Drilling Down on Online Marketing Effectiveness in Google Analytics

As I mentioned yesterday in our look at online marketing dashboards, dashboards aren’t designed to answer every question about your online marketing. And I’m frequently asked whether any report exists that will.

Well, no.

But, that doesn’t mean you can’t set up a few reports that lead you to those answers. For instance, one of my favorites is a Transaction by Medium report in Google Analytics (you can set up similar reports in Omniture SiteCatalyst and Webtrends, though, obviously, the individual steps differ).

First, click on Custom Reporting > Manage Custom Reports. Then click on the link labeled “+ Create new custom report”.

Once you’re in the Edit Custom Report screen, drag the Metrics you want to see on the report to the primary tab. I typically use:

• Goal Completions (Goal11 in this example)
• Visits (Visits often—though not always—serve as a leading indicator for conversions)
• New Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Bounce Rate
• Goal Conversion Rate (again, Goal11 in this example).

Then drag Medium into your first Dimension slot, Source into the second and Keyword into the third. In Google Analytics, “Dimensions” represent categories of data, such as keywords or sources, while “Metrics” represent the count/ratio of those categories. Make sure to click the “edit” link next to the report title, too, and label it “Transactions by Medium” (or something you prefer).

When you’re done dragging your Dimensions and Metrics, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Click on Create Report to save it to your profile. You can elect to apply the same report to multiple profiles (just be aware that the conversion has to be the same in each; changing it in one profile changes the report in all). If you run into any problems, drop me an email and I’ll try to help you out.

To view its data, simply select “Transactions by Medium” (or whatever you chose to call it) from Custom Reporting to see its output:

Since this custom report contains the Source Dimension and Keyword Dimension below Medium, you can drill down to see the keywords associated with your organic and paid search, too:

Obviously, one limitation of this type of reporting is that it only reflects the last item a visitor clicked on before converting (i.e., “last click attribution”). However, much like the dashboards we looked at yesterday, it provides actionable, trended, timely information for you to explore in more detail. You can start with this data to develop attribution models that will help you learn even more about what’s working for driving business to your site. The key point is that using custom reports such as this will help you begin to answer the question: “How effective are my marketing tactics?” And that’s a very good thing indeed.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Technorati Tags:
analytics, bounce rate, conversion, conversion rate, conversion rate optimization, Data-Driven Marketing, E-commerce, e-commerce, e-marketing, ecommerce, email marketing, goal setting, goals, google, Google Analytics, internet business, internet marketing, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing best practices, measurement, metrics, objectives, online marketing, performance, solutions, testing