Google Analytics is the most powerful tool that gives insights into everything related to your customer, their journey, mediums they are using and what not.
Right from your business’ social media channels to website’s landing pages, it collects hundreds and thousands of data points every single day- which can be used to improve your marketing strategies and take right business decisions.
Marketing ROI is the measurable revenue generated in comparison to the resources you invested in your marketing activities.
By calculating the ROI you can analyze whether the time and money you spend on business are worth the investment.
Measuring ROI can help you-
- To identify the impact of marketing campaigns
- To discover where your resources are used more effectively
- To identify loopholes in your campaigns and rectify them for good
To measure ROI in Google Analytics you can refer to Cost Analysis & ROI analysis reports.
The cost analysis report determines the ‘cost per click’ and ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) of all the marketing channels in Google Analytics and the ROI analysis report determines ‘cost per acquisition’ and ROAS for each marketing channel in attribution models.
Here are the few ways in Google Analytics you can use to measure ROI.
1. Enable goal tracking
Google Analytics offers four types of goals you can measure, and the one that’s best for you depends on your business model and your KPIs. The goal types include URL Destination, Time on Site, Pages per Visit and Events.
Once you determine which goal type is right for your company and what you need to analyze, you can easily set up your specific site goals in the conversion section of the report.
By setting up goals you can track how many people used your site for a particular activity, measure success and track people’s customer journey. With these insights, you will have the exact number of conversions which will help you strategize the future campaigns.
2. Use UTM Tracking
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module which consists of a simple code that can be attached to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This enables Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from and what campaign directed them to you.
This method helps you to know where your traffic is coming from, track which links are people clicking in a campaign, group traffic by medium and track traffic for different campaigns.
With this knowledge, you have a report of where traffic is coming from and can attribute success to different strategies and see which ones are worth investing in, which ones need to be improved and which may just be a waste of your time and money.
3. Set up Events
Events in Google Analytics are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, flash elements, and video plays are some example of events.
Tracking events gives insights into when and where a visitor clicks an outbound link, whether visitors actually play the videos you embed in your content, if visitors scroll down to a certain part of your content and if there are certain fields in your forms which cause users to stop filling out your form.
With this information, you can measure micro or macro conversions on your site.
Events are a part of the conversion funnel, which is another way to track your ROI. Having the ability to see what happens to a visitor before and after an event helps to improve the performance and see if your marketing activities are paying off.
4. Link AdWords and Webmaster to Analytics
As you all know, Google AdWords is an advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Whereas, Google Webmaster helps you evaluate and maintain your website’s performance in search results.
Linking Adwords to your Analytics account will help you track the performance of your ads and traffic that comes to your website.
This consolidation opens up a whole new way of tracking people.
It will also track how different ads are performing and help you work better on them through the conversion funnel.
Similarly, integrating Analytics with Webmaster tool gives you data to track users before they even land and exit the conversion funnel.
It tracks traffic from Google’s search engine results page so you can see where organic users are coming from, how they’re landing on your site, and which keywords got them there.
Conclusion
Using Google Analytics to measure marketing ROI would need a lot of patience and analytics skills. Hence, implement all the tactics efficiently and you will definitely reach your business goal and further improve it too.
Please feel free to share your ROI and marketing thoughts below.
