Google Analytics can help you calculate your Marketing ROI

TL;DR – I hated high school gym class and I love the results I get from Google Analytics.

When I was in high school gym class, my teachers and my fellow students were all having a contest to see who wanted to be there the least. The teachers weren’t bad men, they were just good football and basketball coaches. In order to be a coach, you had to be a teacher. If you didn’t want to teach anything, you got to teach gym.

Part of our grade hung on running 1 and a half miles. I don’t remember what the times were, but you basically got an A if you ran it all fast, a B if you ran it, a C if you ran and walked, and a D or F if you walked it really really slow. When we didn’t have a badmiton game to play or a basketball video to watch, we would train for the “Mile and a half” as they called it.

That training looked like this:

• We put on our gym clothes
• We went out to the track
• We walked the curves
• We ‘ran’ on the straightaways

That was the practice that we did in order to run a mile and a half! There was no measurement, no progress, and no accountability. We didn’t hear from our teachers until it was 10 till the end of class and time to change clothes. We knew that was how it worked, so you’d make sure you were on the part of the track closest to the locker room so you wouldn’t have to take another lap to get back.

Practice Needs Measurement

Even if it’s practice, you have to measure your progress. If we would have had a clock timing our practice laps, we would have a way to know if we were getting faster.

If you are practicing at violin, preaching, writing, golf, or anything, you have to measure the results and the process so that you can see if you are making any progress.

Practice Needs a Goal

Not only did we never even know what earned an A or a C, we didn’t know how long we had until the test came. The murmur started from the door of the locker room.

“Oh No! Not today coach!”

The first boy out of the locker room that heard the mile and a half test was today.

When we walked out and the coach told us it was test day, none of us felt ready. We would have at least planned out what we ate for lunch, or stretched and pushed ourselves a little more the days before…but no.

With no goal to shoot for and no timeline to work on, we did what most teenagers (and adults) do, we did the minimum to get by.

Modern marketing thrives on ignorance

If you look at software and services sold to marketers these days, ROI is a hot topic. The reason why? Everyone is asking “How do you calculate ROI in marketing?”

It’s easy to measure ROI in other things. I paid $60 a month and went to the gym to work out 3 times. My scale didn’t change. That was a bad ROI.

I bought a row machine for $300 and challenged my wife to a 2024 rowing challenge. She left me on the dock and out rowed me month after month. We both lost actual weight and felt stronger. That was a good ROI.

The thing with most marketing departments is that everyone works really hard, I mean super hard, but isn’t sure what is working and what isn’t.

I know half my marketing budget is a waste. I just don’t know which half.
– Too many marketing departments

Why is nobody holding our busiest salesperson accountable?

If you hired a new saleswoman to network, shake hands, answer questions, and get some clients, you’d probably be pretty excited. But if she never came back to meet with you, or to let you know how it was going, or what she needed to sell more widgets, how long would you keep her on your payroll?

Your website is visible, right now, to about 5,500,000,000 people. If you have a Facebook page, a potential 2,800,000,000 daily users have the option to visit your page. If you only need 10 leads a week, you don’t have to reach all of those users. But how many can you reach? How many do you reach now? How many people find your website and what are they looking for when they come there?

Google Analytics can help you a lot

Installing Google Analytics on your site can help you calculate your marketing ROI within just a few days. You can see how many visitors come to your website, what pages they look at, and whether they are on their phones or desktops. Gen X is still making major purchases on big screens instead of phones. Are you ready for that?

You don’t have to have a Google Analytics Certification to set up Google Analytics. If you use WordPress, install the Site Kit plugin by Google. I AM certified in Google Analytics and I install that plugin on all of my clients’ sites.

Let it run and set a reminder on your calendar to check it out every week or so. There are enough built-in reports that you can at least learn something about how your website performs.

DOn’t just measure the work you do, measure some results (KPIs)

Sometimes people measure website visits as their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) but lately there has been some backlash against that as a ‘vanity metric.’ To borrow from my life in the church world, those numbers matter because every one of those numbers is a person.

It’s easy for a CEO to see the hours spent at work, but the real measurement is in the results of those hours. I helped a company increase their website traffic but they didn’t get any new leads. That’s ok for now. Insetad of learning from 30 visitors a month, we now get to learn from 200 visitors a month. The data and measurements we get from the 200 will help us grow to 3,000 visitors over the next few months.

Pick something to measure in Google Analytics. Time on page, source, landing pages, and device are all good things to track and watch. From there, you can figure out what is working and what isn’t.

Maybe with some hard data like that, you’re coach will be more interested in your performance and help you out.

You may even figure out why walking the straightaways and jogging the curves isn’t helping you get any progress in gym class.

One last thing, after you install Ga4, do this

P.S. I noticed this old Loom video I made about Google Analytics retention periods. After you install GA4 on your site, do this. If not, you’ll be so sad that you only have data from the last 2 months. Follow this video to extend your retention period to the max (14 months) and you’ll have some sweet YOY numbers too.