Google Analytics: How to Know If Your Marketing is Working

Do you use Google Analytics?

Want to know how data can help improve your marketing?

To learn how to measure what's working with Google Analytics, I interview Christopher Penn.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Christopher Penn, the VP of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications (a PR firm). He co-founded PodCamp with Chris Brogan and is co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. His brand-new book is Marketing Blue Belt: From Data Zero to Marketing Hero.

Christopher will talk about how to use Google Analytics to improve your marketing.

You'll discover how to set goals, and analyze and measure your data.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Google Analytics
How Christopher got into data and analytics

Christopher came into the marketing space through working in technology. In 2003 he joined a student loan company startup as the director of technology. In the startup world, you do many different jobs. Christopher explains that in addition to being the CIO and CTO, he ended up doing a lot of the marketing, data collection and reporting to stakeholders. Over time, he realized  he enjoyed the marketing more than running the technology.

Listen to the show to hear how Christopher used podcasting and social media to stand out from larger companies.

The importance of analytics

Christopher believes there's a perception that doing analytics is difficult and requires a math degree. However, he relates analytics to cooking. He says you don't need to be a professional chef to make a decent breakfast—you just need to follow the basic recipe. If you want to be a professional chef, that's a different story. You should have a culinary degree and years of experience.

Data and analytics are the same way, Christopher explains. If you want to be able to intelligently report on what you're doing, it's relatively easy to get started. If you want to get super-sophisticated, you'll probably want a statistics background down the road.

In terms of what's readily available, particularly for social media, there are four layers of measurement:

The media layer with social tools and analytics about audience reach and engagement.
The web layer, where after engaging on social media, someone interacts on your website.
The middle layer is marketing automation, which is tracking engagement at an individual level.
The bottom layer is your sales and CRM.

Christopher believes the first step toward strategy is measurement and data. After you analyze the data, which is the art and science of telling what happened, then you need to derive insights from it. Once you determine why certain things happened, then you can figure out what to do next.

Listen to the show to learn why and how to use benchmarking on Google Analytics.

Simple things marketers can do with Google Analytics

Marketers need to start by defining goals and goal values in their analytics. That changes the application from "what happened" to "how it's impacting your business."

For example, choose a goal, like newsletter signups. Then determine what dollar value you put on a newsletter subscriber (what a subscriber spends on your website). Once you do that, you'll start to see things like estimated revenue of traffic. This is the value of traffic coming from social media and search to your site.

Before delving into specific features of the platform, Christopher recommends taking the free courses offered by Google Analytics Academy. Do the four courses in this order: