What if your boss asked for a meeting to review the status of your digital marketing efforts? What would you analyze for the presentation? Here’s what we recently prepared for a client who introduced us to their new president.
Percentage of Traffic and Sales by Channel for 2023 and 2022
We gathered this information from the monthly GA4 reports we normally prepare. (If you don’t have Conversion tracking set up, here’s how to do it.)
- In GA4 Reports, under Business Objectives, Generate Leads, select Traffic Acquisition to see Users by Channel.
- Under Admin, Events, Create Event to set up a Custom Event to be tracked. To track a sale, identify the URL of your purchase receipt page (a page you can only reach when a sale is complete), and set up your conversion, adding the specific URL in the second “Value” box as below:
Once set up, return to the Events list, and in the right column, mark the Event as a Conversion.
You might notice that some channels, like Organic Search, may comprise a large percentage of the traffic, but a much smaller percentage of sales. And other channels like the “Direct” channel may amount to a smaller percentage of traffic compared to the percentage of sales.
Organic Search Position Compared to the Competition
Because the majority of traffic for this client was from Organic Search, we reviewed the client’s relative position for their most important keywords compared to the competition. (You can accomplish a simple look at this by searching by keyword using an incognito browser. Both Chrome and Firefox have this option.)
Our client’s products are state-specific, so we had ranking information by their 20 most important states. We also presented an analysis of the client’s in-coming links versus those of their main competitor. Your own site’s incoming links are visible in your Google Search Console. (As your webmaster for access.) You can view some of your competitor’s incoming links, estimated search traffic, and number of keywords, doing a free trial of tools like semrush.
Organic Search Snippets
We post at least three new blogs each month for this client, and those blog posts drive a large portion of their Organic traffic. When we searched for the client’s keywords on google.com, a number of questions appear in the “people also ask” section. Our client’s posts appear as answers for a number of these questions — so as you’re reviewing rank for your keywords, be sure to click on each of these questions to see if you might find your own website being featured there.
Being featured in Organic Search Snippets like these is a way to boost your Organic Search visibility in addition to your Organic Search Listings, and it shows the power of adding useful content to your website that your prospects are searching for.
Organic Search Traffic by Page
We analyzed the 10 pages with the most traffic in 2023, and listed the percentage of traffic from Organic Search.
- In GA4 Reports under Business Objectives, Examine User Behavior, select Pages and Screens, and pull your top 10 Pages by Users.
- In the column “Page Path and Screen Class”, click the + to the right. Select Traffic Source. Under “User-Scoped”, select Cross-Channel, First User Medium. In the Search box above the chart, search for “Organic.”
In the client’s case, the top 10 pages by Users included 4 sales pages and 6 blog posts. So we then pulled Users and Organic Users for the top 10 sales pages, and detailed the percentage of traffic by each channel for each sales page.
Our analysis revealed the importance of Google Ads for some of these key sales pages.
We then added a slide with the top 10 blog posts by Users, along with the percentage of Organic Search traffic for each page. This pointed to the importance of blog posts in driving Organic traffic.
But what happens to that Organic traffic once they reach those blog posts? We pointed out we have a Call to Action box prominently on each blog page to encourage visitors to Find My State to get started, followed by a Get Posts by Email sign-up.
Our monthly reports reveal most blog visitors are on a desktop, so in the client’s case, having these Action items in a sidebar works. If most of your blog visitors are using a mobile phone, the sidebar buttons won’t appear until below your blog, so you might want to intersperse them within your blog content or use a pop-up.
Each blog also includes at least one link to a related product page to try to move that blog traffic onto a sales page.
Sales by State
In the client’s case, sales by state is the key metric. You may want to look at sales by product if you sell multiple SKUs.
We compared sales by state for 2023 versus 2022, and looked at each state’s percentage contribution to company sales. (You could do a similar analysis by product or product line.)
- One way to see sales by state in GA4: under Business Objectives, Examine User Behavior, select Conversions. In the Event Name column, click the + and select Geography, Region, to see Conversions by state.
Website Conversion
How effective is the website at Conversion? We compared Website Conversion for 2023 to 2022, and Overall Conversion to Organic Search Conversions.
We also looked at overall traffic trends, as well as Average Session Duration, comparing 2023 to 2022, and All Users to Organic Search Users. You may see that traffic isn’t increasing, but your visitors are spending more time on your site, which indicates you’re attracting quality visitors who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
If you see your traffic increasing, but visitors are spending less time on site, be sure every blog and sales page has an Action button and link to take the next step and give each visitor a reason to spend more time on your site.
- If you’re having trouble locating particular metrics in GA4, go to any Report and click the pencil in the top right. Select metrics, choose the metric you want to add to your report and click Save. You can also remove metrics you’re not interested in, and change the order by dragging the metrics in the list.
Google Pay-Per Click Ads
For this ecommerce client, the key metric is Cost/Sale, so we computed that number by state, comparing 2023 to 2022.
- Even if you can’t see your Sales in Google Ads (this particular client struggles to implement the tracking code), you can see sales in GA4. Under Business Objectives, Examine User Behavior, choose Conversions. Click the + next to Event Name, choose Traffic Source, and under User-Scoped, Google Ads. Select First User Google Ads Ad Group Name. (This is one reason why we had modified each of their Ad Groups to include the Campaign Name as well.)
We also pointed out what headlines and descriptions we had tested that had won over other options. Those winning words are used in the client’s website, email messages, print ads, and direct mail, as well as future Google Ads.
Email Marketing Series
We reviewed the best Subject Lines for both renewal clients and prospects in terms of sales/delivered emails. The “Get Posts by Email” sign-ups and how well those new prospects clicked through on the monthly newsletter was also discussed.
2024 Direction
For all of our clients, we suggest the Ross Simmonds “use every piece of content more than once” plan. So we plan to turn more of their blog posts into short videos in 2024. We have some ideas to simplify language on sales pages to try and boost conversion, which should be a continuous testing process for every website. And we’ll continue to use what we learn from PPC and email testing across media.
Happy Marketing.
Need more detail on the planning points above? The second edition of our new BEST-SELLING book, “The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing” is now available on Amazon!
Learn more about The Results Obsession and see the Table of Contents
The book contains an entire chapter on marketing math formulas, as well as a chapter on Google Analytics 4, all updated for 2024.
The email strategy chapter includes a discussion of email analytics to track.
And an entire chapter is devoted to maximizing your return on Google Ads. There’s even a chapter on how to test and correctly analyze results in PPC and email.
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