Marketing was obviously at the forefront of everything we did and thought about this year. After all, we’re a company that eats, sleeps, and breathes digital marketing. There’s an endless list of marketing feats, advances, and ideas we covered in our regular emsights posts, created specifically to help digital marketers stay on top of the good and the bad. We’ve touched on a variety of topics this year from changes in Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) to data to new generation marketing channels like podcasting, SMS, etc. It would take pages to recap everything we shared which is why we’ve narrowed it down and summarized it all here.
The Goal with Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is an important tool in any marketer’s tech stack. It plays an important role in creating the best campaign strategies by helping you monitor and measure how your company is doing. You’re able to keep tabs on all aspects of business from traffic on your website to who is and isn’t converting. Here are all the other useful metrics you can use GA to track:
- Website performance
- User engagement
- Conversions
- Customer acquisition data
What’s great about Google Analytics is that it can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. There’s plenty of straightforward functionality and analysis here that can help you with ongoing business decisions. However, if you’re trying to get the most out of this free tool, understanding how to use Google Analytics beyond the basics will be a major help.
For example, learning how to apply Metrics and Dimensions to your analysis can bring up some pretty insightful data. Remember, Metrics are statistics and Dimensions are the scenarios you’re able to throw them into. Overlapping the two is what gets you to the strategic decision-making. Let’s say your site has had 5,000 visits within the past week. This stat alone doesn’t tell you much other than the fact that you’ve had many people pop into your site. However, if you apply this statistic to a Dimension like location, you’ll be able to see where a majority of visitors came from. This becomes much more valuable to you as a business.
With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to center your data discovery all in one place without needing to rely on third-party cookies to pull the information for you. Instead, GA’s powerful capabilities come from AI and machine learning which means you have access to cool features like codeless tracking and customer-centric reporting.
Still trying to figure this tool out? We’ve made it easy for you in our blog post, Google Analytics and Why It’s Important to Your Business.
Key Email Marketing Performance Indicators
We’re already looking forward to recapping our 2023 email marketing experiences in the new year. But you know what they say — it’s never a bad idea to reflect on the past beforehand and what better time to do it than in our emsights roundup.
At the start of 2022, we touched on the subject of KPIs or key performance indicators. Email strategies need an objective, otherwise, you’ll never truly achieve the goals you’re looking to achieve. KPIs are closely tied to these objectives and function as markers to let you know whether you’ve reached your objectives or fallen short. These can change as things adjust whether internally or externally like in the case of Apple’s iOS 15 MPP update. Before the change, many marketers used email open rates as a KPI but afterwards, this became a skewed metric.
To further the conversation, we asked B2B marketers what KPIs should be on the list for any modern marketer to look at. Here’s what we heard back:
Conversions, click-through-rate (CTR), and return-on-investment (ROI) were some of the most important performance indicators to keep track of. This was agreed upon by a good number of people. However, the KPIs we were surprised to find were less of a priority included list growth rate and sharing/forwarding rate. While these may not come to mind first, it was a bit worrying that these were not valued a bit more.
It’s a nice chunk of information to dissect and something we look forward to putting together every year so that marketers everywhere have insight on how everything is progressing in the world of email. If you’re curious about reading into KPIs yourself, we suggest revisiting the original blog post, Email Marketing Key Performance Indicators for 2022, yourself.
Like we mentioned before, KPIs can change depending on how the email marketing world changes and how your priorities change. What may be important this year may be completely tossed out the next. The actual key to KPIs is making the point to set some ahead of time and monitor your email marketing analytics to stay on top of your progress. And, for those that aren’t sure how to start tracking these, just make a full circle back around to the first topic of this blog! (Hint hint: Google Analytics).
What’s Next?
There’s already plenty of emsights to look forward to next year like our 2023 State of Email Marketing Report. But there’s no need to wait for our end of year recaps to catch up on everything there is to learn about marketing. You can easily stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletters! We help you stay current on digital marketing trends and offer tips and tricks to be the best digital marketer you can be.
