Analytics forgetfulness is a common disorder that afflicts businesses. Companies and businesses draw up ambitious plans to improve their marketing, but in the grind of everyday business forget to analyze whether the changes or plans have proved effective or not. Without analysis or follow up it becomes difficult to pass judgments on the soundness of the plans. Here are some tips that will help you to remember your activities and analyze its effectiveness.
Google analytics annotations
- Keep a track of how email blasts changed your business
- Analyze the difference website content change made to your business
- Keep record of how design changes or feature additions impacted your business
- Record how PPC campaigns impacted your business
- Referral campaigns, TV ads, Newspaper ads all impact your business, keep a track of it.
Simple as these may sound, you will be surprised to note that most falter at this important step. Google analytics allows you to annotate such events by setting the dates to before and after the campaigns. You can thus check if the particular activity increased the number of clicks, visits, time on site, or instead increased the bounce rate.
No activity on Google analytics is not automatically annotated, you have to do it manually. However, this could be an added and important feature if Google did something like this. second, annotations cannot be exported, however, you could copy and paste these in an excel sheet if you so desire. This too could be included by Google engineers.
History : Google Adwords and Google Analytics allow you to monitor changes within specific time periods. However, this feature does not include the changes you made outside Google AdWords and Google Analytics.
Google Calendar : A shared and editable Google calendar can help your whole team. If need be color code your Google calendar and additionally create notes that tag your activities, date and time included.
Google docs : Another excellent tool that can be shared with all team members. Each member of the team can contribute to one single document without having to worry about recent versions.
Prepare a checklist :
- Try out a new marketing activity
- Add a annotation to your Google analytics about what you did and when you did it with time stamps.
- Note the activity on Google calendar
- Prepare follow up reminders; it could be in two weeks or four weeks. The calendar offers immense flexibility which can come in handy
- Write down your thought why you feel such an activity is necessary and how you expect it to impact on your business. Then compare the results with your goals.
Generally speaking a combination of journal entries, calendar events, and annotations can help you analyze your activities. These are simple tools which can be effectively used to track changes made and make course corrections if needed.