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Category: Reporting

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Analysis Guest Blog Reporting

Four easy ways to generate insights from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular and effective tools for analytics. It offers a wide range of insights, including traffic sources, countries, campaigns, etc. However, it does not allow you to perform advanced analysis on these data. This article explains how to generate valuable insights from Google Analytics.

Use the Google Analytics compare date range feature

A good starting point for getting insights into your digital marketing efforts is to compare two date ranges. Google Analytics has a compare date range feature that allows you to compare data between two different date ranges.

To use the Google Analytics compare date range feature, go to your Google Analytics account and select the report you want to review (e.g. acquisition). You’ll see the date range in the top right-hand corner. Select this box and then tick the “compare to” box. You can then compare your selected period to the previous period (e.g. the last seven days vs the seven days before that), to the same period the year prior, or a custom date range.

If your business is very seasonal, I recommend keeping an eye on the year-on-year trends. That way, you can see how your efforts are helping you to grow your business year on year.

Use annotations in Google Analytics

Annotations are a way to add extra information about your data in Google Analytics. This additional information can help you understand your data better and make better decisions about using it.

If you are reviewing data yearly, it can be challenging to remember what actions you have made throughout the year and when you have made them. If your Analytics report shows a spike in traffic at a specific time, but you’ve not made annotations, you be left scratching your head trying to identify the cause of the traffic. Furthermore, annotations are a great way of adding this extra information in the reports you produce and even better, they allow you to make decisions quickly based, particularly if you are regularly testing new designs with your website.

Create goals in Google Analytics

The Google Analytics website provides many features that can help you understand your visitors. However, if you are an expert in Google Analytics, you may use advanced features like Goals.

While setting up goals can get quite technical, it doesn’t have to be. Start by creating a goal based on visitors reaching a specific page, such as a Thank You page for anyone who signs up for your newsletter.

Setting up goals is relatively straightforward and will add considerable value to the insights you can generate from Google Analytics. To create your first goal, go to settings, scroll to the right-hand column and find the goals option. You’ll see an empty table and above that a red button saying New Goal. Select that.

Follow the steps, making sure to select the most appropriate category for your goal (e.g. choose acquisition for a new subscriber sign up). Then add the criteria for when the goal is met. I like to set simple goals based on users reaching a particular URL. By selecting the URL as a goal, I can add all thank you pages to my Google Analytics goals.

Once your goals are set up, your Analytics will provide a new level of insights that you were previously missing. You’ll be able to identify which channels drive the most goal completions (conversions, sales, media views, etc.). You’ll be able to see the demographics of users who complete your goals. This new data is unlocked and ready for you to use to optimize your website for even more goal completions in the future.

Use DataMyth to generate insights automatically

What could be easier than having an automated analysis of your analytics created for you?

After many hours staring at Google Analytics reports, DataMyth is a godsend. It takes a lot of the work out of monitoring the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. It helps you see how each campaign is performing to improve it. The performance reports are easy to read as the insights are written in plain English.

If you deliver digital marketing projects for your clients, DataMyth will save hours every month by providing practical insights into your client’s website performance. You can easily see which channels perform best because the report will literally tell you in full, written sentences.

Rather than spending hours each month checking several different reports in Google Analytics, run DataMyth and read the report on a short PDF. In a matter of minutes, you’ll have a complete picture of how your website is performing – from top converting landing pages to the devices that bring in the most users. It’s a done for you solution to generating actionable insights in Google Analytics.

Categories
Reporting

A Guide to Google Analytics Reports

On an average, a digital marketer spends 7.5 hours in a week (based on a survey conducted by DataMyth) creating and analyzing reports across channels for clients/stakeholders. These reports generally are a combination of customized reports based on the client’s requirements or report templates which cover all the necessary information about your website performance in terms of traffic, goals, user behaviour, etc. Google Analytics provides a lot of data but not all of it gets in the weekly or monthly reports. In this blog we will cover the sections which we think are critical and mandatory for a client/stakeholder to understand the website performance.

This report structure will help answer the following:

  1. The number of users received for the selected date range
  2. The source of users by channel
  3. Top channels by user
  4. Campaigns/pages that drove the most sessions
  5. Top landing pages in terms of sessions
  6. Pages that people spend the most time on
  7. Time spent by users on the site
  8. Devices used by users to view the site
  9. Countries users visit from

1. An Overview Section:

The report should always start with an overview of the performance of your website for the selected date range. This section will give the reader information about the overall performance in the first few minutes. The synopsis should cover the ABC of Google Analytics reporting – Acquisition, Behaviour & Conversion. 

  1. Acquisition helps you understand the number of users and where the traffic is coming from. For example: Users, Sessions, Source, etc.
  2. Behaviour contains data which helps you understand  what users do on your  website such as Pages/Session, Avg. Time Spent & Bounce Rate
  3. Conversion data maps your Goals, Goal Rate & Goal Value

Along with the data table, adding graphs makes it more visually appealing and increases the ease of understanding. You can either show the trend for the selected period or for the last 6 months. 

Always ensure to add insights that not only identifies the increase or decrease, but also defines the reason for the change in performance

2. Source of Users by Channel :

While the overview section provides a summary of the performance, the Channel performance section maps your traffic by different sources such as Email, Organic, Paid, Social, etc. An easy representation of performance by channel helps understand which channel is doing better compared to the others.

Now that the data is displayed, one of the important elements to include is the analysis of how the performance was impacted by each channel for the selected period (single date range or comparison date range). Showing a percentage increase and decrease is not a clear indicator of your website’s performance since a change in a channel goal from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. So ensure that your data is calculated taking the impact of each parameter into consideration, and not the percentage difference. Once the channel is identified, next, find the pages/campaigns that triggered the impact for the respective channel.

3. Goal Completion

Based on the goals set for each channel which is inline with your objective, Google analytics provides data for each of the goal types across channels. While this is very helpful you will not receive a consolidated view of all the goals created. So showcasing goals by type & channel gives a clear picture of your goal performance.

Considering the goals set, identify what’s working and what’s not by channel source. Just like we discussed in the channel performance section, calculate the impact here as well instead of the absolute difference. If you are an eCommerce brand, you will have a clear understanding of your ROI by channel. You can optimize your marketing efforts building on this information.

4. New vs Returning Users Performance

It is very important to understand your website user type (new or returning). If you are an eCommerce, media or entertainment client, you should have a good balance between new and returning users. If your brand is focused on B2B, it is better to have more new users than returning users. Providing a breakup of channel & device for traffic & goal will give additional information about your marketing efforts and their results.

For example, the image in this section shows that even though Email drives the highest number of sessions, it does not result in goal conversions for new users, whereas Organic Search goal conversions are higher than Email campaigns. Based on your industry & data, you can make changes to your marketing efforts accordingly. 

5. Identifying the Top Landing Pages

Google Analytics provides landing page reports with traffic, behaviour and conversion details but what matters most is to answer a few questions like:

a) why did the traffic increase/decrease?

b) why is the bounce rate for the page high?

c) which pages do users spend most time on?

To get answers to these questions, we should drill down further into the data. Check the source, device & user type for the page which generated the highest sessions, or low bounce rates , whichever your key metric is. Based on the data available, optimize the page to improve the performance.

6. Device Performance

Understanding the device your audience uses helps you optimize your campaign targets, website speed and responsiveness. Along with the overall device data, knowing the channel source for each device can help define the marketing efforts for the respective channel.

7. Location Performance

Location is a very simple yet important element for your analysis. It shows where you are getting your majority of traffic or goal conversions. Based on this data you can target locations for campaigns or allocate more budget.

Apart from these there are other reports like

  1. Hourly report to understand at what time of the day you are driving sessions or goal conversions 
  2. Page Navigation Report to understand how the user navigates through your website. Are they getting all the information needed or they abandon the page due to lack of information, bad user experience, it is not optimized for a device & etc. 

All the sections covered are present in the Google Analytics console, and each section is a different report that needs to be combined. DataMyth is a solution that can build the report within seconds with data, graphs and analysis – All you need to do is use the time saved to define your strategy. Visit the Google Analytics Report page for more details.

Categories
Automation Reporting

3 Reasons to Automate Your Digital Marketing Reports

As a digital marketer one has to create daily, weekly and monthly reports. Even though it may feel monotonous it is a critical part of your business. As per a survey conducted by DataMyth, we found that companies spend an average of 7.5 hours a week building various digital marketing reports with analysis which is almost an entire day every week. So you have a resource who spends time building reports  wherein he/she could spend this time optimizing campaigns or taking up additional responsibilities.  While you may figure out ways to automate your reports, you still need to analyze the data and present it to your client/stakeholders. What if you figure out a way to automate this entire process (report generation to analysis)? This blog will introduce you to automating reports, its advantages, and ways you can do so.

Reporting Automation in Simple Terms 

Connect all your digital channels to a software/platform that builds your daily, weekly and monthly marketing reports within seconds/minutes.  All digital channels provide APIs that fetch your data and the automated reporting software/platform builds your report. 

Why should you automate your reports?

  1. Hours of reporting reduced to seconds
    1. We’ve discussed how the time taken to build your reports can be reduced to seconds. You can end the blind data ‘copy-paste’, downloading various csv files and analyzing the data to identify insights. With automated reporting, ready to use reports will be available at the click of a button within seconds. 
  2. Focus on new initiatives
    1. Now that the reporting is automated with performance insights, you know exactly what is working and what is not. You can spend your precious time on optimizing & taking on additional initiatives for your business. 
  3. Increase your team’s effectiveness
    1. For agencies, you can increase the number of clients handled per analyst, and brands, you can focus on additional initiatives with small & agile teams

Which tool is best for me?

There are a lot of tools available in the market right from BI (Business Intelligence) dashboards to reporting solutions. 

  • While BI tools provide full funnel reports, they are complicated to set up and need to be maintained by SMEs/experts.
  • Dashboard tools (like Google Data Studio) are not as complicated as BI tools, but not easy to use. You can connect your channels & create dashboards but you might need to pay in order to connect the channels 
  • Many reporting tools available in the market let you drag and drop KPIs & graphs creating a simple dashboard ready to be shared with your client. This is easy to use, needs a one time setup & the user friendliness depends on the tool.

All the above mentioned tools provide the data you need in various templates (some are fixed & some offer custom templates), but once you receive the data in the desired format, you spend significant time analyzing the data which most of the tools do not provide.

Here’s where DataMyth can help. Created by marketer who wanted to skip downloading, processing and analyzing data. It’s an easy to use tool with pre-built templates for each channel (Google Ads & Google Analytics to start with) with automated analysis and performance insights for the KPIs which matter the most to marketers. Reports built with DataMyth can be downloaded as a PDF & shared with stakeholders/clients.

While this may sound too good to be true, have a look at how we simplify your process below, and take the 7 day free trial to see for yourself.

Categories
Reporting

5 Tips to Building Your Digital Marketing Reports

‘Plan – Launch – Optimize’. While you follow this principle to gain the best out of your marketing campaigns, here are 5 tips to get you going with building digital reports.

TIP 1: Define your KPIs

To define your KPI, start by revisiting your objective that has been agreed upon by the key stakeholders. Next, map the objectives against various metrics. Have a look at the table below that lists out a set of sample KPIs based on different objectives.

Objective Possible KPIs
Awareness/ Visibility
  • Impressions
  • Reach
  • Views
  • Clicks
Lead Generation
  • Number of form-fills
  • Number of asset downloads
  • Cost per lead
Sales
  • Number of sales
  • Average revenue
  • Cost per sale
  • ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Engagement
  • Number of interactions (Likes, comments, shares, etc.)
  • Time spent on the website
  • Pages per session

Tip 2: Reason to build the report

Are you building your report to showcase the results to your Stakeholders, or is the report going to help you optimize the account? The format of the reports will change based on your answer to this question. Stakeholders want to see an overall performance, a summary of how the campaign is doing. While a report meant for inputs to optimize campaigns will dig deeper and identify each and every metric that has seen a change in the positive or negative direction.

Here are examples of the format you could follow for each of the requirement:

Stakeholder report: An overview of what is happening in the account, what is working and what is not, where you stand against your goals & what’s the next steps planned

Analyst report: A detailed breakdown of performance based on metrics (KPIs) for each elements such as campaigns, ads, landing pages, etc which can be used as a base to optimize your campaigns

Tip 3: Select a Format that is Repeatable

While zeroing down on a report format, remember that this has to be done on a regular basis. So ensure that you capture the right KPIs and that the format should be easy to continuously replicate. 

Tip 4: Analyzing the data

This is the most important step in building reports. While analyzing the data, start with the top down approach. Identify the performance at an account level, do you see an increase or a dip in performance? If you find an improvement in performance, start digging in deeper till you reach the lowest level of tactics like keywords, placements, text ads, banner ads, etc, and identify the different causes of the impact by analyzing the metrics that are your KPIs. Once done, don’t forget to repeat the same exercise for tactics to identify the ones that saw a dip in performance. This will help you catch instances that will continue to negatively impact your campaign.

Tip 5: Automate Your Report

Since you are going to build the same reports over and over (in terms of format), start optimizing and automating your reports to save time and reduce human error. There are various ways of getting this done – 

  1. You can use APIs to fetch data faster in a format that is easier to analyse, and build Macros to initiate your analysis
  2. You can also manually fetch the data and use Macros to build the required format and initiate your analysis
  3. The 3rd option is to identify a 3rd party tool that generates your stakeholder/analysis ready reports

Implementing these 5 tips will help you define your report, analyze your data, and finally save on time. This can have a direct impact on the campaigns you run as you can start optimizing based on the insights and the time saved can be used to define your next steps.

DataMyth is a report automation tool that provides insights and reduces the time taken to build reports from an average of 7 hours a week to a few minutes. Interested in checking out DataMyth? Fill out the form.

Categories
Reporting

Digital Marketing Report Frequency & Their Outcomes

Report building is very critical for any agency or brand. With the right KPIs measured in the reports, a campaign manager/stakeholder can understand how his marketing campaigns are performing & can   make data backed decisions. Most agencies or companies share reports with their clients/stakeholders on a regular basis. It can be weekly, monthly and/or quarterly. This blog covers the different report frequencies and what are the outcomes you can expect. 

Daily Reports:

Daily reports are used mainly for internal purposes which include the KPIs, critical and important to your client/stakeholders. It helps you identify any anomalies or changes and you can act immediately. 

Example: If the Campaign ‘actual daily spend’ is more than the target spend, you can spot it immediately and modify it accordingly. 

Daily Report Outcome:

  • With Daily reports in place, you can find a trend in your campaign/website performance 
  • You can spot anomalies in KPIs which need immediate attention 
  • A constant status check on the performance against goals 
  • Ensure that both the campaign manager & the client/stakeholders are on the same page

Weekly Reports:

With weekly reports you can measure performances against your short term plans and  track variances compared to the previous period performance. Along with it you will be able to identify metrics/elements that  are working and the ones that  are not, based on the tasks carried out with respect to their results. You can share the weekly reports during the first two days of the week (Monday & Tuesday) and plan for the week. The day can be finalised based on your convenience and your clients. Some reports are scheduled based on the stakeholder’s meeting with higher-ups, which would need the most recent data. In general these meetings happen in the first 3 days of the week (Monday – Wednesday), So you would end up creating the weekly report on the previous day of the meeting.

Example: Introducing a new set of keywords during a week could either boost your conversions or result in a high cost. You need a couple of days to gather significant data and see if the newly added keywords impact your performance in positive or negative. However, this could be an initial check to see if the keywords are spending without any outcome.

Weekly Report Outcome:

  • You can check  if the performance increased or decreased, with reasons that identify the  campaign, keyword, channel or landing page responsible for the impact
  • You will be able to clearly identify what is working and what is not, based on the tasks carried out, and compared to short term goals
  • You can plan your actions according to the recent performance

Monthly Reports:

Monthly reports are the best way you can highlight your campaign KPIs which are critical to your client/stakeholder. You can showcase results of the long term plans/actions taken over a period of time, determine where you stand against the goals, and define if the campaign is on track or not. The monthly reports help the Directors/CMOs to plan their marketing efforts going forward.

Monthly Report Outcome:

  • Like weekly reports, even these reports help you understand what is working and what is not, for a longer time frame as weekly data is generally not sufficient to take decisions
  • Which channel or campaign impacted your performance 
  • Your plans/recommendations to derive better results and either recalibrate goals or recalibrate plans to meet the goal

Here’s a quick summary of the 3 reports:

You can use daily reports internally while the weekly & monthly reports are made for clients/stakeholders as well as  to optimize the campaign. Ensure the Weekly & Monthly reports cover the main elements  in the summary slides such as

  1. Ensure that all the important KPIs are covered
  2. What happened & why it happened
  3. Was the performance in line with your previous plan or not? 
  4. What is your plan/recommendation to either improve performance or maintain it?
Categories
Reporting

Defining the Structure of a Digital Marketing Report

While you share your digital marketing reports with your client/stakeholder, it is necessary to  pre-empt all possible questions your client/stakeholder may have. Your digital marketing report should contain the status of your campaign performance, where you are against your target, how efficient your plans were, keywords and ads responsible for the performance impact. So if you were to lay out all this information in a report, this blog provides a structure that you could follow. And if this is a recurring report, use the first 2-3 reports to define the structure with your stakeholder

Here’s a quick structure that can get you going:

  1. A Summary section
  2. Performance by channel, campaign, network, etc
  3. Visualize your data
  4. Optimization impact  
  5. Next Steps

Summary Section:

Your summary should be clear and concise which can be understood not only by the marketing team but anybody. Highlight the important aspects of your performance & along with the result, the reason for it, and what does that mean for the brand. Your summary should also talk about where the account stands when compared to your goals (short term & long term). Think of this section as one that gives all the information required to know if the campaigns are performing or not, with reasons. Ensure that you don’t go overboard by providing all the information possible. Take a call on what’s important and what’s not. As mentioned earlier, use the first 2-3 reports to define the content with your stakeholders.

Performance by channel, campaign, network, etc.:

Every metric critical to your client/stakeholder should be analysed and compared with the goals set. This will help you understand if your marketing campaigns are working or not. To add value to your reports, ensure that you don’t just add tables and charts, but add critical data driven analysis insights based on the KPIs. Your campaign performance should answer a) what has changed since last reporting, b) the corresponding reason, c) how the change impacts your performance.

Visualize Your Data:

Turn your data into visuals which are easy to read and understand. Ensure to use elegant colors so your reader does not get distracted  with the choice of your colors (danger red, fluorescent green). Always try to find a balance between creativity and clarity. A clear, simple  and aesthetically created digital marketing report template enhances the style. 

Optimization Impact :

It is very important to understand how your performance behaved or changed based on the optimization  carried out during the reporting period. This will help you and your client/stakeholder understand what is working and what is not to define the next steps. 

Next Steps:

Finally, you need to clearly list out your next steps based on your findings from the above steps. This  becomes your plan to optimize the campaigns, so be specific about how you are going to achieve your goals. Being specific will also create a clear path for your client/stakeholder’s marketing efforts moving forward. 

Implementing these 5 tips will help you build comprehensive digital marketing reports. You can make your reporting easy & fun instead of a worrisome weekly task. 

DataMyth is a report automation tool that provides ready-to-use reports with automated analysis that reduces the time taken to build reports from an average of 7hours a week to a few minutes. Interested in checking out DataMyth? Take the Free Trial. 

Are you still manually analyzing report and writing insights?

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