It is one thing to set a goal for yourself, to plot a course for how you will achieve it, and then to relish in your success when you inevitably do. Working this way gives you a plan for the future to help accomplish your goals time and time again. You know not only that the goal was hit, but the path that was used to get there.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you may stumble upon a goal without a clear understanding of how you achieved it. When this happens, trying to replicate the process can require, well, the same blind luck that helped you reach it in the first place. That’s not exactly the formula for a high-converting website.

As marketers, we want to hone in not only on what happened, but how it happened.

Any digital marketing professional worth his or her salt will tell you that step one of customizing your website analytics is setting up goal tracking. While total conversions and conversion rate are both important metrics to review, they won’t tell the full story on their own. Sure, a visitor may have reached your Contact page, but did they do so via the homepage, a product page or an About page? Which page does the best job leading someone to reach out for services? What path is more successful? With just a single number you can’t know for sure.

So where do we get a closer look at the user journey that ultimately created a lead or a sale for you?

Enter, the Reverse Goal Path.

The Reverse Goal Path report allows you to see the steps that led a person to the point of conversion. This article provides an overview to help you understand the Reverse Goal Path, along with tips to help you get the most out of the data through customization.

“Like” it or not, Facebook has increasingly become a pay-to-play network for businesses over the past few years. Unfortunately, many business marketers have learned of this limitation the hard way, as they’ve sadly witnessed the dwindling of interactions with their organic posts.

To cope, we can either make faces like the new angry reaction emoji, or we can get on board by getting better at supplementing organic efforts with paid initiatives.

The News Feed algorithm limits the percentage of brand posts that reach users, especially cutting down on showing sales-specific posts. Out of every thousand users who like your page, perhaps only 5-10 (or 0.5% - 1.0%) of those users are likely to see any one organic post.

As a solution, Facebook offers the chance to use Facebook advertising to promote posts. Obviously the necessity of spending money to do something you could formerly do for free can be frustrating. Fortunately the tradeoff is the opportunity Facebook Advertising offers to highly segment your target audience by specific demographic parameters.

Today, a smart social media marketing plan should also include a budget for paid promotion. Check out our primer on building ads Using the Facebook Ads Manager.

In this article, we’ll talk about ways to integrate paid promotion with your organic social posting strategies in order to achieve the maximum reach to your target audience. In addition, we’ll address some potential concerns with images for ads.

Some aspects of digital marketing may always be a little mysterious. It’s not like a billboard where you can see the finished product towering over a highway. It’s not like being engaged to design a brochure that, once complete, can be seen and held. In a digital marketing campaign, the time spent researching which keywords to bid on and shifting budgets based on past results isn’t tangible. Evidence of hours conducting outreach for links may only be visible as records of outgoing emails.

This makes the results your deliverable.

Beyond business growth, which is hopefully evident to your clients, results are delivered through reporting. That’s why we spend time meticulously preparing a perfect monthly report (on Megalytic of course) outlining successful metrics for a client’s digital marketing campaign.

Because this data is your deliverable, it is crucial to ensure your client actually understands the information in the report and the action items you’re accomplishing for them. In order to do that, regular communication is the key to keeping clients engaged with your work.

To keep the dialogue flowing, schedule regular meetings with your client to review results and plan future tactics. In this article, we’ll discuss seven tips for effective client reporting meetings.

From keyword research to bid management, countless platforms exist claiming to make life easier for digital marketers. Whether they offer a better bid management solution or an SEO research hub, sales reps bombard our inboxes with messages pitching yet another tool.

But how do you know what you need? In the midst of all the tools available for SEO, PPC, content marketing, conversion rate optimization and analytics, how do you choose the one that will be the most valuable for you? Trying to put together the right box of tools can be exhausting and expensive.

So that’s when we turn to the all-in-one digital marketing platform, offered in several variations by different vendors. This tool promises keyword research, rank tracking, AdWords campaign monitoring, competitive research, real-time dashboards, and report building all under one simple login.

All of those features you say? All of the research and the reporting in one place? Perfect.

Or is it?

Even if you are implementing effective strategies and are able to achieve exciting results, the average client may not fully understand and appreciate your work without a proper report. That’s why you don’t want to skimp on the presentation of data to your client.

While reporting is often one of multiple features included in a larger toolset, the all-in-one tool may not provide the best possible solution for one of your agency’s most important activities: communicating results to clients.

An all-in-one solution sounds good in theory, and many of them are excellent. But a juggernaut of digital data may not deliver on all expectations. There are benefits to using separate tools for research and reporting. In this article, we’ll cover some of the advantages of using a standalone platform that’s dedicated to reporting.

When you love metrics, you get excited about every tool update, new feature and new release. But sometimes, it’s helpful to have some starting ideas about how to integrate these shiny new measurements into your day-to-day reporting.

That’s where we come in.

We were ecstatic to add Facebook Ads integration into Megalytic. Now, you can automatically pull in detailed metrics from your Facebook advertising campaigns alongside data from Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, AdWords, and Search Console. Who doesn’t want that kind of multi-channel insight all in one place?

Our integration has made it easier than ever to report those metrics to your clients. In this article, we provide you with a sample Megalytic marketing report utilizing the new widgets now available for Facebook Ads.