I remember one day a few years ago, my dream lead came through the door. I needed to find out where it came from earlier that day (was it from AdWords, was it from our new Facebook post???). So I logged into Google Analytics to check the conversions on our website, then by source. There were two – one from each channel.
Ever curious, I then navigated into the AdWords section, sorted by keyword and noticed one of the keywords had an 80% bounce rate. A slight deviation from my lead source journey, but I promptly delved into that.
Before long I was happily observing that an old post had an excellent ‘time on site’ from the audience it delivered to our website….
…Three hours later I looked up! I had literally spent three hours in Google Analytics looking at an all manner of enticing insights! I had forgotten what took me there in the first place and had no clear actionable outcomes.
Admittedly I’m a bit of a numbers geek, but still…I had literally wasted three hours of my day with no endpoint in sight.
With access to so much data at our fingertips, we need to be very clear and disciplined on what we do with that data and how we use it to improve what we do. And that’s the first topic we want to share with you; a central plank in doing great marketing.
Happy reading.