The year is ending. Even most of my marketing is on hold until the beginning of the year. But if you're responsible for your organization's online presence, including the website, email list, facebook, etc, then you are either:
- agonizing over how to allocate your proposed budget;
- going through the final steps of budget approval; or
- wondering if the budget you proposed has enough money in all the right places.
Regardless of where you are in this process, there is one single Google Analytics report that you must look at right now to tell you how your online efforts are performing. This report is available in Google Analytics under "Traffic Sources->All Traffic Sources" and will work for you as long as you've got some Goals set up.
Set three variables on this page (I've circled them in red):
- Show: Source/medium;
- View the tab with an active goal set (I've got two sets, so I'm focusing on the second one here); and
- Have it show the conversion rate for one of your key website goals. I've selected the downloading of my fundraising ebook as the key goal.
Also you'll want to give yourself a good long time frame with the box at the top right.
This report will now show you both the effectiveness of each channel to converting traffic into downloads of my ebook, but also how much that channel is contributing to my overall total.
For example, look at the row labeled "facebook / cpc". That's for the Facebook cost-per-click ads I run advertising my fundraising ebook. Those are setup to spend no more than US$5 per day. They convert at a rate of almost 8% per visit, meaning that for every 100 visits generated, I get 8 ebook downloads. This campaign generates a whopping 20% of my total conversions, suggesting that I might be able to up my ad budget.
Alternatively, visits coming in from twitter have a very low conversion rate: 0.66%, but because there are so many of them, they actually generate 5% of my total ebook downloads. Truth be told, I simply post links on twitter when I write something, and occasionally when I find an interesting link. I'm certainly not spending 5% of my time on it, so it's a very profitable channel, in that respect.
If I was killing myself, posting 30 things to Twitter everyday and still only getting 5% of my total return, I would call it time to scale back or find a more efficient way to do that work.
Feedburner is another example of this. I don't spend any time actually doing anything special for my RSS feed subscribers, besides writing the content, and yet that is also 5% of my ebook downloads.
This report should tell you how the work you're doing is producing results, and if those results are commensurate with the efforts you're putting forth.
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