Rip Off The Masking Tape

Google Analytics is great! Hundreds of reports of data that can be used to gauge the health of your business. Some reports are used to measure lead indicators (think website visits that should potentially turn into conversions), and some reports are used to measure lag indicators (think the actual conversions, or sales).

I want you to take a moment and think of Google Analytics as the gauge on the fuel tank of your car. You put fuel into your vehicle and the gauge says full (or fully charged). Then you drive! You drive to your work, to lunch, back to work, then to pick up the kids, and finally home. The fuel gauge says you used one-quarter of the fuel.

Now I want you to imagine you put masking tape over your fuel gauge and the rest of the instruments on the dashboard so you can no longer see them. Imagine driving to work with all the variables that life brings you. Don’t worry, just keep driving, you have plenty of fuel to get to reach your child’s school, or to get to work… or do you? You are going below the speed limit… or are you? It’s enough to give you panic attack!

You see, not being conscious of the lead and lag indicators your website is giving you from Google Analytics is like driving your car with masking tape over the instruments because you cannot tell how much fuel your website has consumed or how fast your website is moving.

As a marketer, or any person who is involved in marketing (and this includes you CEOs), we either request, approve, or just do ourselves, but we put fuel into our websites. This happens through the means of traffic generation methods such as pay-per-click campaigns, SEO, display ads, social media marketing, and even print ads that direct traffic to a landing page.

A lot of you are putting nitrous into a souped-up Honda Civic. Others are putting low-octane gas into a Lamborghini. If you don’t know how much fuel is left in the tank though, you don’t know when to put more in or if you should ever put more in.

I want to share with you one, yes just one report, that you as a marketer should look at on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

It is called the Channels report and it will show you what you need to know at a baseline to inform you if the fuel you are putting into your marketing tank is helping you achieve your KPIs.

This report will not only show you how much traffic your website is receiving from each channel (think fuel source), but also where the traffic is coming from, and how it performs on your website. This way you know what types of fuel to stop putting into your tank and what type of fuel you should buy more of.

Stop wasting marketing fuel, rip off the masking tape and get engaged with your website’s analytics.

Here is how to view the Acquisition report.
Log into your Google Analytics account at: analytics.google.com
Then navigate to Acquisition / All Traffic / All Channels.

Channels is the main report you need to look at to judge the performance of your marketing fuel.

If you need help setting up or understanding these and other marketing analytics reports, reach out to us at Timmermann Group and one of our Google Analytics Certified Data Strategists will be happy to schedule a time to discuss what lead and lag indicators you are wanting to track.

This way you can stop wasting marketing dollars in the wrong areas and start spending it in the right areas.