Internet Rocket: How to Assess Your Digital Marketing Mix Quickly

This is an excerpt from a forthcoming analytics e-book from Portent entitled Finding Cross-Channel Opportunity Gaps & Closing Them.

Ever wonder how effective (or ineffective) your marketing channels are today? Do you get the feeling your paid initiatives are wasteful? Do you have a hunch your content calendar isn’t getting you anywhere organically? Do you put a lot of time into developing social media updates and doubt their impact?

Those are all completely natural feelings.

To productively work through those hunches, let’s actually take stock of your current channel performance. That’ll help us get a baseline for what you can improve and where you digital marketing mix needs more balance.

You can use any number of tools to do this, but we’ll be relying on Google Analytics (GA).

Why? For a few reasons:

It’s pretty common. Even folks using paid analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics, IBM Digital Analytics, or Webtrends tend to have a Google Analytics install as a back-up.
It’s user-friendly. Seasoned data scientists and interns alike can get around in Google Analytics and find data points relatively easily.

Full disclosure: We’re a Google Analytics Certified Partner. But we work with great clients every day who use other platforms. The platform is not nearly as important as the discipline of finding this data however you can and using it to your advantage. We’ll be providing some more concrete examples on how to locate these data points in other platforms in future blog posts.

Exploring Your Marketing Mix

On to the data! When we’re working with a new client, I like to start in the Channels report in GA, which looks like this:

If your Default Channel Group balance looks vastly different than this, don’t worry. It should! There’s no right digital marketing mix for all businesses. The way you achieve your traffic and sales goals will be unique to your company and your industry.

The channels will be listed on the left:

And your business objective (leads, revenue) on the right:

This report is great for level setting Conversion Rate for each channel. But what it lacks is the context about how these channels interact to drive sales. For that data, we’ll need to look at the Top Conversion Paths report in GA.

That’s more like it! We can now see the combination of channels that lead to conversions over a certain look-back window. Each combination can reveal its own insights about how people interact with your business online.

Understanding Cross-Channel Interactions

In this example, one visit from an Organic listing drove enough brand awareness that next time folks just came directly to the site to learn more and ultimately to purchase.

Meanwhile, visits from Paid ad campaigns take a few interactions to connect with people until they come back to purchase through an Organic listing.

Similarly, a Referral visit (or link to your site from another site) requires building trust in your brand through a few visits before someone will look you up again through Organic search and convert directly.

In all these cases, we come to understand a journey for a customer is very nonlinear. It takes lots of people many visits to understand that your product or service is right for them and that they want to take action.

But one huge piece is missing for us, as marketers. Granularity.

Namely, we are interested in:

The paid campaign(s) they saw
The page(s) they landed on
The name of the site(s) that linked to us

In the next e-book excerpt, we’ll explore that level of granularity: Specifically, how you can use secondary dimensions to give you deeper marketing mix insights.

But while you wait, there’s no need to twiddle your thumbs. Let’s get that organic visitor some company. Check out Portent’s recent ebook: Technical SEO Best Practices