How to Know Which Marketing Channel is Working Best for Your Business

Know Your Numbers

The answer lies within Google Analytics. Almost every website out there – most of them built on WordPress and Shopify – has Google Analytics attached to the site. It’s your website stats tracker. It can show you who visited your website, how they got there, what city they’re from, what pages they went to, and where and how they converted with you (a phone call, a form fill, instant messaging, etc.).

Anything and everything you want to know about how users interact with your website can be found inside of Google Analytics.

It’s important to visit Google Analytics and look at your data every single week. I tell business owners of marketing directors that it should be the first thing they do Monday morning. Spend an hour inside of Google Analytics and really analyze how people are viewing and interacting with your website.

There is a wealth of information that you will get by doing that, not just about the website, but how people are interacting with your business online. It will help you tremendously when making plans for growth.

Use Your Numbers

But back to the question at hand – how to know which report in Google Analytics will tell you which marketing channels are the most productive for your business.

Here we go.

When you log into Google Analytics, you’ll first see an overview dashboard with some base level stats. It’s good information but you need more detail to see what’s really going on.

In the menu options on the left, click on Acquisition, then All Traffic, then Channels. This report gives you a channel-by-channel breakdown of activity and engagement on your site. This shows how people are getting to your site and what they’re doing while there, whether they came in through organic social posting or paid campaigns to drive people to your site.

• Direct is people who typed your domain name right into the browser.
• Organic Search is people who got to your website from a Google or Bing search.
• Social Media includes your organic social posting as well as display ads or banner ads.
• Paid Search is the ads at the top of Google or Bing.
• Referral Traffic is any other website that is sending traffic to your site through a link.
• Other typically contains your paid social media ads, i.e. ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

What’s great about this report is that it not only breaks down the traffic in the form of users and new users, but it also shows you their engagement – how long they stayed, the average number of pages they visited, if they immediately left the site, etc.

This information is priceless because based on engagement, you’re able to then tweak the marketing campaigns and messages you have on various channels to optimize the traffic coming in. If something isn’t working – and you’ll be able to see it in this report – then change it.

That’s why I would look at this report every single Monday morning. Get your coffee, settle in at your desk, and check out your traffic from the previous week.