Marketing Analytics can be a broad concept when first introduced; however, it can boil down to identifying key metrics that relate to your marketing spend. This can vary from business to business depending mainly on the business’ industry and, specifically, the metrics that are related to that industry. For example, a business might be interested in their blog post performance. They may look specifically at how many organic sessions that blog post is generating or maybe the average time spent on that blog post to measure user engagement. Ultimately, that business would like to tie conversions (whether that be a RFQ, Contact Form, Newsletter Sign Up, etc.) together with that blog post to get an ROI on the creation and implementation of the blog post. Another business may not be writing blogs; but instead, they may be interested in creating a PPC campaign for a new product or service that is launching. Some things they could be interested in may be total impressions or clicks on their ads, the reach of their ads, or conversions contributed from that ad. All with the idea that they can estimate some sort of ROI on their ad campaigns.
There are many different ways a business can look to market their products or services digitally; and because of that, there are many different marketing metrics to monitor. All in all, Marketing Analytics is the process of recording marketing data and presenting it in a way that can drive meaningful insights about your business.
So, you understand what marketing analytics is and now are interested in recording your own data. First things first, what data do you want to collect? In today’s age, almost anything can be tracked and recorded. However, it may be more difficult to find meaning in the noise of 1000’s of metrics. This is why it is important to figure out what exactly your business wants to track and improve on. An example might be wanting to improve your organic traffic to your site; in which case, you would want to track website traffic, google search results, keywords, competitors, etc. Maybe you are more interested in tracking your social performance, which may include tracking social sessions, social impressions, social clicks, social conversions, etc. The good news is that we, at Tactyx, can consult with you to make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want to track and improve upon. However, you can still implement tracking without our help.
Tracking Code Implementation
Google Analytics Tracking Implementation
Google Search Console Tracking Implementation
Google Search Console is a powerful tool for monitoring your performance in Google Search Results. This can be helpful for any business owner who wants to see how they rank for queries related to their business. Again, Google provides a ton of information on how to properly provide ownership of your domain and get started with Google Search Console. Here is another great article explaining step by step how to get started with search console.
Google Ads Tracking Implementation
Google Ads data may be optional for some business owners. In order to use Google Ads, you have to set a monthly budget for your ads. The nice thing about running ads is that you are only paying if someone clicks on your ad and subsequently ends up on your site. Since this is a Google product, Google does a good job of providing resources on how to get started. Here is another article explaining step by step how to get started with Google Ads.
How To Find Value in Marketing Analytics?
Ultimately, the goal is to find value in the tools you are using. What can be difficult is the overwhelming amount of data readily available to you after implementing your tracking code. TACTYX takes an approach that brings your most important metrics right to the forefront, so you can monitor campaigns and performances at a glance. However, this is still doable without a TACTYX report. Below, we will give some examples of important metrics to keep your eye on regardless of your business’ industry.
Google Analytics Use Cases
Once you have your Google Analytics Account in front of you, there is a Audience tab and within that an Overview section. Within this, there are options to look at user trends, Average session duration, bounce rate, and more. For this example, we would look at your website sessions for a specific time range. This can be adjusted in the top right corner.
Already, you can begin to look at overall trends for sessions to your site. Are you losing more sessions over time? Are you gaining more sessions?
But we can break this down a little further to look specifically at which default channel groupings are driving traffic to your site. This can give you ideas on which marketing channels aren’t performing as well as others and may need more attention.
If you go to the Acquisition tab, then further to All Traffic and finally channels.
What we can tell right away is that Direct traffic has brought in 82% of all traffic over the last couple of months, followed by Paid Search at 9.5% of traffic. Looking at this, someone may suggest investing more money into keyword research and blog posts to help drive organic traffic to your site. Referral sessions have only accounted for a single user to the site. This may indicate that your business needs to reach out to blogs or websites that mention your own site in an attempt to get backlinks to your site! These are very simple observations, that you could start doing today.
Google Analytics also has a friendly help bar that can assist you in finding certain metrics. We could try typing in "top bounce rate by pages".
Google generates a quick report for us to look at pages with the lowest bounce rate on our site. From here we could figure out the unique aspects of these pages that keep users engaged in the site. There is much more that Google Analytics offers in terms of website data such as demographics of your users or keywords that drive traffic. In this post; however, we investigate some of the more general features that anyone can start using to gain business insights.
Google Search Console Use Cases
Google Search Console has tons of valuable information about your performance in Google Search Results. One thing to take note of with Google Search Console is that it is a tool to monitor your organic performance. TACTYX uses Google Search Console to mainly observe how your website is performing in Google Search Console, meaning we investigate impressions, clicks, click through rate, and your position for your organic keywords.
Under the performance tab, there is an option to look at Search Results. When you click that, you are brought to a screen that displays your performance in search results. Within this, there are filters to look specifically at date ranges, web results (vs. image results, video results, news results, etc.), specific queries (keywords), specific web pages, and more.
What we are really interested in here is your trends for your impressions, clicks, average CTR, and average position. If your impressions and clicks are increasing, we know that your google results are becoming more and more frequent. More people are starting to see listings to your website organically. These metrics are all correlated together– meaning that if your CTR goes up, your clicks per impression will increase as well. As your average position gets closer to 1 (top ranking results), you will see an increase in impressions which, in turn, can lead to more clicks! This is a great way to monitor how your organic campaigns are performing, such as work on on-page SEO or technical SEO.
Another useful aspect to Google Search Console is the Core Web Vitals report located in the Experience tab.
This can help show you what URLs are failing the core web vitals assessment which can affect how your page is ranking on Google. Opening these reports, will show you the error affecting the pages as well as the pages themselves, so you can begin to fix your website to rank more effectively organically for queries of interest.
Much like Google Analytics, there is much more information that can be extracted from this tool. However, for the purposes of this blog, we are looking into some of the general functionality.
Google Ads Uses Cases
Google Ads can be useful when trying to supplement traffic from organic sources. We at TACTYX when working with Ads campaigns focus on putting resources towards hard to rank for keywords. If there is a keyword that has a high keyword difficulty and is difficult to rank for organically, this may be an indicator to run a paid search campaign for it. There are multiple ways to set up a campaign and ad group to be tailored to your specific needs whether it be website traffic, leads, sales, etc. The nice thing about PPC campaigns, is that as their name suggests (Pay-Per-Click), you only pay for an ad that someone has clicked on. Depending on your business, your ad groups may look different in the way they are constructed. For purposes of how to look at the data and draw conclusions, we will examine a search ad’s performance focused on generating leads.
When examining ad group performance, you will see a trend of metrics such as these. You can change this to look at any specific metrics you would like. In this scenario we are examining clicks and impressions.
Depending on your monthly budget, these trends can look different between companies targeting similar keywords. More importantly, you can see which keywords (these are selected when creating an ad group, keywords you wish to target) are generating clicks, impressions, and conversions (conversions could be selling a product, receiving an RFQ, newsletter sign-ups, etc.). One thing you could do to begin optimizing your ads would be to look at how keywords are performing. Are you spending too much on one keyword that is not converting visitors? Is one keyword driving a lot of clicks, but has a high bounce rate? Does a keyword have a high average cost per click, meaning you are spending too much of your budget on a specific keyword.
Here is some data on keywords that are involved in this ad group over a fixed range. We can tell that the first keyword has 4 conversions, a cost/conversion of $25.90, nearly 200 clicks, around 6,500 impressions, a CTR of 3.02%, and average cost per click of 52 cents, a total cost of $103.62, and a conversion rate around 2%. For each business, these numbers will mean different things, a cost per click of 52 cents may be low for some businesses or may be too high for others, a CTR of 3% may be too low for other businesses; whereas, some businesses may be happy with that CTR. What to take away from this is that depending on your business set up and goals you want to hit, you can monitor ad campaign performance by examining these keywords. Is your keyword generating enough conversions with 4 conversions over the time period? Does your conversion’s monetary value equate to something greater than $25.90? If it doesn’t, then you may be losing money on this keyword. This is a basic analysis that can be performed on your Google Ads Account. Similar to the other tools, there are many more in depth analyses that can be performed to monitor ROI on ads and overall performance.
In Conclusion
Hopefully this was helpful in understanding marketing analytics and their impact on business insights. All of these tools mentioned above are free and can be helpful in many situations when evaluating your overall website performance. If you are just beginning tracking data and are not comfortable just yet with having an agency help in the process, the examples mentioned above should get you started in the right direction. As you use these tools more frequently, you will begin to see some of the other use cases they have and other more complex analyses you can dive into. However, if this is something you aren’t familiar with or don’t have the time to do, we at TACTYX have extensive knowledge in this field and have seen success with our clients in improving their digital image. With the growing popularity of tracking data and its use to accelerate business success, we aim to help any business, regardless of their size, in becoming a more profitable company through the use of digital marketing.
Feel free to check out the rest of our website for more information about TACTYX’s services.
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