I was recently asked to write a piece on Analytics at an intermediate level but this also ties into a stage we have arrived at with some Google AdWords training I’m doing so I’ll explain how analytics can pick up where AdWords left off and also how you can use Custom Reporting to monitor other offline and online marketing efforts.

If you are using AdWords for Business to Business advertising one issue is that data drops off at a certain point as you have no checkout and no price or profit attributed to a click which effectively means no calculation of the Return On Investment. This drop off can be picked up using Analytical software and in particular I shall talk about how we can do this with Google Analytics. The main point to note is that with an end action we can track an entire visitors journey from pre-entry to exit or call to action. With a checkout and a piece of code this purchase price is reported back to your Google Account. The replacement in a B2B case is a call to action and this might be in the form of an email link, request for proposal, click to download etc. As long as the visitor has something to click on then they can be tracked. The long winded process of tracking user journeys if you were using a limited stats package would be to look at the keyword that provided the visitor, tie in the key information that allows you to identify them at different stages of the journey and estimate whether they called to action. With Google Analytics Custom Reporting you are able to do far more. I would recommend using this to track individual marketing efforts and Goals to concentrate on more specific calls to action such as a click on an email link or download. Let’s take your social media efforts for example. You could set up a custom report that tracked all of your social media traffic, the site penetration of each and time on site ie. did they actually stay and read something.

Here’s a step by step guide to such a report,

In the example below I set up a new report, the first Metric I am concerned with is the Pages/Visits, to keep the dimension simple I chose Page Title as I will know exactly the page I am looking at. Once I have established the pages visited I would like to know site penetration so I add Page Views, I next want to establish whether they actually found this page interesting so I add Time On Page, finally I am concerned with where the user left the site so I add Exits.

After creating your report I just want to show you a little hidden extra that gives you a better overview of your traffic. When you look at the report you should see something like this.

This is fine for a top level overview but if you’re keen to delve deeper, click on the Pivot View above the top right hand corner of the table. You will be presented with a chart cross referencing traffic sources, the different Metrics are still available and you can change these with a simple dropdown menu.

You could take this one stage further and apply it to your offline marketing efforts, this is a bit of an eCommerce trick but why not publish an advert in a magazine with a unique URL, a unique landing page that could only be found had the person read the advert.