Key Takeaways:
Understand the importance of context when it comes to your data.
Discover five tools to help you review metrics more easily.
Know how to ask strategic questions to analyze and understand your metrics for each platform.
Not sure your marketing is working? Monitor your business’s metrics! Like the growth charts many of us had as kids, we need metrics as the “growth chart” that shows how our business has grown. Here are some tools and questions to help you review and analyze your business’s data more painlessly.
5 Metrics Tools You Should Be Using
1. Google Business
If you haven’t done so already, set up a Google Business Profile. It’s an invaluable tool for knowing how your local business shows up across Google products like Maps and Search. It can even help you monitor your business’s internal data like your call performance, so you know how many customer calls were answered and how many were missed.
2. Google Search Console
This platform’s features and reports can help you monitor activities like search traffic, page views, impressions, click through rates, and keyword performance. It can also highlight issues that you need to fix to increase your website’s Google ranking.
When using Search Console to analyze search result performance, you can set a filter for country, date range, and what you want to compare.
3. Google Analytics 4
If you’re serious about mastering your business’s metrics, Google Analytics 4 is another “must” to have in your data arsenal. This analytics service lets you measure traffic and engagement across your website and apps.
4. Facebook Insights
When you set up a Facebook Business page, you’ll have access to Facebook Insights. It’s an analytics tool that lets you monitor how your posts are performing and analyze the demographics of the people engaging with your posts. For instance, it breaks down visitors by age, gender, and location — all helpful data that you can use to inform your future posting strategy on the platform!
5. Instagram Insights
Similar to Facebook, Instagram has an Insights tool you can use to review how your business is performing on the platform. It displays data such as accounts reached, accounts engaged, and total followers. You can also explore the age and gender of the people who engaged with your posts and who is following your account.
Consistency is key to success with your metrics. Here at Technology Therapy® Group, we recommend setting aside at least one day each month to review your marketing metrics.
Create a List of Questions to Guide Your Metrics Review
Before you review your marketing data, create a list of questions. It doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list; maybe just start with 3-5 things you want to know about your business.
This is an opportunity to step back and ask what in your business is working and why it’s working. Then ask what in your business isn’t working and why it isn’t working.
Organize your questions by each platform you’re using and what you want to review metrics for. For instance, with Google metrics, your list of questions could include the following:
- Am I ranking with Google?
- What words and phrases am I ranking for?
- Are those words sending visitors to my website?
- Are those visitors in my area?
- Are those visitors calling, inquiring, or buying from my business?
- How are visitors finding my website?
Create a list of questions to guide your data review and analysis. Not sure where to start? Write down 3-5 things you want to know about your business.
Use Your Questions to Interpret Metrics for Each Platform
These questions are crucial for guiding how you analyze and interpret your business’s data. Say you go into Google Analytics reports. The default report screen usually shows how many users visited your website in the last 30 minutes. It shows how many users and which country they’re located in when they accessed your site. For instance, it’s showing that 6 users visited your site in the last 30 minutes: 5 from the U.S. and one from France.
At first glance, that information isn’t helpful. It doesn’t answer the question you wrote down earlier of how visitors are finding your website. So, it’s time to dig deeper.
Go into the sidebar menu and click on “Traffic Acquisition” from the Acquisition dropdown. It’ll bring up a “users by session default group” screen, which indicates the sources your visitors accessed your site from (organic search, direct, paid search, organic social, etc.).
When looking at your data in both Google Search Console and Analytics, though, it’s important to use the same search filters on each. For example, make sure the reports you’re looking at are both filtering results for the last 28 days, so you’re comparing apples to apples.
Make a Habit of Regular Review
Staying informed is key to success with your metrics. Here at Technology Therapy® Group, we recommend setting aside at least one day each month to review your marketing metrics.
Feel like you could use even more pointers with metrics and using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4? Contact us about a coaching session. And check out the following on-demand training sessions to keep growing your data know-how!
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