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Why White Label Digital Marketing Reports?

Published December 31, 2014
Your boss is asking for metrics on the latest campaign.
A client needs monthly reporting on website performance.
Nearly every day someone needs data about something and they’re looking at you to have the answers.
 
How do you handle reporting requests like these? One (cumbersome) way is to cut and paste from tools like Google Analytics and then format a report as best you can in Word or Excel. Or, you can simplify your reporting by using a tool like Megalytic to produce professional, white label reports that are branded with your company logo.
 
Whether you are a data analytics guru, or an agency marketing manager, reporting is an important part of your job. It’s how you communicate with your audience. White labeling your reports elevates the quality of your communication. It tells your audience the report contains important, information that you have prepared and carefully-assembled specially for them.
This post describes how to use Megalytic’s white labeling features to professionalize reporting.

 

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What to Check When Taking Over a Google Analytics Account

Published December 26, 2014
Doing any kind of web work for a client starts with getting your hands dirty in their data. You need to know how much traffic an existing site receives, how much time users spend with the site, what pages they view and how many users convert to leads or sales for a business. But, before you can uncover any of that information, you need to make sure your client is receiving the right data in the first place.
Often, they’re not.
As a digital marketer, it’s your job to review any account you’ve been tasked with to ensure you are seeing accurate data and that you understand how past changes to the site and marketing campaigns are reflected.
Where do you start?

 

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Megalytic Upgrade – December 2014

Published December 22, 2014
Just in time for the New Year, we’ve released a significant Megalytic upgrade, packed with new features for better reports and easier handling of large-scale reporting.
New features include:
  • KPI Widgets – Small size indicators that provide at-a-glance reporting on the performance of key metrics. This is something people have been clamoring for -details here.
  • User Workspaces and Security – Each user in your organization who logs in to Megalytic can now have their own personalized workspace where they see only the reports they need to see – details here.
  • Custom Dimensions – Create charts and tables using Google Analytics Custom Dimensions.
  • Content Groups – Support for Google Analytics Content Groups has been added.
  • Week Ending Day Adjustment – Choose either Saturday or Sunday for the week ending day in charts and tables based on Google Analytics data.

 

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Tracking Facebook Users with Google Analytics

Published December 17, 2014
You have a Facebook strategy. Whether it’s one you lead for your company, or one you created for a client of your agency, you’ve implemented a strategy on Facebook to guide users from the social network to content on a website you control.
How are you tracking that strategy?
Sure, Facebook Insights does its best to keep marketers abreast of clicks, reach and engagement on Facebook, but you need more. Once you’ve driven traffic from the platform to your website, the next step is tracking those users to determine where they are going on your site and how well they are engaging with your content once they’ve landed. Google Analytics can help fill in the data gaps that result when using Facebook Insights alone.

 

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Tracking Traffic from Social Media with Google Analytics

Published December 12, 2014
You’re doing everything you’ve been told you’re supposed to do. You’ve claimed your social media profiles, you’re talking to customers online and you’re diligently posting content each and every day. But is it moving the needle? How do you measure how much traffic to your website those posts are generating? Or, how well that traffic converts?
Maybe your boss wants to know, or – if you work for an agency – your client wants to know. By accurately measuring your website’s social media traffic, you can determine which social networks deliver the most valuable traffic.
Out of the box, Google Analytics provides reports that can give you a lot of insight. However, unless you are tagging your social media campaigns effectively, they will significantly under-report your actual social media traffic.
This post shows you how to use the social media reports in Google Analytics and how to make sure they are accurate by effectively tagging your social media posts.

 

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Website Traffic Analysis with Megalytic

Published December 10, 2014
It doesn’t matter if it’s your boss or a client because the question hitting you at the end of the month is always the same:
“How did the website do?”
Everyone wants to know, and they’re counting on your report to tell them.
Your monthly reporting process shouldn’t involve cranking out meaningless numbers and graphs. Use this opportunity to answer the most vital questions related to the success of the site and, ultimately, the business. Build reports that analyze how the site has performed over the past month, break out problems encountered and outline improvements for the future.
That’s how you really answer the above question.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how Megalytic can help you create a compelling website traffic analysis report.

 

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Google Analytics Dashboards or Reports - Which Is Better?

Published December 5, 2014
Your company wants to promote a data-driven culture. As the resident data guru, part of your job entails recommending what tools and process the organization should adopt to get the right data into the right hands to help drive internal decision making. For example, you may be asked explain the pros and cons of dashboards vs reports; or to provide a wider set of options for data sharing.
You could simply give everybody access to the company’s Google Analytic accounts. But, after a little bit of thought, you realize that will probably not work. After all, most of the marketing team doesn’t know how to use Google Analytics to get the data they need, and they are too busy to learn. Also, maybe handing over full Analytics access to everyone in the building isn’t the best idea.
And truthfully, not everyone wants all the data. What the marketing staff wants is easy access to data that helps them make the specific decisions they need to make. It’s the data most relevant to their story. They need to answer questions, such as:
  • Which campaign generated the most sales last month?
  • Did the new checkout design reduce abandoned carts?
  • Which acquisition channel is doing the best job bringing in visitors from our target demographic?
  • How does the conversion rate for the latest Twitter advertising campaign compare with the one we ran last month?
  • Is the new AdWords remarketing campaign contributing more to sales than it costs?
Each of these questions can be answered with Google Analytics. However, it takes a skilled web analyst driving the tool to bring forth the data to do it.
The key to a data-driven culture is leveraging the abilities of your skilled web analysts to produce data the entire marketing department can consume. This means providing your data gurus with tools to automate the process of producing the data, and also – possibly – some administrative support to help them pull everything together.
As you work on designing and implementing your organization’s solution, you are going to need to decide whether to distribute the data using dashboards, reports, or both. Dashboards and reports each have their strengths, but are suited to different purposes.
This post explores when you should use dashboards and when you should use reports.

 

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Anticipating Questions with Proactive Reporting using Google Analytics Custom Alerts

Published December 3, 2014
You’re preparing a monthly analytics report for your client when you notice a problem. The numbers don’t look good. Organic search traffic saw a serious drop over the last month, and conversions took a hit as a result. The client will be looking at you for an answer, and you better have it.
How will you present the information in a way that eases concern and provides a solution?
Inevitably, as a digital marketing professional, you will not always experience perfect results from your work. At times, search traffic will dip, conversions will suffer and ad campaigns will perform less effectively than expected. You’ll need to present the data transparently, while also helping your client see why drops may have occurred and what they mean.
Below we explain how to use proactive reporting to spot concerns early and anticipate client questions.

 

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Evaluating Google Analytics Traffic by Hour & Day
2 June, 2016 | Blog
Remember how your mom told you not to stand too close to the television because it might hurt your eyes?
The same rules can apply to data. If you’re too close, you may miss the patterns and trends that are crucial to understanding your website’s performance. You can’t judge a site’s performance looking at data in the bubble of a single day, you must consider any day’s traffic compared to the days before and after.
Google Analytics makes it fairly easy to analyze trends over long periods of time. But it also allows you to stand right in front of that TV, to look at more granular levels of time, right down to the hour.
There’s a better way to get that close to the data, without burning your retinas. We’ll cover how to analyze traffic effectively in today’s post.

 

 

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Understanding Direct Traffic in Google Analytics
14 April, 2015 | Blog
When the client first came to you, you talked up the value of Google Analytics. You emphasized the importance of seeing where your traffic was coming from. You went on and on about how Google Analytics can show traffic sources to pinpoint whether people came from search, social media or a specific site referral, and how valuable this data was. You sold them on it, so much so that your client looked forward to receiving that first report, the magical day when they would finally understand where visitors were coming from.
But then the report came, and it looked like this:

 

 

It showed that 10% of your client’s traffic came from “(direct)/(none)”. What does this label mean? How do you explain Direct traffic to your client? Better yet, how do you explain “none”?
Let’s take a closer look at understanding Direct traffic in Google Analytics and how we can address it with clients.
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Understanding Google Analytics Channels
7 April, 2016 | Blog
One of the most exciting and important aspects of digital marketing is the ability to understand exactly how your customers are finding you. It informs every single part of integrated campaigns and helps determine which efforts are working and which ones need to be revisited. Google Analytics allows you to zero in on the performances of different marketing channels to evaluate everything from brand awareness to social media messaging. To get the most insight from that data, it’s crucial to understand exactly how Google sorts your traffic.
Channels in Google Analytics are high-level categories indicating how people found your site. While the Source/Medium report shows you in more detail where people came from, Channels are broader, more “user-friendly” names lumping visits together in buckets useful for high-level reporting categories.
For instance, Facebook Sessions often show up in multiple ways in the Source/Medium report. They may appear as facebook.com, m.facebook.com, and l.facebook.com, all of which are variations of the same source. The Channels report will include all of these in the Social bucket, so you can see less granular, aggregate numbers on social media performance.

 

 

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