Customising your analytics reporting

Before customising any analytics data, you first need to decide what it is you want to track. This information will be based on your KPIs and campaign objectives.

You can choose a couple of metrics for each of your channels, set up a campaign dashboard either in Google Analytics or software like Sprout Social or Buffer and start collecting your data. You need to decide how long you are going to collect the data for and what results would make the data effective.

With dashboards, you can see daily snapshots to compare performance and see how channels are performing. This is useful as you can adapt your marketing plan if things aren’t working.

You can customise the way your data is captured. You can customise which pages you want to track. For instance, if you have a campaign on YouTube you don’t need to include Twitter.

Google Analytics custom reports are a really useful feature. With custom reports, you can build dashboards of data, set up conversion funnels and present it in a way that suits your business goals. For example, if you’ve spent time ensuring your website is optimised for mobile use, a custom report based on mobile performance is useful for seeing how well the site is optimised for mobile and where you may need to make improvements. 

Right tools for the job

Although you can track your social media channels using Google Analytics. Google’s track social function won’t show you how many retweets you got. This is where it’s better to use Twitter or Facebook’s own analytics tools or software more geared to social network analytics, like Sprout of Buffer. You can measure engagement better with those tools.   

You can segment your audience using separate reports i.e., 18-24 25-25 to see how they are responding differently to your content.

With campaign tracking you could potentially have 10 different dashboards at any one time with different dashboards and marketing objectives and KPIs.

It is difficult to measure all metrics. For example, a customer might research a product on their mobile phone but get home go directly to the product page on their PC and buy. The customer journey looks like they just purchased which is an anomaly that needs to be acknowledged.

Are you using analytics as part of your marketing strategy? If not, you should.