Advantageous Analytics, Mapping Goals to Reports

Everyone knows that a successful company is built on a foundation of realistic and well-planned goals. There are two essential types of goal that you will need to think about for your firm:

       1. Your process goals, including word-of-mouth from customers, satisfaction and social media engagement.

       1. Your end goals, such as sales, customer retention, return on investment and average order value.

Without careful consideration of both, you risk maximizing the end goals by sacrificing process goals. For instance, you might find a way to improve your revenue by packing in extra buyers, then discover that this leads to customer dissatisfaction because you cannot handle the new volume of consumers effectively.

Many companies are quite creative when it comes to developing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for their end goals. Things like profit, average order value, sales revenue and returns on investment are easy to calculate and measure. However, measuring process goals can be much more complicated, leading firms to focus on ‘easy way out’ options, such as observing the number of fans or followers they have on social networks. In order to effectively improve your company, you will need to develop a list of KPIs for your process goals, including satisfaction, engagement, and shared voice.

Measuring shared voice is particularly important in social media marketing, as it reflects how often your brand shows up through organic search results in comparison to your competitors. One tactic for boosting this KPI is to select better keywords and work on boosting your search engine optimization. The algorithms of Google make content marketing one of the most efficient ways to improve your search engine results.

Establishing Metrics

If your website doesn’t utilize a system of metrics to calculate what really matters within your company, you’ll find that the amount of data you can actually access quickly becomes overwhelming. The problem with this is that a lot of the data you will actually have access to will not be useful to your company, and you will not have the tools to analyze the parts that are. Companies without the appropriate metrics tend to throw up their hands and ignore areas in need of improvement, simply because they cannot make sense of all the information that they have to assess. If you’ve already put time, effort and thought into establishing your company and the KPIs that are important to you, developing metrics will be much easier, and will allow you to understand the areas of your business most in need of improvement. Instead of thousands of pieces of scattered, meaningless data, you will be able to closely consider small fractions of information that indirectly or directly map your success.

Connect your KPIs to individual metrics. For example, shared voice metrics may include your position within search engine rankings, and your click-through rate can be measured using webmaster tools. Once you’ve matched everything up accordingly, export it into a spreadsheet and calculate your results in comparison to those of your competitors. Don’t forget to apply metrics for showing how your tactics are working. For instance, if you have been working to increase social media engagement with your content, add elements such as likes, shares, and comments into the calculation.

Create your Reports

Gathering various metrics, even if they are relevant and useful, will not improve your performance within the market by itself. The last step within the process of analytics is to generate a report that not only contains the information regarding your metrics but also helps to make suggestions for improvement based on those results. Reports are the ideal opportunity for businesses to analyze their various online strategies and determine the best course of action for their next step – preferably the one that will boost their market impact the most.