Has your CEO ever wanted you to report on your online marketing progress, but you’re not sure how to present that data?

Are you wondering how to create a dashboard that will be used to move your digital marketing program forward?

I can help because I’ve been there.

I once had to report SEO progress to the CEO across 6 different sites while working at the Environmental Working Group.

After hiring a consulting firm to clean up our Google Analytics accounts, and taking Avinash Kaushik’s Google Analytics training at Market Motive, I felt like I finally had the clean data and background I needed to start creating monthly reporting. That said, it was quite a challenge, and that was before the automated tools that are on the marketplace today.

So here’s the good news:

There’s a free tool called Google Data Studio which will make your monthly reporting easier. In fact, there are some great templates that folks have built for monthly digital marketing reporting like these:

• GA Acquisition Overview
• “Ultimate SEO Dashboard” – I particularly like the chart that highlights landing pages with high bounce rates and low conversion rates
• Lunametric’s Monthly Overview of Digital Data is also really solid
• Blog Content Performance – this is great if you need to track author performance
• Online Marketing Dashboard – where you can pivot and segment by marketing channel and device
• GSC Dashboard – Google Search Console dashboard. This report allows you to see what keywords you’re ranking for, along with CTR and impressions, AND you can also switch and see your CTR by landing page and keyword. It’s a great report for helping you improve you meta title and descriptions to see if you can increase your click through rate.

Here’s the bad news:

It’s so easy to create charts and graphs that there’s a good chance that you’ll report on EVERYTHING and then your CEO (and everyone else) will get overwhelmed by looking at too many charts.

Being overwhelmed by data is not ideal as it doesn’t allow the reader to quickly see the patterns that help tell your story of success or spot areas for improvement from the data.

Here are some guiding principles that should help you avoid that common scenario:

1. Write down your business goals

This one should be obvious, but if you’re just starting out this might be a new idea. Once you get into selecting your key performance indicators (KPIs) and adding charts to your dashboard, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You should only be reporting on items that ultimately drive to your business goals, especially in reports you share to your CEO.

2. Write down how your website (and SEO plan) supports those goals

If possible, but them on your new dashboard. Reference them often when you are questioning whether to show a report or not. If you’re stumped on how to create goals, check out my post that walks you through how to think about your website or SEO goals.

3. Brainstorm the marketing questions the data can help answer

BEFORE you create charts, brainstorm the types of questions you want your data to answer. THEN find the charts, graphs or tables that help you answer those questions. That way you’ll have charts that are focused on helping you take action versus charts you’ve added just because you think they look cool.

4. Keep context in mind

Make sure that EVERY chart that you use has context – i.e. it’s showing last vs this month to show growth (or decline).

You should check out this post by Avinash Kaushik if you want a great primer on the power of adding context to your data analysis and reporting.

5. Fall in love with tables

Don’t be afraid to use tables with indicators to show if metrics have moved. I know that the pie charts, bar charts, and other charts are tempting, but sometimes you just can’t read the data in that format.

6. Interrogate every chart

Ask the question of every chart:

“What is the question that this chart is supposed to answer?”

If you can’t answer that question, either modify the chart or remove it. You’re trying to shoot for fewer charts in your dashboard, not more. Don’t be tempted by the multiple pages in Google Data Studio. CEOs would love to learn the answer to their questions on a one-page report if possible. If you haven’t been exposed to great dashboard design, here are some critical resources:

• Information Dashboard Design
• Now You See It
• Edward Tufte – seriously if you can take his class, read his books.

7. Segment data to get to the real answer

All the data in Google Analytics and Google Search Console is an average across ALL of the data points. Almost always that number is not actionable and it’s hiding the real reason why you have a negative or positive trend.

In almost every case, you want to dig deeper to troubleshoot why a metric moved. Depending on the report you might want to segment in the following ways to get to a true insight:

• Was it a desktop or a mobile visit?
• Is this a returning or new visitor?
• Is this visitor from the US or from another country?
• Which channel did the user come from?
• Was this a visit from a web, video, or image search?

The above options are just a sample. Based on the report you’re looking at, think about what different user behavior or context would have skewed your metrics. Get down to a subset of your data where the trend is really prominent and then make some decisions about how you’re going to change your strategy.

NOTE: This only works in Google Analytics account where you have filtered out the activity from your employees, contractors, etc. If you only have one view in your Google Analytics account, you should contact me and I can help you ensure that you have clean data to start from.

8. Everything in your dashboard should drive action

Make sure that every chart, table, etc. drives action. If it doesn’t, remove it. Avinash provides some great examples of action inspiring dashboards.

Here are the types of actions the data should inspire:

• It tells the story about a positive result (great! We’ll keep doing it!)
• It highlights concern about a negative trend (shoot! Let’s troubleshoot and fix now!)
• It inspires creative thinking that will pivot your strategy in the immediate future (THAT site is linking to us? They look like a great new long-term partner! I’m going to reach out to them about our video series to see if they would be willing to share it in their email newsletter).

9. Add narrative 

Every report will require some narrative to answer the questions the data and charts are going to prompt. You’re not going to want to try to figure that out on the fly in your 30 min CEO meeting or try to remember why your email channel was down this month. You’re also going to want to reference it in the future to investigate the reason once and write it down – add it to the dashboard.

10. Create more than one dashboard

The CEO/your boss is only interested in the answers to a set number of questions, and they are usually related to bottom line type activities (“Is this directly linked to an increase in sales?” “Which channel so that I can allocate budget?”). As a digital marketing manager, you will want to know more. Create a custom dashboard for that purpose. Your social media team might also need a custom dashboard. If you have writers that want to look at their own metrics…another dashboard! You get the idea. Ideally, everyone would look at the LEAST amount of data possible to make decisions about what they are going to do (or, not do!) to maximize results.

11. Keep SEO in the weeds items to a minimum

It’s really tempting as an SEO to report about everything that you’ve accomplished because it’s generally pretty slow to impact change, and personally, the small accomplishments keep you going day to day.

I get it.

I had a calendar on my wall at Ketchum where we marked down “small wins” to keep morale up across my team. But your dashboard is not the place to get lost in the minutia. You’ll end up creating a data puking dashboard.

How do you combat the tendency to over-report on data?

Make sure you keep your overall website goals in front of you – it will help you pare down the items you’re reporting on.

What should you report on for SEO?

If technical SEO issues are on your radar, you should report on your progress in reducing those issues, but I recommend adding a just a % complete number where you can see month over month how the pile of tickets is getting smaller with a narrative outlining what you’re working on next month.

It’s also important to track the number of landing pages receiving organic traffic over time, in addition to overall volume and how they are converting.

The progress that you’re making for your top topics/landing pages for those topics probably makes sense too.

The dashboards listed above should help you pull together that type of data. If you want to pull in SEMRush or Moz data, you can but you need to by purchasing and using the Supermetrics plugin and its connectors.

11. Be careful with color

Red draws your eye, so make sure you’re using it strategically. Primary colors right next to each other fatigue your eye, so avoid those types of colors in your charts. Color should help draw the eye to the point you want someone to see when scanning, not distract from the story. Here’s an example of a monthly report template taken from Greenlane Search Marketing.

12. Review before finalizing

Review the entire dashboard quickly like your end user most likely will when they see it.

• What drew your eye and what did you look at first?
• Is that telling your story?
• Have you preemptively answered any concerns the reader might have?
• Have you provided context to the data points that need them?

Hopefully, these steps will help you think through building a reporting dashboard that will work for your organization and will inspire or drive action for those who use the dashboard to evaluate your digital marketing performance.

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts

Here’s the real truth:

It is tough to prove ROI or that your effort in SEO is working IF you haven’t documented what your overall goals are.

Your goals will help everyone on your team be on the same page about what you’re doing and how ultimately it’s driving overall organization/business goals.

It’s also important to be clear about what those goals are since SEO tracking tools and web analytics tools often have to be set up IN ADVANCE to measure your goals and success. This is why the critical first step is to think about your goals EARLY in your SEO project.

It’s also important to have clear documented goals as it can help prioritize your work.

You’ll find that as soon as you start “doing” SEO, you’ll quickly discover there are a million moving parts and things to tackle. Your documented goals will help keep things in perspective.

So how do you set website and SEO goals?

The first step is to understand the business or organization you’re supporting.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What are their business or mission goals?
• Does the website support those goals?
• How does organic traffic drive those website goals?
• What keywords/topics do they want to appear for organically?
• Who are their competitors?
• Who is their ideal target audience and what do you want them to do when they arrive on the site?

Once you have a sense of how SEO lines up to the business, the next step is to set up your SEO KPIs and then measure them.

Wait…What’s a KPI?

A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. It’s a specific measurement that moves up or down, and as a result of that movement, you take some action.

KPIs are:

• Measures that help you understand how you are doing against your objectives.
• Easy to understand
• Lead to action

Here are examples of a well-worded KPIs. (Note there are specific numbers and date ranges):

• Increase the number of visitors signing up for the email list or RSS feed by 10% month over month.
• Increase the purchases and the average order value by returning visitors by 20% in by Q4.
• Increase the share of search for top 10 target keywords by 10% by Q4 in 2013.
• Decrease the bounce rate for visitors driven by top 10 target keywords by 10% by Q4.

You can find additional KPI examples and their associated reporting dashboards here to get you brainstorming.

Not sure if you’ve got the right KPIs in place?

Here’s a tip (coined by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist):

Ask the metric “so what” 3 times, because each question provides an answer that usually raises a question. At the end of the 3rd question, you don’t get a recommendation for action, then you have the wrong metric.

Here’s the “so what” test in practice:

• “The trend of repeat visitors for our website is up month to month.” – So what?
• “This is fantastic because it shows that we are a more sticky website now.” – So what?
• “We should do more of xyz to leverage this trend.” – So what?

If your answer is:

“I don’t know… isn’t that a good thing… the trend is going up… hmm… I am not sure there is anything we can do… but it is going up right?”

This might not be the best KPI for you.

Think about your business and what KPIs will work for you. Generally, they break down into goals around driving awareness, engagement on your site and conversions (leads, email signups, etc). They should also be something that helps you answer questions and drive improvements and action (if things are not improving).

Questions to ask to determine if KPIs are helping include:

• Is my organic traffic improving?
• Are visitors from search doing what I want them to do on my site?
• What type of content on my site is getting the most traffic and why?
• Which marketing channel is converting visitors most effectively?
• IS my online visibility and brand awareness improving?
• What referring links are bringing in the most traffic and how well are those visitors performing on the site?
• How do we create more of those types of relationships?

Once you’ve documented your business goals, set your KPIs, and set them up in your tracking.

We then recommend that you measure your performance monthly (comparing against the month previous) to help you drive improvements over time.  It’s easiest to set up that reporting in Google Data Studio, which is free and has great templates to get you started.

I saw this great article on Moz about Direct traffic by Tom Bennett the other day and it prompted me to write this post, which includes a checklist you can use to ensure that you’re tracking all of your organic search traffic (and SEO work!) in Google Analytics.

I also wanted to make sure that my clients and readers were aware of how Google Analytics’s recent changes will cause items which you might consider organic traffic to be delivered as referral sources instead.

Here’s how your organic traffic can be mislabeled (or missing) in Google Analytics:

Missing GA tracking code

If you launch a page and somehow forget to put GA tracking code on it, Google Analytics not only won’t be able to track interactions on that page but also won’t be able to track where the traffic came from.

To check to see if this is an issue for your site, check to see if you see your own website showing up as a referral source in your referral reporting, and you can also scan the GA tags on your site using Tag Inspector.

Conflicting GA code

Google Analytics can’t support two or more Google Analytics tracking codes on the page (unless they are being loaded from within Google Tag Manager) and if there are two or more codes on the page, it often results in a misfiring of the tags and a loss of data. This also occurs if there are 2 Google Tag Manager containers on the page.

You can check this by using the Google Tag Assistant plugin for Chrome.

Clicks from Google News

You might not be aware, but when someone clicks on your article in Google news, instead of showing up as an organic source, they will show up as news.url. google.com.

Conversely, if your article shows up in the Top Stories carousel like this:

Then you’ll see that traffic in your organic reports in Google Analytics.

Clicks from Knowledge Graph Boxes

Most people don’t know, but when a user clicks on a link that shows up in those boxes, those visits show up as referrals from google.com in your referral reporting, not an organic traffic click.

Also, keep in mind that each time a user finds what they were looking for directly in the Knowledge Graph, it negates the need for them to visit the website, and that results in one less visit coming to the website from the branded keyword search.

Clicks from your Google My Business listing

Same as above, these clicks will show up as referrals from google.com unless you’ve used UTM tagging to adjust those links before you add your website link to your Google My Business listing. Same with Google Posts that you can post from your Google My Business listing.

Did you move to HTTPs without executing 301 redirects?

If you have a redirect from your HTTP page to your HTTPs page, your organic referral source is maintained. But what if you redirected using JavaScript, or didn’t use 301 redirects at all and just re-published all of your URLs as HTTPs? Well, you’ll lose the organic traffic source if anyone clicks on those indexed HTTP URLs, and that information will show up as direct instead. Additionally, you’ll lose all of the SEO organic rankings for your HTTP URLs as you effectively broke all of them and re-published them as HTTPs.

You can check this by running a crawl with your favorite crawl tool to see how many valid HTTP pages are surfaced.

Other redirect issues

Sometimes 302 redirects will drop the referrer, and (no matter what Google says you want to use a 301 redirect). Also, Meta refreshes and JavaScript redirects can wipe out your original referrer – replacing it with Direct as your traffic source. Those later redirects are also bad for SEO as well.

Curious as to what type of redirect you are using? You can surface this data by using a crawl tool like ScreamingFrog, Sitebulb, or Deepcrawl, or you can check this issue on a page by page basis by using the Chrome Redirect path plugin.

Links from Non-HTML documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks or PDFs do not pass referrer information. you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters.

Did you move to AMP?

Without proper configuration, you’re going to see those visits from some version of cdn.ampproject.org vs. Google organic. If you create a channel grouping report – pulling in all of the AMP clicked pages you can get a more complete set of metrics around how AMP is performing against your other marketing channels.

Incorrect UTM tagging

If you mess up using UTM tagging, Google Analytics will get confused and put that traffic into the direct reporting instead. While I encourage my clients to use a spreadsheet to track their UTM tagging usage and the very least you should use this online UTM tagging creator and keep track (in an internal document) of how you label your various parameters (including capitalization). That should cut down on the errors. And be careful when labeling “social media” as Google only takes particular labels for the medium parameter.

And please don’t use UTM tagging on your landing pages. That will destroy your data integrity and make digital marketers like me cry.

Dark Social

A large number of your users will share your content via private channels – their own email, a messaging app (like Facebook Messenger) and all of those platforms strip our your ability to track where your users have come from.

Or maybe your user opened up your URL from an email or social media app (like Facebook, Pocket, or the Google News app). When that happens, it’s basically as if they had simply copied and pasted that URL into their browser (unless you already use UTM campaign tagging for your social media posts, then Google will read those parameters you provided and assign the referrer properly).

Here’s an infographic about the impact of dark social:

 

Groupon did a study in 2014 that showed that 60% of their Direct traffic was actually SEO traffic.

OK, but how do you fix all of these SEO traffic tracking issues?

1. Check to make sure you have Google Analytics tracking on all of your pages.
2. If you notice that you have many of these issues, you might need a full Google Analytics audit (and I can help you with that).
3. Make sure you are using 301 redirects only (unless there’s a great reason to use a 302, like a user login page).
4. Use UTM tagging properly and regularly on any link you place OFF your website, and on your non-HTML documents like Word docs or .pdfs.

What have you seen in your Google Analytics accounts? Do you think you’re effectively tracking all of your organic traffic?

So you’ve decided that you want to start working on getting a Google featured snippet for your client or site as they are ranking in the top 4 for a particular keyword, and you think that they are well positioned to earn those rankings. How do you actually track and report on that work?

It turns out that some of the rank trackers will report (in general) if the SERP for that keyword is generating a rich snippet, but won’t actually track YOUR client or site is ranking for those terms.

Here are the tools that I found that can help you with this issue.

Moz

Not surprisingly Moz has the ability to track your appearance in featured snippets (especially considering their advocacy to the SEO world that we think beyond the top 10 blue links, and work to rank #0).

Once you set up your campaign, you can find that under “SERP Features” in the Ranking section:

Ahrefs 

If you set up your rank tracking in Ahrefs, they also display whether or not your site appears in ranking #0 for your target keywords, though it’s easiest to see in an export of your data:

GetStat

Get stat tracks “Rank” where #0 is actually tracked as #1, and also a “base rank” where 1 is the top organic listing. It will also pull through the type of featured snippet you’ve claimed (list, paragraph, etc). More about their tracking is here.  Their data is also exportable.

 

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…
1) Leave a comment
2.) Share it with your network
3.) Follow me for future posts