Measuring Success with Analytics

19/05/2022

This article is a 5 stage process to building an analytics framework for your website that takes less than 12 hours work*

* if you know what you're doing

It is specifically aimed at non-transactional websites, although certain principles can be applied to transactional websites as well. I consider a non-transactional website as one where there is no ability to place an online order. A transactional website is a website with full eCommerce or it has the ability for an order to be placed so that the value of the order is recorded.

For transactional websites, you can use Google Analytics eCommerce to report the number of transactions and the value of those transactions and use the total to feed into your marketing campaigns to assess their success.

Non-transactional websites also need a success measure - after all, every website is online with a purpose and measurement of success is critical to assessing your marketing campaigns.

Here are the 5 stages to measure success.

Decide on the success measures for your website and ideally these should be aligned with the success of the business as a whole.
Assign a notional dollar value for each of your success measures. The value should reflect how far the particular action moves the user towards the purchase of a product or service.
Use Google Tag Manager to create all the required triggers and tags to generate events in Google Analytics.
(Google Analytics 4) Assign values to the events in Google Tag Manager.
(Google Analytics UA) Use Google Analytics to build the success goals and assign values to the goals.
(Google Analytics 4) Use Google Analytics to configure the required events as conversions.
Use Google Data Studio to build relevant dashboards that show campaign stats against Google Analytics goals/values.

The endpoint of the 5 stages is a notional profit/loss per click. This can then be used to optimise your campaigns.

So let's address these stages in more detail.

These are the types of user actions that can be counted as a success.
- Stay on page a minute and scroll down 75%
- Watch a video to 80%
- View a white paper/product brochure
- View the contact page
- Sign up to newsletter
- Click on "mailto" or "tel" links to email or call
- Submit an online contact form
The dollar values you assign are very much dependent on your type of business. If you sell large value products/services infrequently then maybe the values are higher to reflect that. These are examples below.
- Stay on landing page a minute and scroll down 75% - $2
- Watch a video to 80% - $3
- View a white paper/product brochure - $5
- View the contact page - $10
- Sign up to newsletter - $20
- Click on "mailto" or "tel" links to email or call - $35
- Submit an online contact form - $50
This article is not the place to discuss the details of how to configure Google Tag Manager. I've written a series of articles on GTM 101 which cover how to create all of the tags listed above.
(Google Analytics UA) When you set up a Google Analytics goal, assign the required dollar value as shown in the example below
(Google Analytics 4) When you create the event tag in Google Tag Manager, send through extra parameters as shown in the 2nd image below.

5. With Google Data Studio, you are able to bring in data from Google Analytics and if you link Google Analytics with Google Ads, you will have all details of the your Ad campaigns. You can build a report like the one below that shows the cost per click (CPC) of your campaigns and use bars to show the percentage conversion for each of your goals. The final column shows the profit or loss per click of all your campaigns so you can quickly see which ones are delivering value to the business.

If numbers work better for you, this is the same data represented in a different way. You can also build similar views when you drill down into the Ad data, to look at Ad Groups and Keywords, all valuable information to enable you to change your bids or halt certain keywords.

Every platform has the ability to swamp you in data, making it difficult to pick out of it the lkey information that you need. The power of Google Data Studio is the creation of dashboards showing data from a range of platforms and only focused on the data that you care about. Here is an example from the STEM Festival website showing activity across the website using Google Analytics and Facebook data for 2019.