Most B2B marketers use analytics, but are they doing it right?

Jill Quick

, digital marketing consultant at

Quick Marketing

, presents three ways to make the most of your analytics

Does this sound like you?

1. You open up your analytics software
2. You look at your favourite report
3. You see if the numbers go up or down
4. Close, get on with your day.

Or perhaps you open up analytics, look at a number of reports, but feel like you’re not quite getting the most out of the insights that analytics has to offer. Juggling your workload often means you don’t have enough time to maximise your returns with this super tool.

You are not alone.

Google Analytics is a free tool, and one most marketers are using. However, the majority are self-taught, or have been giving an account and don’t question the setup.

There is a wealth of information available, but many marketers are only using a fraction of it. Unless marketers attend a workshop, read an analytics book or hire an agency or consultant who really get this, then they are missing out on the opportunity to master Google Analytics and become a data-driven marketer. By grasping data, marketers can gain a competitive edge over their peers and competitors.

What is the right way to look at analytics?

1. Create a marketing idea
2. Ask a question that supports that idea
3. Find the report that provides the answer
4. Segment and contextualise the data
5. Attribute and measure the impact.

We will cover a lot of this in our

B2B Analytics Workshop

in October, but until then, here are three analytics tips B2B marketers should implement today in order to improve their reporting:

1. Have more than one view and use filters

Google recommends that you have at least

three views

in your Analytics account.  

1. One master raw data, think of this as your backup file
2. One test view, where you practice applying filters and gold, and when you’re happy that you haven’t broken anything rollover into your…
3. Reporting view, which you use to create your marketing reports and insights.

You need to configure the data that appears in your reporting views by applying filters. The most common type of filter is to remove or exclude traffic from your company (you don’t want to be counting sales and customer service as visitors).

There are a few more filters that you need to consider. Spam has been a typical problem for most websites (traffic from bots or ghosts that are not real visitors to your site but get counted). You want to include a filter to remove spam campaign sources, hostnames, and referral traffic. Brain Clifton, who brought Google Analytics to market back in 2005, has written a great post on how to

tackle spam

.

2. Tracking your content marketing

Most B2B marketers will have some form of content marketing as lead generation or customer retention. Think a blogging platform or a resources section with expensive videos and whitepapers etc.

However, the boss will always want to know the impact of your content on KPIs and, ultimately, its ROI. To achieve this, marketers need to tinker with their website a little and learn how to use advanced segments.

To measure impact on your bottom line, marketers should create advanced segments. This gives them the option to layer conditions and receive the answers they’re looking for.

For example, does watching a video make people convert? Do they buy more if they read your blog? Is churn reduced if they read a set number of resources? Which of your whitepapers or guides drives a higher conversion rate?

3. Calculated metrics

Calculated metrics

came onboard around November 2015, and are still quite unused within analytics. So, why are they worth your time? Most KPI dashboards will likely require some maths, such as linking two metrics together. Only rarely will these two metrics not appear in the same Google Analytics report. Google have now made this a little bit easier for you, so here are five calculated metrics you can create that map to your funnel and also link to a key activity or marketing programme.

For example, if you were running a paid search campaign to drive prospects to your website to read a blog and watch a video, with the ultimate goal of them signing up for a webinar they need to register and sign-in for, you can create the following metrics:

• Prospects: Average cost per session – How much did it cost you to bring the prospects to your website?
• MQL: Average events per session – What were the average events (blog scroll, video plays etc) per session?
• SAL: Sign-up success rate – How many people actually signed up?
• SQL: Login success rate – How many who signed up actually showed up?

If you are looking to master Google Analytics, thus ensuring you possess the insights to put data at the core of your B2B marketing programmes and website activities, then join us for our

Introduction to Google Analytics: B2B perspective

on 5 October.