10 tips to make your reporting days easier - This presentation looks at tips, approaches and tools to help your digital reporting needs. Take a look at data from a different perspective and help improve results.
MeasureFest November 2017 - 10 tips to make your reporting days easier
1. 10 tips to make your
reporting days easier
rachel mepham - head of digital - digital clarity
@rachelmepham
2. 6. GA Secondary Dimensions
7. GA Advanced Segments
8. GA Multi Channel Funnels
9. Data Studio
10. Excel spreadsheet
1. Lateral thinking
2. Comparing Data
3. Google Trends
4. AdWords Filters
5. AdWords Segments
Agenda
3. Useful reporting tools
AdWords Reporting
Google Analytics
Google Trends
Google Data Studio
Find this deck = https://goo.gl/AYxWs3
56. Ads not working well
1. Are clicks down or impressions up?
2. Is position down? Why?
3. Is CPC down? If we reduced it and position fell then CTR could fall
also?
4. Did my broad match keywords match to an irrelevant term?
5. Is there something in current affairs or the news? – e.g. Spike in
impressions for Africa because of Xfactor!
6. Are the right keywords triggering the right ads? – cross negatives
57. Summary and Takeaways
Lateral thinking
Comparing data
Google Trends
AdWords delving deeper
Google Analytics segmentation
Multi Channel Funnels
Data Studio
Excel spreadsheet
58. Thanks for listening
rachel mepham
head of digital
www.digital-clarity.com
rachel.mepham@digital-clarity.com
@rachelmepham
Notes de l'éditeur
The plan for today is to run through 10 top tips and tools and ways of looking at data to help your reporting.
My hope is that everyone will come away with something.
Quite a lot to run through so lets kick off…
Going to cover -
How we approach data
Comparing like for like trends
Breaking down data in AdWords and G Analytics
Data Studio – visualising and sharing data
Trusty Excel spreadsheet
Some useful tools I reference throughout this doc.
To start - I wanted to set you all a lateral thinking puzzle
Anyone who has heard this keep the answer to yourselves for now.
Reporting is all about runing data
looking for patterns and trends
making sense of the data.
Sometimes this means thinking about things differently
Lateral thinking is, the solving of problems by an indirect, creative approach, viewing the problem in a new and unusual way.
Lateral thinking Puzzle – I will give you the answer at the end.
This puzzle is interesting because it seems to make no sense! So needs some thought put towards it.
The key is to break down each part of the puzzle and question it from a different approach.
What does a gun and glass of water have in common,
Why would the gun result in the same solution as a glass of water – they seem miles apart!
Will leave that with you for now…
Tip 2 – Comparing data
There are thousands of reports you can run just from your Google analytics account.
Plus another thousand odd from adwords, and your chosen SEO tools and your social media accounts etc..
Page views for a particular page which is down in October YoY my assumption might be
Data from March this year to October to a specific page, peaks end of march and September
But…
Actually March through to october are extremely low.
Turns out the annotation for end of January a website change was done and that page was removed from the navigation. Hence only tiny amounts of traffic now.
Make sure you know what you are looking at.
Seasonality peaks can skew data, if you sell to the education industry, school holidays may see a drop in traffic to your website, therfre comparing a normal week to half term will always be apples and oranges
ALWAYS COMPARE the data to previous and the trend rather than looking at it in isolation.
Google trends can be really useful for understanding market search trends in specific countries and how these trends compare from keyword or topic.
However we still need to have our analytics head on…
We all know who this is now….Theresa May
Until June last year there was bearly any active search around Theresa May, but nearly overnight searches peaked!
Google search peaks were Huge! And again around the recent election. We could make some sweeping assumptions but hold on lets just put things into perspective:
Bring Brexit into the mix…
Maybe those spikes in searches were not so big!
Brexit searches on the week of 19th June were huge, slightly worrying that day after the brexit vote traffic spiked for “what is brexit”
What surge of searches could belittle Brexit last year? ...
Both Brexit and May were dwarfed by Pokemon GO at its height of interest.
make sure you know what you are comparing,
what data you are looking at,
once you do google trends can be really useful..
Would think the trends for these terms would be pretty much the same, but no…
UK – dominated by AFRICA SAFARI
When we look at the US surprisingly the trends are different – AfricaN safari is the dominating search term.
Help keyword decisions,
country learnings,
suggested searches too
I suggest you go and have a play around with it.
How many people using Google Adwords – couple of quick tips which sometimes overlooked…
Quick way to look at your data and break it down by metric or association. E.g. keywords that include specific words, or performance metrics of groups of keywords
Useful to understand weak performing kws for quality.
Cost over £100 conversions under 1
Start filtering your performance keywords in adwords.
Often you can focus on the top spenders, and the low converters but not the middle teir where the most growth opportunity is.
Keywords including a word , e.g.” buy” when I group them together I can actually learn the average CTR and Conv rate is ….
Can be useful for delving into more detail per kw, ad, group or campaign..
Break down your data by day of week, search network, device
This is often where data is hidden.
Find what isn’t working for your campaign or adgroup or even a keyword level and optimise.
n overlooked, segments in AdWords can be really useful for troubleshooting. Why is this campaign now working as well as it should be?
See if its google search causing trouble – or the search partners.
From experience you often get a very mixed performance on both networks, so this is a good area to keep an eye on.
Rather than looking at the top level device performance, try to understand what each campaign, ad group, keyword and even ad is doing on different devices.
Possible weekly trends by keyword.
Hands up who has google analytics on their website? And who is using it to their best ability?
Google analytics can be used to delve into the finer detail of your website and marketing performance.
Secondary dimensions is one useful little tip for breaking down your data
Sorted by new users, this shows Monday Organic search drives the most new users.
Why is this important, well I can look at my other marketing channels and potentially invest more as Mondays are good, or reduce spend on PPC as Organic is driving the most and save some budget, your call dependant on clients needs/goals
Often different country visitors have different behavioural patterns
By using secondary dimensions we can see how devices are being used in different countries for each channel of data
Another quick tip in GA Break the data out to quick ways of segmenting
System auto segments – or you can set up new ones which wont go into now but speak to me after if you want to find out more.
Collate all data coming from one location, e.g. London – and analyse,
Or USA v UK
Organic vs PPC vs Direct, vs display
Often see that display or PPC is not getting what it deserves in regards to sales. They are influencers.. The MCF report allows you to start to understand Attribution.
Touch points before converting
Dependant on how you are attributing the click, you can understand what is influencing sales or conversions.
You can filter the funnel by type of conversion, path length and all traffic or adwords.
Window of time you are looking at
unavailable in the path demonstrates the conversion ending via another source non AdWords.
Allows you to understand your influencing kws.
Also multiple searches people are doing
What is it? – a reporting dashboard which allows multiple sources to be collated, e.g. your adwords, analytics CRM database, spreadsheets etc…
Simple easy overview reporting which updates automatically.
Save time once set up – auto populates, share etc..
Sometimes overlooked with all the wizzbang reporting platforms. Calculate what you need to see in straight forward tables and cells
Back to the puzzle I set at he start
Lateral thinking Puzzle – I will give you the answer at the end.
This puzzle is interesting because it seems to make no sense! So needs some thought put towards it.
The gun gave him a scare therefore replacing the need for the water
If we knew he had hiccoughs at start then everything would be logical. It seemed illogical until we knew that final piece of information.
If we apply lateral thinking to the kinds of data we analyse e.g. CTR has dropped.
But f you apply some lateral thinking to this, a more creative look at things we question the data
The power of why? Question the data
