While I may enjoy spending a day in Google Analytics and spreadsheets, I know it’s not for everyone. I’m aware many marketers got into their roles to avoid numbers altogether (no shame from me, I successfully avoided math classes after high school). With that in mind, I’ve put together some tips to help you get the most out of your marketing data so that you can get right back to the parts you love! And if you find out that you love the numbers too, welcome to the club.

This guest blog is by Lauren Simonis-Hunter, a past member of the Ad 2 Madison board. Interested in writing your own guest blog?  Contact Kaine Korzekwa, Ad 2 Madison VP and Comms Lead, at kainekorzekwa@gmail.com. 

Tip #1: Find Your Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs)

This may sound like something your college professor would tell you, but hear me out. You should be looking at numbers that actually indicate the success of your tactics and goals. For example, a campaign built around the goal of brand awareness is going to have very different success metrics than one intended for lead generation. You can’t always look at pageviews or ad impressions or likes on a Facebook page. In some cases, these numbers do indicate success, but other times they are just numbers. Here’s a handy list to get you started on thinking about which metrics to pay attention to:

  • Your goal is brand awareness
    • Look at the numbers that show eyeballs on your content. This can be pageviews, impressions, reach, open rates on emails, etc.
  • Your goal is lead generation
    • Look at attribution of which channels brought in the most amount of form fills. This can usually be done in Google Analytics if you have Event or Goal tracking set up, or in your marketing automation software if you have attribution models set up.
  • Your goal is thought leadership
    • Look at both attribution in Google Analytics, as well as click performance on your promotional efforts. This may also look like conversion rates: How many people who saw the promotional effort clicked through? How many people who registered for your webinar actually attended?

Tip #2: Compare Like Data

Grouping data into categories can help you identify trends and create realistic benchmarks. Not all of your content and efforts have the same effect and shouldn’t be compared as if they were apples to apples, when they really might be granny smith to pink lady to red delicious. Here are some ways you can segment your data to create a better picture:

  • Use year-over-year graphs to help you see seasonality in your industry. This may help you better understand a sudden increase or decrease in the metric you are analyzing, as well as identify particularly overachieving or under-performing campaigns that fall outside your normal trends.
  • If your organization has different business lines, product lines, etc., segmenting out efforts related to those can help set realistic goals based on that content. A clothing company, for example, may see different benchmarks from their men’s clothing campaigns compared to their women’s clothing campaigns.
  • Compare the same types of content. When looking at landing page or form performance, an educational worksheet will likely vary from that of a sell sheet or case study. This can also relate to your emails if you send out different types like a newsletter compared to a webinar invite compared to a nurture email.

Tip #3: Know Your Tools

There are a ton of different spots where you can usually collect your data. I find it handy to keep notes on where I’m pulling certain data from to ensure I am always pulling from the same source. This is particularly helpful when looking at campaigns that span over months and when I’m trying to compare data from previous periods. Additionally, there may be ways you can make your reporting process more efficient. Do your tools offer the ability to set up a report that can then be sent to your email automatically on a scheduled basis? One tool I love that helps speed up my monthly reporting process is Google Data Studio, which allows you to set up a report and will automatically update data from directly connected sources. Simply update the date ranges as necessary and your report is complete!

Tip #4: Ask the Question “Why?”

While this tip may feel like I’m asking you to go down the rabbit hole of data, it will all be worth it, I promise. If you see something that seems abnormal or a trend that is going the opposite direction than it should, asking “why” may help you find some things that may need fixing, or unexpected wins that deserve celebrating. Instead of giving you some general ideas, I figured it might be helpful to provide examples where I’ve asked “why” and got the information I needed.

  • Example 1: unsubscribe data. I started to notice a trend of unsubscribes going up on my emails. This was a month over month trend of increasingly larger numbers. So, I asked myself “why is this happening?” It wasn’t all concentrated on one type of email or business line, so what was going on? I started digging into the lists of people who unsubscribed and noticed that they tended to be in large groups from the same organization. That told me that there was something probably automatically unsubscribing people. We updated our unsubscribe link from a one-click unsubscribe that could be triggered by spam checkers, to a link directing to a landing page with a button to unsubscribe. Our numbers went back to normal!
  • Example 2: huge spike in pageviews. While looking at pageviews during my monthly reporting, I noticed one blog post had a significantly higher amount of pageviews than in previous months. We weren’t doing any specific promotion to this blog post, so why was this happening? After some digging in Google Analytics it became clear that the traffic was coming from Organic Search. That lead me to dig in Google Search Console to see that the page was getting a ton of traffic from a specific keyword. Turns out, we had gotten a featured snippet without noticing. Cue the celebration!

Numbers may not be for everyone, but every marketer needs them. Hopefully these tips will make reporting on your campaigns and marketing tactics easier, and maybe even more fun.