A short while backed I talked about tactically measuring metrics for your site/company. Recently I talked a bit about methods of marketing. A large key to getting the most out of your time and money is to properly report against the intersection of these two items. First I’m going to make the assumption you’ve read those posts, if you haven’t go back and do that. Next this is heavily on the assumption that you’re using Google Analytics as your primary tool for measuring metrics and have setup goals appropriately.

Within measuring you’re metrics you’ll have abandonment at each level. You may have some visitors that never register, and many that register but never purchase anything. It’s wonderful if you’re able to immediately have full insight of the best means of marketing to drive revenue, however realistically it occurs in a more phased approach. The first step is to drive visitors and almost immediate second is to convert those users as registered.

Acquisition -> Activation

This at a high level makes sense, as does at a high level knowing you should be targeting users in your target market. However, even slightly drilling into this you realize that all traffic is not equal. It’s often known that CPC and CPA advertising does not convert well for users, though can drive traffic. This may not always be the case. For Registry Stop to make this analysis easier we’ve created a custom report in google.

To create your own custom report simply click Manage Custom Reports under the Custom Reports area then “Create new custom report”. The custom report ability in google gives you much more ability to drill into the data that you already have at a higher level. To track effectiveness of converting visitors to registered users and which sources are effective at this you’d create something that looks like:

Here while very simple we’re able to see some very key information quickly. Here’s an example of how it would appear over a few day period:

As you progress in your stage of bootstrapping or growing your startup you’ll want to grow custom reports that allow you to report against as many metrics as possible. The first and last part of my day is spent pouring over these reports. Having this data readily available allows us to drive our business based on data. Perhaps the hardest part of all of this is admitting when the data is counter to what we expect and following its advice.