How can you measure marketing channel value?

In our first Google Analytics guide, we taught you all about the basics – how to measure traffic, the key terminology and how to find out which page is performing the best. In this guide, we are going to take you deeper into the world of GA and we’re going to show you how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing channels. This will help you make informed decisions on where to allocate your time and money!

What are goals?

You can create ‘goals’ within your analytics account to determine which of your users complete a specific action onsite – this will answer questions such as:

  • Which marketing channels are driving leads on site?
  • Which devices are performing better for website performance?
  • Which website content aids converting site users?

There are two parts of finding the answers:

  • Setting up goal tracking
  • Using the right reports

The following will act as a short guide to show you how you can make the most out of Google Analytics with goal measurement.

Setting up the goal tracking

There are a few forms of interaction that a car dealer could consider a ‘conversion’ or ‘goal’ on site. These include:

  • Contact form submissions
  • Phone calls
  • Brochure downloads

If you’re tracking a contact form that doesn’t lead to a new page, or you tracking phone calls (that won’t change the page you are on) then you’ll need to set up Event Tracking. If you’re a Spidersnet client, we have this type of tracking setup automatically, so there is no extra development needed. However, if you’re not a Spidersnet client and you want to start tracking this type of site interaction you will need to speak to your developers to implement event tracking.

Official Google instructions for event tracking are here.

Your developers will need to name the events with a sensible structure, as this helps you identify the correct events within Google Analytics easily.

For example, Spidersnet labels a contact form submission as:

Event Category: ‘Responses’
Event Action: ‘Email Enquiry Submit’
Event Label: The page the email enquiry was submitted

and a phone call as:

Event Category: ‘Responses’
Event Action: ‘Header Phone Click’
Event Label: The page the phone click happened

You’ll notice that we’ve used the word ‘Responses’ in both Event Category parts of the tagging. This means we are able to group an email enquiry with a phone call easily, as to a client these are both considered as a lead, so in some pieces of analysis, we’ll combine this figure.

You can create a goal based on the event tracking you set up by going to Settings → Goals → New Goal.

For example, to create a goal based on a Spidersnet email enquiry, you can define the goal to match the event structure we set up previously.

In some cases you won’t need to set up event tracking for a conversion. For example you might have a page where a user can download a brochure. Once the user successfully downloads a brochure they may be taken to a thank you page, for example /download-complete

Instead of setting up event tracking you can set the confirmation page as the ‘Destination’ of the goal.

That’s all you need to do to setup Goals. It’s worth noting that goals only track successful conversions after the goal has been setup properly, so you won’t be able to get data going backwards after setting up the goal.

Using the right reports

We normally jump into Google Analytics with questions that we want answering, however can struggle to find the right report or data. Here are 3 common questions that we can use our Goal tracking:

Which marketing channels are driving leads on site?

You want to know if the money you’re spending on your online marketing is turning into successful leads. One report that can be used to determine this is the Channels report.

This is found within Acquisition → All Traffic → Channels

Once you open the report, you’ll see a list of your marketing channels, how much traffic they are driving and how many users from these channels have given you leads (which we are now tracking as goals)

In this instance we can see the Organic Search (free Google traffic) is the best performing channel in terms of converting users with over 1% of users converting as a lead. This client in fact holds one of our Search Engine Optimisation packages, which is the reason why their Organic Search channel is the best performing.

It looks as if Paid Search is struggling to convert even with a few hundred visits from this channel. In this particular example it would be worth reviewing the Paid Search activity here – are there any specific campaigns that aren’t performing well? Is the client targeting the right users via Paid Search?

If you have set up several Goals, you can break ‘All Goals’ up into specific conversions by clicking on the drop-down and selecting specific Goals.

Which devices are performing better for website performance?

You want to know if your site is performing better on a particular device type. One report that can be used to determine this is the Devices report.

This is found within Audience → Mobile → Overview

In this example we can see that the mobile site is performing extremely well in comparison to the desktop and tablet site with 1.76% goal conversion rate in comparison to just 0.47% for desktop and 0.73% for tablet. From this, it would be important to see if there are any areas of the desktop site which are causing problems for the users, or perhaps any areas on the mobile site that are working particular well. This is important especially because for this site the majority of users come via desktop and tablet (74% combined) so optimising that site traffic will help extra leads filter through.

Which website content aids converting site users?

You want to know if there is content within your site pushing users through to convert. One report that can be used to determine this is the Landing Pages report.

This is found within Behaviour → Site Content → Landing Pages

Here we can tell the pages that users first see when they enter the site and how these aid goal completions. For example, we can see that the homepage of this client (displayed as a ‘/’) is one of the highest entrance page for converting users (2.21% of visits landing on the homepage then convert), however, is just 25% of the traffic.

It looks like users landing on other pages do not convert as much and exit the site. Perhaps this is because the homepage acts as an introduction to the customers, and therefore this client could test some landing pages that act as a homepage but aid marketing messages sent out by the client.

There are so many other reports within Google Analytics that use Goal tracking to help you make better data decisions. If you’re interested to know more about this topic don’t hesitate to contact Spidersnet to find out more!