Google Ads is the most popular pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform in use today. In 2021, advertisers spent an estimated $209 billion on Google Ads. That’s a lot of money, but it is an important driver of new leads and customers for many businesses, which means it needs to be well-managed to deliver strong results. 

But what would you say if I told you that many of these advertisers have a gaping hole in their PPC campaigns and were potentially losing a lot of money? And even worse, they are completely unaware of it and aren’t doing anything about it. 

Ridiculous, you say? Sadly, no. It is something that actually happens to many businesses. In this blog post, I’m going to explore this problem and show you what you can do about it.

Tracking Conversions for PPC Campaigns

If you’re spending money on PPC campaigns trying to win new customers, you want to know if your efforts are successful or not. The way we do this is through something called “conversion tracking.” This is the process of measuring whether or not someone clicks on your ad and then takes action on your website or with your business. Examples of conversions include:

• Lead generation forms
• Contact forms
• Free-trial forms
• Clicking on an email address to reach out to your business
• Phone calls

It’s this last one that, in my experience, is often overlooked. And that’s the problem with many PPC campaigns today: they aren’t measuring phone calls (or, aren’t measuring them correctly) and reporting it back as a conversion. As a result, advertisers are paying for clicks, but seemingly have nothing to show for it. In short, they are wasting their money.

The good news: phone call tracking is quite easy to set up and, depending on the solution, will provide a wealth of data that can help you improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

What Is Phone Call Tracking in Google Ads?

When a searcher sees your ad in Google, they can click on the ad to go to your website where they may call the phone number displayed on the page or, in some cases, click on the phone number displayed in your ad to call you. Either way, when searchers call you, they are showing their interest and there’s a chance they may become a customer. You need to track those phone calls as they are important measures of success. 

But how can you do that? There are three primary options available:

1. Use the Phone Call Extension Built Right Into Google Ads. Google makes available an option in your text ads that will display your phone number in the copy of the ad. This is called a “call extension” and it is very helpful, especially if your call-to-action is focused on getting the searcher to call you. Once this extension is set up and turned on, Google displays it with your ad and tracks clicks on that phone number (called “click-to-call” links). These clicks, once tracked, can be reported back to the PPC campaign as a conversion. The major advantage of this option is that it is free; the only cost incurred is when someone clicks on the link, which is the same as a click on any other link in your ad. The disadvantages, however are that they only track clicks-to-call, meaning that if someone clicks on the ad to go to your website and then calls the phone number on your website, no conversion is reported back to the campaign. This leads us to a second option.

2. Track Phone Calls to the Phone Number on Your Website. When someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website, they may choose to call the phone number displayed on your site (that’s good!). In order to track these phone calls, you need to set up dynamic phone number swapping using custom code available from Google Ads that will automatically change out your phone number for a trackable phone number. The trackable phone number automatically redirects to your actual phone number and there is no impact on the user. However, because there is a trackable phone number on your website, we are now able to record that phone call as a conversion and report it back to the Google Ads campaign. Now we’re getting somewhere! This option is also free and is relatively easy to set up as long as you understand Google Tag Manager or can edit the backend of your website. But what if you want call data for traffic coming from sources other than Google Ads and what if you would like to record those phone calls? This leads us to a third option.

3. Track Phone Calls Using a 3rd Party Tool. There are several tools in the marketplace today that will provide phone call conversion tracking and reporting back to your Google Ads campaigns. For example, CallRail will integrate with both Google Ads and Google Analytics to provide seamless passing of data between the ad, your website, your Google Ads campaign and Google Analytics. The set up is a little more advanced than the standard Google Ads phone call tracking configuration, but the insights it provides is considerably more valuable. For example, once you’ve set up CallRail within your site, you will be able to track phone call conversions from various traffic sources such as Google Ads, organic search traffic, social media campaigns, email campaigns and more. This is the most well-rounded option available as it provides near total insight into the performance of your marketing campaigns as it relates to phone calls. And the best part: 3rd party tools offer phone call recording so that you can listen to playback of the phone calls to find out what the potential customer is actually looking for and compare that to what they searched for. Information like this can be incredibly helpful in fine-tuning your PPC campaigns so you can reduce wasteful spend! Just keep in mind that there is a monthly cost associated with 3rd party tracking tools and you’ll need to balance out those costs with the insights you receive from the tracking data.

Is Phone Call Tracking Right for Your Business?

So, are you convinced that phone call tracking is important? I hope so. If you’re running Google Ads campaigns today and haven’t included phone call tracking in your set up, you likely have a big hole in your marketing efforts. Fortunately, it is a problem that can be addressed quickly and thoroughly to strengthen your PPC campaigns.

How Dijital Farm Can Help

At Dijital Farm, we’ve been helping clients success in paid search advertising since 2011. If you are unsure if you have the right phone call tracking solution in place for your campaigns or if you need help setting up phone call tracking for your Google Ads campaigns, contact us and let us do an assessment. We can help you determine the right solution for your needs as well as help you get phone call tracking implemented for your Google Ads campaigns. 

Thinking of Getting Started with Google Ads?

If you’re interested in exploring Google Ads to see if it is right for your business, we can help. Book a consultation with us today and we’ll provide you with a customized Google Ads plan to get your business up and running today.

When I work with marketing teams to help them adopt an agile marketing methodology, I often ask if they are familiar with a few terms that are specific to agile. Terms such as scrum, sprint, marketing backlog and the daily stand-up. I’ve found that many marketers have, at a minimum, heard of these terms. But when I press them for a definition, they struggle. This is particularly the case with one of the most visible parts of agile: the daily agile marketing stand-up.

In this post, we’ll introduce the agile marketing stand-up, the role it plays in a healthy agile marketing team, explain the three basic questions that teams should answer during the daily stand-up and identify a few roadblocks you’ll want to avoid.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing seems to be all the rage in marketing circles. A 2016 survey found that a whopping 70% of marketing teams have adopted some aspects of the agile methodology.

So, what is agile marketing? Simply put, it is a flexible way of planning and executing your marketing initiatives. Of course, there’s so much more to agile marketing, but at it’s heart, agile is about taking many small steps and adapting your path based on real outcomes as opposed to creating a “big-bang” marketing strategy that outlines the steps your team should follow over the next year or two (or longer). Agile marketing is all about flexibility (hence the name!).

The Agile Marketing Stand-Up

When marketing teams begin to think about adopting agile marketing, one of the first things they hear about is the daily agile marketing stand-up. And with good reason: this is easily one of the most visible ceremonies in Scrum framework, which is one of the most popular forms of agile marketing. But what is the daily stand-up? Why is it a part of agile marketing? How does it benefit the team? And, most importantly, how do you do it? Let’s take a look.

The Agile Marketing Stand-Up Defined

As the name might imply, this is a meeting that involves all members of your agile marketing team where everyone stands-up. Yes, that’s right. Everyone stands for the entire meeting. But don’t worry. It isn’t as bad as it sounds because if you’re doing it correctly, this meeting should last no longer than 15 minutes. It is hyper-focused on helping the team understand what work was done the day before and what work the team is tackling today. That’s it. That’s the main focus of the meeting and it should move very quickly. But how do you do it? How do you pull off such a powerful meeting in such a short time? Especially if you’re in an organization that seems to “meet to death?” Read on.

Creating Effective Agile Marketing Stand-Up Meetings

The secret to effective (and fast) agile marketing stand-up meetings is only asking team members three very specific questions:

1. What tasks did you work on/get done yesterday?
2. What tasks are you working on today?
3. Is anything blocking you from completing your tasks?

These three questions get right to the heart of what the team needs to know. Nothing more, nothing less. If you can get this information from everyone on the team, you have a pretty good idea of the status of your agile marketing sprint and what changes, if any, you need to make.

Do I Really Have to Do the Agile Marketing Stand-Up Daily?

This is one of the common questions new agile marketers ask. I believe the question gets asked because it seems we are always in meetings. And it doesn’t leave us a lot of time to get the actual work done. As a result, marketers are a little hesitant to commit to yet another meeting, let alone one that takes place daily. But this meeting is different. As noted above, you’re only focusing on the answers to three questions. But it is important to hold this meeting every day. Doing so makes sure that you always have a firm understanding of the status of the work and any problems the team is facing. In essence, with the daily stand-up meeting, no problem ever goes more than 24 hours without a chance to identify it and address it in some way. By contrast, if you don’t do your stand-ups daily, you increase the likelihood that a small issue can quickly grow into a serious problem. And almost every marketer wants a chance to correct a small problem before it becomes a major issue, right?

How to Conduct an Agile Marketing Stand-Up Meeting

Making the commitment to conduct a daily agile marketing stand-up meeting is only the first step. The next is to actually meet. I recommend holding your stand-up meeting as early in the workday as possible. The sooner you can get the team together, the better the team’s focus will be throughout the day on the tasks that are at-hand. For example, if everyone on your team arrives at work by 8:30 a.m., consider scheduling the stand-up for 9 a.m. to allow time for everyone to arrive, check-in and get in the right mindset for the day.

Next, you need to have a designated spot for your team to meet. Pick an area where everyone can stand, easily see one another, will not distract others and can see the team’s agile marketing scrum board. An ideal place is a common area or open space just outside of everyone’s offices or cubicles. If you can avoid it, stay out of conference rooms with chairs and tables. Meeting in conference rooms encourages people to settle in and get comfortable, which hurts the productivity of your meeting. And that defeats the purpose of the stand-up meeting.

You’ll want to turn to your team’s scrum master to facilitate the session. Notice I use the word “facilitate.” This is intentional. The scrum master is not a project manager. In fact, the scrum master isn’t even “in-charge” or “responsible” for the work of the team. Instead, the scrum master is simply making sure that the team is functioning and has what it needs to succeed. For the daily stand-up, you should have your scrum master kick off the session by asking someone to provide their responses to the three questions. The only other action the scrum master takes in the stand-up meeting is to note if a team member is blocked on an item. The scrum master, along with that team member, will then talk after the meeting about what can/should be done to unblock that item.

In the agile marketing stand-up meeting, the team members are ultimately responsible for driving the conversation. I recommend going around the circle and having each team member answer each of the three questions before moving on. This establishes a rhythm and prevents the conversation from venturing off into places it shouldn’t go.

Once everyone provides their update, the meeting is over. Be sure, of course, to update the scrum board to note if any tasks are completed, in-process or blocked. If any items need to be discussed further, team members involved in that discussion should peel off into a separate conversation so that all other team members can return to their work.

What to Avoid in the Agile Marketing Stand-Up Meeting

As you can see, the stand-up meeting is intended to be very focused and conducted at a rapid pace. Your goal is to get an update on the team’s work and then get back to work. To do this, you’ll need to avoid a few potholes along the way that could derail your stand-up meeting:

Avoid trying to solve problems in the meeting. When you get the team together in the daily stand-up meeting to provide updates and identify roadblocks, there is a natural tendency to try to solve the problems creating the roadblock. While we do want those problems solved, it is rare that finding a solution requires input from the entire team. As a result, you should avoid trying to solve problems in the stand-up meeting. Instead, park the discussion until the end of the stand-up. Once the meeting is finished, those that need to discuss the problem can stick around and explore the topic further, thus freeing up everyone else to get back to their day’s work.

Don’t let anyone get comfortable. As noted above, you want to avoid holding this meeting in a conference room or place where people can get comfortable. Comfort breeds longer meetings. Our goal is short, focused meetings. By keeping everyone standing, you’re sending a subtle signal that this is a quick meeting.

Start the meeting on-time. If you’ve committed to starting your agile marketing stand-up at 9 a.m. each day, you need to get started right at 9 a.m. Don’t wait for everyone to arrive. You want to reward those that are there and are ready to go. You also want to wrap this meeting up as quickly as possible. If someone isn’t on-time for the meeting, they’ll experience the awkward situation of walking in while everything is underway and trying to catch up. Hopefully, after the first time this happens, they’ll make a strong effort to get there for the start of the meeting.

Ready to Get Started With Agile Marketing?

The agile marketing stand-up meeting is one of the most visible parts of the Scrum methodology in agile. It also happens to be one of the most effective elements as well. My hope is that you have a better understanding of how to lead these sessions and set them up for success within your team’s agile marketing efforts.

Want to know more about agile marketing? Consider subscribing to Dijital Farm’s agile marketing digest, a monthly email that gives you exactly what you need to know about agile marketing and helps you stand up-to-date on the latest news and trends from the world of agile marketing. And if you need help with getting started with agile marketing in your organization, contact us to learn how we can help you quickly get your team ready for agile marketing.

Life for marketing teams can be tough. At any given point in time, you might have paid search campaigns, paid social campaigns, email marketing programs, organic social media campaigns, content marketing campaigns and event marketing activities all underway. And the common expectation of the marketing team is that each of these channels will perform well and deliver the leads and the customers the business needs to survive.

It may not be fair, but it is reality. And if you’re a part of a marketing team today, it is your reality.

But what can you do? Are you just crossing your fingers and hoping you and your team can get it all done and it will deliver as needed? That’s probably not working. As the old saying goes-- hope is not a strategy!

Perhaps you’ve heard of this thing called Agile Marketing. But you don’t really know what it is. And, from what little you do know, you’re not sure how it works or if it could even work within your marketing team. My goal in this post is to introduce Agile Marketing and show you how Agile Marketing can help you handle your biggest marketing challenges.

The Promise of Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing has the ability to bring structure with flexibility to a marketing organization. And for today’s marketing teams, this is exactly what’s needed. As a marketer, you need a way of processing and handling the volume of work that you’re being asked to complete. And you need to do it within the constraint of the personnel and budgetary resources you’ve been provided. In short, Agile Marketing can help you and your marketing team reign in the wild and complex and make it simple and more manageable.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing is a lot of things, but I believe it is critical to point out a few things that it is not:

• Agile Marketing is NOT a way to cram more work into the marketing pipeline. This is a common misconception among organizations just starting out with Agile Marketing. Usually a person higher up within the organization hears about the processes used in Agile Marketing and believes that they have found the right way to simply “get more done.” Instead, Agile Marketing is about making informed choices about what to work on. You use Agile Marketing to cut through the clutter and choose those activities that will have the greatest impact on your marketing goals. If cramming more work into the pipeline (without considering the tradeoffs) is why you are considering adopting Agile Marketing, do yourself a favor-- don’t do it.
• Agile Marketing is NOT an updated form of project management. Traditional project management is focused on building a schedule of tasks that are to be completed in sequential order. This is commonly called “waterfall” and it places a great deal of control in the hands of the project manager. This is the exact opposite of what Agile Marketing is designed to do. Agile Marketing is focused on having the marketing team take control of the work to be performed and planning it out in small two or four-week increments as they best see fit.
• Agile Marketing is NOT a cure for all the organization’s ills. While Agile Marketing can do a lot of things, it cannot overcome a lack of business direction, unqualified/incompetent team members or a lack of resources. Agile can help bring some of these issues into focus, but solving them is outside of the power of Agile Marketing.

So what is Agile Marketing? There are no shortage of definitions and there’s no need for me to try to re-write what others have already taken the time to hammer out. So, consider these definitions:

• “Agile Marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.” - Andrea Fryrear on the Workfront Blog
• “Agile Marketing [is] an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile software development.” - Jim Ewel on AgileMarketing.net
• Agile Marketing is an approach to marketing that is built around a set of values (found here). - The Agile Marketing Manifesto

Of course, the definitions are nice, but when most people talk about Agile Marketing, the most common description that comes to mind is really based in Scrum. Scrum is a framework for translating the values of Agile Marketing into a way of operating your marketing team on a daily basis. As you can see in this video from the Scrum Alliance, scrum is comprised of four main elements:

The four main elements of scrum are:

Sprint Planning. This is the time where the team plans the work that it needs to complete in the next 2-4 weeks. The primary tool in the sprint planning phase of Agile Marketing is the marketing backlog. Think of the marketing backlog as the large “to-do” list of all the marketing campaigns and marketing needs you and your team have been asked to accomplish.

Sprint. The sprint is the period of time where your team focuses on the work to be done as it was planned out in the sprint planning session. This is where the real benefits of Agile come into view. By focusing exclusively on the work to be done, free from any other distractions, the marketing team is able to quickly deliver powerful and valuable marketing campaigns and elements that are ready to be deployed right away. Sprints usually run for either 2 or 4 weeks. The determination is based on the preferences of the team.

Sprint Review. In this activity, the team is focused on reviewing its performance during the sprint it just completed. The goal of the sprint is very simple: identify what work you completed and which items are incomplete. Using this information, you’re able to plan for your next sprint so you can stay focused and on-task to complete these items (if they are still needed).

Sprint Retrospective. In this final activity, the team is focused on evaluating the process it used to accomplish the work in the sprint. Did the daily huddles help or hinder the work? How was the team’s communication? Did we document our sprint plan and learnings so we can refer back to it in the future? The retrospective is all about finding ways to improve the process so we can achieve better results in the future.

These descriptions only scratch the surface of how to work in an agile way. But they can provide valuable insight into the concept of Agile Marketing and helping you determine if this is the best next step for your marketing team.

Is Agile Marketing Right for Your Marketing Team?

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a cut and dried answer for whether or not your team is truly ready for Agile Marketing. However, there are a few characteristics that give us a pretty good indicator of whether or not a marketing team is a good candidate for Agile Marketing:

• Team dynamics. Is your team tightly connected? Do you enjoy working with one another? Do team members respect each other as professionals? Agile Marketing is focused on having the team take ownership of the marketing work to be done. If the team cannot function well because the team members do not get along, you will have a hard time adopting Agile Marketing.
• Clear direction. Does the marketing team have clear direction on the team’s role within the organization? Does the team know how its efforts impact the bottom line of the business? Has the team been given authority to develop and execute marketing campaigns as they see fit? If you’re interested in adopting Agile Marketing, you need to be able to clearly answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions.
• Team member skill levels. Are the members of your marketing team proficient in their respective areas? Are they able to work independently and complete their work without being told what to do next? Are they able to take constructive criticism from fellow team members? Are they willing to be held accountable for the decisions they make and the actions they take? Agile Marketing teams move very fast and you must have team members that are mature both personally and professionally so they can work within a team dynamic.
• Open communication. Is the team comfortable with everyone knowing what they are working on, how things are progressing and what is contributing to any failures? Agile Marketing is conducted out in the open. Daily huddles, scrum boards and planning/review meetings are just a few of the tools Agile Marketing teams use to track progress and deal with small problems before they become large ones. If team members are not comfortable working in full view of everyone else, they will struggle and that, in turn, will hurt the team’s effectiveness.
• An Agile champion. Do you have someone within your organization that can serve as a champion to the rest of the company for your Agile Marketing efforts? In many respects, Agile Marketing is counter-cultural to the way most organizations operate (though Agile is quickly working its way into many parts of organizations today). As a result, the organization may not view your Agile efforts as positively as you might. Identifying a champion, especially within the senior ranks of your organization’s hierarchy, will do a lot to smooth the path towards adoption of Agile Marketing within your team.
• Tracking time (or effort). Does your team currently estimate and track its time in relation to the tasks it has to complete? In order to properly plan your work during the sprint phase, you must have the ability to estimate time or level of effort. If your team is not currently familiar with these concepts, it doesn’t automatically disqualify your team from getting started with Agile, but it does mean you face a tougher road to adoption. Those teams that already estimate time or effort typically find it easier to plan their work and look for ways to increase their overall velocity because of their familiarity with the concepts.

Are You Ready to Get Started with Agile Marketing?

I’ve had the good fortune to work with several clients to help them on their journey of implementing Agile Marketing. The adoption process wasn’t always smooth and there were times that they questioned whether or not the direction was truly the right one for them. But in the end, they found benefits that they never would have reaped using traditional methods. If you’ve considered the above points in light of your team and are ready to take the plunge, let’s talk. And if you’re already underway with implementing Agile Marketing and needs some help, reach out and let’s discuss your situation. Agile Marketing is a wonderful way to bring order and focus to your marketing team’s efforts and I’m confident you won’t regret the decision to go forward!

As a marketer, you know it is important to track your campaigns, measure the results and understand which campaigns or channels are delivering valuable traffic. But with so many campaigns, platforms and tactics available to marketers today, how can you reasonably pay attention to the “right” areas? Put another way, and with apologies to Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat character in an old SNL skit, how do you stop looking for keywords in all the wrong places? In this post, I’ll introduce you to two of the most valuable sources for keyword data and show you how to incorporate them into your sustainable inbound digital marketing strategy.

Why Keyword Research is Important to Your Sustainable Inbound Marketing Strategy

Successful marketing today is all about having the right content and providing the right context. Think about the way most of us use the web when we need something (an answer, a product, a service, etc.). We turn to a search engine like Google and we type our question into the box.

Searches like this are performed more than 3.5 billion times per day worldwide on Google. And with this many people searching, there is a strong chance that they are searching for what you have to offer.

But if you don’t know what they are searching for, how will you know what kind of content to create? How will you know what words or phrases to use in your blog post? How will you know what the subject of your next video should be? In short: if you don’t know the keywords your potential customers are using it is like creating content in the dark. And you’re a busy marketer with limited time and limited dollars, so you can’t afford to waste efforts.

This is why you should pay attention to keyword search terms. And there are two great (and free) places for you to find them: Google Analytics and Google Search Console. But if you’re not careful, you’ll find dead ends and confusing information that could actually hurt your content marketing efforts.

Finding Keyword Search Terms in Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), is a tool that provides you with content and technical insight about the performance of your website. Google Search Console can help you identify everything from 404 errors to the status of your XML sitemap to which search terms are triggering your website to display in search results. And that’s exactly what you need to focus on.

To get started, you’ll need to setup a Google Search Console account and connect it to your website. This is a great resource for getting started with setting up Google Search Console. Once you’ve verified your website, GSC will begin collecting data. You may need to give GSC a few days to collect data on your site before you can begin your analysis. But once GSC has the data, you’re ready to dive right in. Head over to the “Search Analytics” report inside the “Search Traffic” folder to find the search terms that are triggering your site to show in search results:

How to Use Keyword Data from Google Search Console

Once you are inside the Search Analytics report, you’ll likely find a table listing with lots of keywords. This table will provide you with information about clicks, impressions, click-thru-rate and position. This is marketing gold. In this one table, you’ll find the keywords and phrases that are triggering your site in the search listings. These keywords can become:

• Subjects for future blog posts
• Trigger words that you need to use within your standard pages on your site
• Keywords that you should focus on in your metadata
• Topics for videos

Be sure to download this list of keywords from GSC and export it to a spreadsheet. From there, you can filter the data to focus on high-priority keywords that are likely to deliver the traffic you are searching for.

Finding Keyword Search Terms in Google Analytics

Another great tool we can turn to in our search for the keywords and phrases you need for your content is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool that tracks visitor activity on your website. Google Analytics is free to use and provides a wealth of data. (Learn more about setting up Google Analytics in your website). And once you are inside Google Analytics, you’ll want to go straight to the “Acquisition” report folder where you’ll find the “Source/Medium” report.

Once you are inside this report, you’ll want to focus on “Google/Organic” in the Source/Medium column. Additionally, you’ll want to apply a “Secondary Dimension” to the report. In this case, you’ll add in “Keyword.” This will place an additional column in the report that shows you the keywords that site visitors typed into Google before they found your website. And it is here that you’ll notice a problem: one of your top keywords is (usually) "not provided." Let’s take a closer look at this issue and what you can do about it.

The Problem of “Not Provided” in the Google Analytics Keyword Report

If you find that you have a large volume of traffic that came from Keyword: (not provided), this means that Google is hiding the referring keyword from Google Analytics. Google made this move beginning in October 2011 and their reasoning for the move was to protect the privacy of their users. Great move for users; bad move for marketers.

How to Unlock “Not Provided” Keywords Data in Google Analytics

First, let’s be clear: the keyword data that Google is hiding is gone and you won’t ever see it again. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t find a way to understand how the visitor arrived at your page. There is a nice hack inside Google Analytics that allows you to search and replace the keyword referring data field with the URL of the landing page that the visitor landed on. This process is nicely described in this older blog post by Dan Barker and I recommend giving it a quick read to find out how to setup this solution.

Once you’ve implemented the search and replace function inside your Google Analytics account, you’ll find that your previously unhelpful keyword report has been transformed into a field full of rich data:

How to Use Keyword Data from Google Analytics

Once you’ve unlocked the valuable data that was previously hidden from view behind the “Not Provided” category, you are in a position where you can understand which content your organic traffic was most interested in. Of course, this doesn’t quite as action-ready as the Search Terms report in Google Search Console, but now you know which topics to focus on for new content development, which pieces of content to promote in other channels (i.e. social, ppc, paid-social) and which pages you need to focus your search engine optimization efforts on.

Conclusion

With these two tools primed and ready in your marketing analysis arsenal, you will be better equipped than ever before to understand what keywords and phrases your audience is using and which topics they are most interested in. And this provides you with a nice roadmap to the type of content you need to create as part of your ongoing content marketing strategy.

Still have questions about accessing keyword data in Google Search Console and Google Analytics? Want to know more about how to make the shift to a sustainable inbound digital marketing model? Contact us at Dijital Farm and let us help you explore your options.

When it comes to Web analytics, many of us today use Google Analytics. And with good reason because Google Analytics is a great tool. Powerful even. But for all the good that it does, there is one thing it doesn’t really do: it doesn’t give us answers. Now before you pop off and say “but wait a minute, Google Analytics collects lots of data and gives me great reports that I can use to understand what’s going on in my Web sites,” consider this: Google Analytics gives us data. Data does not always translate into answers. Intrigued? Read on and I’ll explain.

What Google Analytics Really Does For Us

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation on Google Analytics to the Triangle American Marketing Association’s 2013 Funnel Fuel Conference. The topic of my presentation was “A Fresh Look at Google Analytics.” My intent was to cover some of the newer reports available in Google Analytics and show how they can be used by digital marketers to shape their digital marketing campaigns. During the course of my presentation, I mentioned something I’ve said for many years:

“Google Analytics doesn’t give us answers. Google Analytics gives us data, which leads to questions, which leads to more data, which leads to more questions, etc.”

I could tell right away that this comment caused a stir, so I needed to elaborate a little on what I meant by this comment. Consider this: Google Analytics is a tool that was designed to capture data. Data about visitors to your Web site, where they came from, what they did while they are on your site and whether or not they complete the actions you’d like for them to complete. It delivers all of this data in nicely designed reports that you can view in the dashboard, export as a PDF or extract to review within another data tool.

But Google Analytics doesn’t give us answers. The data it gives us is just data. That data has to be interpreted. That data has to be analyzed. And it is through this process of analysis that we discover more questions. For example, you may look at a report and find that you had a significant increase in traffic to your site from Twitter (which the data will clearly show). What was the cause for that increase? Did you post a lot more to Twitter during that time frame? Which time of day did your tweets deliver a better response? If you were pushing out multiple versions of your tweets (you do try multiple versions, don’t you?!), which version delivers better results. And from those different versions, which geographic areas seem to get more conversions within your Web site?

See what I’m getting at? A simple report in Google Analytics delivers data. But that data alone cannot answer your digital marketing questions. Google Analytics wasn’t built to do that.

How to Get Answers from Google Analytics

So, how do you get answers for your digital marketing campaign questions? Google Analytics can help, but the real answer resides within you. That’s right. You are the key to getting answers and Google Anlaytics can be your ally to gather them. Understanding how effective your digital marketing campaigns are requires thoughtful analysis and knowing how to use a tool like Google Analytics.

Here are three things I recommend to get you started down the path to getting answers to your digital marketing campaign questions:

1. Have a clear idea of what your campaign goals are. I know, you’ve probably heard this one before. Well, it’s true and it’s critical. If you don’t have a clear definition of success within your campaign, then you’re simply going to be staring at data. And in my experience, when you stare at data, you can see anything you want to see.
2. Establish a baseline performance for your campaign. You can’t really measure the success or failure of your digital marketing activities against someone else. You can only measure it against yourself and your own past performance. How do you do that? You establish a baseline. If you’re getting XX number of goals completed today by visitors to your Web site, make that a baseline and measure your future efforts against that baseline. Are your efforts improving your performance? Hurting it? That’s how you measure success. Google Analytics can supply you with the data; you have to interpret it.
3. Meet regularly with your key stakeholders. This one is tough. No one likes meetings. It would be much easier to schedule an export of a report from Google Analytics and make certain that all the “right” people get the email. In reality, very few people look at reports unless they are prompted to. And that’s where you run the risk of failure. That nice report you exported may simply sit on the desk (or in the inbox) of the CEO/SVP/Department Head and rarely get read. And that’s not helpful. Instead, you need to meet in person with these key stakeholders and go over the data (from Google Analytics) with them. Remind them of the stated goals, show progress (or failure) as measured against a baseline and discuss what needs to happen next in your campaign. This last item is the key. You must discuss specific strategies of where to take your campaign to in the future. If you don’t, you’re just looking at data.

Google Analytics is great. I have used the tool for many years to guide lots of digital marketing campaigns. But you must look through at it through the right lens: Google Analytics is a data collection tool. Finding the answers to your questions requires more. More thought. More analysis. More effort. And when you grab a hold of that viewpoint, you will be on the path to success with Google Analytics.

A Fresh Look at Google Analytics: PowerPoint Slides

Below is a copy of my slides used at the Triangle AMA 2013 Funnel Fuel conference. The topic of the presentation was “A Fresh Look at Google Analytics.” If you have any questions about these slides, Google Analytics or digital marketing, reach out to me on Twitter (@jonparks), Google Plus (+Jon Parks) or on LinkedIn or by email at jparks@dijitalfarm.com and I’ll be glad to help you find out how to get more from Google Analytics!