The DataHero Blog

Marketing analytics provides such a wealth of insight into how our marketing is performing, what our customers want, and ultimately gives us a map to improve our business. How do we make sense of all this information is a question we find ourselves asking regularly.  The answer is pretty simple: set up a few marketing analytics dashboards once and check back in on them to collect your insights. Separate marketing dashboards ensure that you’re not trying to apply the same metrics to all areas of your marketing analytics. Below are a few we recommend to start you off.

Content Engagement

We measure blogs and content in a different way than we measure many other areas of marketing. Blogging cannot be held to the same KPIs that search engine marketing can, so don’t measure content this way. Instead, focus on engagement metrics.

Track metrics like:

• Time on site (broken down by blog post)
• Sessions by blog post/category of blog post
• Sign ups by blog post/category of blog post
• Webinar registrants (other other content goals)
• Sessions by source/post
• Bounce rate by source/post

This is where you can really dig into the effectiveness of your content marketing, but of course clear goals are necessary to begin with, so you can measure what success looks like. Monitor these content goals over time to demonstrate success to clients or to your boss.

External Site and A/B Testing

External site includes the homepage or specific landing pages. The homepage and landing pages are likely intended to convert, whatever your organization defines a conversion to be. You should be A/B testing these pages, so you need to carefully monitor how these landing pages are performing based on these tests.

Track:

• Sessions by landing page/source
• Goal completions by landing page/source
• Conversion rate by landing page/source
• Bounce rate by landing page/source

You can break this dashboard out further by monitoring metrics by specific sources (like SEM or SEO). Be sure to carefully track any A/B tests by date, so you know exactly what is causing a change in conversion rates.

Social Tracking

Social networks aren’t just for keeping up with your hometown friends. They’re a great way to interact with your customers as well. Connect the dots between social media engagements and actual revenue for your business. Be sure to tag any URLs you put on social media to ensure you’re able to track conversions/goal completions through the entire funnel.

Track metrics like:

• Spend by social campaign/social network
• Goal completions by social campaign/social network
• Sessions by social campaign/network
• Engagements by social network (you’ll need to determine which engagements are actually valuable)
• Shares by blog post

You should be A/B testing your social media strategy as well, so again, be sure to monitor which campaigns work best based on wording, images, subject matter, etc.

Site Usage

This is where you can dig a little deeper into how users interact with your site. Track more technical metrics that will allow you to cater to your audience better.

Track:

• Mobile usage
• Screen resolution
• Operating system
• Time spent on site overall

These metrics are pretty technical but they can make a big difference in terms of optimizing your site. To dig even deeper, look at how these more technical metrics connect with content or social metrics. For example, do all your Twitter users come through mobile to a particular landing page? Better make sure that landing page is optimized for mobile.

High-Level KPIs

Monitor high-level marketing metrics that allow you to see at a glance exactly how the marketing department is performing overall. This information will likely come from multiple places, so see this post on combining datasets from different data sources. In this dashboard you’ll want to track metrics like:

• Overall spend
• Sessions by source
• Activations (or other key goals) by source
• health of overall funnel

The idea of this dashboard is to keep an eye on metrics really easily, so you don’t have to log in to five different sites to get a view of the health of your marketing efforts. Keeping all this data in one place assures that any changes in how marketing is performing won’t go unnoticed.

All these dashboards can seem time-consuming to set up initially but it’ll definitely be worth it when you can go to one place for all the answers you need about your marketing programs. DataHero integrates with many marketing services, so you can import data from any of them, create charts, and then add those charts to these dashboards listed above. It’s that simple.

Plus, if you keep these dashboards automatically updated, when your presentation comes around, all you have to do is export them and drop them in a Powerpoint. Seems worth it, right?

 

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DataHero helps you unmask the answers in your data. There’s nothing to download or install. Simply create an account and connect to the data services you use everyday (like Salesforce, Stripe, MailChimp, Dropbox and Box). DataHero automatically decodes your data and shows you the answers you need through dynamic visualizations.

 

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