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Google Analytics offers a huge amount of data, and an almost endless array of options for analyzing that data. That's a great thing for data-driven marketers such as ourselves, but for many businesses, that can be overwhelming and is frankly more information than they will ever need. There are a handful of critically important metrics that every business should be reviewing to identify the overall health of their website, and our recent broadcast focused on those.

As the world becomes digital, more marketing budgets are moving from traditional channels to online channels. Most traditional channels don’t allow you to accurately track the return on your investment. Fortunately, the online world offers a detailed level of tracking and measurement that helps us better understand the return on our digital investments.

Executing an effective inbound marketing requires three things: 1) patience, 2) commitment, and 3) good decision making. It could take months, or even years, to see a significant payoff from inbound marketing. This is where patience and commitment come into play. Good decision making is less straightforward. It requires a level of expertise to do the right things the right way. It also requires good data to make educated, informed decisions about what to do next. Our Guide To Measuring Inbound Marketing showed you how to measure your inbound marketing efforts across a variety of platforms. Now it's time to go deeper. Most marketing automation platforms provide only a modest level of web analytics. This is adequate for a high-level view of what’s taking place, but it’s not enough for extensive analysis. Google Analytics is considered the gold-standard in free web analytics platforms, and it should be used in conjunction with any inbound marketing campaign. While Google Analytics provides hundreds of different reports and metrics, only a few are essential to the modern day inbound marketer.

If your organization is concerned about monitoring marketing efforts and wants to continuously improve results, then developing a digital marketing dashboard should be a priority. Dashboard reports can provide at-a-glance clarity around current digital marketing efforts with a focus on how digital marketing efforts are contributing to meaningful business results.

Metrics Drive Decisions

This post is all about ideas that will help you create good blog posts. Most of us know the value of blogging and most of us experience "writer's block" at one time or another. So, when I read an article recently that offered some ideas about creating blog content, I was so inspired that I had to share some of the ideas. To be fair, the original content came from someone who writes for Search Engine Watch. Following are 5 easy ways and ideas about where to go for inspiration to write blog posts.

An article was published this morning by eMarketer that highlights the criticality of data. You can read the full article here. The survey results reveal that more than 3 in 4 marketers feel the greatest deficiency among marketing agencies is their lack of analytics and meaningful KPIs. See chart below.

Industry experts report that marketers this year will spend $171 billion on paid advertising. Those advertisers, and their bosses, will experience much anxiety because in many cases they won’t know what worked and/or how well it worked. Here’s a quote from a famous man that underscores this -

We often hear from clients that the online marketing world is tough to navigate. They rely on us to provide guidance and clarity so they can make the best decisions for their business.

The following post originally appeared in WorkIt Richmond, an online resource for small business owners in central Virginia.