Faster than marketing teams can keep up, today's marketing content is often shared across social channels, in email campaigns, and on third-party sites. It's a good problem to have...

Why? Because with the abundance of the resulting digital insights available, modern marketers have become better equipped at proving campaign ROI to their bosses, clients, and stakeholders.

The data from Google Analytics alone, such as clicks and conversions, is enough metrics to fill an Olympic-sized pool—and they're easy to snag and display in a pretty graph.

The increase in information, however, has resulted in those same bosses, clients, and stakeholders asking more and more questions.

In fact, 85% of marketers say they feel more pressure to show their ROI to the C-suite, even though it's technically easier for them to do, according to a study by The Information Technology Services Marketing Association and VisionEdge Marketing. Yet, of the 40% of marketers who could show that their efforts made a difference, none could report on the direct impact their contributions made to business goals.

So, what data should marketers really home in on to help executives understand the impact of how such greater reach is delivering value through the sales funnel?

When it's time to compile those marketing reports, Google Analytics is a highly accurate and helpful tool to illustrate both quality of leads and areas for improvement. Think of it as a giant swimming pool of valuable information that you must tread through for interpretation.

In this article, I've included my own tricks and insights to help any marketer identify and show real ROI.

Venturing Out of the Shallow End of Google Analytics

If you've ever used Google Analytics, then you're likely familiar with the basic metrics, such as sessions and bounce rates. However, it's easy to misinterpret some of that information, especially when you look only at overall site performance. You may have increased your website sessions, which could be great! But did those visitors take a desired action? And did your blog, social media posts, or online ads contribute to the increase?

The answers lie in deeper analysis. It's important to think about what these metrics are in fact telling you so that you can accurately break down the performance for each tactic in your marketing campaign.

Here are some key behavior metrics in Google Analytics:

Pages per session

This metric tells you whether your content has piqued users' interest into learning more about your product, service, company, or brand, in general. If users continue to other pages or, better yet, make a purchase after your tweet or marketing email drove them to your site, then congratulations, you just earned a customer.

Bounce rate

Quite possibly the most important website metric outside of a sales conversion is the rate at which users are exiting your site. If this number is too high, that's a red flag that both content and targeting strategies need to be revisited.

Sometimes, other factors negatively affect a bounce rate, and you may not even be aware of them; poor navigation and lack of internal links, for example, could be culprits. If you find that certain traffic sources or specific landing pages on your site have a high bounce rate, then it's worth a deep dive into possible causes.

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Marketing ROI: How to Get Actionable Insights From Google Analytics

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jennifer Blackburn

Jennifer Blackburn is a senior account manager at AR|PR, one of the nation’s fastest-growing technology PR firms and a PR News 2016 TOP Place to Work.

LinkedIn: Jennifer Blackburn

Twitter: @SocialSaaSy