Directive Launches First Comprehensive Database for Search Marketing
AUSTIN, TEXAS (November 18, 2019) – Directive, a leading enterprise search marketing agency, launched the first database for search marketing,...
“I know that only half of my advertising works, but the only trouble is that I don’t know which half.” –Henry Ford
If you own a business, big or small, then you spend a certain amount of money on marketing each year. In today’s world with online advertisement, local directories, emails, and social media; there are many different marketing channels you can use to promote your business. More marketing channels is great. It creates different ways to reach your target market, and it makes you more money. However it creates one big problem. What marketing channels are working and which ones are not? What if you could track each marketing channel and put your money into the ones that are bringing you more sales. That is where marketing analytics comes in.
Marketing analytics is the process of giving credit to all marketing channels that lead a client to finding a business and making a purchase. In 2012, Google did a study where they looked at the purchasing journey of 3,000 shoppers across numerous verticals. All 3,000 of them took different paths to making that purchase. A customer travels through multiple media channels until they make their final purchase. The benefit of knowing the client’s journey is that it tells you what marketing channels are making you the most money. Once you have this insight you can optimize that channel and allocate more resources (money) to it.
Without the proper tools and insight, Marketing Analytics is not easy. There are a plethora of online and offline marketing channels. Companies like Google, Yelp, and Facebook are now providing analytics, but they offer an overwhelming amount of data for someone who is not a marketing analytics expert. This guide will help you analyze your data quickly and effectively so that you will be able to track the return on investment on both your online and offline marketing channels in one place.
If you are a large business that spends a high amount of money on advertising then you may have a budget for a marketing attribution company such as Market Share or Adometry. However, if you are a smaller company that does not have thousands of dollars to spend on marketing attribution, this guide will show you useful resources that are free.
Before we begin to analyze the data, there are a few things that should be covered. So first thing is first. If you haven’t already signed up for Google analytics, sign up for an account. Make sure to add your website, and then access your account. Now it may seem like you have just entered the matrix. There are a bunch of weird words that have no particular meaning to you and complicated graphs that seem to display something important. Do not worry we are going to go through the basics first.
Clicks are how many times someone has actually clicked on your website. Impressions represent how many times your website has been visibly displayed in front of a searcher. You will always receive more impressions then clicks.
Sources represent the point of origin from which the searcher began. There are three types of sources.
Channels represent the path in which the user takes to get to the website. There are many different channels, but here are a few examples.
Mediums represent the way the website link was delivered to the visitor. There are three types of mediums.
Knowing these terms will help you to better navigate through analytics, and understand what to look for according to your particular business.
Establishing your goal/s is very important because it weighs the value of the results according to that goal. Every company has an end goal that they are trying to accomplish with their website. The first step to structuring a return on investment from analytics is creating a goal and goal value.
Steps:
If you have not enabled Webmaster Tools data with your website, your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reporting will show up blank. Having SEO reporting is very essential before analyzing your data. SEO reporting displays what search queries are driving users to your website, and what pages are being visited the most. If you have not done it yet, do not worry, enabling Webmaster Tools with your website is as easy as making a Facebook post. All you have to do is go to Webmaster Tools, and add your website.
Now that you have learned the Vocabulary and finished all the backend work to setting up your Google Analytics, it is time to perform Marketing Analytics.
First, take a look at the overview under the “Acquisition” tab on the left. This shows you a basic overview of all your acquisition information. Acquisition is an important tool to look at because it displays what channels are bringing more visitors to the website, interacting with what pages, and eventually converting into sales.
According to the example above, marketing analytics would indicate to keep performing the email campaigns because it is bringing in the most users that call the company.
There is one more great tool underneath the “Acquisition” tab. Click on “Search Engine Optimization” and go to “Queries.” This page displays what keywords are driving traffic to your website.
Now that marketing analytics has shown you what keywords are bringing in more clicks, you can use more resources to optimize for those keywords.
Next, go down to “Behavior” on the left tab and click on “Behavior Flow.” Behavior shows you how the user interacted with your website. It shows which pages they bounced from and which ones they stayed on the longest. “Behavior flow” shows all of this and the path in which the user took throughout the website.
This type of marketing analytics shows you which pages need to be altered and which ones need to be optimized. With the example above, one can see that the majority of traffic is going straight from the main page to the blog. The majority of users are going to the blog and then to particular blog articles. This would suggest that the articles are bringing in the most traffic for the website because they are receiving the most activity.
Next, go to “Goals” under the “Conversion” tab, and click on “Overview.” This is a basic overview that displays how many times your goal has been completed, and what pages and channels are leading to that goal. You can choose the time period in the top right hand corner.
The benefit of using both the “Goal Completion Location” and the “Source/Medium” is that you can see what channel is bring in the conversions and what pages are these conversions going to before they go to the contact page. This lets me know what channels to invest more money in and what pages to that I need improve.
Next, go to “Attribution Models” under the “Conversion” tab. This tool is essential for companies that are very active online! Google Analytics automatically uses the “Last Click Model” for their results. This model is dying in marketing analytics because marketers realize that the user journey is much longer than the last click. If the user went through multiple media channels to make the final purchase then all media channels must be given credit. There are many different models for this because there is no easy solution for accurately distributing the appropriate credit to each channel along the user’s journey. However, there are two main models that are used for businesses.
I know I said that this would be a guide that helps you use marketing analytics quickly and effectively to analyze results. That is where shortcuts come in. All of the features that I just showed you can be put into your “Shortcut” tab. There is a “Shortcut” option on all of the featured pages at the very top left corner that gives you an option to put that page as a shortcut. This will put all of the features that you need into one spot.
Dashboards make it even easier to analyze reports in Google Analytics. Basically, you can put any feature that you like from each section onto one dashboard. This makes it easy to analyze everything all at once. This tool is very valuable, especially if you are managing an account for a business owner. Google Analytics has the option to automatically send your dashboard to your clients on a monthly basis.
If you do not feel ready to make your own dashboard, there are plenty of dashboards that you can import into Google Analytics. Here is a list of some very useful dashboards made by Google Analytics experts.
Any offline marketing analytics will have to be done the traditional way, and that is through direct contact with the consumer. However there are a couple of tools that are useful for doing this efficiently.
If you assign a coupon with one of your media channels, you can track its effectiveness. Every time a person asks for the discount you can be confident that they were reached by that media channel.
You can simply place, “how did you hear about us” on the invoice. This is an effective way to do marketing analytics for service oriented businesses. Here is an example:
Keeping track of offline and online marketing data may become overwhelming. If you want to keep everything all in one place here is an awesome tool to import your offline conversion data into Google Analytics. Make an account at whitespark.com. Add your business name and make a list of your offline channels like the ones listed bellow.
Once you receive results from your offline marketing channels make sure to plug them into this software and it will automatically be transferred into Google Analytics.
Marketing Analytics is a very valuable asset to add to your business model. If you are a small business owner you probably spend hundreds of dollars on Yelp, Email Campaigns, Social media management, SEO, and more. It is important for you to know if these media channels are actually making you money. Marketing Analytics does not only show you which media channels are wasting your money, but which ones are working so you can optimize them. Remember, if you ever get overwhelmed when it comes to tracking your analytics use this guide to help you get it done quickly and effectively.
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