How to Best Measure Your ROI Using Google Analytics

by Jeremy LaDuque

Google Analytics is a free service that produces statistics about the visitors to a website. It can track visitors from which search engine or website they were referred by, email marketing, online PDF documents, and pay-per-click networks.

1. Understanding Traffic Building Behaviors through Statistics
If you know which online campaigns, keywords, and adwords are working and which ones are not, you can focus on the tactics that have been proven successful and change the ones that are not producing sales.

2. How to Build Meaningful Reports
Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) help you track what matters. Every industry is different, therefore goals are different. The best way to track KPI’s is to come up the ones that are useful in reaching your goal.

Here are some examples of formulas used with these goals in mind:

Have more people visit the website: Visitors > Visitor Trending > Absolute Unique Visitors
Ensure there’s a return on marketing efforts: Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns Have more people buy products and/or services from the website: E-commerce > Conversion Rate
Have more people register to be a user on the site: Goals > Conversion Rate
Determine your newsletters’ effectiveness: Goals > Conversion Rate
Increase the percentage of returning visitors: Visitors > New Vs Returning
Increase the number of “branded visits”: Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits

3. Establish KPI’s that measure ROI
Albert Einstein brilliantly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result”. The same concept applies to your online marketing efforts. How much return on your investments are you actually getting from your online marketing strategies?
You need to determine what matters most to you (your conversion matrix) in order to decide what to track.

Here are some examples:

For Brand awareness, things to track include:
• traffic
• new visitors
• time on site

For Building leads, things to track include:
• landing page success rates
• website signups
• newsletter click throughs

For Sales, things to track include:
• conversions to sales
• abandoned cart percent

4. What is your Return On Investment for each web initiative?
• How much is email list acquisition?
• How much did the newsletter cost to design?
• How much did it cost to send out?