Digital Marketing Reporting
As soon as we connect digital marketing tools to our sites, it activates a huge stream of data right away. But what’s actually important in this stream?
One of the biggest complexities in all reporting is enhancing the meaningful results to the viewer.
In regards to websites, there’s a few most important aspects of it’sperformance.
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1. Website Traffic Data Report
First of all, it is important to see how your website is converting users to customer.
As soon as we connect Google Analytics 4 to our website there’s a stream of user behaviour data. It is all worth mentioning but in our practice, there’s a priority for some of the metrics.
Google Analytics 4
It collects data from website users and distributes the data to reporting tools.
Most obviously, our websites are meant to convert users coming our way, meaning, we want them to convert from an unknown user to our customer. So we track when user fills the client forms.
The best way to look the rate of users converting is to look at it by user segments. One of the most important segmentation is Channel Group segment which allows us to see where did our clients came from when they first signed up to our offer. These channels are predefined to be
- Organic Search
- Paid Search
- Organic Social
- Paid Social
- Referral
- Direct
Each channel can have sub-segments, f.e., Organic Search includes channels such as Google Search, Bing Search, Yandex Search, etc.
There is going to be quite a difference between all channel, as you may imagine. Each channel attracts our users in a different way, thus, their intent also can differ.
2. SEO Report
Important aspect of your website is how many people it can attract with no advertisement.
With rare exceptions, the SEO performance should always be primary optimisation target to successfully attract users via Google Search with organic, non-paid results. So the important measurements will cover SEO metrics.
Google Search Console
It shows us how many times our webpages appear on user’s search queries on Google.
Each visit on Google Search Console (GSC) you see some total numbers:
- Impressions - total number of times our page result has been shown to the Google User for their search query.
- Clicks - The number of times users have clicked on our page results.
- CTR - click-through rate - percentage of clicks out of all impressions.
- Position - an average position of our page in search page results. The lower the number, the better.
Then, under the line chart there’s really useful table with all the queries our users have typed to see our results. Of course, there’s not all of the queries but most important ones are for sure listed. For each query we will have those same metrics available – Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Position.
There’s a caveat – those numbers do not mean much.
- solution keywords – they indicate that the user is looking for a solution our page tends to offer,
- branded keywords – keywords containing name of any of our brands,
- trash keywords – non-intentional or no-intent keywords.
In terms of regular Digital Marketing strategies we always focus on solution keywords as it’s attracting new audience to our websites. For this reason, all the metrics start getting important only if you can filter them for solution or branded keywords group separately. It’s not easy, but there are good ways.
3. Report Setup
For report it is important to gather data automatically so the report generation takes least time possible.
Report generation time is of importance, but it is also important to have a tool that offers easy report setup. We use Looker Studio to lay out the graphs and explanations in our PDF reports. It also allows scheduling reports so you receive it by the end of every quarter, month or a week.
Google Looker Studio
It is a BI (business Insight) tool that can gather data from multiple data providers and allows us creating stunning graphs with ease.
We normally report on multiple levels according to hierarchy where:
- top level report – combines only the major numbers for all channels
- deep top-level report – shows major numbers segmented by major categories (countries, channels)
- channel report – presents main numbers for each channel.
We always focus on reporting those metrics relevant to the reader.
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We’re meant to work on all phases of the project – development, publishing and maintaining – in order to reach best results. Yet, it’s also possible to have us taking ownership over each phases separately.
Keep in mind that reporting can be limited by any issues in tracking, ads or website setup. It’s important to have either a good plan or only one side covering all website aspects to escape any blocking issues.