Google Analytics and paid software like Omniture provide tons of potentially useful information, but the amount of information can overwhelm and paralyze if you don’t distill it into a minimal executive summary.
While every business has unique needs for metrics, all businesses want to see the resulting cash, so I show a couple of spreadsheets that allow you quickly to input data from analytics packages to produce monetary ROI projections and results.
Below is an example of an Excel projection of PPC ROI. Research with Google tools and with the client’s server analytics produces data inputs, which can all be altered to play with scenarios. Of course you can input actual numbers once the campaign is live. This simple spreadsheet for a small business was further simplified and compressed to fit here, but serves to illustrate.
Sample Spreadsheet for Showing PPC Profits after all Costs
Of course marketing managers often want, and DISC gives, other metrics as well as a few paragraphs about strategies done and planned, but when very busy, the snapshot above allows you to move on down your todo list, and of course the projections help you decide whether or how much to invest in PPC.
SEO reporting should also be driven by monetary measures, as in the simplified example below, where we use 75% of the clients’s industry’s average $1 click cost as a proxy for cash value of each organic search engine click. This client already had excellent SEO and organic traffic before SEO, so while improvements were only 29%, the monetary ROI is good.
Sample Spreadsheet for Showing SEO Profits after all Costs
Given the incredible stat packages out there (which we at DISC love), the above tables seem too simplified. Exactly!
Depending on your server analytics package, you can create such views within the package, rather then exporting to excel, but either way, your search marketing work can and should be distilled to show costs and profits in one glance.
