Digital Marketing Analytics with Google Data Studio and why your business needs it

What is Digital Marketing Analytics?

Digital Marketing analytics is a methodology that combines statistics from multiple software tools, a website, and data analytics. It includes metrics that measure customer engagement with a website, interaction with potential customers on a website, conversion rates.

It helps to trace the entire journey the customer makes. It can gather information from almost all sources, like Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc., different communication channels, like phone calls, online orders on the website, e-mails, messages via instant messengers, and CRM systems, where the sales information is located.

The aim of it is to help businesses measure the effectiveness of the website or online marketing campaigns, calculate the ROI of marketing efforts, and much more.

Why does your company need digital marketing analytics?

With the help of digital marketing analytics we can:

1. Track the perfomance of users.
2. Track trends and dynamics of key indicators.
3. Collect the necessary information from different sources in one place.
4. Combine the data, create new calculated metrics.
5. Draw the right conclusions and make the best decisions.
6. Get dynamic updates on the users’ performance.
7. Monitor buyer and consumer behavior.
8. Determine which marketing tools or campaigns work efficiently and how they impact the business.
9. Build up an effective strategy to improve sales performance.
10. Help to improve the customer experience.

Example of Digital Marketing Analytics

Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau can be viewed as competitors as all of them enable you to automatically build analytics. Each has its pros and cons. We prefer to use Google Data Studio for a number of reasons:

• Google Data Studio is a tool that helps to create visually appealing analytics. As it has been proven by multiple research, visual information is perceived much better than the one where you can get bogged down in figures.
• Easy manipulation with all the charts — is another advantage of Data Studio. You don’t need to be deep in it to understand how to use it.
• We can create new calculated metrics and dimensions directly on the platform.
• Editing and integrations can be done live.
• We can provide you with a link to the report that you can share with anyone.
• Reports are available for download in PDF format.
• You can combine it with various Google marketing products.

Now let’s examine how it all works and which advantages it presents

Before we get started, we need to decide upon the metrics we aim to track. We can either choose standard metrics or pick up the ones the client wants.

First of all, we need to show the channels through which the user landed the page. Here we can differentiate between the source and the mediums. A source is the origin of the traffic, a place that the user visited before s/he came to the website, such as a search engine, or a domain. A medium is the general category of the source, such as organic, paid, email, or web referral.

At this stage, it is important to analyze all the channels and make conclusions about the traffic they generate and their effectiveness. This will help us in the future to build up the right strategy for the client and attract more customers.

Reports allow us to understand how many people were on the site in any period and compare it with the same period in the past. We can see the pages they are viewing, the actions they are taking, and the conversions.

The advantage of reports in Google Data Studio is that we can provide the client with the link to the interactive reports and dashboards. The client can choose the period, custom filters, sort the data by columns, automatically highlight the best results, download the report, or send it as a link.

If we connect additional services, such as Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, Facebook, and LinkedIn, we can get and, therefore, depict a more in-depth analysis of the target audience.

There are more than 500 Standard Connectors, 20 are Google connectors, and the rest are Partner Connectors. We can connect them the way we need. Among Partner Connectors, we have LinkedIn Ads Data, Facebooks Ads Data, Instagram Insights, etc.

The connector allows loading the data from the current source into the report. Most of the connectors are Google products that are split into 3 main groups:

1. Helping to connect to Google products (like Google Analytics, Google Adword, Google Sheets, YouTube Analytics, Attribution 360, BigQuery).
2. Helping to connect to database platforms ( like MySQL, Cloud SQL, Search Console, PostgreSQL).
3. Helping to upload files and extract data (upload of CSV files; data set creation and management, data extraction to increase performance).

Providing analytics to the client

Let’s look at one of the examples of how we provide the client with digital marketing analytics.

We have been working with this client for several years and have helped to automate all the reporting and bring the business to a new level. However, it took time before we came to the reports in Data Studio.

First, the client was manually choosing the parameters they wanted to track. These were only the figures in the format of an Excel table. Then, we were faced with a need to visualize all the massive data we gathered. As all the work was done manually, mistakes occurred. At this stage, we suggested automating the whole process with the help of Data Studio. We started gathering the data and sending it as reports monthly. Filters allowed us to make the data interactive.

Now they have two types of reports: a monthly report which includes the statistics of the main and other pages, and a more general or universal one composed of different slides according to the filters within the selected period. Among some specific reports, we had the ones that showed the results of a concrete email campaign, newsletter launch, site redesign, and many more.

As a result, the client has managed to:

• Reduce the time for obtaining the necessary data from 12+ hours to 2 minutes per month. We also cut 8 hours we spent on preparing weekly reports.
• Exclude the human factor in the collection of statistics and long calculations.
• Get flexible configuration and visualization of the required data.
• Have the ability to compare indicators with the past period.
• Obtain the necessary information/statistics from different services and sources in one report.

After they got the data from the reports, they:

• Have changed their strategy and goals.
• Have changed forms on the site.
• Have modified the strategy by shifting the focus from quantity to quality and concentrated on attracting only specific audiences (ABM).

The advantages of reports in Data Studio

Using Google Analytics alone is not enough. The integration of Google Analytics and CRM (customer relationship systems), e-commerce services, offline bases, call-tracking systems, etc. gives much better results.

The advantages of reports in Google Data Studio:

• Intuitive and understandable.
• A variety of style options.
• Adding any number of data sources.
• Auto-updating.
• Many options for customizing the view for any purpose and measurement of any indicators.

How we can help your business

Based on our experience, companies that track the data and make data-driven decisions have a competitive edge over those that don’t.

It provides insight into how each marketing tool works and what benefits it brings to the business. It helps:

• Сalculate the payback of each tool and the posts on social networks, banners, requests in contextual advertising.
• Make the work process more transparent, give an understanding of where traffic and requests come from.
• Find vulnerabilities in the marketing strategy.
• Segment the audience, highlight a separate group of customers who left contacts, but did not reach the deal.
• Automate reporting.
• Calculate ROI.
• Introduce changes into the current strategy.
• Depict the performance of the site and sales.
• Monitor the ups and downs in key metrics and adjust the strategy.
• Save time and efforts in the decision making of executives.

After considering all the benefits, you can turn to our team to help you make the most of your business.