Lead generation is the lifeblood of any company. Measuring your results to determine which strategies are working and which are not requires managing large amounts of data from various sources.
Gathering, analyzing, and presenting the necessary and backup data to make informed decisions or to submit to management can be a challenging task.
Some of the challenges are:
- Logging in and out of analytic tools
- Exporting data
- Filtering out metrics that are not helpful and including those that are
- Putting the data together into presentable and easy to understand reports
Google recently offered a new tool called Google Data Studio (GDS), a platform where you can review all of the data you need in one setting and make administrative tasks easier.
What is GDS?
When you use Google’s Data Studio, you can create customizable informative reports and easily share data-driven insights with co-workers, team members, clients, or anyone else who needs or wants access to your data.
Business has multiple options to choose from when deciding how to visually present your data including line graphs, bar graphs, font styles, and font colours.
The reports you can produce in GDS are dynamic. This means that when there are updates in a data source you are using, the dynamic information will automatically be changed in your reports as well.
Marketing professionals know that when working on lead generation strategies, it is imperative to utilize data from many different sources, not just Google Analytics.
With GDS, any data you pull into a Google Sheet and add to your dashboard can be used to create reports that help you visualize your product roadmap Google Adwords campaigns and click-through rates, Youtube data, and more. Some of the data sources you can connect are:
- Social Media
- Lead Generation
- Email Marketing
- Google Adwords
- Bing Ads
- YouTube
How to Get Started and What Can GDS Do?
You can get started by going to Google’s marketing platform and signing into your Google account.
You will be able to view some sample reports to see how the platform works. To get an idea of what this tool is capable of, select one of the samples.
You will see that the reports are built and branded with a logo, brand colors, and the modules the user decides to include.
Every module is interactive, and you can select the date range of choice from the drop-down at the top right of the screen.
From your dashboard, you will see on the left-hand side a “reports” option. These are the visualizations you decide to create.
The “data sources” option will allow you to select where the data you need is located. Use the + symbol on the right-hand bottom corner of the dashboard to select your data source.
Once you click the + sign, you will be presented with a welcome screen and an invitation to get started.
After you consent to the terms of service and put in your company name, you can decide to opt in or out of notifications from GDS.
Click the + sign again, and now you will be able to see all the types of connectors you can use for your reporting.
Some of the connectors you can use are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Adwords
- Google Sheets
- YouTube Analytics
- MySQL
- Adobe Analytics
- Bing Ads
- Amazon Seller – Products
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- PayPal
- SEMrush
- Dozens more
Before you can create a report, you have to connect to a data source. You will then be asked to authorize the connection.
Here is where the good stuff begins, and you can start creating and sharing your visually-appealing, informative reports.
To use GDS effectively, you should create dashboards to generate internal or client reports you need such as:
- Keyword rankings and trends
- Traffic trends and rankings
- Website conversions for any given period
Your dashboard is the place for you to bring in all the metrics you need from various sources so that you can visualize your data all in one place.
Google helps guide you through the process by providing short video walk-throughs.
How is GDS Being Integrated with Lead Generation Tools?
Businesses that want to be successful should have a steady flow of leads that they can qualify and guide down the sales funnel process to convert them into paying customers.
Lead generation tools automate the process to make it easier to:
- Analyze who is visiting your website
- See what pages they are visiting
- Know the day and time they are landing on your web pages
Use this information to establish the best marketing and sales strategies to grow your company.
Once you have integrated your own software with Google Data Studio, companies’ lead generation processes can be brought to a new level by enabling people to incorporate data from your own system, Google ads, and Google BigQuery.
This innovative integration gives you the ability to create comprehensive reports without having to write code or perform search queries.
One significant benefit is the ability to have control over your data and to show the ROI of sales and marketing strategies in a visually-appealing, customizable, and understandable way.
Also, being able to drill down into collected data to gain deeper insights will enable more precise reporting on desired metrics.
When you use GDS and your own lead generation tools together, you will be able to create and share the visual story of your lead generation strategies.
The customized and specific reports you will be able to generate will allow you to spend more time qualifying the leads that are most likely to convert.
Analyzing data, especially when you are getting data from multiple sources, takes a lot of time and effort, and is often overlooked because of the complexity of the task.
Without measuring the ROI of your lead generation processes, you could be wasting your resources. Why spend more of your time or your money on an approach that is not adding to your bottom line?
Using Google Data Studio to collect, analyze, and report on data from many different but complementary sources gives you an overall visual picture of all your team’s actions so you can evaluate the best way to increase sales.
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