Service 8 · Foundations
Marketing reporting and analytics in Huntington Beach
Each platform a business uses keeps its own numbers in its own format. We set up the measurement and build the report that puts them side by side, from our office in Huntington Beach.
The parts
What a report is made of
A report is a table first: what was measured, for which period, from which source.
The column headings
One column per channel or source: the profile, search, the ads, the website.
The periods
One row per period, so the same measure can be compared across weeks or months.
The cells
What each source recorded in that period, read from the source itself.
The work
What reporting and analytics involves
Reporting and analytics is the work of measuring what a business’s marketing produces and presenting it so that decisions can be made from it. The sources are the platforms themselves: Google Analytics for the website, Google Search Console for organic search, the performance data of the Google Business Profile, and the reports of each ad account. They do not agree with each other, by design, because each one counts in its own way: a click, a session and a conversion are three different things. The work is to decide which measures matter for the business, such as calls, form requests and direction requests, to make sure each one is recorded where it happens, and to put them in one report, period by period, with the source of every number written beside it. Most of these sources are free, and they belong to the business, not to whoever reads them.
What we measure and report for your business is agreed in writing before we start. A report describes what happened; it is not a promise about what will happen next.
What we need from you: access to the accounts the numbers live in, and the measures that matter to your business, in your own words.
Questions
Questions about reports
Why don’t the numbers in Google Ads and Google Analytics match?
They count different things. Google Ads counts clicks on ads; Google Analytics counts sessions on the website, and a click does not always become a session: a page can be left before it loads, or a visitor can block measurement. Both numbers can be right at once.
Which numbers should a local business watch?
The ones that end in contact: calls, form requests and direction requests. Views and clicks explain how those came about, but they are not the result.
Where does the data stay?
In your accounts. Google Analytics, Search Console, your profile and your ad accounts belong to your business, and a report reads from them. Our privacy policy describes how we handle the data we receive.
Can phone calls be measured?
A call can be counted when it starts from a tap on a phone number, on a profile, an ad or a website, and the platforms report those taps. Counting calls dialed by hand needs a separate setup.
Do you need my Google Analytics password?
No. Google Analytics lets the owner of a property add other users and choose what each one can do, so access can be given without sharing a password and removed at any time.
In the same group
The other foundations: the website people land on, and the posts that fill your accounts.
Foundations
6–8
- Website design
The website a result sends people to once they decide to click.
- Content and social media
The posts, pictures and words that fill your profile and your feeds.
Talk to us about measuring your marketing
Call or write, and tell us which numbers you look at today.