Tuesday Tip: Get visual. How visualization has changed marketing ROI.

Our digital strategists have a new tool they've been ogling over: Data Studio. This visualization tool from Google has made it easier to lay out analytics data with charts and graphs that make it more digestible. Surprisingly, the only really tricky part comes in convincing companies that this is data they should be looking at every week (or more!). Today's tip: If you want to see improvements on your site and a higher marketing ROI, it's time to get visual with your data.

TrenDemon argues the same in their post "Why Data Visualization is Key in Content Marketing Analytics" and I found their study to be quite eye-opening. In order to measure how well each website page was converting visitors into actual customers, they used a comparison graph. The blue bar graph shows visits per week of the web pages, and the yellow-green line graph displays the conversion rate of each of these pages.

As you can see, there were four conversion rates that were much higher than the rest. Moreover, the highest rates for visits / week did not positively correlate with the highest conversion rates. 

Seeing how apparent this was, they decided to test what would happen if they drove traffic to the highest converting pages. This is what they saw:

The graph above shows a "400% increase in conversion rates within 42 days." After performing this experiment across other company's sites, they "could establish a causal relation between the articles people read and the likelihood of them becoming customers" (TrenDemon). In other words, they could highlight the content readers actually liked, increasing the chance these readers saw the content that would convert them into sales. 

Pretty crazy, eh?

Seeing as over 65% of us are visual learners, what's crazier is that we don't use our visual analytics capabilities more frequently. Think about it: if you're in the digital marketing or web design field, you spend most of your day hoping to see boosts in web traffic and conversions on your site. You also want to see ROI and show others the value in your work. If you were regularly checking in to your data as seen above, you could quickly make tweaks to strategy and potentially see huge increases in traffic and conversions. You just have to set yourself up with such reports. 

If the hold up for you is the amount of time it takes to set up a report, think again. Data Studio is fairly slick and offers a lot of help in getting you started. If this feels too time intensive, invest some of your budget in an agency's service. Either way, the initial time or fiscal investment is a worthy one, as it gets you reports for many months to come.

Our digital strategist, Jerod, set up the automatic report below. If it appeals to you, contact our team and we can set you up with your own monthly or weekly report that matches your needs. 

[View the report]