B2B Marketing Blog

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

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Essential Google Analytics Uses for Informed CEOs

 

Google Analytics remains the most used set of analytical tools for monitoring and tracking online statistics. Businesses across all industries use these tools to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

If you currently only use Google Analytics to keep track of the number of visitors to your website, you are missing out on key features used by informed CEOs and marketing experts.

The goal of this post is to help you discover the essential functions that you should be using and how they can help improve your marketing campaigns.

Why Do You Need to Use Google Analytics?

For those who are unfamiliar with this platform, Google Analytics is a set of free analytical tools and resources available to any business or entrepreneur. As your website is the hub of all your online traffic, analyzing your website offers useful information for any marketing campaign.

By using Google Analytics, you can gain a better picture of how people use your website and who these visitors are. You can identify and monitor your audience, determine where they came from, and even set your own goals.

Identify and Monitor Your Audience

The most essential use of Google Analytics is for identifying and monitoring your audience. Identifying your audience is part of the acquisition data. Google collects details about user demographics before those users visit your website.

Audience

Some businesses may have no idea who their customers are. With this acquisition data, you can gather the following details about your audience:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Interest
  • Location
  • Type of web browser

used Using these details, you may determine that your website tends to attract an audience in a specific demographic, such as young adults or senior citizens. This can help you tailor your marketing campaign to focus more on this demographic to increase conversion rates.

You can also monitor your audience after they arrive on your website. User behavior data includes a variety of useful information about the way users interact with your web pages, such as the following:

  • How long they stayed on a web page
  • Whether they visited any other pages
  • Whether they followed any links
  • How many times they have visited the website

These details are useful for improving the user experience of your website. You may find that visitors tend to leave your website after visiting a specific page. You can then make a few simple changes to that page to help direct visitors to other content on your website.

Behavior

Determine How Your Audience Found Your Site

You can also use Google Analytics to determine how people are finding your website. Google has a set of default traffic channels, letting you know where visitors came from before visiting your site. These channels include the following:

  • Direct – the visitor types the URL into their browser O
  • organic search results
  • Social media traffic
  • Email traffic
  • Affiliate marketing traffic
  • Referral traffic – traffic from external links
  • Paid search traffic

acquisition

Viewing this information lets you know how people are arriving at your site, allowing you to assess whether or not your marketing efforts are working. By evaluating these channels, you can determine where you need to focus your marketing efforts. For example, after an extensive social media marketing campaign that includes a link to a specific landing page, you should see an increase in social media traffic. If there is no increase, you may need to evaluate the content used for the social media marketing campaign.

Set Unique Marketing Goals and Track Your Progress

Google Analytics also provides features which allow you to set goals. While you can set goals for any reason, these features are most commonly used to set milestones for marketing campaigns. You can choose to set a goal of increasing your conversion rates or lowering the bounce rates.

You can also use filters to gain insight into visitor behavior and your progress in reaching your goals. For example, you can filter your data to focus on incoming social media traffic from a specific platform, such as Facebook.

Last Thoughts on Google Analytics

Every CEO and marketing manager should be using Google Analytics to gain valuable insight into their target audience and the results of their marketing efforts. You can evaluate traffic flow, determine what users are searching for, and discover valuable information about your website visitors.

Remember to use these essential features of Google Analytics to maximize your next marketing campaign and build a stronger brand.

 

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John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Just last week, HubSpot published their annual State of Inbound global report. As a researcher at heart myself, I spent a fair amount of time gushing over the stats and content over the past few days; trying to make sense of where Marketing and Sales stand and their developing trends.

One of my biggest questions scrolling through the new report was how this report compares to the report for 2017. Sure, HubSpot spends 11 multicolored charts showing how trends in the field have shifted over the past 4 years, but I just felt like there was more I could find if I did the year to year comparison myself. So that’s exactly what I did. Comparing the 2017 global report and the newest 2018 report, left me with a lot of insight on just how much has changes between December 2016 and March 2018.

That being said, here are the top 5 changes in inbound marketing and sales not to be overlooked, what that means for this ever-changing field, and what we can expect in the year to come.

1) “Thinking specifically about inbound marketing projects, what are your company’s top priorities?”

Diving right in, let’s see how the world of inbound marketing priories has changed.

HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

 

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

Holding tight for first and second place in this category are respectively ‘Growing SEO/ organic presence’ and ‘Blog content creation’. It’s the third place spot that gets interesting. While in 2017 the Bronze winner for this question was ‘Content distributionamplification’, that got knocked down a notch on the roster to make room for ‘Marketing automation’.

So what’s going on here?

As I mentioned in my last post on AI and machine learning, automation is the future. According to Forrester’s recently published ‘Marketing Automation Technology Forecast’, they’re predicting that over the next five years there will be a 14 percent compounding annual growth rate in marketing automation spending. Seems like automation’s about to get big, fast. Making sure your stellar content is getting in front of the right people (or more accurately buyer personas) at the right time is crucial, but even more than that, marketing teams are learning now more than ever that they’ll need to use marketing automation to nurture their leads down their path to purchase. As great and helpful as content can be, if there’s no consistent follow up, you’re missing the boat to position yourself as a trusted problem solver for your prospects. This trend of marketing automation and AI is only bound to grow in 2018. So stay tuned.

2) “What are your company’s top sales priorities for the next year?”

Moving on to sales, we see something similar to what we saw in the marketing question above.

HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

It’s a no-brainer that the main priority of a sales team across time is ‘Closing more deals’. ‘Improving the efficiency of the sales funnel’, also seems to make sense to be found at the top of the list for both 2017 and 2018. The point of intrigue comes again at #3, ‘Social selling’ (2017’s pick) or ‘Reducing the length of sales cycle’ (2018’s pick).

So what’s going on here?

2017 was the year social selling for business was the hot topic. In this year’s report, it states that in 2016 9% of sales teams thought Facebook was a successful channel to connect with prospects. One year later, in 2017, that jumped to 12%. Interested in where that stat sits in 2018? It dropped down to 7%; showing even less successful than it was 2 years prior.

The future for social selling has become uncertain. Sure, you don’t need to an email address or a phone number to follow leads and interact with them on social, but is that the best way to talk about their pains, add value, and position your company as a thought leader? It’s unclear. I’m looking forward to see how well social selling does in the 2019 report. My guess is it might make a comeback due to the compliance of many companies to GDPR. Who knows? Social might just become more important than ever to engage and nurture leads.

3) “What is more difficult to do in sales compared to 2 to 3 years ago?”

Ah yes, a good, meta reflective question. Here’s what sales teams had to say the past couple of years to this question.

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

Telephone, telephone. Email, email. So far so good. Wait — what? What channels fall into the 15% of what 2017 surveyors referred to as ‘Other’ channels? Nevertheless, it’s good to know that LinkedIn is really on the ups when it comes to channels to be investing your time in.

So what’s going on here?

There’s no denying that when it comes to business, especially B2B, LinkedIn has been and will most probably always be the social channel where professions connect, learn, and browse, all while wearing their business hats. Try to catch them on another platform, say Facebook, and there’s a good chance they’re not in the headspace to be thinking about business.

Another perk of LinkedIn is the seemingly endless possibilities of what you can do to marketing and sell using this channel. I love this guide from HubSpot on ways you can do more business on LinkedIn. Read it, learn it, and use it to start generating leads in the post-GDPR age.

5) “Do you feel that your organization’s marketing strategy is effective?”

Different from the Gold, Silver, Bronze analysis we’ve been doing up until now, I almost overlooked this these bar charts.

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

If you’re confused why these charts are set up differently from each other, not to worry. I made a sweet table of my own to help you make sense of the data.

2017 report 2018 report Difference over time
Inbound/ Effective 68% 75% +7%
Inbound/ Ineffective 32% 25% -7%
Outbound/ Effective 48% 62% +14%
Outbound/ Ineffective 52% 38% -14%

So what’s going on here?

Inbound is clearly the winner of the marketing strategy competition and its power only seems to be growing. The interesting part of this is that outbound seems to have made significant advancements in effectiveness compared to last year. So the obvious questions staring us in the face is, why? Talking it over with our data wiz and account manager Nick Kenton, we came to the conclusion that maybe we’ve just gotten smarter at how to do outbound. In the past year with the rise of outbound marketing and sales tools like SimilarTech and Drift, we’ve been about to create more personalized and targeted outbound efforts than ever before. Something tells me we can expect to see more technology like these pop up in the second half of 2018 and into 2019.

Conclusion

The HubSpot State of Inbound report is the pulse that helps marketers and salespeople around the world understand how they fair compared to other professionals in the field. It’s always important to note though that these stats don’t come in a vacuum, but are a reflection of the times we live in and how the world of inbound is changing quickly around us. The better we can tap into trends today, the better off we’ll be at predicting the trends of tomorrow.

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John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

measuring inbound marketing header

Introduction – Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

“A recent survey of 1,200 CEO’s indicated that nearly 70% had lost trust in their marketers’ ability to deliver growth, in part because of the inability to show ROI on campaigns.”  Don’t be that kind of CMO!

Inbound Marketing is one of the most important, yet underrated and misunderstood sections of business, particularly this ever so mentioned key performance indicator “ROI”.

So what does this section contain? The lovable, useful and job-saving ROI (Return on Investment). In layman’s terms, ROI means how much money you brought in for the cost of your campaign. In this post, I’ll break down how to calculate Inbound Marketing ROI, and what metrics to take into account. I’ll also throw in some of the proven and most efficient ways to track your Inbound Marketing for that exact purpose.

Why keeping track of those numbers is so important

The average CEO often sees the marketing sector as nothing more than a costly hassle with little to no reward. Without proof or numeric data to show exactly how an Inbound Marketing campaign can be significantly useful, the title CMO can be nothing but a “glorified role without any purposeful impact on the bottom line.”

Without a measured ROI, you as CMO have no possible way to quantify what your business gets in return for its possibly costly campaign. B2B Marketing budgets can, have, and will be slashed without evidence of effect. Why spend all that money on something that MIGHT improve sales? The CEO ponders, but cutting marketing’s budget could be a choice that results in the slow death of business.

More so, with a calculated ROI a failed campaign doesn’t mean a scolding or vacant position for said CMO. The issue a lot of B2B marketers have is the simple lack of analytic ability in its marketing team, e.g. they don’t know what metrics or parameters they should be documenting. When marketing leaders were asked to name the factors that their department was weakest in, 49% stated: “Use of analytics to guide marketing decisions.” If a CMO is keeping track of the right metrics, a failed, or not totally successful marketing campaign can become nothing more than a learning experience, or even beneficial to the marketing team in the future.

How to calculate ROI

On paper, ROI couldn’t be any easier to explain. You take the revenue derived from the investment, subtract the total cost of the investment and divide the total by the expense of the investment:

(revenue-cost)/cost

Sounds simple, right? It’s a trap. It’s never that easy.

“Hard” and “Soft” metrics

Hard metrics are things that can be easily quantified, for example, if you sold a product for $ 350 and the overall cost of advertising was $ 100 your ROI rate would be = 2.5

Soft metrics, on the other hand, are harder to define, and are not concrete. For example, you can’t easily quantify social media attention or buzz, but it is a very affecting factor to your bottom line. You could count every Facebook like as monetary value and treat it like a hard metric, but this is incredibly unreliable, unrealistic and amounts to wishful thinking.

Marketing Automation eBook

 

How to calculate ROI for Inbound Marketing

Now that you got your head around the basic formula, and are certainly excited about the return, you will face one dilemma: the investment.

Simply said: profitability depends on numerous things that requires you to look beyond simple sales figures.

Some companies subtract the overall cost of the marketing campaign from how much the customer paid, but what they fail to do is to factor in the ‘true’ budget for marketing and it’s totally and completely wrong. CMO’s often fail to take into account other costs for Inbound Marketing, while this creates more work, it creates a more realistic ROI measurement.

The 4 Up-front costs to consider when measuring inbound ROI:

1. Employees costs

An example of a seemingly obvious but often neglected metric is the cost of employees. Working with an in-house marketing team, or hiring freelancers can be costly, and depending on the experience of said employee(s) you could end up paying lots for little.

2. Agency costs

Short term-wise, it’s usually cost effective to work with an expert agency. Agency teams work together providing only the skills and expertise needed at the given point of your campaign, meaning you pay for those skills and expertise when they are of use. Long term-wise, it’s smart to calculate the ROI of training your in-house team and to gradually shift to that, hence keeping the know-how under your wing.

3. Marketing automation tools

Unfortunately for B2B marketers, bombarding a potential lead with advertising, while simpler than Inbound Marketing, is interruptive and doesn’t prove effective. The most effective way to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy is to use marketing automation tools. Factor the cost of the latter when calculating ROI. Yearly costs vary between $2,000 to $60,000. There are “best of breed” solutions as well as “all in one”.

These tools provide closed loop solutions that will make a CMO’s life a breeze. The challenge of working without these is titanic. Marketing automation tools have been proven to create marketing improvement, because more feedback for every sector is provided and a potential lead’s behaviour can be monitored and tracked from the source.

Tools that enable you to keep track of the traffic, or the click to your website don’t show you what influences leads to become MQLs, SQLs and eventually customers. You may have methods to receive the numbers but no real information on precisely how a sale was created. Without marketing automation tools, you’re almost playing a guessing game.

Marketing automated tools create feedback that is not only useful for marketing, but allows for every section of the business to know what methods result in sales and should be included.

4. Asset creation costs

So you have a stunning blog, you have in-house/ outsourced experts working on your strategy, and you’ve implemented automated marketing tools. What’s missing? Oh, that’s right, the core. You will need to create assets for your Inbound Marketing, i.e blog posts, ebooks, infographics, landing pages, CTAs and more).

Inbound Marketing agencies will have tier 1 writers and designers ready on demand. Freelancers can also result in a cheap and effective option for ‘one off’ content. Just remember that your inbound assets are probably the most important factor in your Inbound Marketing strategy, this is not the place to cut costs. If you decide to get your in-house team to create the assets, make sure to follow the following editing checklist. Factor asset creation costs into effect.

Where CMO’s handle metrics wrong

 1. “I know, I know, I should measure Inbound Marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”

A primal reason that CMO’s fail to use their analytic data in a beneficial way is that most of them don’t know what metrics are of value. It’s all well and good having a warehouse full of data, but utterly pointless if you don’t know what data is relevant or how to process it.

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles.”
Steve Jobs

Marketers tend to track the large, great looking data that simulates results. As a CMO, it’s your job to keep track and monitor the most important metrics when it comes to generating leads. By now, you are certainly familiar on how to optimise your website or blog in order to create a long-lasting marketing strategy. If not, we strongly advise you to read our detailed guide.

Next to keyword rankings and conversion rates, it is important to understand the lifecycle stages for successful inbound sales. Simply said, you must know the steps to turn a stranger into a customer.

MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL’s (sales qualified leads) are as well key metrics you should know by heart, as they are the basis to improve your marketing and sales approach to incoming deals. If you just thought about SQL being a database, then we advise you to read our detailed article on the importance of MQLs and SQLs when it comes to generating leads.

But big numbers don’t confirm the generation of leads or conversions. While social media plays an essential part of Inbound Marketing and may lead to numerous results, it is important to track and monitor the quality of leads generated. Otherwise, you will end up asking yourself why you’re not getting high-quality B2B leads.

2. “I just measure what is easy!”

CMO’s love to collect the easy data, and often only focus on singular metrics, how many visits to a website, email systems to track how frequent emails are opened or how many attendees at events. The problem with prioritizing metrics like this is no promise of lead or conversion, and no variation in its methods. These metrics show interaction, yes, and generate potential leads too, but this data doesn’t show in concrete what influence was successful and the most efficient at gravitating leads and securing conversions. This metric alone isn’t enough to result in marketing improvement. To put into other words, there’s no easy way out.

Finding your way out of the maze

Good news: the hard part is over, so make yourself a nice cup of coffee and let the information sink in. Now that you understand the whole process of calculating and measuring the ROI, there are two recommended methods by marketing experts you should consider:

1. Closed-Loop-Marketing

The method of Closed-Loop-Marketing is recommended by HubSpot. This process makes sure that every step of measuring your ROI is documented and shared between departments.

 

 

Source: HubSpot

With this method, you have to focus on the right channels and offers that are the most powerful ones, help you to get clearer results, and gain insights into your target audience (as discussed here, defining the ideal customer persona is important to target your marketing strategy). It can also shorten your sales cycle and help you save overall investment costs.

In other words: The Closed-Loop-Marketing reporting helps you to quickly identify if something is broken or not. If it’s broken, fix it. If not, make it shine!

2. Attribution Modeling

A second, important method of reporting the ROI is tracking results of marketing programs to assign the value to the first (or last) program that has touched the deal. Since it is quite a complex method, it’s best to read through our overview of the attribution Modeling.

Conclusion

Reflect on past metrics that show Improvement.

Study the past if you would define the future.”

― Confucius

No matter how big a number is, or the effort took, the primal thing to think upon is which metrics advance your marketing effectiveness. Data that proves one particular marketing method is working, will let the CMO know where to focus their time and resources, leading to less waste of financial investment. A market leader who doesn’t keep track of practical results and data creates no progression and leads to financial loss. So, if you want to keep your title of a CMO, better stay on track.

If you found this useful, I invite you to download our FREE Digital Marketing MUST Reports and Measures eBook. This is your guide to start measuring what truly matters in your campaigns and take control of your spendGet your FREE copy now >>

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John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

ppc reportig.jpg

Introduction

Not all marketing efforts can be measured accurately (SEO for example can get very challenging to measure). PPC is great in the sense that it enables very precise (though sometimes complicated) measurments.

As with every aspect of digital marketing reporting, the purpose of a PPC report is to inform you on whether your marketing efforts are helping to achieve your goals. If not, your campaigns need to be realigned to do just that. Don’t let yourself get distracted by overwhelming data, remember that what matters most is to have a clear grasp of the bottom line. Not every measurable metric needs to be included in a PPC report. A good report should reflect the results of your marketing efforts and revolve around ROI.

Your periodical PPC report (whether weekly, montly or quarterly) should be built in some sort of bucketing method. This post will walk you through what you need to know.

A PPC report structure

When creating a PPC report, marketers should make sure to consider the level of PPC knowledge and familiarity with PPC terminology of the reports readers. This should go without saying but the persons being informed needs to be able to understand the report, not just be impressed by it. The data should always be explained with respect to what it actually means for your  business.

A PPC report should start with the most valuable,  bottom-line information, following a drill down of each channel/campaign.

Here’s an example of a recommended report structure:

Executive summary

This part should detail the total media spent on all channels vs. the bottom-line success of the efforts. A pro report will elaborate down to revenue and ROI/ROAS metrics.

For example: This month we’ve spent 20,000$, generated 10 customers and a total revenue of 100,000$.

Campaign Performance (Consolidated channels)

This should consolidate all channel effort per specific campaign goals.

For example: a B2B Company aiming at selling three different products will probably be advertising on multiple channels (Google, Facebook, Linkedin, etc).

Each of the three products will be advertised in a seperate multi-channel campaigns, it’s important to understand the performance of each campaign seperatly (campaign A for product A, Campaign B for product B, etc)

The data should be displayed as following:

  • Campaign A – Summary
    • Channel Performance
      • Google
      • Facebook
      • LinkedIn
      • Any other channel
  • Campaign B – Summary
    • Channel Performance
      • Google
      • Facebook
      • LinkedIn
      • Any other channel

Improvment suggestions

Expect to find performance issues reported in your PPC campaigns. A report that presents flawless performance is almost suspicious. Shortcomings are part of the equation, it’s important to acknowledge what went wrong, and create a comprehensive plan of action in order to optimize and improve.

Two examples of how deep PPC can get

With PPC reporting, there is a wealth of information that can be measured to inform you of whether ad and keyword dollars spent are worth it or not, but there are two metrics which are particularly challenging. However complicated, these metrics are super useful to understand and they’re  not impossible measure, so go the extra mile and do. I’m talking about attribution modeling and offline conversions.

  1.  Attribution modeling, or understanding how each PPC marketing channel is performing for paid ads (Google, Facebook, etc.), takes a decent amount of effort (but it’s worth it). This metric is typically measured using Google Analytics, which allows marketers to shed light on which paid ads have the greatest campaign ROI. You can read our guide on how to setup Google Analytics attribution models here.
  2. While not applicable for every business (Low-touch SaaS, eCommerce, other online-only retailers), tracking offline conversions is often overlooked as a metric to scale advertising effectiveness. An offline conversion is basically any time a customer is converted outside of directly using your website (for example via phone or a personal meeting). To measure offline conversions using Google AdWords is a little labor intensive, but it is valuable in order determine how online ad spending has been resulting in offline conversions. With a bit of digging, you can report on how the investment in each keyword  has influenced a campaign’s success. Click here for our step-by-step guide on how to use your CRM and AdWords to track offline conversions.

Reporting shortcomings

When it comes to any digital marketing campaign, not everything is going to be perfect 100 percent of the time. A lot of times there will be tracking issues or data discrepancies that will prevent evaluating and measuring deeply enough. That’s natural. Make sure that your tracking is aligned and enables optimal indepth reporting.

Conclusion

By understanding what worked, what didn’t work and why, you will keep on improving. Don’t forget to always keep your eyes on the prize – measure for ROI.

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John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

the importance of reporting header

Introduction – Measuring for ROI

From the moment digital advertising entered the arena, it was obvious that it’s a game changer. Finally a cost-effectiveness method in which you can actually measure the impact of every dollar spent – no more excuses.

Measuring methods have been changing constantly in order to adapt to marketers’ evolving needs and understanding. At first, impressions were mostly measured, a little later on clicks following by the rate between the two.

A Campaign used to be considered successful if it generated a vast amount of impressions and clicks, regardless if what those clicks yielded.

Over the years, as technology and marketers evolved, so did measuring methods, introducing conversion tracking, enabling marketers to measure for conversions on their website. Conversion tracking was mainly used for lead acquisition tracking, and all the industry aligned accordingly. Affiliate and ad-networks started offering CPL (Cost per Lead) models instead of CPM or CPC (cost per impression/click) models. Campaigns were considered successful in accordance with the amount of leads they were generating and the cost per lead per each campaign.

Marketers soon identified the opportunity and realized that precise measurments provide them with much better insight then before, so why not drill down deeper?

Technology and marketers kept evolving and by now it is possible to measure the direct revenue and ROI driven by your digital marketing campaigns.

However, with more data = greater measuring and reporting complexity. In this post I’ll explain how to find the optimal report you need to generating without drowning in an ocean of data.

Let’s discuss KPIs

The key performance indicator (KPI) quickly became a buzzword in the digital marketing industry, because it streamlines the decision making process for choosing what should be paid attention to the most, more so than other data that could be studied, to reflect whether or not a campaign is working and achieving its goals.

In other words, just because data can be measured does not mean that it needs to be reported in order to find out if an online campaign is returning on the company’s investment. The key word in KPI is ‘key’.

The KPIs you should measure depend on your budget, industry, business type and goals.

The number of possible variables to measure in digital marketing is enough to make a person’s head spin. That being said, once you have identified which variables are truly your key performance indicators, the hard part is over (besides tech requirements). The following is an example of a list of some of the most commonly used KPIs for digital marketing purposes (paid advertising):

  1. Impressions / CPM
  2. Clicks / CPC
  3. CTR
  4. Conversions / Conversion Rate
  5. Lead / Cost Per Lead (CPL)
  6. Purchase / Cost Per Action (CPA)
  7. Revenue/ROI/ROAS

Each of the above inform marketers of whether or not their efforts are worth the time and money you are paying them.

As mentioned, there are many ways to evaluate the efficiency of marketing efforts, but each marketing campaign is unique and demands specific KPI to optimize for – that KPI should be the main focus of the report.

If your company is a clothing brand, an expanding geographic reach is a great KPI to measure your ROI. If you are a cloud SaaS company, it would not be as valuable to focus on geographic reach as much as it would to measure contacts created, MQLs, SQLs, ARPU, etc.

To put it simply, in the case above there is no reason for the SaaS company to set geographic reach as a KPI, while there certainly is for a clothing brand. Pay attention to KPIs that only reflect you and your company’s marketing goals. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money, of which it should be safe to assume none of us are big fans.

While brand awareness KPIs like the above example are sometimes very useful, they are the more “old-school” means to understand marketing efficiency. After all, what does it matter if people know about a brand but aren’t buying from it? In digital marketing, the savviest marketers will measure KPIs that demonstrate how well the number of visitors are converted into leads and how well leads are converted into your customers. This is how you get to understand ROI.

That being said, brand awareness has significant impact on your digital marketing efforts. Good brand awareness will increase CTRs, Conversion rates, CPLs and eventually ROI (It is very difficult to measure the EXACT impact of brand awareness unless a conversion lift research is being performed).

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The necessity of client-specific KPIs

The purpose of digital marketing reporting is not exclusively for informing you of whether or not the marketing  efforts are yielding positive ROI. Reporting should to keep you informed of your campaign strategy’s effectiveness. This point is important, because a company’s industry dictates the KPI’s that prove meaningful to measure. Nearly every single enterprise, startup, or “Mom and Pop” shop has an online presence, but different industries demand specific KPIs be measured to determine marketing success.

Different businesses have different goals and challenges. Accordingly,  measurments vary to reflect different digital marketing efforts. All businesses should attempt to measure for ROI. Sometimes the diversity of marketing channels (omni/multi channel advertising) poses a great technological challange when attempting to measure the exact ROI per each channel and how much to attribute to each channel.

Here are two examples of this complexity:

  1. SaaS Company – these companies produce software as a service solutions and rely on online users to pay in order to use their software. Typically, saas products (especially the costly ones) require a long sales cycle and sometimes entail micro-conversion along the way. Measuring micro-conversions could assist in understanding what marketing action performs better. For exampl, the amount and cost per MQLs/SQLs or opportunities generated by a specific channel could tell a much better story than focusing only on the amount of impressions or clicks.
  2. Large retailers without an online store – these businesses can’t easily measure (if at all) the effectiveness of their online marketing. A typical campaign for such retailers is a brand awareness campaign. In such instance, social sharing, brand mentioning, impressions or average monthly searches are good metrics for measuring marketing efforts.

In both examples, we would want to track the cost per click or impressions, the CTRs and conversion rates in order to better optimize the campaigns. Reporting wise, we would want to asses the main impact of each campaign and what can be done in order to improve it.

Conclusion

Monthly reports are a marketing status quo. A report can be done each quarter, once a year, once a week or whatever you decide. Make sure your reports are result driven, define relevant KPIs that are specific for your business and make sure you are measuring for ROI.

If you found this useful, I invite you to download our Digital Marketing MUST Reports and Measures eBook. This is your guide to start measuring what truly matters in your campaigns and take control of your spendGet your FREE copy now >>

 

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

 

 

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John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

3.png

Introduction

Harnessing and making good use of data has become essential in the last couple of years. In fact, many businesses will describe data as the underlying engine of their business objective. What they say is that anyone who can harness the data that is relevant to the core of their business will succeed in driving the business forward.

Google Analytics has been constantly providing all the tools necessary for businesses to gain Analytics 360 insight about their website traffic. To help companies get even more data, Google has recently launched Google Analytics 360 Suite. It consists of six apps, two re-branded and four brand new tools.

 

The Google Analytics 360 applications

1. Google Audience Centre 360 is a data management platform. It helps seamlessly integrate both Google and DoubleClick’s ad networks, and also, it works with third-party DSPs. This can help businesses avoid overusing retargeting campaigns and reach wider audiences with their efforts.

2. Google Optimize 360, which is currently in beta, will come as a surprise for many. It will let users test their landing pages, offers, funnel flows and all of that without any knowledge of coding. This way, it will become easier for marketers to see what works best with their audience and improve their marketing strategy.

3. Google Data Studio 360, also currently in beta, is built on the GoogleDocs framework and provides and extensive solution for data visualisation ability to change data in real time ,which will make it easier for users to update and collaborate on the tasks. In addition, it provides tools that will make data easy to present.

4. Google Tag Manager 360 is an existing tool, which worked within Google Analytics as a partner recently. However, from now on users will be able to use it as a standalone product. Now, the powerful APIs will provide simplified data collection opportunities for increased targeting accuracy.

5. Google Analytics 360 seems to be just a re-branded version of Google Analytics premium. So far there are no new features coming along with it, but there are rumours that there will be several new features coming  up in the future.

6. Google Attribution 360 is a tool that was previously known as Adometry. After acquiring the company in 2014, Google integrated this feature into its Google Analytics Premium, but will now serve it as a standalone product. The tool helps advertisers allocate their investments into marketing more precisely and efficiently. In order to be integrated with the 360 Suite, the app was rebuilt from scratch.

Conclusion

What makes Google Analytics Suite 360 particularly interesting is the fact that these tools will be available for purchase individually. Therefore, if a company needs only one of the tools, there will be a possibility to purchase it separately and save some cash.

Making clever use of data is rapidly becoming more important than ever, and companies like Google are trying to simplify data consumption, gathering and interpretation as much as possible, in order to help businesses maximize the effectiveness of their marketing tactics. Google Analytics 360 seems to be a promising set of features that should at least be given a try by every business.

If you have tested any of the products, share your experience and opinion with us in the comments bellow!

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