Reporting: The Best & Worst Part of Your Job - Dana DiTomaso (MnSummit 2019)

Editor's Notes

1. I’d like to start with an illustration of how most reports are delivered now.
2. I bet you’ve spent hours and hours on a report, delivering 48 pages of sizzling commentary and no one looked at it.
3. Do we think the stuff we’re doing isn’t working?
4. What if we can’t trust the data we’re getting, or it’s incomplete?
5. I want to talk about all these problems but let’s start with this one.
6. Because “collect every piece of data we possibly can because we might need it later” is not a system.
7. Serious question. Why are you marketing what you’re marketing? Why are you doing things the way you are?
8. People say I need a website or we need to buy ads or whatever… but is that true?
9. Don’t just jump in. Take a deep breath first. Then ask yourself…
10. This involves writing up something we call a Goal Charter (explain the charter and how it works)
11. sample
12. Sample part 2
13. Now we can start thinking about tactics. How will the tactics support the charter?
14. This helps everyone stay laser focused on the goal instead of gut feelings or “this seems popular”
15. This is where the goal charter really shines because if you think back, we talked about the data we’ll have to measure.
16. Now you know what you need to support the goals, now you can start to build the report.
17. We have a problem in digital marketing where we hope this one magical tool purchase will solve all our problems. It won’t, but that doesn’t stop us from trying! I don’t want you to fixate on the tool. I’ll talk about GA because that is what I know best but your own mileage will vary. IT’S YOUR CALL.
18. First, you’ll need to build a customer journey to figure out how your tools should talk to each other
19. These are your personas. And I don’t just mean women 40 to 60 for example.
20. I see this more in some industries than others. DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY ARE DOING THEY MIGHT BE WRONG
21. The quickest lead to sale, the people your sales people liked talking to, the people who left you 5 star reviews.
22. Ask them questions. What do they enjoy? (phone calls, nurses, etc)
23. These are your customer stories, their goals that they want to accomplish.
24. Then you want to list out all the touchpoints that this customer journey could go through.
25. For example, this is what was done for Rail Europe (go through some of the examples).
26. You’ll see on the Rail Europe list there are non-branded channels like Expedia. You need to extra watch these because you don’t control them.
27. Now that you have this list, “run water through the pipes”
28. You should have a tool/data warehouse inventory so you know what connections need to be made. Do your touchpoints talk to each other? Probably not. You probably have ad to purchase down, but what about pushing a shipping confirmation to GA when a package is delivered, so you can see if delivery time corresponds with repeat purchases, or better reviews?
29. Otherwise how are you going to tie all this data together?
30. CID for short. It’s stored in a 1st party cookie for 2 years. If you have a login you can use User ID which tracks across devices – you can use UID like CID if you do.
31. Whenever you visit a website, you have a CID that’s set in the GA cookie. You can see it using the Analytics Pros Data Layer Inspector extension for Chrome. (Do this on other sites and see what people are measuring, it’s fun!)
32. You can see how this works in GA now if you go to Audience > User Explorer.
33. And if you click on any of these, you can see all the details GA has on that CID.
34. But we can do so much more with this!
35. Why? Because it isn’t saved in GA in a way that you can see via the API and we’re going to need that in order to tie data together.
36. Perhaps that sentence made no sense to you. Let me explain.
37. GA is made up of dimensions and metrics – here is an example of how they work together. I like to think of dimension as the descriptor and metric as the number of times that descriptor happened.
38. To do this, follow this instruction from Simo Ahava.
39. This is the real trick – because without getting the CID elsewhere, you won’t be able to tie the data together.
40. Another how-to, from Mike at Upbuild. Mike talks about putting CRM ID into GA – you can do that, or you can push GA ID into your CRM. Your call! Again, WHATEVER WORKS but you need one place to hold everything. (KP is tweeting the link)
41. Anything at all. If you can turn it into a hit that GA can understand, they will work with it.
42. Then, this CID goes into say Salesforce as a custom field that is now associated with that person’s Salesforce contact.
43. I’ll be honest. You’re going to need to learn a bit about GA and how the measurement protocol works, but
44. Or another Zapier-ish app of your choice but I am a Zapier fan so that is what we’re doing.
45. Okay you do need to know a tiny bit of JavaScript but your web developer will be able to add this. UpBuild has made this code available for anyone.
46. Google has this neat tool called the “hit builder” where you can roll your own calls to GA’s measurement protocol which is how GA records info. (example of a basic pageview hit)
47. In Zapier, you do the same – this is an example of pushing a closed Salesforce opportunity into a webhook with the hit built. You’ll pull in the Salesforce parameters to populate the fields.
48. What’s stopping you from trying this out? Definitely test this out until you’re happy with what you’re seeing!
49. Let’s go over some quick examples!
50. Are people happier if they buy a certain thing? If you ask did you buy for you or someone else, what do they typically buy? (e.g. when you buy Lego)
51. For example, GatherUp does have Zapier integration so you could push review scores into GA. It isn’t totally full featured yet but it’s close.
52. Tie the CID to the loyalty ID and you’re golden. A purchase is a purchase, after all.
53. Now what?
54. Because it does, we know it does. HOW ABOUT NEVER EXPORTING A SPREADSHEET EVER AGAIN
55. Why do I love GDS?
56. There’s math! There are calculated fields!
57. I did a whiteboard Friday on this, you should watch it!
58. You can do some pretty basic quality of life stuff with reports.
59. Because you can blend data sets in GDS, if you can’t get everything to push back to GA but you could get the CID to other tools, you can blend data sources and use the CID as the connector. For example.
60. We put this into the document where we outline exactly how their GA and GTM accounts are going to be set up.
61. This is super hard. I feel like we operate in a very Excel based world and so that’s what we turn to first. But sometimes a table isn’t the best way to support the data!
62. And if you looked at a 6 year old report you’d still know what was going on.
63. Do they love printing? What about powerpoint?
64. Don’t cram lots of shit on a single page just because you can.
65. Add notes to explain the data. Remember, assume you won’t be there!
66. What do they call things? Call your report items those things. For example, if a goal is member sign ups, don’t call it “new member conversions” or something like that. Phone calls, not goal 4 phone completions.
67. Another thing we do is sketch out the reports in advance, usually on cue cards or graph paper.
68. Try to work in the client’s brand colours if it makes sense. And you don’t need to put their name on the report. They know it’s for them. TALK ABOUT THE WORD CONVERSIONS AND HOW IT IS NOT ON HERE.
69. I know right? Page 1 doesn’t even cover that. This is hard to give up, we’re so used to starting with this.
70. They know that a week might look low until it’s done. This is their traffic by channel.
71. And if they are really that concerned, they can mouse over the chart and see the data.
72. Free report giveaway!
73. When you start building your own report, focus on what matters! For this client, people contacting them matter. Yes, if things are going horribly wrong we’ll look at traffic drops, but this is how we are showing them that.
74. That can extend to filtering out that one page that gets tons of totally useless organic traffic.
75. Or maybe there is one persona that is important for your site but they aren’t the thing you need to focus on right now or even just in this report.
76. Here is a real example for one of our clients. A/B/C are good personas, and D is the bad one. This is built on variables that we are capturing from various sources.
77. Then you can make a report on whether or not people opened the report! Or a zapier that reports to Slack every time a report is opened.
78. You know, that actual marketing thing that people pay us to do.