Tag: analytics

How to evaluate your franchise marketing data

Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your franchise’s target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective.

However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut out ineffective strategies. That way, you can develop a successful marketing plan that helps your franchise earn more profits and build its reputation.

Here’s how to effectively evaluate your company’s marketing data. 

Sales

Ultimately, you market and advertise your franchise and its products to increase sales and revenue.

You can use the data you get from your marketing and advertising campaigns to determine whether or not sales are increasing and by how much. Additionally, depending on the type of campaign, you can determine your return on investment (ROI). ROI is important because it can help you determine which campaigns are the most successful.

While you may get more sales from one type of campaign, you may also find it costs you more to advertise. That would give you a lower ROI. 

In many cases, ROI can tell you how much it costs to acquire customers through one medium. It also indicates how much you’re earning from franchise advertising or marketing. For example, if you advertise on social media, you might have a higher ROI on a certain type of ad or within a certain region.

Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.

Customer responses

Customer reactions to campaigns can help you determine customer sentiment as part of your franchise marketing data-gathering efforts.

You can provide your customers with surveys or general customer service feedback forms through email or text message to understand what your customers think of your company and your marketing campaigns.

Simple questions about how customers felt about specific campaigns can help you understand which initiatives are most successful and which customers are making the most purchases. 

See our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights.

Reach

Whether you’re implementing search engine optimization, social media marketing, or digital advertising into your overall franchise marketing strategy, one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness and reach.

Ultimately, you want to reach more people within your target audience who are more likely to purchase from you. 

Expanding your franchise marketing reach can help you find new people who may not have heard of your products or services yet. This also grows brand awareness in your current markets.

When using digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure your reach. However, that becomes more difficult when you’re using traditional marketing. For example, if you do a billboard campaign, you won’t have exact numbers on how many people saw the billboard, but you can estimate based on data how many drivers use a particular stretch of highway.

Lead generation 

Marketing is supposed to support your franchise sales by generating warm leads to give salespeople a higher chance of converting.

While some marketing efforts can lead to direct sales, others do not, especially in the B2B space. Lead generation comes in many forms, including appointments, form submissions and subscribers to mailing lists. 

You can easily track lead generation as part of your franchise marketing data if you’re doing it through your website by counting the number of form submissions.

Additionally, you should always compare that data to sales data to ensure the leads you’re generating are quality leads that make a purchase at the end of their journey.

While you can’t expect every lead to make a purchase, your lead generation efforts should be increasing overall sales. 

Check out our 12 strategies to capture more email leads without annoying everyone, and level up your franchise website pop-up ads with our eight tips to get more leads from them.

Website traffic

Your franchise website is a valuable sales tool, even if people can’t make direct purchases on it.

Building a website can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness for your franchise, but only if you’re getting website traffic. Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

For example, whether you do a traditional marketing campaign or a digital marketing campaign, you should see more traffic to your website. This is because effective marketing makes people want to look for you online to learn more about your products and services. 

marketing-data-website-traffic
Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

Additionally, all digital marketing strategies should lead back to your website. For example, if you’re doing affiliate marketing that is relevant for your franchise, the goal should be to get an influencer’s audience to click on a link that leads them back to your website. If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, your campaigns are ineffective. 

If you’re not sure how much website traffic you’re getting, you can use Google Analytics to learn more. 

Check out our eight tips to increase organic traffic to your website.

Testimonials 

Testimonials are essential for all franchise marketers. Consumers rely on the opinions of their peers to decide whether or not it’s worth it to purchase from or work with a business.

Of course, testimonials and product reviews can help convince potential customers to trust your franchise based on others’ feedback.

Learn more about social proof, as well as nine ways to use it in your digital marketing.

Unfortunately, measuring the impact of testimonials can be difficult. However, you can experiment by putting testimonials on different pages of your franchise website and checking your web stats, such as views, clicks, and generated leads to see if adding testimonials has made an impact. 

Reviews can be easily measured because your customers can provide you with a star rating. That average star rating can tell you how much your customers enjoyed their products. Allow customers to make comments on their reviews to explain why they gave you a certain star rating.

By learning about your customer’s experiences with your product, service and/or franchise, you can find ways to improve both. You also can leverage that knowledge for better marketing initiatives.

See 17 of the best social proof tools to boost your sales.

Customer retention rate

A customer retention rate tells you how many customers you retain over time.

It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your customers returning rather than constantly finding new ones.

In addition, your retention rate impacts revenue. It also can help you determine which marketing campaigns work best to keep customers coming back. For example, many franchises use email marketing to ensure their current customers don’t forget about them. 

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty.

In conclusion

Collecting franchise marketing data is important if you want to learn about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, you should always determine the most important statistics to you and your franchise.

Instead of measuring everything and deciphering tons of data, look at the most important metrics first. This will help you determine which strategies are performing well and which are costing you money.

From there, you can start digging deeper into each campaign. Use franchise marketing data to learn more about how to make them better.

Learn more about franchise marketing and how DailyStory can help you level up your efforts.

About the author

Ashley-Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she shares knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, or financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

8+ content marketing metrics you should track

Content marketing plays a key role in many digital marketing strategies, but what metrics should you be following to ensure that what you’re doing is working?

Content marketing is essentially described as the creation and publication of content in order to build an audience and generate sales leads. In other words, you’re leveraging content that you’re creating to create brand awareness and educate audiences.

While 80 percent of content marketers use metrics to measure performance, only 65 percent have KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure performance, and only 43 percent measure their content marketing ROI (return on investment).

So, while many brands may be using content marketing, plenty are still figuring out how to measure success.

Of course, your metrics matter. Content production, strategy, distribution, promotion and any related software all cost time and resources. Are you getting your money’s worth from your content? 

If you’re new to Google Analytics, check out our nine tips to get the most out of the analytics platform. 

The following are eight-plus content marketing metrics you should track to ensure that the content you’re sharing is working the way you want it to.

Website referral traffic

A common content marketing metric is website traffic, but go beyond just the total numbers of visitors. Take a look at how these visitors are finding your content. 

To see where your traffic is coming from in Google Analytics, use the Channel report. You’ll be able to see how users are finding your content, whether that’s organically or through social media, search engines, etc.

This will give you insight into whether your social media promotion is working, if your SEO needs a boost or if a popular email newsletter is linking to you. 

In other words, website referral traffic can help inform your content marketing strategy overall.

User behavior

User behavior is actually a collection of metrics that can give you insight into reader engagement and content performance, especially when paired with other metrics, such as website traffic. 

You can find the following user behavior metrics in Google Analytics:

  • Time On Page
  • Bounce Rate
  • Pages/Session
  • New/Returning Visitors

The power of user behavior metrics does come from the pairing up with other larger metrics, but they can help you better understand the performance of your content.

For example, you have a blog post that is receiving a lot of traffic from search engines, and visitors are spending significant time on the web page. From that you can infer that your post is matching the search intent of these users, which is a win.

Shares and backlinks

When it comes to any brand awareness goals, it’s important to understand how far your content is reaching (beyond traffic on your website). You can get an understanding of this by tracking social media shares and backlinks (which are hyperlinks that point from one website to another). 

These metrics show whether users are willing to share your content with their personal audiences and networks.

You can measure social media shares on such tools as BuzzSumo, and you can measure backlinks on such tools as SEMRush, BuzzSumo and more.

Check out our seven tips to grow quality backlinks and boost your SEO.

Google Search impressions and click-through rate

In Google Search Console, you can (and should) track impressions and click-through-rates of your content in organic searches.

These metrics can help you understand whether the keywords your content is ranking for actually lead to how many users saw your search result and how many clicks resulted from that. 

You can find these metrics in Google Search Console by filtering by a specific landing page and then looking through the queries linked to that page. Click on Performance, then Search Results and then Queries.

Check out our four tips to boost your click-through rate in Google Search.

Keyword rankings

Speaking of keyword rankings, this is another content marketing metric you should be tracking. You’ll want to monitor your core keywords and their rankings at least monthly.

Ranking improvements can reflect positively on your content marketing performance. You can use Google Search Console to find this metric. 

If you’re not sure what keywords should be on your priority list, start with keyword research. Check out these 11 free SEO keyword research tools you should consider.

Lead generation

Lead generation is all about your content bringing in new sales leads to your business. In other words, it is the process of getting people interested in your business and gradually nuturing them into becoming paying customers. 

To measure lead generation in Google Analytics, you’ll want to set up your goals in the platform. This allows you to follow such things as demo requests, Contact Us submissions and more. This can then be used to help determine how many conversions come through a blog or other piece of content.

Premium content is not only a key part of any content marketing strategy, but it can directly increase lead generation. Learn more about what it is and how you can leverage premium content in your marketing.

Customer retention

New visitors are great, but don’t forget about your loyal, returning visitors. These are the consumers whom you’re building a relationship with that can lead to purchases in the future.

These are warm leads that you can’t ignore. What content is appealing to them? To find out in Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Behavior, and then New vs Returning.

Speaking of returning visitors, check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

Email opt-in rates

Email subscriptions might not be the first content marketing metric you’d think of, but it matters because your subscriber number reflects how many consumers found enough value in your content to want more of it delivered to them directly.

DailyStory is just one email marketing tool that can help you track your subscribers, their engagement with your emails and more.

In conclusion

Remember that the power of your content marketing metrics is only as strong as the goals you’re setting around your content.

Don’t have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals? Check out our seven expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business.

As you’re getting serious about tracking your content marketing metrics, think about your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

26 social media metrics you should track across platforms

Are you paying attention to the right social media metrics?

Social media marketing can help you achieve your business goals, but it’s important to track your social media metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not.

About 43 percent of consumers increased their social media use to discover new products.

Of course, the best metrics to track on social media relate to your specific goals. But in general, the following are the 26 top metrics to track, based on social media platforms.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media network, with nearly 3 billion monthly active users as of July 2022. Of course, the sheer size of the audience makes it a favorite platform for marketers. But even though it’s popular, it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed when tracking your Facebook performance metrics. Here are five social media metrics you should track on Facebook:

  1. Reach and impressions, which are the number of unique users who saw your content and the number of total times your content was seen (regardless of whether one user saw it multiple times), respectively. Tracking these numbers gives you a sense of how large of an audience you’re reaching and can help give context to other Facebook metrics.
  2. Likes and reactions, which are a form of engagement that give users the opportunity to express their support for a page or a post. “Likes” used to refer to interactions with both Facebook pages and posts but Facebook has since expanded the options to engage with posts. These “reactions” span from “angry” to “love.” They act as social proof that your audience is connecting with your content, and Facebook uses them as a ranking signal to potentially show that content to more users in their news feeds. You also can get a sense of user sentiment about your content by monitoring your post reactions.
  3. Video views, which reflect when a video is played for at least three seconds. To count as a video view, the video needs to be 100 percent on screen in desktop browser mode and at least 50 percent on screen on mobile devices. Within the video-view metric, Facebook offers 3-second video views (when a user paused for your video but did not complete it), 1-minute video views (when a user watches for a significant period of time) and total minutes viewed. This is an important metric to monitor to understand how your video content is performing.
  4. Link clicks, which happen any time a user clicks an external link in your post to access more content. This could be to your website or another web page or site. This differs slightly with Facebook ads, where a traditional link click is called an outbound click and “link clicks” refer to clicks a user has made but still stays within the Facebook platform (such as filling out a form from a lead-generation ad but is still on Facebook). If your goal is to drive traffic to your website or someplace else, this metric reflects your success in those efforts.
  5. Comments and shares, which refer to the number of replies users have published on your content and the number of times users have sent your post to others on Facebook Messenger or shared on their own feeds. This acts as social proof that users are connecting with your content. It’s a bigger interaction than a like/reaction. You also can gauge user sentiment from comments on your posts.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Facebook.

Instagram

A visual-first platform owned by Facebook, Instagram now is the fourth most-used social media platform, with 1.22 billion monthly active users. It’s also particularly popular for consumers 34 years old and younger. Here are four metrics you should track on Instagram:

  1. Impressions, which are the number of times your content is seen by users who are logged into Instagram, even if a user saw it multiple times. This metric shows how effective your content is at getting the attention of your audience and beyond. It also helps give context to other metrics on Instagram.
  2. Reach, which is the estimated number of unique users (who are logged into Instagram) that saw your content. This metric is about users, not views, but will show you how large your audience actually is and can help give context to other metrics.
  3. Video plays, which are the number of times your video or reel was played by an Instagram user. Keep in mind that because many videos are short and play in a loop automatically, this metric can be higher than expected based on that content’s reach. It’s important to gauge whether all your video efforts are paying off.
  4. Post interactions, which are the number of likes, saves, comments and shares on any particular post. This metric does not include deleted interactions. To include deleted interactions, look at “content interactions” instead. This is all about understanding how well your content is connecting with your audience and can actually help boost your impressions and reach within the Instagram algorithm.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Instagram.

Twitter

A micro-blogging social network, Twitter has about 396.5 million users globally. About 92 percent of the content on Twitter is posted by 10 percent of its users. So, while Twitter might not be the most popular social media network, it has a very engaged section of its users. Here are four metrics you should track on Twitter:

  1. Impressions, which are the number of times your tweet appeared on screen, whether that’s through a user’s timeline or via a hashtag. You can view this metric for your account as a whole and for individual tweets. This metric can give you a sense of how many users viewed your content.
  2. Engagement, which is the number of times users have retweeted, quoted, replied to, liked or clicked within your tweet. This metric shows how effective your content is.
  3. Link clicks, which are any click on a URL or card within your tweet. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website or somewhere else, this metric can show how successful your efforts are.
  4. Profile visits, which reflect the number of users who visited your profile either through a tweet, search or other ways. This metric indicates the number of users who want to learn more about you, whether they ultimately follow you or not.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Twitter.

YouTube

A video-only social networking and broadcasting platform owned by Google, YouTube has more than 2.5 billion active monthly users. If you’re already creating video content, you definitely want to create a YouTube presence and share it there as well. Here are three metrics you should track on YouTube:

  1. Total watch time, which equals the total amount of time that all users have spent watching your video. This metric can help indicate how well your content is connecting with users. You also can see how total watch time compares between your subscribers and non-subscribers for more understanding.
  2. Video views, which is defined by Google to be “the number of legitimate views for your channel or videos.” This can refer to views that users initiate, such as by searching or clicking on a thumbnail. This metric can reveal how compelling your video is to potential viewers.
  3. Engagement, which is any interaction with your content beyond accessing it, such as likes, dislikes, views and comments. This metric shows how well your content connects with your audience.

Check out our 20 tips to grow your YouTube subscribers.

TikTok

Seemingly the “new kid on the block” in terms of rising popularity, short-form-video platform TikTok has a particularly large audience among Gen Z and Millennials. Depending on whether this younger demographic is part of your target audience, you may want to consider a presence on TikTok. Here are four metrics you should track on TikTok:

  1. Total time watched, which is the cumulative amount of time users spent watching your video. You’ll only see this for individual videos. However, by regularly monitoring this metric, you’ll see how successful new video content is.
  2. Engagement, which is how users interact with your content. This gives you a sense of how effectively your content is connecting with users. The higher the engagement, the higher your reach will probably be. 
  3. Video views, which are the number of times users played your video. As soon as a video begins to play, that counts as a video view (unlike some other social media platforms). This metric also counts repeat plays, including video loops. Video views essentially act like impressions on TikTok, so you can see how large of an audience you’re reaching.
  4. Hashtag performance, which reflects how many viewers found your video through a particular hashtag. This is important because the hashtags you use on your videos can impact your view count and engagement. Using the right hashtag matters. Tracking this metric will help you make more strategic decisions along the way and potentially attract more viewers.

Check out our 15 tips to market your brand on TikTok.

LinkedIn

With more than 830 million users in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals. The platform is definitely a must for B2B (business-to-business) marketers. Here are three metrics you should track on LinkedIn:

  1. Impressions and unique impressions, which are the number of times at least 50 percent of your post was visible on screen for a logged-in LinkedIn user for at least 300 milliseconds and the number of times your post was visible to the same standard for unique users, respectively. These metrics show the size of your audience and how visible your content is to them.
  2. Engagements, which reflects video views, clicks, reactions, comments, shares and more in a section on LinkedIn called Update Engagements. You’ll get a sense of how well your content is connecting with your audience through this metric.
  3. Engagement rate, which is based on the following formula: number of interactions plus number of clicks plus number of followers acquired divided by number of impressions. This metric shows the percentage of impressions that result in engagement actions. Of course, the higher that percentage, the more effective your post is.

See our six tips to be more effective with your marketing on LinkedIn. Plus, check out the six biggest mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn so that you can avoid them.

Pinterest

Founded in 2009, Pinterest currently has about 478 million monthly active users. Think of Pinterest as a visual search engine, housing tons of photos, graphics, links and inspiration for nearly anything you might want to find. Yes, it’s popular for recipes and DIY projects, but there really is more to it than that. Here are XX metrics you should track on Pinterest:

  1. Impressions, which show the number of times your pins have appeared on screen, regardless of whether a user clicked to open it or not. This metric is available on an account level or by individual pin, and it helps illustrate how effectively your content is reaching an audience. It also can help provide context for other metrics.
  2. Engagement, which is defined by Pinterest as the number of “saves, pin clicks, outbound clicks, carousel card swipes, secondary creative (collections) clicks and Idea Pin foward/backward swipes.” In the simplest sense, Pinterest is saying that engagement is any time a user interacts with your pin in any way instead of scrolling past it. Monitoring this metric helps you understand how well your content is connecting with your audience.
  3. Outbound clicks, which are the number of times a user clicked on an outbound link (to your website, for example) from your pin. This metric matters is one of your goals is to drive traffic to your website or another web page outside of Pinterest.

Check out our six expert tips for marketing on Pinterest.

In conclusion

Monitoring your social media performance is imperative if you want to achieve your marketing goals. The challenge can be navigating so much data across platforms. Keep your goals in mind, as well as these top social media metrics. That way, you can focus on the most important information for your campaigns.

As you begin to drill into your top social media metrics, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

9 tips to get the most out of Google Analytics

Your performance data should be the lifeblood of your digital marketing strategy. But when it comes to using Google Analytics, are you more of a casual user than you’d like to be?

Maybe you’re not checking as often or only get a vague notion of what is going on with your website traffic and the campaigns surrounding it.

Google Analytics is a commonly used analytics platform that integrates with your website and offers data on:

  • How many people are visiting your website.
  • What they’re doing while they’re there.
  • How much time they spend on your website.

It also features a ton of crucial information, like the most common type of device used to access your website pages and the geographic information of your visitors.

And there is so much more than that with its in-depth insights and tracking power. If you still need to learn the basics, check out this course from Google.

Remember that about 76 percent of marketing leaders base decisions on data analytics. If you’re basing your decisions on gut instincts, don’t. About two out of three marketers say data-based decisions are more effective than gut instincts.  

The following are 9 tips to get the most out of Google Analytics every time you use it.

Compare your historical traffic trends

There is so much power in understanding the history of your performance data (and how that compares to now as well). Whether that’s month-over-month data, year-over-year data or everything in between. 

This can help you identify patterns and trends in your own traffic. Historical comparison data views are as simple as using the time filter in Google Analytics.

Simply specify your desired date range and the previous period to compare it to. Keep in mind that Google Analytics defaults to the number of days in the specified period. For example, a Monday-through-Sunday week view won’t mirror the the corresponding days of the previous week.

Assign a monetary value to your goals

Goals are critical to every digital marketing campaign, so you’ll want to take advantage of them in an elevated way in Google Analytics. 

Unsure about your goals? Check out our seven tips.

Google Analytics gives you the ability to assign monetary values to your goals. Why does that matter? Because you should be able to gauge exactly how much money you’re making (or losing) with every new lead earned (or lost).

To assign a value to a goal, navigate to the Admin section of Google Analytics in the top menu and click “Goals.”

You’ll then see a list of your goals. Click on one, and you’ll have an interface open where you can then specify the monetary value of the goal.

Of course, how much you assign can be a typical question, and that definitely depends. Typically, you’ll want to underestimate how much a goal is worth.

Assigning monetary values can really help you see in financial terms how much money you could be losing in your marketing funnel and where you’re losing it.

If you need a refresher on how to create goals to begin with, Google has this walk-through.

Use audience data in your custom visitor segments

Custom visitor segments can help classify your visitors by demographic data, such as age, gender, location and so on. But don’t forget about the data in the Audience reporting views that can assist with how you create your custom segments.

The audience data will tell you about how specific users are interacting with your website.

To leverage this additional data, navigate to the Interests Overview within the Audience reporting section. You’ll find a broad view of the other three Interests reports, including Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments and Other Categories.

Once your more-detailed custom segment is created, you can measure it against your other visitor traffic to better understand how certain types of visitors behave in comparison to each other. That way, you aren’t just looking at the broad overview of all page views and/or sessions.

Consider your top conversion paths

While we would all love to see a consumer click on our ad to visit our website and immediately make a purchase all the time, that’s not how it goes. Website visitors don’t always behave the way you expect.

Going through your top conversion paths in Google Analytics gives you insight into how your visitors are actually converting as opposed to how you think they’re converting. It’s an often-complex route, for sure.

To find this, navigate to the Top Conversion Paths section of the Conversions reports. You’ll then see the top 10 conversion paths by default, with the option to extend the number of displayed rows.

Remove your IP address from reporting

If you’re starting to notice your own business IP address in your reports, know that this is normal, especially if you have an entire team in your office working on different parts of your website. 

Even though it’s common, it can slightly impact your Google Analytics reporting. 

Fortunately, you can exclude your internal traffic by creating a filter for your Google Analytics account that blocks your specific IP address from showing up in your reporting.

You can do so by clicking “Admin” and navigating to the account in which you want to create the filter. In the “Account” column, select “All Filters.” Then, click “+ Add Filter.” You’ll want to select “Exclude” in the filter type menu, and that’s where you can decide how to exclude your internal traffic sources.

Set up Intelligence Events in Google Analytics

If you’ve been monitoring your website traffic for a while, you’re likely aware of strange anomalies that can happen. Think a huge spike or drop in your traffic as an example.

Intelligence Events in Google Analytics allows you to set custom parameters to monitor for unusual activity on your website and send alerts to designated account users. For example, a doubling in your average website traffic in one day would be unusual, and Google Analytics can not only alert you about it but also record the data related to it.

Keep in mind that Google Analytics will, by default, notify you of unusual site activity. But don’t rely on that. You’re going to want to set up Intelligence Event notifications.

To set these up, open the Intelligence Events reporting section and select the “Custom Alerts” tab from the right-side menu. Then, click “Manage Custom Alerts.” You’ll want to select “+ New Alert” to then create your custom Intelligence Events.

Monitor your overall website speed

Website speed matters, especially when considering your mobile SEO. If any of your webpages take more than a fraction of a second to load, you risk losing the trust of your visitors and losing them entirely.

In other words, the faster your website loads, the better.

To check your speed within Google Analytics, click on “Reports” followed by “Behavior” and then “Site Speed.”

Add annotations to your reports in Google Analytics

If you’re not the only person managing your Google Analytics account, you’ll definitely want to take advantage of annotations. These are simple notes that can be added to an Analytics reporting graph to explain or give context to various performance data. In particular, you might want to explain an increase or decrease in traffic, make a note of when a specific campaign launched and almost anything else.

Annotations look like speech bubble icons along the bottom of a graph.

To view annotations, click on the downward arrow tab icon beneath the graph, and you’ll see a list of all annotations made within the specified time period, as well as who created the annotation and their email addresses. Then to create a new annotation, click “Create New Annotation” on the right side above existing annotation authors’ email addresses. Keep in mind that you can make annotations public or private, depending on who should see what.

Stay on top of everything with emailed versions of your top reports

Last but not least, you have the opportunity to streamline your analytics monitoring with emailed reports from Google Analytics.

That means that you don’t have to log into your dashboard each time you want to understand what’s going on with your website.

And if logging in has been difficult on a consistent, regular basis, then email reports are something you definitely should leverage for yourself.

First, decide what reports would be best to receive in your email inbox. Then, navigate to each report, set it up how you like (i.e. date filters) and then click “Share.” You can then decide what email addresses it goes to and how frequently it’s sent.

In conclusion

Your performance data will give you the power to make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategies. Take the time to not only understand Google Analytics but also to make it work for you.

Check out our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners to explore the possibilities of what you can do for your brand.

While you’re exploring to Google Analytics, think about your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

How to evaluate your company’s marketing data

Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective.

However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut out ineffective strategies. That way, you can develop a successful marketing plan that helps your business earn more profits and build its reputation.

Here’s how to effectively evaluate your company’s marketing data. 

Sales

Ultimately, you market and advertise your business and its products to increase sales and revenue.

You can use the data you get from your marketing and advertising campaigns to determine whether or not sales are increasing and how much. Additionally, depending on the type of campaign, you can determine your return on investment (ROI). ROI is important because it can help you determine which campaigns are the most successful.

While you may get more sales from one type of campaign, you may also find it costs you more to advertise. That would give you a lower ROI. 

In many cases, ROI can tell you how much it costs to acquire customers through one medium. It also indicates how much you’re earning from advertising or marketing. For example, if you advertise on social media, you might have a higher ROI on a certain type of ad or within a certain region.

Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.

Customer responses

Customer reactions to campaigns can help you determine customer sentiment as part of your marketing data-gathering efforts.

You can provide your customers with surveys or general customer service feedback forms through email to understand what your customers think of your company and your marketing campaigns.

Simple questions about how customers felt about specific campaigns can help you understand which initiatives are most successful and which customers are making the most purchases. 

See our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights.

Reach

Whether you’re implementing search engine optimization, social media marketing, or digital advertising into your overall market strategy, one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness and reach.

Ultimately, you want to reach more people within your target audience who are more likely to purchase from you. 

Expanding your marketing reach can help you find new people who may not have heard of your products or services yet. This also grows brand awareness in your current markets.

If you use digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure your reach, but it becomes more difficult when you’re using traditional marketing. For example, if you do a billboard campaign, you won’t have exact numbers on how many people saw the billboard, but you can estimate based on data how many drivers use a particular stretch of highway.

Lead generation 

Marketing is supposed to support sales by generating warm leads to give salespeople a higher chance of converting.

While some marketing efforts can lead to direct sales, others do not, especially in the B2B space. Lead generation comes in many forms, including appointments, form submissions, and subscribers to mailing lists. 

You can easily track lead generation as part of your marketing data if you’re doing it through your website by counting the number of form submissions.

Additionally, you should always compare that data to sales data to ensure the leads you’re generating are quality leads that purchase at the end of their journey.

While you can’t expect every lead to make a purchase, your lead generation efforts should be increasing overall sales. 

Check out our 12 strategies to capture more email leads without annoying everyone, and level up your website pop-up ads with our eight tips to get more leads from them.

Website traffic

Your website is a valuable sales tool, even if people can’t make direct purchases on it.

Building a website can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness, but only if you’re getting website traffic. Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

For example, whether you do a traditional marketing campaign or a digital marketing campaign, you should see more traffic to your website. This is because effective marketing makes people want to look for you online to learn more about your products and services. 

marketing-data-website-traffic
Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

Additionally, all digital marketing strategies should lead back to your website. For example, if you’re doing affiliate marketing, the goal should be to get an influencer’s audience to click on a link that leads them back to your website. If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, your campaigns are ineffective. 

If you’re not sure how much website traffic you’re getting, you can use Google Analytics to learn more. 

Check out our eight tips to increase organic traffic to your website.

Testimonials 

Testimonials are essential for all marketers. Consumers rely on the opinions of their peers to decide whether or not it’s worth it to purchase from or work with a business.

Of course, testimonials and product reviews can help convince potential customers to trust your business based on others’ feedback.

Learn more about social proof, as well as nine ways to use it in your digital marketing.

Unfortunately, measuring the impact of testimonials can be difficult. However, you can experiment by putting testimonials on different pages of your website and checking your web stats, such as views, clicks, and generated leads to see if adding testimonials has an impact. 

Reviews can be easily measured because your customers can provide you with a star rating. That average star rating can tell you how much your customers enjoyed their products. Allow customers to make comments on their reviews to explain why they gave you a certain star rating.

By learning about your customer’s experiences with your product and business, you can find ways to improve both. You also can leverage that knowledge for better marketing initiatives.

See 17 of the best social proof tools to boost your sales.

Customer retention rate

A customer retention rate tells you how many customers you retain over time.

It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your customers returning rather than constantly finding new ones.

In addition, your retention rate impacts revenue. It also can help you determine which marketing campaigns work best to keep customers coming back. For example, many companies use email marketing to ensure their current customers don’t forget about them. 

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

In conclusion

Collecting marketing data is important if you want to learn about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, you should always determine the most important statistics to you and your business.

Instead of measuring everything and deciphering tons of data, look at the most important metrics first. This will help you determine which strategies are performing well and which are costing you money.

From there, you can start digging deeper into each campaign. Use marketing data to learn more about how to make them better.

About the author

Ashley-Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she shares knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, or financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

Snapshot: Understanding your metrics on Instagram

Instagram has shown itself to be one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. Any successful account should have a sense of what’s working and what’s not for its audience.

On Instagram, you can find Insights data in three different places in the Instagram app.

To access Insights from your account page, tap the bar graph icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. For analytics on an individual post, navigate to the post and tap View Insights in the bottom-left corner. Or, to see data for a story, open the story and tap the names in the bottom-left corner.

Insights homepage

The Insights homepage shows a summary of data for the content you’ve posted in the last seven days.

In the top section, find out how many total followers you have and how many you’ve gained in the past seven days.

You can also view how many total posts you have on your account and how many you’ve added in the previous week. Scroll down to see a series of bar graphs that reveal the total impressions, reach, and profile views for the past 7 days, and then you can swipe to view website clicks and call-to-action button clicks (Call, Email, Directions).

On the Insights homepage, scroll down to the Followers section to see a summary of follower demographics including gender, age group, and location. Note that you need at least 100 followers to see demographic data. Tap “See More” to open a page with graphs that break down follower demographics in more detail.

More on followers

At the bottom of the Followers section, you’ll find two graphs that show when your followers are most active on the network.

In the first graph, find out when your followers are online each day. Scroll down to the second graph to discover which days your followers are most likely to be online. Look for patterns in the times and days your followers are online, so you can post content at times that will maximize reach and engagement. You can then create a posting schedule that best reflects when your audience is online.

More about posts

The Posts section of the Instagram Insights homepage shows your three most recent posts. Tap See More to view additional posts.

By default, the Posts section shows the total number of impressions for all of your posts in the past year. To segment this data, tap any of the blue links at the top of the page and choose from these filters:

  • Content type (all, photos, videos, and carousel posts)
  • Measurement (comments, engagement, impressions, likes, reach, and saved)
  • Time (7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years)

Individual posts

If you want to see data for an individual post, open the post and then tap View Insights in the bottom-left corner. Drag up to view a variety of metrics for that post.

At the top, you find engagement stats (likes, comments, and saves). In the Actions section, discover what actions users took on your profile after seeing this post.

Instagram Stories

You can access insights for your Instagram Stories from the Insights homepage or directly from an individual story post.

If you access stories data from the Insights homepage, you see all of your Stories posts for the past 2 weeks. This view only shows data in the aggregate; you can’t click on individual posts.

By default, Instagram shows impressions data for your stories. Tap one of the blue links at the top of the page to filter Stories data by time (24 hours, 7 days, and 14 days) and action. Analyze this data to find out what Stories content is resonating with your audience and what content is causing them to exit or swipe away. Use these insights to inform future Stories content.

To see insights for an individual Instagram Story, open the Story and tap “Seen By” in the bottom-left corner. From here, you’ll see which users saw the post, total impressions and reach, and what actions were taken on the post. The actions include replies, swipes away, and clicks on stickers and tagged accounts.

The most important thing is to simply start digging into your data. The takeaways will only fuel a better posting strategy on the visual-first social media platform.

For a deeper look, Instagram details every aspect of its data offerings.

You also can dive deeper into the opportunities and challenges of Instagram for small businesses. and our six tips to master Instagram hashtags.

Then, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Snapshot: Understanding your metrics on Facebook

If you’re managing a Facebook page, it’s critical to know what’s working (or not) with what you’re posting. It’s also important to get a real sense of who your audience is.

And all that data can be found in Facebook Insights.

You’ll find Facebook Insights by navigating to your Facebook page and clicking on “Insights.”

Meet the Overview section of Facebook Insights

It defaults to the Overview section, which gives you a one-stop-shop of sorts to get a sense of what’s happening on your page.

Notice that it also defaults to looking at the past seven days and is comparing those days to the seven days before that. This can be changed in the top left corner of the screen to today, yesterday or the past 28 days.

Use the Pages To Watch section at the bottom of the Overview page. The value of this is only limited to the pages you select to compare yourself to (competitors or similar pages are best). However, it will give you an overall gauge of how your page is doing.

There are a number of sections you can explore in depth in Facebook Insights, but two of the most helpful tend to be Posts and People.

Meet the Posts section

In Posts, you can see at a glance how your posts are performing, as well as data showing when your fans are online (which may help shape your post timing).

You also can control how the reach and engagement data are displayed, but the available list graph will show you how your latest posts compare to one another.

Ultimately, your strategy will dictate whether you value reach or engagement more. Typically, you should be taking both into consideration. Take note of what worked and what didn’t. Over time, these successes and misses will help shape your posting.

Meet the People section

The People section also holds a lot of relevant data for your Facebook strategy.

In it, you can see the gender, age and geographic breakdown of your audience, who you’re reaching and who you’re engaging. Plus, you’ll see how they stack up against Facebook’s overall audience.

Take a moment to explore Facebook Insights on your page. Get comfortable with the navigation of the data there, and make it a regular habit to check it. This will build an ongoing library of takeaways that will help you make better content and posting decisions on your page.

For more, hear from the social network itself.

While you’re at it, dive deeper into the opportunities and challenges of Facebook for small businesses and check out our 12 expert tips to optimize your Facebook business page.

Then, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentations and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.