Are you guilty of random acts of marketing?
Trying a bit of everything hoping that something will increase traffic and conversions?
Unfortunately this is pretty common.
This happens because we don’t know how to properly measure our efforts.
Without a measurement plan we don’t know what to measure.
That means we don’t know what is working.
When we don’t know what is working we desperately perform RANDOM acts of marketing.
Start with a Measurement Plan
To help achieve long term marketing success I use a framework called “Measurement Marketing.”
It is a framework that helps marketers track the most useful metrics.
There are five stages in the Measurement Marketing framework:
- Planning
- Building
- Reporting
- Forecasting
- Optimizing
This post will focus on the first stage: PLANNING
To successfully measure our digital marketing performance we need a plan.
A plan will guide our efforts and give us a path to marketing success.
We need to think about WHAT we need to measure and WHY we need to measure those things.
Are your measurement efforts helping you understand which of your marketing is successful?
When you collect and report numbers they should give you insights.
When it comes to data analysis it’s easy to jump to tactics and focus on HOW we collect, measure and analyze our data.
The Q.I.A. Framework
I like to keep things as simple as possible.
So use something called the Q.I.A. framework.
The Q.I.A. framework is a simple (but powerful) measurement plan.
It’s made up of these three components: Q – I – A
1) What Questions do I need to answer?
2) What Information do I need to answer those questions?
3) What Actions will I take when I find the answers?
Easy peasy.
Just three questions to think about.
The “Q” in Q.I.A.
Before you start looking at your Google Analytics reports you need to know what QUESTIONS you want to answer.
Start by writing down the top 2 – 3 business questions you want to answer with Google Analytics.
This step is crucial to making Google Analytics easier to use.
This needs to be the first thing you do on your measurement journey.
So BEFORE you open your Google Analytics, jot down your list of questions.
This list will help give you FOCUS.
It will help you figure out exactly what you need to measure.
This focus will help reduce the scope and the complexity of Google Analytics.
Why?
Because you can find answers to your questions in just a handful of reports.
In most cases you will only have to focus on 3 – 5 reports.
This means you can ignore all the other reports (and there are hundreds available in Google Analytics!).
How’s that for a stress reducer???
Two types of questions
There are two types of questions you need to answer.
1) “Results” questions
These are questions about the results or outcomes important to your business.
These are typically the things you want people to do: make a purchase, donate, schedule a demo, etc.
These are questions like:
- How many sales did we make?
- How many donations did we get?
- How many leads did our marketing campaign generate?
These are successful outcomes that grow your business.
But Google Analytics doesn’t know what success looks like for your business.
You have to tell GA what is important by setting up conversion goals.
2) “How” questions
The second type of question is “how” questions.
These questions help answer how people got to the desired results.
They shine a light on the steps people took to arrive at the results.
Answers to how questions give you insights into the BEHAVIOR of your visitors
and their journey through your website.
Example HOW questions:
- How did visitors find our website (i.e the traffic source)?
- How many visitors saw our service offer?
- How many people watched our product demo video?
- How many visitors started the checkout process?
- How many visitors left the website before completing a purchase?
Are you asking these two types of questions?
Asking “results” and “how” questions will make it much easier to measure if your marketing is working.
If you are stuck and unsure of what questions to ask try focusing on these three key areas of your marketing:
1) ACQUISITION
- How do you acquire traffic for your website?
- Do people come to your website from Organic Search engines, paid ads, social media, email, etc.?
2) BEHAVIOR
- What pages on your site do visitors view?
- How do visitors move through your site?
- How else do visitors interact with your site? (scroll, click, etc.)
3) CONVERSIONS
- What visitor conversions (outcomes) are important to your business’ bottom line?
- What macro and micro conversions are important to measure? (Signing up for your email newsletter? Downloading a PDF? Requesting a Quote? Scheduling a product demo?)
Get specific
The more specific your questions are the better. Specific questions will get you to meaningful insights quicker.
Here are some examples to help you get unstuck.
- Which of my blog posts lead to email newsletter signups?
- Did my Organic Traffic increase or decrease this month?
- Do I get more weekly goal conversions on mobile or desktop devices?
- Did my “Back to School” campaign get more visits from Twitter or Facebook?
You get the idea.
Once you have a specific list of questions you want answered, the next step is to identify the Google Analytics reports that contain the answers you need.
Once you know which Google Analytics reports to look at, measurement becomes MUCH easier.
The “I” in Q.I.A.
Once you identify your “Results” and “How” questions, the next step is to gather the correct Information to help answer those questions.
But how do you find the right marketing metrics?
There are 100+ reports in Google Analytics to choose from!
Information overload can happen quickly, leaving you feeling overwhelmed.
It’s like staring at the Matrix.
The Information stage of the Q.I.A model is key to reducing the complexity and simplifying what you need to be concerned about.
It helps you focus on gathering ONLY the information that matters to you and your business.
You can ignore everything else 
Two types of information
There are just two types of information you need.
1) Already Measured
This is information already being measured and stored somewhere.
It could be in Google Analytics.
It could be in other marketing platforms (Facebook, Mailchimp, Google Ads, etc.).
Or in your CRM or spreadsheets you update regularly.
Find where the data you need is stored and make a list of all the locations you will need to access.
2) Not Yet Measured
This information is necessary but is NOT being measured.
Figure out how to measure this information and how to send it where it needs to go.
You may need to use tools such as Google Tag Manager to send the necessary data to Google Analytics for storage.
Make sure both types of information will help answer your “Results” and “How” questions.
A simple example
If you use Shopify for Ecommerce transactions then you already have your number of sales in that platform.
Therefore, the information is easily attainable for your “Results” question: “How many sales did I make?”
But maybe you don’t have the “How” questions covered:
“How many visitors start the checkout process but don’t complete it?”
In this case you may need to set up funnel tracking to learn how many people started the checkout process and where they exited.
Add “Set up ecommerce funnel tracking” to your measurement plan so you know to build it in the future.
The “A” in Q.I.A.
You’ve identified your most important “results” and “how” questions.
You know where the information is to answer those key questions.
Now comes the most crucial part of the Q.I.A. framework: 
Planning to take ACTION
Taking action is the part that many marketers often ignore.
This boggles my mind.
The reason we measure things is to learn what is working (and what is not).
If things are working properly we can stay the course or do more of what is working.
If things are underperforming we can make changes to get closer to achieving our goals.
What’s the point of measuring data and answering questions if you don’t take any action based on your findings???
To increase the likelihood that you will take action on your measurement findings we need to plan what actions to take BEFORE we measure any numbers.
It might seem backwards to figure out what actions you should take before you measure anything.
But we’re just priming the pump.
We’re preparing you to be ready to take action when the time arrives.
Think of it as a dress rehearsal.
At a high level we want to determine beforehand:
- Actions you will take if the answer to your question is X.
- Actions you will take if the answer is Y.
An Example Plan of Action
Let’s say you have a landing page designed to increase B2B leads by offering content your target audience would find useful.
You are sending Google Ad traffic to the landing page with a desired opt-in rate of 5%.
If you measure an opt-in rate of 5% or higher, then your marketing is working and you can continue the campaign without any changes.
But if the opt-in rate is LOWER than 5%, you will do the following:
- Verify the Ad copy matches the copy on the landing page
- Review the call-to-action on the landing page to see if it can be improved
- Review the Ad copy and see if it can be made more persuasive.
In this example you have planned what actions to take if you measure an opt-in rate LOWER than what you were hoping for.
So you already know what is needed to get you closer to your goal.
This should make it easier for you to actually take action
Core Outputs of the Q.I.A. planning
When you answer the three questions in the Q.I.A. framework you will have a map that helps you measure Traffic, Conversions and Engagement for your website and digital marketing.
Traffic and Conversions are the lifeblood of your business.
Without them you don’t have a sustainable business.
And Engagement consists of all the things that turn Traffic into Conversions.
Here are three core crucial elements that should come out of your Q.I.A. planning.
1) Traffic Sources
The Q.I.A. framework will help identify all your traffic sources and how you want to track them in GA.
A big part of this will be how you will implement UTM Campaign Tagging.
2) Customer Journey paths
The Q.I.A. framework will help identify the top 2 – 3 customer journey paths through your site.
How do most people get from Point A to Point B? In this case, where do people enter your website? Then what are the steps they take that lead them to a successful outcome.
3) Conversions
The Q.I.A. framework will help identify and measure the top conversion goals for your site.
To get the full story of how people convert on your website you can use the A.C.T. goal framework (Awareness, Consideration, Transaction) to create GA goals that measure performance at EACH important step of the customer journey paths you identified above.
You can then set goals for each of these steps to track visitor progress through your desired marketing funnels.
Improve your measurement to improve your marketing
Going through these Planning steps can be a lot of work.
But creating this kind of plan will make it easier to find valuable insights that are aligned with what’s important to the business (and your boss).
This type of measurement plan will help keep you on track and stay focused on measuring what matters.
And a good measurement plan will get you to performance insights quicker.
And most importantly it can help eliminate random acts of marketing
If you don’t have a documented measurement plan, schedule time in your calendar to start thinking about it.
The sooner you get a plan in place the sooner you will be able to achieve meaningful results.
Helpful documents for the PLANNING stage:
- Document your Measurement Plan in this template.
- Use a UTM Campaign Tag URL builder to help you build UTM tagged links to accurately track campaign links shared in emails, social media, etc.
ANY plan is better than NO plan
Are you blindly throwing darts at a target hoping you hit the bullseye???
Because that is NOT a good way to do your marketing.
