Measuring your marketing in 3 simple steps

A lot of time and money is spent to drive online traffic these days – Google AdWords, SEO, billboards, radio sponsorship, magazine ads, not to mention the social space. It’s great to have time and money to invest in marketing, but what kind of a return are you or your clients getting? This post will walk you through a quick way to determine which marketing methods are getting you results online.

For an example, let’s use CashCurve, a dead-simple web app for cash forecasting that we recently launched. At this point we’re just looking to find a few subscribers to try it out and give us some feedback. So we posted updates about CashCurve on our personal Facebook pages, blogged it, e-mailed folks, posted it on LinkedIn, and asked for feedback on Hacker News.

In just a few minutes in Google Analytics we can figure out what method of marketing was most effective. Here’s how.

1. Segment visits by traffic source

The natural place to start is by looking at our top traffic sources. Where is our traffic coming from? In Google Analytics, simply click on “Traffic Sources” and then “All Traffic Sources”.

Clearly Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) has brought in the most visits for CashCurve. Number of visits tells us nothing about the quality of traffic though.

2. Segment visits by conversion

Now, in addition to segmenting by traffic source, you add segmenting by conversion. Most commonly this will be people completing an action on your website, like signing up for an account, submitting a contact form or completing a purchase.

This can be done with “Goals” in Google Analytics, but custom segments provide much greater flexibility. All you need to know is the URL someone would visit only if they completed the outcome. On CashCurve, this would be someone who visits the sign up form and then visits the Dashboard. Here’s how to set up your custom segment:

1. Above your traffic graph, beside “Advanced Segments” click on “All Visits”
2. Click “Create a new advanced segment”
3. Under “Dimensions” click “Content”
4. Drag “Page” to the “dimension or metric” area on the right
5. Now enter the exact URL for the outcome you’ve chosen (e.g. /dashboard)
6. If the URL for the outcome you’ve chosen has a part of it that is variable (e.g. /dashboard?123) then change “Matches Exactly” to the appropriate condition.
7. You can add additional refinements to this segment with “or” and “and” statements.
8. Enter a name for your segment below and click “Create and Apply to Report”

Beside “Advanced Segments” above the graph you should now see the name of your segment. Click the name to display Advanced Segments again, check “All Visits” and click “Apply”.

3. Dig for insights

We can begin to uncover our best marketing channels by answering the following questions using our report.

1. Which traffic source generated the highest number of conversions?
2. Which traffic source generated the highest conversion rate (%)?
3. Which traffic source generated the highest degree of engagement (low bounce rate, high pages/visit and average time on site)?

For CashCurve, we can see that the only marketing channel we pursued that generated results was Hacker News. The other top 3 traffic sources are likely related to Hacker News as well. One interesting twist is that Twitter’s conversion rate was over 5%. The sample is too small for clear conclusions, but it does mean providing easy ways to tweet headlines in the future could be very beneficial.

Which marketing channel has been most effective for you? And the bigger question, why?

Post a comment:

Name:
Email:
URL:

Click here to try another image.

Type the code shown: