Picture a close friend's life. Has the last year been good or bad to them? Were there great experiences they could've had more often, and bad ones they could have avoided? Did a handful of exceptional experiences make or break their year? How would you identify them? Well, if you had Motion Charts it would be easy! Motion charts let you visualize trends in an amazing, intuitive, and very useful way.
Many opportunities are simply hidden because of averages. Just as your friend tells you the last year was great, a marketer can whip up a report showing strong ROI over the last year. It's great to know ROI, but it's much better to know what positively influenced ROI over time. Often it's a combination of timing, strategy, and luck. Motion Charts help you identify each of those elements. By stepping out of the world of averages and into time series analysis, you position yourself to get above average results.
Getting started with Motion Charts is easy. Just log into your Google Analytics account, navigate to your keywords report, and click Visualize. Click the play button, and bingo -- you're seeing your data stream by as it was generated! Want to watch your search engine revenue over the past year in 10 seconds? No problem. Want to get a grip on a new marketing campaign and literally watch the hours pass? You can do that too.
The other incredible thing Motion Charts do is let you visualize data in up to 8 dimensions. You have your X and Y axis, time, color, and size. You can also choose data like revenue per visit that is composed of more than one metric. Thinking in 8 dimensions over any time span you want can be a little tough to get used to! Let's look at some real data and discover how to apply this incredible reporting system.
The first thing to do is to set your chart to report useful data. By default, you'll only see visits and pages per visit. Try visualizing one of your marketing campaigns, and then setting your chart as follows:
- Revenue along the Y axis
- Bounce rate along the X axis
- ROI as size
- Conversion rate as color
In the example, we checked box "New Years Eve Countdown" to make it stand out. We immediately start spotting insights. First, most of our high revenue campaigns have mediocre ROI. These campaigns are circled in the report above; we know ROI is poor because each campaign shows as a small dot. More interesting are the campaigns near the Y axis. These have high ROI, low bounce rate, and high conversion rates. We also notice our New Year's campaign is getting lousy results.
Moving forward in time, we make some improvements to our New Year's campaign and check the "Trails". Revenue improves immediately and bounce rate begins to drop, but we're still not seeing positive Return On Investment. Looking into our New Year's campaign, we find a few highly competitive keywords dragging our performance down. We drop those and move into the New Year successfully.
Motion Charts are great for spotting trends as they happen so you can optimize marketing campaigns. You can also discover opportunities you missed in the past, and glean insights from those to make the future better. Before you run off to make changes to marketing budgets or adjust your content, be sure to play through at least a few weeks of data to neutralize time series effects.
You can work with us on a per project basis. You can also opt for us to provide a full suite of analytics services at a fraction of the cost of an in house department. In either situation, you benefit from our ROI driven approach.
To get in touch, just send us an email at contact@valitics.com or check the Contact page.
Thanks for reading!