Collect Marketing Analytics KPI Data, Visualize for Insight

Continuing with our case study on marketing strategies, we have tackled one hypothetical goal of Ellemenopea.com. We decided they wanted to focus on search optimization to drive targeted website traffic to their site and become the leader in wall art. They chose several key terms that would help them rank at the top of the search engines (though several other factors are also necessary to rank highly) and have launched their initiative.

The next step now is to track the data and visualize it for rapid insights and action and communicate progress to all employees. Remember the purpose of this series is linking organizational vision all the way to the bottom-line. By creating a strategy that everyone understands and buys into, and then tracking progress and posting the results, the owners and employees of Ellemenopea.com are able to see exactly how their efforts are impacting the bottom-line.

First, the owners build a tracking spreadsheet of their key terms:

(Search Engine Rank Tracking)

This allows them to track how long it takes to improve search engine rankings as well as track their progress towards their goal.

Then we being tracking our marketing KPIs. We decided on two:

• Improve overall traffic share by increasing visits per month from 500 to 10,000 in six months
• Improve conversion rate by increases purchases per month from 2% of site visitors to 10% within six months

To track them, Ellemenopea taps into their web marketing analytics data. They run Google Analytics on their site for free. They pull a spreadsheet of raw data and run it through a graphing program to instantly see trends, data anomalies, outliers, or strengths and weaknesses. Visualizing marketing analytics data drastically reduces data crunching and error rates, and increases the number of insights that can be acted upon.

(Daily website traffic per day)

As we can see, the data correlates with their efforts. As they strive for search optimization and a social media footprint on blogs and forums, as well as talk to friends, leave fliers around town, and perform other offline initiatives, they can see that their site traffic is increasing, bringing them closer to achieving their goal. This not only creates unity of purpose for all employees but also creates enthusiasm and brand evangelism, exactly what Ellemenopea needs to reach the top.