Do your metrics cover the entire funnel?

DIY performance analytics with GA4 and GSC

Hey friends,

The entire marketing funnel – start to finish – is chock full of conversions. Some are huge, like purchasing a product. Others are tiny, but still important to the sales funnel.?

Consider this typical buyer’s journey:

• They saw your page in search
• They clicked on a link
• They read a post
• They filled out a form
• …
• They signed a contract

Each of those actions is a conversion. Each stage has its own set of metrics. Some of them you already have in GA4 and Google Search Console! It’s just a matter of extracting the data.

? ?Metrics that follow the marketing funnel

For any content team trying to understand content performance across the marketing funnel, we recommend this handful of metrics – all of which you can find in your Google suite.

In our content analytics guide, we group them into 4 stages, each one building on the previous stage.??

• Search performance. In order to win the attention of your target audience in search, a page needs to rank well for specific queries that your users are searching.
• Traffic. In order to convert the highest possible volume of targeted leads, you first need the highest possible volume of targeted visitors to a page.
• Engagement. Once people land on your page, the task is to keep their attention and, ideally, spark their curiosity to explore more.
• Conversion. What exactly constitutes conversion will vary across marketing departments and individual campaigns. Regardless, the fundamental goal remains that same: getting users to take specific action towards becoming customers.

?? ?The hard part: locating data in GA4

Nearly every one of these data sets is already defined and collecting data. There are several routes by which you can access them. Some are easier than others.?

Though GA4’s dashboard isn’t exactly welcoming, it does offer default reporting options. In there, you’ll find some relevant reports, including the engagement overview report.? The learning curve here can be a bit steep, though tutorial videos are provided.

??? ?External tools to streamline the task?

Even if you’re willing to deal with the mighty steep learning curve for GA4, you’ll need to integrate the various data sets. This includes not only GA4 data but also Search Console data.

That’s one reason why marketing teams use Looker Studio. It’s a pretty awesome tool (though the setup requires a big lift). We build Looker Studio dashboards for our clients. Here’s what they look like:

The much simpler, and economical, route is Ottimo. (We set every client up with an Ottimo account as well.)

Ottimo consolidates all of this data for every page on your site. It also provides access to the native GA4 and GSC dashboards for each page.

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Finding individual page data in Ottimo is also much easier than trying to do so natively in GA4.

No matter how you choose to track content performance, make sure it’s a method that you can repeat with relative ease. This might mean starting out with more simple reports, or a pared down set of metrics. That’s totally fine!?

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A simple plan you execute is way better than a complex plan that you don’t.

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