In January of this year, I started working at EKG Marketing in Boone, North Carolina. It has been an experience like no other actually getting to use methods I have learned in the classroom and putting them into an experience that I have gotten to use in the real world. When I first came to EKG, I started out as the Digital Analytics Specialist because I was Google Analytics certified (a certification that I had to do for class credit). At first, we were trying to find a way to present the data gathered by Google Analytics and Google Adwords in a way that was easily readable by the client instead of just numbers upon numbers on a spreadsheet. We thought that Google Supermetrics would be the way to go for this mindset, since Supermetrics is an add-on for Google Sheets, using this software we were able to bring in data from the various locations and even some that you cannot see on Google specific items such as Bing Ads. What this did was put all of the numbers in front of us, but it didn’t really tell us what we needed to do with these numbers or visualize this into graphs and charts.
This is when we did some research and stumbled upon Google Data Studio, a place to visually represent the data that we were receiving from Google Analytics and Google Adwords and place it in a dashboard that was easy to use and easier to read. When first looking at the behemoth that is Google Analytics and all of the data that it places in front of you, I start with looking at the various breakdowns that Google Analytics already provides for you: Audience, Behavior, Conversion, and Ecommerce. Then I look at what the business wants and personalize their dashboard so that it is customized to their needs. From my experience using Data Studio, I have come to use dashboards that show …
-Location tracking in the top 100 cities split by the number of transactions that they are bringing in
-Which devices are receiving the most amount of sessions split by gender and new and returning users
-Which campaigns are receiving the most return on ad spend that is broken down by ad group and search keyword
-What products are selling the most by transactions and how much revenue those products are bringing to the business
Through these and many more ways to break down the data, you are able to see what kind of marketing plans that you should use, whether that be which locations should you target because they are bringing you the most revenue, what products you should emphasize on since they are bringing your company the most worth, or even which campaigns you should put more time and effort into since they are bringing in the most return for your business.
