Michael Keenan – Cyfe

SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics

Michael Keenan — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 11:13:21 +0000

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said the great father of business management, Peter Drucker.

Truer words were never said. No matter your industry or role, tracking SEO KPIs, analytics, and data is a crucial component to success.

They tell you whether your efforts in marketing, sales, UX, and customer service are working effectively, how you can improve your strategies, what your competitors are doing, and other external influences on the market.

But which are the best KPIs to measure? And how do you ensure your analytics data is actionable? We turn to experts in search engine marketing to share their thoughts on evaluating SEO KPIs.

Keep reading to uncover their top 20 SEO KPIs tracking tips.

1. Conversion rates are king

That’s according to Vinny La Barbera, founder and CEO of imForza, a full-service agency based out of El Segundo, CA. He says: “Conversion rate and top mediums for conversions tell you the most and affect your company’s bottom line more than anything else.

“You can set up specific alerts on these meaningful KPIs so that you’re notified whenever there’s any type of unusual data. This helps you recognize and spot trends almost before they happen and plan for future ones more proactively.”

2. Track keyword ranking positions

After conversions, freelance search engine optimization consultant, Brett Bastello focuses on monitoring keyword ranking positions. He explains why:

“I like to track keyword ranking positions, both the number of keywords ranking and at what position. This is important because, based off historical conversion rate data from the client, we are about to loosely gauge how much profit or loss is obtainable with a shift in ranking positions.”

3. Bounce rates help you improve your pages

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your web page rather than stick around to view other pages on your website.

Rebecca Stickle of WebpageFX advises how measuring bounce rates “provides a great opportunity to go back and revise a web page to keep more people on your site, especially if it has high amounts of traffic as well as a high bounce rate.”

Curtis Boyd, CEO and founder of Future Solutions Media, also advocates measuring bounce rates: “It really shows you whether your web page’s presentation is off. Depending on which keyword or paid source brought visitors to the page, their expectations are always different.

Looking at bounce rate, you can effectively tailor landing pages and your service offering pages in hopes of enhancing sales conversion goals.”

4. Drive organic traffic using keywords

Anna Daugherty, product marketing manager at Sincro, shares her SEO strategy for raising organic traffic via relevant content:

“I check AuthorityLabs to see where my chosen keywords are ranking. These rankings help me determine which keywords need more attention through content or outreach.”

“If I want more organic traffic for a certain search query, I will devise a content marketing plan for that keyword. This involves establishing a few pieces of content around that keyword (blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, etc.), creating those pieces, publishing them over a few weeks’ time, and performing outreach and distribution.”

5. Tracking exit percentage improves sales

Exit percentage is the number of page views divided by the number of exits on a page. Here’s why (and how) Aaron Watters, CEO of Leadhub, tracks this KPI:

“If the exit percentage is higher on one page than on others, that tells us that the UX is lacking. We then take action by making front-end changes designed to keep the user on the website longer and promote sales.

“You can improve exit percentages by adding similar products on the page, restructuring the layout, and adding information you feel is more relevant to the prospective buyer.”

6. Monitoring website traffic reveals the overall health of your SEO

“Monitoring website traffic helps you determine if there’s something drastically wrong with the website, such as the server going down,” says Brian Thackson, content writer at WebMechanix.

“The next most important marketing KPI to monitor is leads. This lets you know if our SEO efforts are actually creating revenue for the client (hint: they want to know that too!). You also want to determine if there is something you did recently that is really paying off and performing well. If you can uncover this, it’ll help drive strategy in the future.”

7. Three core KPIs are needed to tell the whole story of SEO results

Tim Lavelle of U.S Interactive Media identifies these KPIs as Keyword Rankings, Organic Traffic Statistics, and Organic Conversation Rates. He explains these in detail below:

“SEO MUST be guided by comprehensive keyword research and a specific keyword targeting strategy. Keyword rankings must be tracked for each of the terms identified as being relevant to the campaign. Without tracking keyword rankings, it’s impossible to tell how well SEO is working, especially since Google Analytics’ introduction of organic keyword encryption.

He concludes that: “At the end of the day, SEO is not about rankings or visits, it’s about revenue. SEO campaigns that aren’t effectively measuring organic conversions (including dollar-pegged conversions) can’t prove that they’re providing positive SEO ROI.

What do C-level executives want to get out of their SEO reports? Simple: ROI (Profit/Cost).”

8. Monitor rankings weekly to grow authority and attract new leads

“Competitors run campaigns and improve their sites regularly,” explains Randy Milanovic, entrepreneur, author, and blogger of online marketing, SEO, and social engagement. “We also know that Google and Bing update their Algorithms constantly. And, people change their search patterns.”

“As a result, no matter how well a site ranked yesterday, nothing will keep it top search more easily than maintaining activity and monitoring rankings weekly. To achieve this, keep an eye on keyword rankings, tweak content to leverage changing search patterns, and continuously deploy new blogs and offers on topic to grow authority and attract new prospects.”

9. Create SEO goals based on what you need to accomplish

“If an SEO metric is not attached to an immediate marketing or business goal, there’s no point wasting hours looking at analytics,” says Josh Ledgard of KickoffLabs. “Tools like KISSmetrics and Google Analytics are good for deep dives, but using a KPI dashboard, daily updates, or system alerts can be a time-saver and help make your most important metrics more accessible to you and your team.”

While Rebecca Stickler, content writer at WebpageFX, advises how, “These organizational goals will depend on your business model (for example, eCommerce sites should focus on sales KPIs, while B2B companies should focus on new leads), but should give you a clear picture of how well your site is performing overall.”

Marcus Miller, head of search and digital marketing at Bowler Hat, concurs: “If you understand your business’ goals and ensure you’re reporting on all major and micro goals in Google Analytics, you can ensure you have the data to analyze across each step of the buying cycle.”

10. Make KPI tracking and measuring goals simple

“Tracking and measuring goals should stay as simple as it needs to be,” urges Rob Watson, digital marketing consultant at Click to Sale.

He explains this further: “If you’re a relatively low-traffic site, there is probably no point in creating complicated multi-step funnels, which don’t yield much data. For example, on a freelance consultant’s site, you could simply measure how many people come to the contact page and how many of those convert into inquiries.

Whereas on an established e-commerce site with a lot of traffic, you would need more in-depth analysis to break down the steps in the sales process and see where people are dropping out.”

11. Set up alerts to spot issues as they arrive

“Nothing’s worse than reading the analytics of a site and discovering an issue that began occurring some time ago,” says Orun Bhulyan, founder at Agency Undone. “Weeks or even months go by with many issues lurking in the background, undiscovered. Unfortunately, this is the norm in most companies’ analytics suites.

“This can be resolved by setting up alerts. Google Analytics alerts can be triggered when a particular KPI changes drastically and unexpectedly. And the best part is you can configure these alerts to send to emails, notifying you of changes in real-time.”

12. Data isn’t always immediately actionable

Rather, “data highlights something that needs investigating, and then an action emerges from that,” says Joel Stein, search and media manager at award-winning Manchester agency Code Computerlove.

“For example, if the bounce rate has suddenly increased on a specific page, I’d be testing the load speed of the page and looking for other potential issues that could have caused this.

“Reporting isn’t just about churning out some numbers – it’s about spotting data insights and opportunities for improvement, learning from successes, and mapping out a list of actions off the back of this.”

13. It’s not always necessary to track KPIs on a daily basis

A lot of SEO strategists follow daily metrics like a hawk. But is this always wise?

James Rice, head of SEO at Picked says, “doing so might cause you to panic or make a knee-jerk reaction, and it’s important to remember that SEO is at heart about investment for medium-to-long-term performance.

“Weekly reporting is fine (though I’d say monthly is best), and on that basis, you should check organic traffic by landing page, as well as the contribution of organic traffic to the bottom line. Those two key metrics (growth and profit) are ultimately the only ones that will always be under scrutiny, so focus on them above all else.”

14. Compare SEO campaign data month vs. month presents a bigger picture

“You get a better picture of the ongoing status of the sites SEO performance,” advises Sam Raife, offsite strategy manager at Blueclaw, a search marketing agency. He continues, “this way you can monitor the increase of traffic, revenue and rankings as the campaign is being delivered.

“Any changes you need to make can be identified with enough time to make small but positive increases. This might be something small like adjusting the target niche slightly or focusing on specific products because they are performing better.

Anything less than a month on month comparison and you run the risk of reading too quickly into data that is being affected by external factors you can’t control”

15. Leverage A/B testing to action data

“Actionable analytics often begins with an action. These often take the form of A/B testing,” explains Andrew Nevelos, department head of SEO at WebMD.

Andrew expands on how he uses A/B testing: “We use tools such as Optimizely to randomly serve two different versions of the page. We are always trying to draw a correlation or better yet causation between the action we have taken or not taken and a change in the KPIs we monitor.

The analytics should be a tool to test and guide your optimization effort rather than stand-alone source information.”

16. Ensure Google Analytics is configured properly

This tip comes from Tim Lavelle, director of SEO & social media at US Interactive Media.

He expands: “You need to make sure that Google Analytics is collecting data from every page on the site and that you’re collecting the right types of data using things like: advanced segments to separate out traffic to certain pages from certain; filters to remove internal traffic; annotations to mark when major SEO updates are rolled out to the site; event tracking and specific goals to measure conversion behaviors at the granular level (clicks on specific buttons, form submissions, cart abandonment, purchases, etc.).”

17. Keep tabs on your competitors through the competitor rankings KPI

Knowing how your competitors’ sites and blogs are ranking helps you spot trends, assess the market, and sharpen your competitive edge. Dan Shure, co-owner of Evolving SEO, elaborates:

“We like to keep an eye on how competitors are doing in search. If our client slips, but competitors slip as well, we know maybe it’s turbulence in that keywords space in general. If we see competitors slowly gaining in the ranks, it can alert us to something they are doing we may want to know about and stay on top of.”

18. Generate a total “link power” rather than count links for content

“We don’t count the number of links because we’ve found that simply getting links doesn’t correlate well with rank increases,” advises Niaw de Leon, senior marketing lead and SEO specialist at Azeus Convene.

She continues: “Instead, we came up with a total “link power” for the backlinks we generate. That way, even if we only built one link but with high authority, then we get a high link power, which means that our link building is in a healthy state.”

19. Start with a Google search when looking at the customer journey

Martin Milanov, marketing manager at Tavex Gold&Exchange, focuses on measuring core keywords, keyword phrases performance measurement, visitor bounce rate per channel, and time on page. When it comes to the customer journey, he advises how:

”Starting with a Google Search ensures you can provide relevant high-quality content and unique business proposition for each stack of keywords. This will not only provide better user experiences, but it is the main way (par quality backlinks) to achieve higher trust, and by proxy, ranking in SERPs.”

20. Use analytics to make data actionable

“Creating insights from analytics is key to changing data so it has context and meaning,” informs Mae Demdam, vice president of marketing strategy at Digital Edge.

She gives the following example: “If the bounce rate is high on a particular landing page with little to no content, analyze the landing page and see where continuous improvements can be made. Create more content, add images or interesting information, and monitor that landing page in analytics to watch for improvements.”

Your Turn

We hope these KPI and data analytics tips have inspired you to make better use of your data and level up your SEO and marketing efforts. But we’re curious – can you add to the list? If you’re up for the challenge, comment with your tip below!

Michael Keenan

Michael is a SaaS Marketer and SEO living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Through storytelling and data-driven content, his focus is providing valuable insight and advice on issues that prospects and customers care most about. He’s inspired by learning people’s stories, climbing mountains, and traveling with his partner and Xoloitzcuintli.

The post SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics appeared first on Cyfe.

7 Marketing Agency KPIs You Shouldn’t Ignore

Michael Keenan — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 07:14:00 +0000

Most agency’s list of marketing KPIs is too long. They focus on tracking every marketing metric under the sun rather than those that matter.

What’s worse is that clients don’t even understand most of them. Marketing agency KPIs end up just being numbers on a data dashboard.

In this article, we’re going to take a different approach. Instead of listing a million marketing metrics to cover, we’re going to talk about seven key marketing agency KPIs to track.

Plus, how to set measurable marketing goals that turn your monthly client reporting into a smart, performance management system that helps grow your agency business.

How to set measurable marketing goals

Many digital marketing agencies understand the importance of setting measurable marketing goals for their clients. By establishing and tracking targets, you can get real-time feedback on your campaign performance and motivate your team to achieve more.

Aramis Herrera, Chief Product Officer at Ivaldi Group

“Setting clear and specific objectives that can be broken down in attainable steps is key to reaching targets, as it pushes you to allocate time and resources to achieve your goals while keeping you, your team, and clients motivated.
Focusing on the smaller milestones allows you to get momentum and feel motivated while allowing you to pivot and correct longer-term goals if necessary.”

But what goals should you set to inform your marketing KPIs? SMART goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed. When you understand each element, you can effectively track the right metrics to measure progress towards a defined goal.

SMART goals are:

Specific

Clear and straightforward, so you understand what you want to achieve.

Example: we want to build brand awareness for a new product launch.

Measurable

Define what signifies that you’re making progress towards your goal.

Example: we will generate an additional 1,000 sales-ready leads.

Achievable.

Is your goal reasonable? Setting goals your team can accomplish within a specific timeframe keeps them focused and motivated.

Example: we will run Facebook ads to a warm audience to generate 1,000 sales-ready leads each month.

Realistic

Do you have the resources to achieve the goal? For example, an eCommerce business may have a product customers want, but lack a sufficient advertising budget or distribution strategy.

Example: To achieve our goal of targeting warm leads, we will need enough cash for a creative agency to build the campaign and pay for daily ad spend.

Time-based

What is the time-frame in which you’ll achieve this goal? Set an end-date to keep everyone motivated and aligned. If you don’t reach the goal, take time to figure out why and make adjustments based on your results.

Example: we will run Facebook ads to a warm audience to generated 1,000 sales-ready leads each month for Q2.

Some other examples of SMART marketing goals you can set are:

Within six months, we will rank on the first page of Google search results for the keyword, “italian restaurants fort lauderdale florida.”
We will generate 1,000 new leads from our landing page by the end of this year.
We will increase creation and publication of compounding blogs from current 4 per month to 10 per month within six weeks.
We will increase net revenues from $2 million per year to $2.5 million per year within one year.

Top 7 marketing KPIs to measure for clients

Angela Allan Founder, Mads Collective Group

“Clients love visibility. By tracking business metrics, it means you can show them, at a glance, what is generating ROI in paid campaigns. When it comes to organic posts, you can show them what is performing and what’s not, so together, you can start doing more of the right things that attract their prospects. By tracking specific key performance indicators, you can prove to clients that your strategies are not only working, but bringing in leads and sales, and this ensures they want to keep working with you. It means you can secure reliable recurring revenue, too.”

Now that you understand how to set SMART marketing goals for your clients, let’s look at what KPIs you should use to measure each target’s progress.

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value is the total worth of a customer throughout their relationship with a business. It allows you to determine the net profit you’ll make off each new customer you get based on your customer acquisition costs.

For example, if a new customer costs $30 to acquire, and their CLV is $40, then that customer is considered profitable. You can use this information to target similar audience segments and find new ways to increase the value of existing customers to drive growth.

The formula for Customer Lifetime Value is:

(Average Purchase Value x # of Average Purchase Frequency Rate) X Average Customer Lifespan

An increasing CLV means you’re keeping your clients’ customers happy, reducing customer churn, and connecting with leads the right way.

2. Website traffic to lead ratio

A website is often the first point of contact a customer typically has with a business. A marketing agency needs to be aware of how successful this contact is, which is expressed as your website traffic to lead ratio.

This will allow the team to understand the website conversion rate of the website and the quality of website traffic.

You can measure the percentage of website leads with the following calculation:

(# of leads from website) / (total # of website visitors)

Once these numbers are broken down, you can look at ways to increase the conversion rate and turn more website traffic into customers. You can also use this formula to figure out the conversion rate of different conversion points on your website: such as contact form completions, lead magnet downloads, and more.

3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Increasing website traffic and converting visitors into leads is good for business. Just because a person becomes a lead, it doesn’t mean they will buy from you.

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is someone more likely to become a customer than other leads. The qualification process is different for every business, but you can typically base a benchmark off of:

meeting your buyer personas.
specific demographic factors such as age or location.
what webpages someone visits.
what lead magnets they download or complete.
repeat engagement with business content.

Once you have these benchmarks in place, you can go beyond measuring general leads and show how you make a meaningful impact on the company’s bottom line. Remember, if a lead doesn’t become an MQL right away, it doesn’t indicate they won’t become one.

4. Customer Churn

Customer churn is the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company. Depending on your client’s industry, it can be upward of 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than selling to an existing one.

Keeping track of customer churn for a client can help you:

identify customers at risk of leaving your clients’ business.
put more resources into existing customers so they don’t leave.

To determine the number of customers that churned, take all the customers you’ve lost during a time frame, such as monthly or quarterly, and divide it by the total number of customers your client had at the start of the month.

By focusing on churn, you can help clients multiply their sales and marketing efforts by looking at the reasons people leave and making improvements in their product or pricing strategy.

5. MQL to SQL Conversion Ratio

The MQL to SQL Conversion Ratio is sometimes known as Lead to Opportunity Conversion Ratio. In short, it’s the ratio of how many marketing qualified leads turn into sales qualified leads.

Your conversion ratio here is a direct result of your lead generation and nurturing strategies.

The formula for determining MQL to SQL conversion ratio is straightforward:

(# of SQLs / # of MQLs)

6. Social media conversion rates

According to recent social media statistics, Facebook and Instagram have become two of the top channels for people to research and buy products online. Potential customers are getting used to social selling, which is good news for folks managing client social media accounts.

Social media marketing metrics to track can be:

referral traffic from each social media channel.
amount of customers converted from each social media platform.
amount of leads converted from each social media platform.

Regardless, you want to set specific social media SMART goals, as highlighted above, to show a good return on investment.

With reporting and analytics in Cyfe, you can easily show campaign goals and outcomes to understand what’s working and what’s not for clients.

7. Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) measures how much profit you make from a campaign. You calculate the ROI on each campaign, whether inbound or outbound marketing, and reporting on it.

Lauren Petrullo, Owner and CEO of Mongoose Media

“When launching campaigns on Amazon, we have ROI minimum rules to ensure profitability. Historically, we used ACOS (advertising cost of sale) to show the campaign’s profitability — a number represents the percentage of advertising spend that makes up a sale. This should never exceed 12%. However, now that we have ROAS (return on ad spend) on Amazon, we can also show how many dollars in sales we earn based on one $1 or £1 invested in ad spend.”

The formula for calculating marketing ROI is:

(Gross profit – marketing investment)

If you want to truly take your agency to the next level, consider creating a return on investment dashboard for each client with Cyfe.

One thing that sets a great agency apart from the rest is the ability to monitor performance in real-time. Sell your analytics not as reporting, but as a performance management system that shows clients what they need to do to grow their business.

Trilce Jiron, Founder of TBS Marketing

Turn your clients into experts! Explain what metrics mean to you, and how they convert, for example: engagement means interaction, but low conversions might mean a poor sales agent, or au contraire, high conversion means a fantastic sales agent! By being aware, they can take the right actions within their company to keep improving cash flow, and they’ll trust you even more.

Becoming a better digital marketing agency through KPI tracking

These marketing metrics are a good starting point, but they’re not always exactly what each client needs. There are other important secondary KPIs depending on what they want to see in a marketing report based on their target audience, current marketing strategy, etc.

Read this post if you want to learn about five key dashboards every marketing agency needs.

Michael Keenan

The post 7 Marketing Agency KPIs You Shouldn’t Ignore appeared first on Cyfe.

4 Keys to Improve Client Agency Relationships

Michael Keenan — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:53:05 +0000

Everyone talks about the value of building healthy client agency relationships. But how do you do that?

Trust.

Trust is one of the most critical building blocks of growing a successful agency long-term. And it’s fundamental for a healthy client agency relationship. Yet it’s one of the hardest things to build and the easiest to lose.

In this article, we’ll walk through four key ways in which you can build a trustworthy agency and retain clients for the long run.

Four key ways to improve client agency relationships

1. Say what you mean, mean what you say

As kids, we learn to pick up on clues that someone isn’t telling the truth. Your parents threaten you to eat the broccoli, or you can’t leave the table, but they never follow through. Your sibling promises you they’ll share their Skittles with you, but they never do.

Because of this, we adjust our expectations and behaviors accordingly and learn not to trust the person next time to avoid a letdown.

In the marketing and advertising world, this translates to “under-promise, over-deliver”. As an agency, it’s imperative to set clear expectations with clients about your services.

For example, if your strategy takes time, let them know upfront.

“With every new client, be diligent about what you can and cannot deliver. But also ask what they expect. What kind of results are they looking for? What kind of service do they want? Getting crystal clear on your expectations upfront will mean better feedback, a better experience, and better results.”

Daniela Furtado, SEO Consultant at Findable Digital Marketing

Take time to sit down together and talk about the expectations of your agency relationship. Discuss the strategy, your process, and determine the right marketing KPIs to set yourself up for success. If you want to build a good relationship with your client, say what you mean and do what you say.

2. Be transparent

Transparency is the one thing that separates you from the competition. It’s a specific benefit that helps improve customer retention, even if it doesn’t always show your agency in the best light.

Being transparent eliminates anxieties or suspicions a client may have about the value you offer. When you lay out the truth about your services — including their limitations — you prove you are not trying to hide any shortcomings.

Transparency not only allows you to serve your current agency clients better but also attract new customers. A few ways you can maintain this level of openness with clients are:

Ask about your client’s goals first, budget last. Transparency starts from your first discovery call. When starting the conversation, ask about your clients’ plans and goals. Listen to their problems first, speak second. Show you understand what they need, then discuss how you’ll help them solve their goals.
Give your client a point of contact. Whether you’re a solo-prenuer or seven-person team, give your client someone to reach out to agency-side who’s working on their campaigns.
Respond to questions fast. Don’t take too long to respond to client inquiries. If it’s a simple request, respond as soon as you can. If it’s a more complicated matter, respond and let them know you’ll get back to them with an answer soon. Make your clients feel like they’re on the top of your priority list.
Give access to files and tools. Let clients freely access shared workspaces and project management tools. Don’t let them guess the status of a project or jump through hoops to find their files.
Hold regular reviews. Start a weekly or bi-weekly review process for you and the client to catch up. You can identify any weak spots or issues that need to be fixed. Gather feedback, or even catch up about a personal matter.
Share data openly. Frequently communicate metrics with your clients. You can set up a data dashboard where clients can see progress, and send automated email updates to keep stakeholders in the loop.

“The best results I’ve had with clients come from maintaining total transparency with our clients. I explain that our services take some time, but it will be worth it. Every month I send over an analytics report to each client, outlining exactly what worked and what didn’t. The more open, honest, and full disclosure I am with our clients the more comfortable they are to ask questions and work together.”

Tricia Moceo, Head Marketing Strategist at Stodzy Internet Marketing

3. Decide on a client approval process

As a marketer, you know how important it is to get client approval throughout the creative process. Approval processes are a workflow where any project step— from briefing to completion — is approved by your client the same way every time.

There are many different actions to prioritize in your process, so consider what’s most valuable to your client’s business and make room for that.

Here are some approaches you can take with your process:

Consider how work should be submitted. The first step to a good client approval process is how you will submit the work. Are you using email or a collaboration tool like Monday? To whom are you presenting the work? How are the changes being requested? When you decide how to manage and approve tasks, you can set the foundation for more successful campaigns.
Only include critical steps. Take a look at your internal approval process and see what you can cut out. Unnecessary approvals slow down projects. Identify what criteria is necessary with your client to move on to the next phase of the project.
Know what happens after approval (or rejection). Both you and your client need to know what happens after approvals or rejections, and how it fits into the greater project. You can set up a notification system when tasks are decided on to keep everyone in the loop about where to go next.

Considering that only 54 percent of clients agree that the standard approval process works well, getting it right can create a great relationship and improve retention rates. Remember that every approval process is different for each agency. With these approaches, you can build a foundation for approvals where the decision-making process is painless, everyone is accountable, and better work gets done.

4. Keep open communication between your agency and client

One of the most significant issues between agency and client is lack of communication. Many agencies struggle with over or under-communicating with a client. Your goal is to ensure clients don’t feel confused or ignored on the status of their marketing or advertising campaign.

Sometimes clients have their own objectives and responsibilities to tackle — may it be events, trade shows, blogging, etc. — so they aren’t always available for talks.

But if they have unmet expectations from your agency, the relationship can become hard to manage. That’s why it’s essential to communicate important information, fast, so everyone is on the same page.

That’s where a client communication dashboard comes in. You can answer stakeholder questions quickly with little interruption.

When creating a client communication dashboard, be sure to clearly show:

The current status of the work in progress
How your agency is adding value to client’s business day-to-day
What aspects of the campaign should be prioritized week by week

It’s gaps in the above factors that clutter every meeting, slow down the progress of projects, and causes confusion between client, teams, and your agency. When you give clients this visibility through a dashboard, you can show the business impact your agency provides and how it gets done.

Building long-lasting client agency relationships

Whether you’re a digital marketing firm or ad agency, maintaining client relationships can be challenging. But it definitely pays off to take a reasonable approach to them and follow best practices.

Think of it as a domino effect: the better your partnership, the better your campaign, the better the results, the more sales you make.

These four key tips above will take you no time to implement once you’ve done it a few times with clients.

Michael Keenan

The post 4 Keys to Improve Client Agency Relationships appeared first on Cyfe.

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

Michael Keenan — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:00:00 +0000

If you want to speed up data collection and save time reporting, then you must understand and use Zapier with your Cyfe account.

Zapier is an easy online automation tool, but it can be challenging to know the best apps to connect to.

But don’t let that discourage you. Zapier is really simple to set up, and we’ve put together a list of the top Zaps you can use with Cyfe today.

Here’s everything you’ll learn in this guide:

What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation tool that connects thousands of web apps, such as WooCommerce, CallRail, Slack, and more. If you have an app to connect to your Cyfe dashboard, and Cyfe doesn’t currently support it, you can use Zapier to send data between them without any coding or developers.

Building a workflow takes just a few clicks, so that you can get started right away.

Three terms you should know before moving forward:

Zap. A Zap is a workflow between your apps. For example, you could have a Zap that updates new orders from WooCommerce to a clients data dashboard. Zaps are made up of a trigger and one or more actions.
Trigger. A trigger is the event that starts a Zap.
Action. An action is the event that completes that Zap.

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Whether you’re new to Zapier or using it for the first time with Cyfe, let’s walk through how you’d create a Zap.

Say you want to send WooCommerce data to an eCommerce dashboard in your Cyfe account.

Here’s what the set up looks like:

After you sign in to your WooCommerce account, edit the Push Value in Cyfe box. You’ll notice the following form.

The difference when using Zapier and Cyfe is pulling the API endpoint for your widget. To get this URL:

Log into your Cyfe account.
Click Add Widget in the top left-hand corner.
Type Push API in the search bar.
Add Push API widget, then click Configure Widget.
Copy URL in the API Endpoint box.

Add that URL to the API Endpoint box in your Zap. Adjust the name, metric value, color, type, and connotation.

Once you fill out in the form, which takes five minutes tops, turn on the Zap, and that’s it. Zapier will start sending data from the app to your Cyfe dashboard.

Curious what apps Zapier works with? There are thousands to search through, or try out these popular Zaps today to get started.

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

Here are the top Cyfe and Zapier use cases you can get started with today.

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

CallRail tracks phone calls for your marketing campaigns, but if you want to track call volume in an easy-to-understand graph, connect CallRail to Cyfe. With Zapier, you can automatically send new calls to your Cyfe dashboard each time you get a new call.

Want to connect CallRail to Cyfe? Get started now with this template.

Other popular metrics you can track when connecting CallRail to Cyfe are:

Phones call completed
New company created
Form captured
Session tracker created
SMS received
Phone call marketing as spam
SMS sent

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

Want to build out your database with sales leads? Connect Cyfe with HubSpot to track when a new contact is added to your HubSpot database. Determine what campaigns are working and which aren’t, so you can make smarter business decisions for client’s.

Want to connect HubSpot and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track using HubSpot and Cyfe are:

New Deal
Email subscriptions timeline
New Form submission
New engagement
New calendar task
Contact recently updated or created

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

If you want to make customer support more efficient, you must keep track of new tickets over time. Connect Freshdesk to Cyfe using Zapier to automatically update your dashboard each time a new ticket is created in Freshdesk.

Want to connect FreshDesk and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Freshbooks and Cyfe are:

New contact
Update ticket
Update contact

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

Digital Ocean is a simple, fast, and scalable SSD cloud virtual server that you can deploy in seconds. If your company stores a lot of data, you can see when new backups are created.

Want to connect DigitalOcean and Cyfe? Get started now.

Other popular metrics you can track with DigitalOcean and Cyfe are:

New snapshot
New droplet
New SSH key

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

Want to know how your WooCommerce orders are coming long? Whether you’re tracking their count or value, use the WooCommerce integration to help. Whenever you have a new order, Zapier will send the updated value to your Cyfe dashboard.

Connect WooCommerce and Cyfe now with this template. It’s free to create your Zap.

Other eCommerce metrics you can track using WooCommerce and Cyfe are:

Coupon events (created, updated, deleted, etc.)
Product events
Customer events
Order events
Subscription events

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

Do you use Pipedrive to speed up your sales pipeline and be more efficient? Connect Pipedrive to Cyfe to track long-term dealings and more. Whenever you receive a new deal in Pipedrive, this Zap will update the value in your Cyfe dashboard.

Want to connect Pipedrive with Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Pipedrive and Cyfe are:

New activity
New person
Updated deal stage
Organization matching filter
Person matching filter
Deal matching filter

7. Track new Magento orders over time

Monitor new orders from your eCommerce store and understand your business growth by connecting Magento to Cyfe. When you use this Zap, you can push a value to Cyfe each time you receive a new Magento order, and more.

Connect Magento to your Cyfe account with this free Zap template.

Other metrics you can track from your Magento store are:

New sales order shipment
New credit memo
New customer
New sales order invoice

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

Stay updated on your marketing campaigns by using the ActiveCampaign Cyfe integration. Once activated, you can keep track of new contacts and more all in one place.

Connect ActiveCampaign to Cyfe with this free Zap template.

Other popular metrics you can track using ActiveCampaign and Cyfe are:

New campaign link click
New deal note
New campaign opens
New campaign unsubscribe
New deal task

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

If you want to keep track of your Gravity Forms activity, you can set up an integration with Cyfe through Zapier. This Zap will push each form and survey submission you get on Gravity Forms to a Cyfe dashboard so you can monitor sign-up trends.

Connect Gravity Forms and Cyfe with this free template.

How to Use Push by Zapier

Push by Zapier is a Google Chrome extension that lets you perform Zaps from anywhere on the internet.

Need to log work time, add a phone number to your contact list, create a document, save a website, start a timer or run any other tedious task fast? Push by Zapier is the quickest way to do them and hundreds of other tasks you want.

It works in three steps:

Install Zapier’s Chrome extension.

2. Sign in to your Zapier account

Click Make a Push Zap!

4. Build the Zap to automate the task you want.

5. Click the button in the Zapier Chrome extension whenever you want to run the workflow.

For more help on how to use Push by Zapier, read this help doc by Zapier.

Final thoughts

Using Zapier with Cyfe isn’t complicated. You just need to figure out what metrics to monitor, grab the API endpoint when creating a widget, and fill out the necessary information to build the Zap. Once you turn a Zap one, it handles all your tedious tasks in reporting, so you can focus on more meaningful work in your business.

Michael Keenan

The post Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users appeared first on Cyfe.

How To Create the Ultimate Social Media Dashboard

Michael Keenan — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 06:00:03 +0000

Updated: 7-1-2020

Whether you’re a consultant managing multiple social media accounts or a business owner managing your own, you want to keep all your analytics in one place. Without it, you’re stuck flipping through 10 different boards to show all your social media data.

Visual dashboards can give anyone who needs to monitor their social media channels a one-stop shop for the most important data.

In this post, we’re going to build the ultimate social media dashboard with Cyfe to help you quickly get a full look at your social media activity.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is an information management tool used to track, analyze, and display key engagement metrics across multiple social media channels, all in one place. Social media dashboards gather information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube to create unified social media metrics reports.

These social dashboards are designed to benchmark and visualize metrics but are not intended for data analysis. Their primary purpose is to monitor business-critical data on social media, and achieve the following:

Create measurable business goals for social media accounts
Provide tracking and sharing data
Assess audience size, engagement, and demographics
Collect social media statistics
Compare data from individual campaigns, posts, or pages

How does a social media dashboard work?

Social media dashboards are used by social media managers, marketing, and communications teams who use social media to run campaigns and discover consumer insights. These tools allow you to create dashboards with scorecards and easy-to-understand visualizations of social data to follow trends and KPIs from any social media platform.

Many social media dashboards offer a drag-and-drop function so the average social media manager or marketer can build the social dashboard they need, quickly and easily.

Three key benefits of your social media dashboard:

Pull data from any social channel through one-click integrations.
Offer visual representation of key performance indicators, in real-time.
Provides easy-to-interpret metrics for high-level overviews of social strategy goals.

Social media dashboard widget examples

First, let’s look at widgets you can use to see important analytics and data about your activity on the top social networks.

Facebook Page dashboard widgets

When you use a reporting tool like Cyfe, you can choose from over 50 widgets for Facebook page insights that cover:

Reach
Impressions
Clicks
Check-ins
Like
Views
Posts

While you could create a social media dashboard just for Facebook, here are a few top ones to include in your ultimate social media dashboard.

Facebook Page Overview

Your Facebook Page overview widget gives you the top insights for your Page. You can use it to track activity over the past year and pinpoint specific time periods your page was most popular.

Facebook Page Impression Types

How are you driving traffic to your page? The Facebook Page Impression Types widget shows you the source of Page impressions. It tracks mentions of your brand, fans, posts on your feed by you, posts on your wall by fans, and other types of posts.

Facebook Page Likes by Country

For businesses that are targeting customers in a particular location, you want to know where your fans are located. The likes country map widget can help you keep track of where your fans are based.

Facebook Page Check-ins

Local businesses will want to monitor their Facebook check-ins using the check-in widget. You can even use the text widget next to your check-ins widget to log particular events that might have driven more check-ins.

Twitter dashboard widgets

The Twitter dashboard widget shows you the top Twitter analytics for your account. In addition to seeing your follower growth, you can monitor the frequency of your tweets, how many people add you to Twitter lists, or the number of times someone favorited your Tweet.

LinkedIn dashboard widgets

If you use LinkedIn to market on social media, monitor all your company LinkedIn analytics in one place. With Cyfe, you can track key metrics including:

Interactions
Interaction rate
Impressions
Likes
Comments
Shares
Click
Followers Growth
All Page Views
And more

Pinterest analytics dashboard widgets

In addition to the top networks, you can also monitor an overview of your profiles on Pinterest. You can track boards, pins, followers, and how many people you’re following.

Instagram analytics dashboard widgets

With the Instagram analytics dashboard widget, you can track different metrics such as Followers, the number of photos, and how many accounts you’re following.

YouTube dashboard widgets

The YouTube widget tracks views, comments, favorites, likes, and subscribers for your social media dashboard. If you want to go more in-depth with YouTube Analytics, you can use the YouTube dashboard template by Cyfe to track overall channel performance, see where viewers are coming from, and determine what your best videos are.

Facebook Ads dashboard widgets

The Facebook Ads dashboard widget lets you track advertising metrics from Facebook, including cost, impressions, clicks, video watches, cost per action, and more.

How to create a social media analytics dashboard

Whether you’re building a social media dashboard for a client or internal comms, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a meaningful dashboard:

1. Set your goals

First, determine what your social media objectives are. They will help guide you through what widgets to use in your dashboard.

2. Sign up for a reporting tool

Use a freemium tool like Cyfe to build a custom dashboard and track the most important KPIs for you.

3. Create a new dashboard

Don’t forget to give it a name such as [Client Name] Social Media Dashboard.

4. Add widgets for each social channel

You can choose from channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, and more in your Cyfe data dashboard.

5. Continue to build out your dashboard

Your social dashboard is not a static asset. As you run different campaigns, you may discover new metrics that lead to valuable insights for you or your client. Continually improve by adding or removing metrics on your dashboard to help make better decisions for your business.

Social media management dashboard FAQ

What are the best social media management tools?

Hootsuite for simplified social media scheduling.
Cyfe for social media monitoring and analytics.
Traject Social for social media management.
Iconosquare for running Instagram business accounts.
ManyChat for running paid social campaigns and lead generation.
Post Planner for content curation.

How do I manage my social media?

Create your social media strategy.
Choose a social media management software.
Build an editorial calendar.
Monitor engagement and connect with your audience.
Track important KPIs.
Analyze and improve your strategy.

What are the best KPIs to track in a social media management dashboard?

Number blog subscribers
Number of comments (engagement)
Forwards to a friend
Social bookmarks
Positive sentiment
Web traffic from social sites
Share of conversation
Media engagement
Likes and/or followers

Pulling the social media dashboard together

A social media dashboard can be built in a number of ways. While this process definitely works, don’t limit yourself to just one style! Cyfe has over 9 different social media widgets you can use to track campaigns, so you can make more informed decisions and grow your business.

Michael Keenan

The post How To Create the Ultimate Social Media Dashboard appeared first on Cyfe.

Agency Business Development: 7 Tips to Win New Business

Michael Keenan — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:01:11 +0000

Agency business development can be difficult for new owners, but it doesn’t have to be.

When you’re in the early stages of building an agency, it’s tempting to put business development aside. You wear an endless amount of hats: from lead generator, financial planner, head salesperson. It becomes easier to sweep business development under the rug than manage it.

But the truth is: agency business development is the key to success. Done right, you can scale and grow with better clients, engaged employees, and most of all, more money to your bottom line.

Although it’s not the reason you got into business — which is to make a good living and do what you love — you can turn it into something fun and exciting for everyone.

In this article, we’ll walk you through 7 tips to help develop and scale your agency.

7 top agency business development tips

1. Choose one flagship service

If you want to capture new business as an agency, the first thing you need to do is choose one flagship service.

Your flagship service will be what catches a potential client’s interest right away. It explains the problem you solve and why a client should work with you, so it can make all the difference.

Artem Axenov, Operations Manager at E-ideas Limited

“For any new agency starting out, sit down and see what services you can provide. Then make a hard decision. Choose what you really want to be known for. This could be one you’re most experienced in delivering, or the most in-demand service, or even your most profitable one. Success lies in what flagship service you commit to over the next six to twelve months.”

When it comes to business development, avoid being the “all in one” agency. Make your service valuable to one specific group instead of being an “OK” provider for everyone.

Take note that you don’t have to focus on one industry. You can solve a common problem a group of businesses has such as optimizing Facebook ads.

If you only run Facebook ads, you can work with several different industries from local businesses to eCommerce or professional services, and help them pull in more revenue with this one tactic. You can effectively report to clients with your Facebook Ads dashboard.

2. Focus on the right internal metrics

You’ve probably heard to “focus on metrics” time and time again. Heck, you may have a data dashboard set up with different agency metrics already — and that’s a great start.

There are three hidden metrics you also want to focus on to improve business development in your agency:

Project write-ups and write-offs. Track how much you go over or under for each client. How much do you write off for the job? How much are you not able to bill the client? What projects come in under? This will help you realize which clients you are over-servicing and not recouping costs on.
Profitability by client. If you’re tracking overall profitability, that’s a good start. Now it’s time to drill down into each client. Aim to track client profitability on a monthly or quarterly basis. Keep a minimum profitability percentage in mind, which for most agencies is 10%. Ideally, you want to stay in a 30% profit range.
Minimum engagement for clients. Determine what the minimum yearly billings you will take on per client. This can be $5,000, $10,000, or $100,000 — whatever works best for your business. Know where your sweet spot is for the size clients you can win, delight, and deliver excellent results to, so you can produce a better profit for your agency.

3. Think outside the box

If you want to win new business, you don’t want to run the same playbook as everyone else. You need to think out of the box.

It gives you an edge over the competition because it shows that you’re a problem solver. You approach things in innovative ways and can help clients get results through your creativity.

It’s a strategy that Joan Westenberg, Founder of marketing and ad agency studio self, uses to generate new leads for their agency.

Joan Westenberg, Founder of studio self

“One of the best business development tools for Studio Self was a mental health tips and tricks email community called Tiny Spells — built entirely around self-care. It had nothing to do with marketing work, but it demonstrated how good we were at building traction and the quality of our content. It got us a foot in the door with folks who were excited to talk about how and why we built it – who would never have picked up a Zoom call to talk marketing.”

Start by questioning the status quo. Challenge your team to approach problems by asking:

Why?
What if …
How might we…

Encourage team members to challenge the ways you do things today as an agency. It’ll help you create new thinking and drive agency business development with fresh, innovative ideas.

4. Build credibility by podcasting

Content will always be your best friend when doing any kind of marketing for a business, and this holds up for your agency. Ultimately, there’s no telling what your ideal client will respond to early on, but you can build agency credibility by becoming a podcast host.

Podcasting helps you reach a brand new audience, those who may never find you in search and read long-form content because they prefer audio. It’s a tactic that Kevin Geary, CEO at Atlanta-based marketing agency Digital Gravy, recommends as a key business development tip for agencies.

Kevin Geary, CEO at Digital Gravy

“Go all-in on being a guest for industry-related podcasts, especially if you have a specific niche you serve. The ability to speak directly to your target market for 20-60 minutes on someone else’s platform, build your authority, have the host vouch for you, pitch at the end, and earn a backlink to your site all at the same time is second to none.”

To find podcast guest opportunities, start by identifying the audience you want to reach. Do you want to talk to pet store owners? Restaurant owners? Marketing managers?

Once you have a better idea, use the following steps to find relevant podcasts to guest host on:

Search in iTunes for specific keywords
Browse Apple’s iTunes Podcast Directory by category
Search on Google for podcasts that your target market might listen to
Browse online podcast directories such as cast.market
We’d love for you to submit an application on our very own Agency Ahead Podcast by Traject.

No matter which route you take, create a list of 10 to 20 podcasts you want to become a guest on. And start reaching out to them by email, Twitter, etc. If you want to start your own, don’t forget to promote your own podcast and get the world out to build credibility.

5. Create a referral program

The most valuable reason for having a referral program is that referrals are trusted. Anyone can read up on recommendations and reviews online, but most people value the personal opinion of a friend, family member, or colleague.

Kevin Miller, Founder and CEO of The Word Counter

“My #1 strategy for attracting new clients is to ask for referrals. We typically wait until after two or three months of results. However, this is the highest converting channel and it works without fail. ”

There’s no match for a solid referral from a trustworthy friend—make the most of that by rewarding those who recommend your business. “Setting up internal sales teams, doing cold outreach, etc. is a waste of time in my opinion,” Kevin adds, “and not a path I’d suggest going down, particularly as an agency owner.”

The best part about referrals? You get to excel at what you do best. Do great work and people won’t think twice before recommending you to others who they think will benefit from your service.

6. Build a community around your personal brand

If you want to succeed in business development as an agency, you want to build a community of trusted colleagues.

Networking with other agency owners — whether they are in marketing, design, UX, advertising, etc. — is an excellent opportunity to develop and gain knowledge from your peers, get new business, and spread the word about your agency. It also helps you learn from their experiences and mistakes.

Start by jumping on social media and chatting with people on Twitter or LinkedIn. For example, this thread from Matthew Kobach, Former Head of Social Media at Nasdaq, describes his journey through building a community on Twitter.

One year ago today I decided to see if I could build a community from scratch.

Mostly I wanted prove to myself that I could do it. So I decided to take what I knew about community building and apply it to my personal Twitter handle.
— Matthew Kobach (@mkobach) April 27, 2020

He describes,

“I have met dozens of remarkable people (some of which I now get to call my friends). I have learned more about marketing this past 12 months than ever before. And somehow thousands of people are willing to read what I tweet.

I still find it all hard to believe.”

When people have a place to express themselves, they feel more loyal toward your brand. If you set out to meet new friends and make a positive impact on the community, you can impress existing clients, reach your target audience, and build a successful agency.

7. Clearly communicate client metrics

Agency leaders can all agree on one thing: how you communicate metrics is key to successful agency business. Making a client’s progress easy to understand saves them time and energy. Plus, they don’t have to sort through endless spreadsheets of data and decode the data.

Whether it’s landing page metrics or SEO insights, use a dashboard to show clients exactly what’s happening with their campaigns.

You can build a dashboard in Cyfe to show many mission-critical KPIs, including:

Pay-per-click costs, clicks, impressions, and conversions through Facebook Ads and Google Ads dashboards.
Social media analytics from all your channels
Call logs through Marchex
Email marketing effectiveness through any email marketing software provider including MailChimp and Klaviyo
Search engine optimization progress through tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and AuthorityLabs.

You can better track a marketing strategy’s effectiveness and return on investment when you better communicate metrics with your clients. Plus, you can also determine what’s working and what’s not, so you can lead your clients towards better business decisions and improve their overall business performance.

Becoming a more reliable agency business today

Whether you’re putting together your first business plan, or have been an agency owner for years, these tips above will help you become a stronger business. So you can scale and grow with better clients, hire better employees, and add more money to your bottom line.

Michael Keenan

The post Agency Business Development: 7 Tips to Win New Business appeared first on Cyfe.

What are Closed Loop Analytics?

Michael Keenan — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 03:00:37 +0000

The sheer volume of metrics and data available allows you to track almost everything our business does in a given time.

But monitoring all those numbers can be overwhelming. You need a way of connecting your campaign and sales data. So you can track your entire customer lifecycle and determine which platforms and channels are delivering the most value.

Closed loop analytics makes this possible.

Learn how you can implement closed loop analytics into your organization. Your reward will be more educated correlations and insights about your business.

What are closed loop analytics?

Closed loop analytics, aka closed-loop marketing, is the business process of sharing information between marketing and sales teams to improve results. With closed loop analytics, your marketing team can attribute which marketing campaigns lead to Sales and revenue generated from them.

With closed loop reporting, you are “closing the loop” between the data collected by marketing from sources like Google Analytics (which reports on customer behavior) and the data collected by your sales team from a CRM (which reports on customer purchases, Average Order Value, sales call details, etc.).

The power of closed loop reporting

Historically, marketers have dealt primarily with top-of-the-funnel lead generation tactics and analytics. Their visibility usually ends at website engagement and Google Analytics – they can’t see which assets on their website or social media profiles contributed to sales.

While salespeople have dealt with the lead-to-customer transition and metrics. Because they lack marketing visibility, every lead at the end of the customer journey looks the same. They can’t report on what led them to conversion at the beginning of the funnel.

With closed loop analytics, salespeople and marketers get the bigger picture.

Marketers can measure the fruits of their labor through the entire customer lifecycle. For example, they can accurately report on the ROI of an ad, video, or blog. On the other end, salespeople can feedback where the majority of leads are coming from and the actions that led them to conversion.

This allows your marketing and sales teams to collaborate, draw insights, and make better decisions on what drives the greatest ROI for the business.

Ultimately, closed loop analytics help companies transform (and track) anonymous web visitors into leads who can then be converted into customers. It also allows us to see what channels and tactics are creating leads, conversions, and sales.

7 marketing metrics to measure

In practice, closed loop analytics consists of comparing data between two or more analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and a CRM, to get a full view of the customer lifecycle. Let’s take a look at the metrics you should be tracking to do this effectively.

Overall traffic: how many people visited your site in total
Channel-specific traffic: how many people enter your site through a particular channel
Total conversions: how many visitors convert to customers
Bounce rate: the average number of visitors who left your site
New vs. returning visitors: how many repeat visitors you are attracting
Social comments: how many people are taking the time to comment on your post
Content shares: how many times your content is being shared

For metrics specific to email marketing, check out HubSpot’s guide. Also, discover the top sales KPIs you need to start monitoring to improve your sales growth.

Some platforms enable audience-tracking tools and CRMs to work together. However, since sales and marketing have historically been separate departments and functions within a company, many businesses are using platforms that don’t talk to each other. The good news: we can still work with that.

You can implement closed loop analytics without upending the company processes by implementing all new software. Sure, it’s going to take a little more effort on your part to analyze metrics in two different places, but it’s possible.

Implementing closed loop marketing in your existing business process

A successful sale usually has four stages:

Most marketing tools track your customers through stages one and two. Some will bring it all the way through stage three but few will track through stage four. That’s because leads are typically turned over to the sales team and taken away from marketing at this point.

So how can we track all four stages? Let’s go stage-by-stage:

1. Visitor arrives at your website

Even the most simple audience-tracking tools will track the source of a visitor when they land on your website. Whether your visitors are coming from organic results, PPC, social media, email marketing or any of your other marketing tactics, it’s important to understand where your visitors are coming from first and foremost.

Here is a pretty basic sample report pulled from Google Analytics showing the sources of this website’s visitors. Notice how the majority of visits are direct (or there’s no known source) followed by organic search.

Regardless of where your traffic is coming from, understanding your sources is the first step in determining what efforts are most effective in bringing in new customers.

2. Visitor browses your website

Once you’ve captured your website visitors, you can start tracking additional information about them and how they navigate your website. Information such as:

What pages they visit
In what order they visit those pages
How long they stay on each page

Ideally, you would be able to track this information for each individual user. But if your audience-tracking software provides this information in aggregate (as Google Analytics does), that’s a good starting place too.

Here is a sample of how Google Analytics provides page view information:

Pageview data will help you determine what content is valuable to your visitors and how they are engaging with the content on your website.

3. Visitor converts to a lead by filling out a form

Most simple audience-tracking software does not, by design, show you which visitors on your site convert by filling out a form. Instead, these people will be converted to leads and sent to a salesperson by email and/or entered into the sales CRM.

Most companies stop their marketing efforts here as the leads are turned over to salespeople for nurturing. However, when implementing closed loop reporting, you want to continue your tracking through this stage and the next to get a complete picture of the customer journey.

Although simple audience-tracking software isn’t set up to track these conversions, there are a few options for you to capture and analyze information on visitors who become leads:

Implement software that tracks form conversions, like Google Tag Manager, HubSpot or Formisimo. (Struggling to get conversions from your forms? Read: How to Get Your Contact Form to Convert Visitors).
Customize your current software to track form conversions: many audience-tracking platforms allow you to create a way to track conversions. For example, if you are using Google Analytics, you can set up a Goal to track conversions in addition to all of your other metrics.
Track them in the sales CRM: one way that many salespeople receive leads is through visitors on the website converting by filling out a form. When this happens, the salesperson will likely get an email with information about that lead and manually enter it into the CRM, or it will be automatically entered into the CRM.

4. Lead becomes a customer

Marketing’s job usually ends once the lead enters the CRM and sales picks it up from there. But with closed loop analytics, marketing continues to track the lead through to becoming a customer (or a lost deal) to determine which of their efforts result in conversions and which don’t.

Truthfully, you need software that tracks the actions of individual users to understand which tactics lead to sales and which don’t. Without it, this task is very difficult. A platform like HubSpot, for example, integrates with your CRM and uses tracking cookies to deliver individual insights about each lead.

The benefits of closed loop marketing

Closed loop helps the entire company determine the effectiveness of their customer acquisition strategies.

This is something businesses are traditionally bad at understanding. Only 21% of B2B marketers are successful at tracking ROI, according to The Content Marketing Institute. Shifting to closed loop reporting is a huge step in solving that challenge.

As well as better understanding your customer metrics, closed loop reporting also enables marketing and sales teams to collaborate better. This alignment can lead to 38% higher sales win rates, reports Marketo.

Closed loop analytics FAQs

What is closed loop measurement?

Closed loop measurement is, also known as online-to-offline measurement, is the process of monitoring customer behavior across online and offline touchpoints to inform your product, marketing, and sales team to make better business decisions and create content that encourages customers to purchase a product or service.

What is closed loop tracking?

In practice, closed-loop analytics consists of comparing data between two or more analytics tools. As you probably know, marketers typically track their campaigns using an audience-tracking tool such as Google Analytics. Likewise, the sales team usually tracks their prospects and leads using a CRM platform.

Whether your company measures using closed loop analytics or not, choosing the correct KPIs to measure is crucial to ensuring that your efforts are targeted towards your overall business goals.

Not sure which KPIs to track? Check out our free eBook: The Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Right Marketing KPIs for Your Business.

Michael Keenan

The post What are Closed Loop Analytics? appeared first on Cyfe.

Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data

Michael Keenan — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 07:26:00 +0000

Whether you’re the founder of your own one-person agency, or a marketing manager at a 5,000+ person organization, the strategy behind your data insights could improve both your decision-making process and marketing campaigns — which makes prioritizing collect and analysis more critical and challenging.

So what should you focus on to help grow your business?

In this article, we’ll look at why data insights are important, how you can observe and make sense of your data, and some key examples of actionable insights for small businesses.

What are data insights?

Data insights refer to the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data related to your company and its clients. The goal is simple: make better decisions. A good data management and analysis strategy help companies monitor the health of critical systems, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about data insights, they usually referring to three core components:

Data: think about what happens when you go on Facebook. When you log into the app, you allow it to collect information about: where you live, articles you read, places you’ve been, where you went to collect, and other sensitive information. It can even send you push notifications each time you get a comment or reaction. Every time you use Facebook, it sends this unstructured data to a warehouse or database in the form of numbers and text.

Analytics: So what does Facebook does with all this information? With the help of data insights tools, the social media giant will break your information down into smaller groups to create a detailed buyer persona of you. Facebook can then understand how and why you behave the way you do. They can tell from the data that you’re getting married or planning to buy a house based on your actions in the app.

Insights: Now that Facebook better understands you, they can send personalized offers to you and other customers similar to you. The platform can now send targeted messages about new homes to buy in your area, or offers for low mortgage rates. Actionable insights are what you learn from data collected, and how your business can use it to improve an objective.

Why are data insights important?

74% of companies say they want to be “data-driven,” according to a Forrester report, but only 29% are actually successful at connecting analytics to insight. Data will be the largest area of spending for companies as they attempt to become more data-driven. If your business is going to survive, you need a strategy for the future. You have marketing, social media, web analytics, sales, and support. Staying up-to-date with reliable information on your growth is not easy tasks. Data insights can give you a clear overview of what’s happening across your business. And see everything in one place with a data visualization tool like Cyfe.

With easy access and visibility to data, it’s easier to process the information and make smarter decisions, faster. Teams can see key metrics into how your company is performing, how successful campaigns are, where your best customers are coming from, and so much more. A smart data strategy can help companies of all sizes improve their bottom line, especially small businesses that need to do more with less.

Four tips for pulling insights from data

1. Accurately display information in a data visualization platform

When showing key metrics from your data analysis, keep your x and y-axis points in proportion. Otherwise, you have a graph that misrepresents the data.

The example below shows interest rates between 2008 and 2012, and while the graph on the right makes the metrics look the same, the graph on the left shows a more accurate picture of what happened.

The right side shows static activity, but the left side truncates the y-axis to represent 3.140% through 3.154%. While the numbers do increase over the four-year time frame, the amount of the increase is insignificant. But at a quick glance, the chart on the left looks like rates skyrocketed.

Data insights can tell a different story based on their visual presentation. Aim to find a technology that collects your data sources and displays them in a clean and accurate way.

2. Identify the right patterns in data sets

As marketers or data scientists, we gather data so we can find patterns in it. Most commonly, numbers trending upwards or similarities between two sets of numbers. Often we spot patterns in a table presentation, or, you can visualize it in a chart such as line graphs, scatter plots, or a time series.

One common pattern to look for when visualizing data is trending quality.

Spotting trends refers to a number that is increasing or decreasing — for example, data on pageviews in your Google Analytics account.

In this case, the numbers are increasing week-by-week, so this is an upward trend. It shows the underlying asset is working. For example, if this is a blog post on your website, you’ll want to create content around similar topics. The uptrend can mean readers are interested.

Now consider this data about organic search traffic from Jan 1st until Jan 25th.

In this case, the number of organic entrances is decreasing week by week, indicating a downtrend. This could mean an algorithm update impacted your rankings, or you need to optimize decaying content.

We analyze data to help make predictions and decisions about a business objective. Look for correlations between uptrends and downtrends and why they exist, so you can better understand and prepare for future situations.

3. Look at the correct time frames

Timing is everything. Errors can occur when business owners look at a quick slice of data and make assumptions without taking into account historical trends. A “slice” could be a month, quarter, or a year, however, you want to look back in time to get a clear picture of what’s happening.

Looking at historical data can provide insight into how your business has reacted to different variables such as economic cycles, seasonality, and market trends. These data points are analyzed for trends or patterns that may align with current conditions so you can make a smarter decision based on fact.

To view historical data, use a data visualization tool that lets you access different time frames easily. When presenting the analysis, you can reference historical trends and tell a more cohesive story for the data.

4. Avoid measuring averages and totals

Consider this: if you calculate the average net worth of everyone in a bar one night and Bill Gates walks in. That number is going to skew upward dramatically. This is where averages can get dangerous. Data points such as these may produce a correlation you want to see, but once Bill leaves the room, you’re going to have a much different story to tell.

Try to stand clear of feel-good metrics like Total Followers or Average Time on Page. These only give you half the picture. To see the full picture, you want to measure percent changes and point lifts depending on what data you’re presenting.

Four key data insight examples for small businesses

1. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Customer acquisition refers to the process of gaining new customers for your business. Customer acquisition costs are the cost associated with finding and convincing a customer to buy your product or service. This includes marketing costs, advertising spend, employee salaries, overhead, and commissions or bonuses.

What it costs to acquire a customer helps determine the overall profitability of your business. Some businesses are not profitable after a customers first purchase; it may take multiple purchases to go green. You want to keep track of this data to see what campaigns work and which don’t. If CAC is high, it could mean your targeting or ideal customer profile is off.

To calculate customer acquisition costs, take your total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers in a given time frame. Track any changes in CAC monthly or quarterly to see where you can improve your strategy.

2. Buying habits

Buying habits are commonly overlooked as a metric for small business owners. However, understanding how and why your customers buy is important. When you understand your customers, you can create more effective advertising campaigns, tailor marketing communications, and improve the communications strategy for your business.

To better understand customers buying habits, ask yourself the following questions:

Where do your customers shop?
How frequently do they buy?
What channels do they prefer to chat on?
What are their buying preferences?
Why do they buy your products or services?

Another data point to observe is: are the products customers frequently buy your most profitable items or are they your loss leaders? If you’re only reselling your loss leader products or services over and over, you’re not going to be in business very long. Understanding this may help you adjust your mindset and start focusing on pushing your customers to your more profitable products and services.

3. Average ticket price

Average ticket price is a great metric to track when pulling insights from data. It covers the average total of every ticket or order placed over a period of time. Even if you have a ton of traffic and a high conversion rate, if your average ticket price is low, it’ll be hard to stay in the green.

To improve average ticket price, you can use upselling techniques to encourage customers or clients to buy more. For example, you can offer complementary products at a checkout page if you’re an eCommerce store. If you’re an agency, you can upsell a Messenger bot with your Facebook ads campaigns. Lifting your average ticket price

4. Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

The Marketing Originated Customer Percentage refers to how much new business is a direct result of your marketing efforts. To calculate it, take all the new customers you received in a given period, and look back at which ones started with a lead that marketing generated. You can use a marketing analytics tool such as HubSpot to track every channel and touchpoint a lead has before they buy.

The average percentage can be between 20 – 40% for the average sales team. If you have a lot of lead generation from marketing, it can be more between 40 – 80%. An alternative way to look at this is calculating based on revenue. It all depends on how you want to look at your business.

Finding the truth in data insights

While the above examples show some of the common ways data insights are found and used, it’s certainly not all of them. Always remember two things one, if you think your data insights look off or too good to be true, they most likely are. The second is to use an all-in-one business dashboard to show clean, structured data that’s easy to understand. Good data visualization can lower your chances of misrepresenting and interpreting data insights, which results in poor decision making in your business. Don’t waste time looking at inaccurate data insights. Getting comfortable around the right business intelligence analytics helps you and your team discover the truth faster, more accurately, and with a lot less fuss. This way, you can be confident in the actions you decide to take that are informed by non-biased data insights.

Michael Keenan

The post Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data appeared first on Cyfe.

9 Landing Page Metrics: How To Track Landing Page Performance

Michael Keenan — Wed, 27 May 2020 06:00:36 +0000

Most marketers know that the most important landing page metric is conversions. You can spend tons of time and resources creating the perfect page, so you want to show your marketing ROI. But did you know there are other critical landing page KPIs you can improve to boost conversions, too?

In this article, we’re going to look at nine different landing page metrics, where to find them in your analytics, and cover how they can boost your marketing strategy and improve conversion rates.

Nine landing page metrics to track and improve conversions

1. Traffic source

In website analytics, including Google Analytics, a traffic source shows where your landing page gets traffic from. For example, if someone finds your page through a search query, the source is organic search. If your conversion rate is low, it could be because you’re getting traffic from the wrong channels.

Evaluating which channels bring in high-converting website visitors can help you better optimize your page and drive more conversions. Here are some examples of traffic sources to watch:

Direct traffic: people who directly typed your URL into their browser to go directly to your landing page.
Referral traffic: people who find your landing page by clicking a link on another website or source.
Social media traffic: people who find their way to your landing page from a social media post or profile. You can sort by which social network.
Organic traffic: people who found your landing page from search queries on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Email traffic: people who clicked a link in one of your email marketing campaigns and landed on your page.
Pay per click traffic: people who clicked on PPC ads (typically in search engine results) to get to your landing page.

In Google Analytics, you can data on your traffic sources in Acquisition → All Traffic → Source/Medium.

2. Landing page views

Landing page views, or pageviews, show you how many times your landing page has been seen by a visitor. When pulling up this metric, you can also find out when people visit more often and see what events drove more views. If you’re running PPC ads to your landing page, you can use this information to set specific times when ads will be delivered to help boost traffic and landing page success.

To pull this report in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once you reach All Pages, you can tap into specific landing pages and pull up the data.

3. Return vs new visitors

The difference between new and return visitors is pretty straightforward. Regardless, it’s often the most overlooked user engagement metric for landing pages.

Say the goal your lead generation campaign is to generate new leads for your business. For this campaign you’re giving away downloadable content — like an eBook or whitepaper — in exchange for visitors information. If return customers are converting on the page, you may have a good conversion rate, but you won’t have a great funnel to nurture.

To get the data for this metric in Google Analytics, head over to Audience → Behavior → New vs. Returning.

4. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is one of the most important landing page metrics. It refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website before visiting a second page. Most marketing campaigns run paid traffic to a dedicated landing page, where a person fills out their information and clicks through to a landing page. That would count as a second page visited.

A high bounce rate can mean three things:

Your audience doesn’t match with the page and doesn’t engage with it.
Your content is of low quality. There’s nothing keeping people around.
Visitors find what they are looking for and exit the page.

To find bounce rates in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once in All Pages, choose the desired landing page to pull the report.

A good bounce rate for landing pages falls into three categories:

Excellent: range between 26 and 40 percent.
Average: range between 41 and 55 percent.
Decent: range between 56 and 70 percent.

Anything higher than 70 percent for a specific landing page for lead generation (not a blog, news, or events) is considered poor. If you’re seeing bounce rates in below average, you may want to work on your conversion rate optimization, or redesign the campaign completely.

5. Average time on Page

Average time on page is the average of time all users spend on your page. The sole purpose of this landing page metric is referencing if your content is good or not — similar to the bounce rate. The longer people spend on your page, the higher your conversion rates can be.

Pulling this data is the same as finding your bounce rate. Navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once in All Pages, choose the desired landing page to pull the report.

6. Conversion value

Conversion value is the number you assign to a specific conversion on your landing page. This typically represents the future income a lead brings your business.

Tracking conversion value shouldn’t be viewed alone in your marketing campaign. You want to monitor as relates to your traffic source, cost per conversion, and new vs. returning leads (amongst others). The benefit of allocating conversion value is to help you optimize and report return on ad spend (ROAS).

7. Form abandonment

Whether you’re optimizing a page for an e-commerce site or a paid digital marketing campaign, you want to track form abandonment. Form abandonment is the number or percentage of people who started filling out the required information on your landing page, then left.

This can happen for a number of reasons. Maybe your form is too much or too sensitive for potential leads.

If you want to improve conversion rates, make sure the information you’re asking for matches the perceived value of your offer. Ask yourself, “Would I provide my phone number for an eBook on data dashboards?”. If the answer is no, then you should probably remove it from your form.

For any marketing campaign, A/B test different forms. When you go to perform a landing page analysis, you can uncover what information people are willing to give, and adjust your fields accordingly.

8. Cost per conversion

Another big landing page metric to monitor is the cost per conversion. Cost per conversion is how much it costs to acquire a new lead. Although you want to increase conversions on your page, you don’t want to drive the cost up to do so.

The equation for cost per conversion is simple: take the total cost of traffic generated to your page divided by the number of conversions. For example, say your ad campaign costs $200 for 100 views. At the end of the campaign, you got 5 conversions. Using this formula you’d see $200/5 = $40. Your cost per conversion is $40.

9. Lead to customer percentage

One of the key metrics you want to measure for landing pages is lead to customer rate. How many leads from each landing page and went on to become a paying customer?

Say you work to improve conversions on your landing page. You check your analytics account and it shows your reaching the target audience, more people are signing up for your offer. But if you don’t turn those lead into customers, your conversion rate is a vanity metric.

Sometimes, landing page optimization goes beyond the key metrics. It may involve changing your offer, targeting a new audience, or reevaluating your sales approach. Lead to customer rate can provide that type of insights for your business so you can make smarter decisions.

Good conversion rates vary depending on your industry and offer, where it falls in your sales and conversion funnel, and the quality of leads being generated. In general, you should expect to see between 5-10% lead to customer rate.

FAQs: Landing page metrics

How do you measure landing page success?

Landing page success is different for each marketing campaign. However, you can focus on key landing page metrics including:

Conversion rate
Form abandonment rate
Cost per conversion
Bounce rate
Lead to customer rate

What are the most important Google Analytics metrics?

Here are five important Google Analytics metrics you want to track your landing page:

Traffic source
Pageviews
New vs. returning users
Average time on page
Bounce rate

What is a landing page in Google Analytics?

A landing page in Google Analytics is the first page viewed in a session. When checking your Google Analytics reports, a landing page is how someone entered your website.

Making the most of your landing page metrics

To run any successful outbound or inbound marketing campaign, you want to track metrics that matter. If you want to improve your conversion rates and make an impact on your business, track the above nine landing page metrics.

Connect your Google Analytics to Cyfe to easily track and improve on key landing page metrics all in one place. It’s free to get started.

Michael Keenan

The post 9 Landing Page Metrics: How To Track Landing Page Performance appeared first on Cyfe.

Small Business Analytics: 4 Ugly Truths and 6 Best Practices

Michael Keenan — Wed, 13 May 2020 06:00:27 +0000

Small business analytics is the silent driver of successful companies today. Every owner knows their work impacts the bottom line — spikes in traffic, more sales — but they don’t always know what’s making the most impact and why.

The problem is, there’s so much data available today it can be overwhelming for a small business owner. Wrangling data takes the right tools, the right metrics, and the right application to build a sustainable long-term business.

To lessen the burden of small business data analytics, we’ve put together a guide below that discusses four ugly truths (and how to fix them), plus, six best practices you can use to understand the health of your small business and make more informed, strategic decisions.

If you’re short on time, click to a section that interests you the most:

4 ugly truths about small business analytics

With the amount of data that’s available to you, it’s easy to misunderstand and misuse it. And if you don’t jump on specific mistakes early, it can negatively impact your bottom line. Below are some common issues around small business analytics and how you can overcome them.

1. Small business owners know they should be using data, but they don't.

Many business owners decide to focus on revenue-generating activities like lead generation or advertising. Analytics has become something owners fear because of lack of time, resources, technical knowledge, etc. The truth is, data wrangling is profitable once you get over the learning curve. Once it’s set up, you can start making more strategic decisions for your business and grow revenue.

For example, Don Marler, a street food vendor, achieved a 30% revenue boost by tapping into his customer’s geographic data. The data already lived in his Facebook Business account. At the time, Facebook Messenger policies were changing and Don had to find a new way to connect with customers. Using this new geographic data, he was able to create a new marketing channel for his food cart and drive more revenue for the small business.

Data wrangling tips:

Think like Nike and Just Do It! Spend time each week looking at your business’s analytics to understand the health of the business, and where you can improve whether it be in customer acquisition, expenses, or paid ads. When you own your business intelligence data, you can make better decisions and make more profit.

2. Most small businesses don’t have the right reporting tools in place.

To say there are a hundred different free reporting tools may be an understatement. Yes, you can use spreadsheets to manage your business data — but they often lead to human error, less informed insights, and can limit what data you act on.

Tools tips:

Update your toolkit. Any new business should set aside a budget to track and measure their data.
Choose free reporting tools. Spreadsheets are free. But so is a Cyfe dashboard. You can link up to any data source from finance to sales and marketing softwares, and create a dashboard in minutes.

3. You’re looking at the wrong metrics

Whether you’re a start up, local business, or e-commerce store owner, it’s critical that you identify, track, and improve the right metrics. If you do, you’ll get a clear picture of when you’re adding value to your business and when you’re not.

More often than not, small business analytics focuses on vanity metrics: Facebook Likes or Instagram followers. This extends outside of social media. You could consider revenue a vanity metric if it’s not matched up against how much the company loses. A vanity metric will only tell you half the story.

Metrics tips:

Set key performance indicators that are easy to understand and access. You can pull data from your Google Analytics or sales system. More on what to track later in this article.
Track metrics that lead to insights. Social following doesn’t help you understand how good your onboarding is, or how to personalize the customer experience.
Don’t track totals. For example, total revenue. To see the full picture, you should measure things like customer engagement, percentage of conversions, customer satisfaction, etc.

4. You’ve stopped asking why.

Data doesn’t live in a vacuum. Metrics are usually dependent on each other, for example, say your email click-through rates were up last month, and so we’re your profits. You could report the reason profits were up was because you ran a great email marketing campaign. If that’s the case, you should continue to improve on your email marketing efforts.

Take the extra steps to question your data. To properly validate your claim, you want to support it with a story that explains the how and why behind your success.

6 small business data analytics best practices

Now that we’ve covered the common issues most small business owners face, let’s get into what small business analytics metrics you should track to improve performance.

1. Pay attention to trends

A trend quantifies and explains data patterns over time. It can be an upward or downwards shift in your data set overtime. The goal is to predict what might happen to your business in the future. Armed with this knowledge you can take actions to support good trends and fix bad ones.

You can track trends day-by-day, week-by-week, monthly or quarterly. Whatever time frame works best for your business. Since trends are formed over time, you’ll have to set up your analytics first, wait within the given time period, then compare over time.

Top trends to focus on for small businesses:

Traffic source: A traffic source report shows you an overview of where people came from before landing on your website. It’s commonly found in your Google Analytics account. For example, a “direct source” would be someone who visited your site by typing in your URL. An “organic source” is Google or another search engine. You want to track traffic sources so you can optimize the channels bringing you the most traffic over time.
Keyword rankings: To know how people are finding you in search engines, you should track keyword rankings. You can then tell what content is performing well, and if you should improve it or not. Plus what topics you should create content on.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV): Customer lifetime value is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the relationship of your average customer. You can break these up into segments depending on how many different customer groups you have. Knowing CLTV can help your business focus on acquiring the most profitable and best fit customers for your business.

2. Monitor more than just website traffic

Website traffic refers to people who visit your website. It’s measured in visits, or sessions, and is a standard way to measure how good you are at attracting leads. But just measuring website traffic isn’t the only thing you want to measure as a small business. You also want to look at:

How long people stay on your site. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have if no one stays for more than a few seconds. Look at bounce rate and time on page to determine how people interact with your site.
What percentage of visitors convert. Whether you’re an e-commerce business or brick-n-mortar, you have a goal for site visitors. It can be buying a product, signing up for a mailing list, grabbing a coupon. You want to track how many people convert on your website. This will help you determine if your messaging or product offering is effective or not.

Identifying the metrics above, along with demographic data in Google Analytics, can help you figure out who’s actually visiting your site. You could then create better offers, adjust your marketing tactics, and improve your website for conversions. The possibilities are endless once you have good data in place.

3. Oversee cost of customer acquisition

Do you know how much it costs to get a new customer?

The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is determined by dividing all the costs spent on getting a new customer by the number of new ones in a period of time. For example, if you spent $1,500 on marketing in January and acquired 10 new customers, your CAC is $150.

Remember customer lifetime value (CLTV) from above? Well, say your CLTV is $1,100 and you spend $150 to acquire one, that’s a win for your business.

When you evaluate CAC and CLTV of different customer groups, you can see who your most profitable customers are. Now you can focus on the most rewarding ones rather than customers who cut into your profits.

4. Use data to monitor content engagement

Content is a great way to drive new business. The goal is to draw people to your company by offering tips and insights on issues they care most about. You attract an audience, then convert them into customers over time.

Just like any other form of marketing, you want to measure your content engagement to see how effective it is. Here are a few examples of content engagement metrics to track for your small business:

Sign-ups: Chances are you’re using content to drive people in from search or social. When someone visits your page, you want to give them the option to sign up for a subscriber list. Today that list can be e-mail, Messenger, or SMS. You can embed a sign-up form directly on your site with a call-to-action that explains why they should join your list.
Click-through rates (CTR): When you send a message to your list, you want to know how many people act on it. Measuring click-through rates can tell you what type of content works for your audience, and which don’t. The higher the CTR, the better.
Social shares: Fewer metrics can express your content’s strength than people sharing it with their network on social media. This is different than social engagement, for example, likes and comments. Look at how many people re-posted your content on their feed.

Monitor those trends and which pieces of content or pages are performing best and worst to help you understand what is most impactful and which content to avoid.

5. Keep track of financials

Financials are the painful necessity of small businesses. Some find it boring, while others enjoy the pain. While we recommend working with an accountant to support your financial health, some financial metrics you can track are:

Income: Without any revenue or income, you don’t have a business. You can’t buy supplies, or pay your team. Track income on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. And compare it to how you were doing the last period. It’s an easy number to track, think, what are your total sales?
Expenses: You want to know what it costs to operate your business. If your expenses are too high and income too low, you won’t be in business very long. Expenses can include any tools, softwares, ad spend, employee, etc that cuts into revenue. It’s how you determine if you are profitable or not.
Cash flow: Negative cash flow plagues many small businesses. You can’t just have money in your business checking account, you need to have a positive cash flow. The ideal cash flow is 2:1 assets to liabilities. If you’re below 1:1, it means you don’t have enough money to operate.
Aging accounts receivable: An aging accounts receivable can be shocking for businesses who invoice customers. It reports on unpaid customer invoices and is used to identify cash flow problems. For example, if one customer pays in 30 days, but 3 other clients pay over 90 to 120 days, you’ll have a cash flow problem. You now know to charge late payment fees or drop clients who don’t pay on time.

6. Make your data accessible

If your data is not accessible and easy to find, you won’t get much insight from it. Here are some guidelines to make your data easier to understand and present.

Present your business analytics on mobile. With teams becoming more dispersed, make sure data is accessible by everyone, at any time — whether it’s in a meeting, on a plane, or on the beach.
Make data easy to share. All your data should live in one place. That way you can share insights with teams, clients, or vendors via link or click of button. This includes simple export features so you can save and store specific files over time.
Invest in real-time monitoring. A good data dashboard will give viewers live updates of your most important metrics. Whether it be website traffic, online sales, or active sales funnels.
Auto-send reports to stakeholders. Some people don’t want to log into an analytics dashboard — and that’s okay. With Cyfe, you can create reports based on specific information and set a time to send them to yourself and other team members.

Making the most of your business intelligence as a small business

Now that you have some insight into managing small business analytics, the ball is in your court. Taking control of your data can benefit your business long into the future — and help drive more revenue. From there, you can really dive into business intelligence and take your business to the next level.

Michael Keenan

The post Small Business Analytics: 4 Ugly Truths and 6 Best Practices appeared first on Cyfe.

Michael Keenan – Cyfe

SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics

Table of Contents

1. Conversion rates are king

2. Track keyword ranking positions

3. Bounce rates help you improve your pages

4. Drive organic traffic using keywords

5. Tracking exit percentage improves sales

6. Monitoring website traffic reveals the overall health of your SEO

7. Three core KPIs are needed to tell the whole story of SEO results

8. Monitor rankings weekly to grow authority and attract new leads

9. Create SEO goals based on what you need to accomplish

10. Make KPI tracking and measuring goals simple

11. Set up alerts to spot issues as they arrive

12. Data isn’t always immediately actionable

13. It’s not always necessary to track KPIs on a daily basis

14. Compare SEO campaign data month vs. month presents a bigger picture

15. Leverage A/B testing to action data

16. Ensure Google Analytics is configured properly

17. Keep tabs on your competitors through the competitor rankings KPI

18. Generate a total “link power” rather than count links for content

19. Start with a Google search when looking at the customer journey

20. Use analytics to make data actionable

Your Turn

Michael Keenan

7 Marketing Agency KPIs You Shouldn’t Ignore

Table of Contents

How to set measurable marketing goals

Top 7 marketing KPIs to measure for clients

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

2. Website traffic to lead ratio

3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

4. Customer Churn

5. MQL to SQL Conversion Ratio

6. Social media conversion rates

7. Return on investment (ROI)

Becoming a better digital marketing agency through KPI tracking

Michael Keenan

4 Keys to Improve Client Agency Relationships

Table of Contents

Four key ways to improve client agency relationships

1. Say what you mean, mean what you say

2. Be transparent

3. Decide on a client approval process

4. Keep open communication between your agency and client

Building long-lasting client agency relationships

Michael Keenan

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

Table of Contents

What is Zapier?

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

7. Track new Magento orders over time

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

How to Use Push by Zapier

Final thoughts

Michael Keenan

How To Create the Ultimate Social Media Dashboard

Table of Contents

What is a social media dashboard?

How does a social media dashboard work?

Social media dashboard widget examples

Facebook Page dashboard widgets

Facebook Page Overview

Top Posts by Engagement

Facebook Page Impression Types

Facebook Page Likes by Country

Facebook Page Check-ins

Twitter dashboard widgets

LinkedIn dashboard widgets

Pinterest analytics dashboard widgets

Instagram analytics dashboard widgets

YouTube dashboard widgets