looking at these factors.

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Video: Capabilities of Multichannel Analytics

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One of the greatest challenges in the past has been effectively tracking traditional marketing methods like billboards, direct mail pieces, and print advertisements alongside internet marketing efforts.  This is much more attainable nowadays via Multichannel Analytics.  DMG’s Web Analyst Brandon Wensing describes some of the benefits of using this method to yield imperative insights into your high level marketing efforts:

Web Analytics: Usage Analysis Leads to Improved Customer Relations

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Knowing how your target audience uses your website is integral to increasing visitor conversions and improving customer relations. Various retail stores around the world spend millions of dollars on researching how their customers browse their brick and mortar stores. They use this data to arrange the store in the most efficient manner, even engaging in testing to increase purchases by the customer.

Your internet marketing campaign should adopt a similar approach. Focusing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within your web analytics solution can provide insights into how your target audience is using the website. The KPIs can bring troublesome drop-off points within your goal conversion funnels to your attention so you can make the required changes to the design of the page or its content to increase conversions. Perhaps certain landing pages have a consistently high bounce rate. Or perhaps the pageviews-per-visit or average time on site are down. This could indicate that the content on the page is not relevant or targeted enough for the consumer.

Customer relations are not only managed in brick and mortar stores, over the phone, or in emails. Implementing web analytics into your internet marketing approach can provide an integral avenue of improvement to customer relations and conversion rate.