At the end of last Friday’s article, I introduced the business intelligence dashboard, which is a tool to centralize all of your key business and marketing metrics. If you ever wished you could get a bird’s eye view of your daily, weekly, and monthly performance across your business, then you’re going to love dashboards.
To give you an idea for how powerful dashboards can be, I’m going to walk you through how to set up your own digital marketing dashboard using Google Analytics. Since Google Analytics is free and quick and easy to install, every business from a “Mom & Pop,” all the way up to, well, a “Google-sized” business can use this tool to improve their marketing decisions.
Now, just because Google Analytics is free and easy to use doesn’t mean it’s not very powerful. In fact, I’m only going to scratch the surface in this article. By the end you’ll have a good feel for the tool’s capabilities so you can dig deeper into the areas you need to set up in your business.
Source: analytics.blogspot.com
One Report For All Your Marketing Channels
My favorite report in Analytics is the Channels report within the “Acquisition” section of Analytics. The Channels report shows you exactly how every marketing channel (like SEO, AdWords, email marketing, social media, and even offline channels like print, TV, radio, and direct mail) is performing within any date range you want to analyze.
Now before you log into your own Google Analytics account and accuse me of lying, I need to explain how Analytics tracks the source of your website traffic, and how it attributes the traffic to the correct marketing channel. Some of this happens automatically, but a lot of it does not.
Use the URL Builder for ALL of Your Links
Google Analytics does a pretty good job at figuring out where a website visitor came from. For example, if the visitor clicked a link in Facebook, then Analytics will consider that social media traffic in your Channels report. If a visitor clicked an AdWords ad in Google.com, then Analytics will consider that Paid Search traffic in your Channels report.
But what about a website visitor from one of your email marketing campaigns? Or how about a visitor from a print ad? In both of those situations Analytics can’t easily categorize the traffic.
That is unless you use the URL Builder. The URL Builder is a tool that will add tracking code to any URL you enter into the tool. Most importantly, you can add the medium, or marketing channel, to your URL to specifically tell Analytics how to categorize the traffic.
That means you can use the URL Builder to create a tracking URL for your email campaign and every time a subscriber clicks the link to visit your website, Google Analytics will correctly consider that traffic to be from your Email Marketing.
If you’re not using the URL Builder, then your Channels report is not as accurate as it should be. I recommend making it a habit to use the URL Builder every time you need to create a link for your marketing.
Track Conversions Per Channel
Now that your Channel report is accurate, it’s time to add conversion tracking. A conversion could be a lead from a webform, a sale from your e-commerce store, or even a phone call if you’re using phone call tracking software.
To set up a Goal, go to the Admin section of Google Analytics, then click on Goals in the right column and follow the steps to add a Goal. (For complete, step-by-step directions to set up Analytics, including Goals, watch our Introduction to Google Analytics video training.)
To track a webform or an e-commerce sale, you will copy/paste the “thank you” page that visitors see after completing the webform or order form. Then any time someone makes it to the “thank you” page, Google Analytics will count that as a conversion in the Channel report.
The goal here (pardon the pun) is to ultimately have one report that shows you all of the traffic per channel, as well as all of the conversions and revenue per channel. This can all be done using the URL Builder and Goals.
But you may be wondering, what about phone calls? Calls obviously don’t take place on your website so how could Analytics report on phone calls?
Well now we’re getting into advanced tracking and I promised to keep this article simple. For more information, I recommend IfByPhone’s article and directions to set up call tracking within Google Analytics. No coding skills are required to set this up, but it’s definitely an advanced tracking tactic.
Your Digital Marketing Dashboard
OK, at this point you have all the tools to set up your digital marketing dashboard. As promised, you’ll be able to see all of your marketing channel performance, including traffic trends, conversions, and even phone calls. All in one report!
To learn more about dashboards and how they can improve your marketing, register for our webinar on Thursday.