Letting Data Drive the Decisions

As a digital marketing consultant, I rely heavily on clickstream analysis tools, like Google Analytics, to gain actionable insight for my clients.

Data from these reports allows me to review which channels, devices, and campaigns are driving new leads, and where to best allocate time and marketing budget. While Google Analytics isn’t the only tool available for tracking your marketing campaigns, I’m partial to it as it’s free and easy to install and configure.

Here are five reports and tool features you can use to assist you in making data driven decisions.

1. Channels

The Channels report provides you with a high-level overview of which online marketing channels are leading to new visitors and leads.

Here’s an overview of a few different channels that can be used to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns in Google Analytics:

Direct

These visits are logged anytime a visitor types the exact URL of a page on your website into their browser, or uses a bookmark to access your site. Direct visits can assist you in measuring the overall popularity and awareness of your brand. These visitors are already familiar with your business.

How it’s actionable:

This report is great for evaluating how various marketing campaigns are leading to brand awareness (e.g. did you pay for a radio spot that mentions your homepage URL? Do you have a billboard? Did you send out a flyer?) Measure both online and offline campaign performance by adding an annotation in Google Analytics. Learn more about direct traffic here.

Organic Search

These are visitors that have found your business via a search engine including Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL or Ask.

How it’s actionable:

Use this report to analyze what pages are receiving organic search traffic and leading to new estimate requests or calls. This report can help you understand how your search engine optimization efforts are improving your business’ visibility and bottom line in organic search. Don’t forget to associate your Google Search Console account so you can view the queries (keywords) that are leading to new organic sessions.

Social
These visitors have come to your site via a social channel including Facebook, Houzz, Yelp, Google+ and more.

How it’s actionable:

While there are many metrics you can use to help evaluate how well your social media marketing strategy is working, one that I find valuable is how many people are clicking through back to your website. Using this metric as a KPI, helps me understand if we’re reaching the right audience and if our sharing and engagement is leading to visits back to our website.  Using this report can help you understand where you should be spending your time on social media.

Referral

These visitors have accessed your site via a link on a 3^rd party website or blog.

How it’s actionable:

Who is sending you qualified traffic? Have you run an ad, published a guest post, actively contribute to a forum, or have a partner or affiliate that’s linking back to your website? The referral report will help you understand which advertising efforts and relationships are bringing in new leads and sales.

Paid Search

This report shows you how your paid ads on Google AdWords, Bing Ads or other paid search providers are leading to new visitors and goal completions. If you’re running a Google AdWords campaign, make sure your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts are linked.

How it’s actionable:

What type of experience are your landing pages providing? Is the traffic converting? If so, from what keywords? Is your PPC campaign acting as a touch point in your customer’s online journey to purchase? Use this report to find out.

2. Goal Completions

Increasing traffic is only half the battle. Increasing traffic that converts is how you win the war. Tracking all desired visitor actions like estimate requests via form completions, downloads, phone calls, etc. is vital for understanding how well your digital marketing campaigns are working.

To track these interactions I set up a goal, which allows me see who’s converting and from what channels. To track phone calls, Congruent Digital uses CallRail, a dynamic call tracking solution that easily integrates with Google Analytics.

3. Mobile

With mobile searches surpassing desktop searches in Google last year, having a website that’s optimized for mobile visitors is essential. In a recent Google Performance Summit, AdWords execs shared some surprising statistics including:

• There are now trillions of searches on Google.com and over half of those searches happen on smartphones
• Nearly one third of all mobile searches on Google are related to location

In Google Analytics, view your mobile visits by either using the left navigation option and selecting Audience > Mobile > Overview or use the advanced segment option to filter for mobile visitors only. When viewing these reports, questions to ask are:

• How does the time on site, bounce rate, and goal completions compare with desktop visitors?
• Is contacting us easy on mobile devices (do you have a click-to-call feature?)
• Are your forms mobile friendly?

Google just updated their existing mobile ranking algorithm which is supposed to provide an additional rankings boost to websites that are mobile friendly.

Not sure if your website is mobile friendly? Try Google’s free Mobile Friendly Test tool here. You can also use the free tool Screenfly to see how your website appears across multiple devices.

4. Location

Understanding how to segment and filter your data by location can make it more insightful. While not a hard and fast rule, typically traffic from outside of your service area won’t convert and can skew important metrics in your Google Analytics reports.

Also, getting tons of traffic from a blog post is great, but if it’s not coming from your local service area, in my experience chances are slim it will lead to new business.

Tip: set up an advanced segment or filter to help you understand which channels are leading to new visitors from the cities and towns from your service area. Make sure you are localizing your landing pages so that you’re sending clear signals to search engines about the cities and towns that you serve.

5. Landing Pages

Channels aside, regardless of how a potential customer finds you online, the experience your landing pages provide is crucial to acquiring new leads. A landing page is defined by Google Analytics as the first page a visitor views during a session – also known as the entrance page. If your website’s landing pages are providing a poor visitor experience, you’ll be wasting money paying for advertising and marketing services.

You can find the Landing Pages report by navigating to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Important metrics to look at when evaluating the experience you’re providing visitors are:

• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is defined as a session that only visits one page. A high bounce rate, a low session duration, and no goal completions can all be red flags
• Avg. Session Duration: this metric is defined as the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions. If you’re avg. session duration is low, it could indicate visitors aren’t quickly finding the information they are looking for
• Goal Completions: a goal is any desired visitor interaction. While the online path to purchase can often span multiple sessions as your customers do research, if you’re doing a good job of explaining who you are, what you do, and why you’re a better solution than your competitors, eventually potential customers will want to talk.

Wrapping it Up

Whew, that’s a lot and I’ve only scratched the surface of the reports and features available in this powerful tool. Having data that’s actionable is worth its weight in gold.

If you have questions about implementing anything I’ve mentioned, or would like to learn more about Congruent Digital’s online marketing services, you can email me here. I look forward to learning more about your business!