ROI – those three letters can strike fear into working professionals everywhere. Proving a return on your investment is essential for just about every aspect of business – and search engine marketing is no different. But how do you go about determining the value of your various marketing strategies? Let’s explore a few ways you can use Google Analytics to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Track Goal Completions That Are Vital to Your Business
Most people associate Google Analytics with traffic data, like sessions and page views. These are certainly the most common metrics that you’ll look at, but the software can provide even more data, like goals. A goal is something you configure to tell Google Analytics that customers have completed an action on your website that you consider important to your business. For ecommerce sites, this could be making a purchase. For lead gen sites, it could be filling out a form to request a quote. Analytics allows you to track these goals by marketing channel, so you can see exactly how many purchases or form completions were credited to your SEO efforts versus your paid search campaigns or even your social media accounts.
Measure the Value of Individual Landing Pages
Your landing pages are a vital part of your business. A landing page is the first interaction visitors have with your site – and we all know the saying about first impressions. Analytics allows you to look at how each landing page performs across your marketing channels so that you can get a sense of which are the most valuable for your business, as well as which could use some work. You’ll be able to look at how many times that landing page led to a conversion, how many new and returning users it’s brining in, how often people bounce from that page, and much more, so that you can make an informed decision about each and every page on your site.
Determine Which Products Sell the Best
If your business relies on ecommerce, Analytics has a section just for you! Though it requires some additional coding, you can configure Analytics to collect data about your products and sales, including the number of items sold, the average (and total) value of each sale and item, and plenty more. You can even look at this data by marketing channel so you can see if certain items sell better through social media ads, organic search, or other forms of promotion.
Proving ROI can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Understanding how to use Analytics’ reporting features to their fullest potential will help you make smarter decisions about your business.
