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The holiday season will soon be upon us with Black Friday and Christmas just around the corner (don’t shoot the messenger 😉!), and for many businesses it’s a big opportunity to give their sales a final boost at the end of the year. But how do you know if all that extra Q4 marketing activity you’re doing is really working
Tracking your return on investment (ROI) as you go along is the simplest way to measure your campaigns to make sure they’re driving the results you want. Without doing this you could be wasting time and money on activity that isn’t creating more sales.
Google Analytics is the perfect tool for this job. It gives you detailed data that paints a clear picture of what’s working (and what’s not), so you can make smarter marketing decisions and maximise your seasonal profits.
This step-by-step guide explains why tracking your ROI is so important, what metrics to choose, and how to set up and use Google Analytics to measure the success of your Q4 campaigns.
So, let’s start with the absolute basics. Without any tracking, you’re just guessing! Sorry (not sorry) for putting that out there. I see too many business owners waiting until the quarter is over to do a review on ROI, at which point it’s loo late to make any tweaks.
If you don’t measure and review results regularly, you won’t truly know where your sales are coming from. This doesn’t just impact on your sales performance right now; it also has a knock-on effect on decisions you might be making for the next quarter and beyond.
Without regularly checking in on the status of activity, you could be wasting money on ads or promotions that aren’t actually converting – a drain on your budget and your precious time.
Google Analytics breaks down exactly where your customers and sales are coming from (email, social media, SEO, paid ads), showing you which marketing channels are performing well so you can adjust your activity accordingly.
It also tracks what visitors do, from the moment they land on your website through to the moment they leave. Tracking their journey through your site so you can identify common patterns or issues.
The data shows you exactly where your visitors are coming from (the source), how long they spend browsing (the whole site and individual pages) and what they bought.
This insight will help you to spot problems more easily. Look out for underperforming campaign sources, page content that’s not converting and landing pages where visitors are leaving almost immediately (we don’t want any of those!).
Google Analytics is a great tool to help you optimize your Q4 marketing strategy in real time, based on live customer data.
Example: Emma, an online boutique owner, assumed most of her Black Friday sales came from Instagram. After checking Google Analytics, she found that email marketing was her biggest sales driver, so she invested more in email for Christmas.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you on the benefits of ROI tracking, but maybe you’ve never done this before so I’m going to walk you through how to get it all set up properly in Google Analytics. It’s pretty straightforward once you know how!
If you sell your products online, then you’ll need to turn on ecommerce tracking in GA4 to track things like revenue, conversion rates, and top-selling products. This tracking enables you to get really specific on what you want to measure based on what’s important for your business, whether that’s interactions with products, items added to the cart or the actual purchases.
Take a look Google’s guide on Ecommerce in GA4.
When sharing your seasonal promotions via email, social media, or paid ads, you can use UTM links to track where sales are coming from. UTM stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Module’, and no it’s not an actual digital critter, it’s a tagged URL that enables you to measure the performance of a specific campaign by adding parameters like the source, medium and campaign name.
These can be easily set up in GA4 using Google’s Campaign URL Builder. You simply add your website address first and then add the specific parameters to it that you want to measure. These links will allow you to track metrics and conversions of campaigns running in different places.
Adding the specific parameters is the key to getting useful results, so instead of just linking to your standard website address www.yourwebsite.com, you can create a trackable link that looks like this:
www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=blackfriday
I’ll be writing a blog post on UTM’s very soon but the standard naming conventions for them are:
Use lowercase, no spaces, and keep names consistent
Example: Tom, a fitness coach, ran two separate Facebook ad campaigns for his Q4 promotions. With UTM tracking, he saw that one ad was converting at 5% and the other at only 1%, allowing him to stop the underperforming one and save money.
You might be wondering what are the most important metrics to track in GA4? Here’s a quick rundown on the key things to keep an eye on, to help you monitor the overall health of your campaign activity and sales.
This will show you how many of your website visitors are actually making a purchase. No shop? Treat bookings, enquiries, or downloads as conversions.
This will break down sales from different external marketing channels (paid and organic) including Google, social media platforms and email campaigns.
Get data on your best performing products and use this insight to make decisions on what to promote to drive more revenue.
This tells you how many people add items to their cart but don’t complete the purchase and can help you to identify issues in the sales funnel and checkout process.
Goal tracking looks at specific events and user actions that can be linked to business success and is useful even if you don’t sell products online. You can track things like contact form submissions, button clicks, appointment bookings, email sign-ups and freebie downloads.
How to mark Conversions in Google Analytics 4.
Example: James, a financial advisor, set a goal in Google Analytics for his “Book a Consultation” button. He discovered that most people clicked on it in a holiday finance guide blog post, so he created more of that seasonal content to drive more bookings.
Now you’ve got your tracking set up, it’s time to start monitoring and finding out what’s really going on. Having more visibility of what customers are doing on your site and how they are arriving there, will enable you to make small tweaks to your activity to create even more sales opportunities.
You’ve done the hard work setting up the tracking, don’t wait until Q4 is over to make changes. Check your Google Analytics reports weekly so you can make improvements in real time. If a traffic source isn’t converting, think about adjusting your messaging or budget.
Don’t just focus on what’s happening right now, you can also use Google Analytics to compare your Q4 data from this year against the same period last year. Have your sales improved? What have you done differently this time? Where can you see the biggest changes?
Go all in on what’s working, safe in the knowledge that your decisions are based on real time data and facts. Make changes with confidence and drive the best possible sales results you can.
Example: Sophie, a handmade gift seller, noticed her “Christmas Gift Guide” blog was driving more traffic than paid ads, so she updated it with fresh keywords and added a discount code, boosting her holiday sales by 30%.
If you’re investing time and money into specific holiday and seasonal marketing campaigns then tracking your results makes good business sense. Google Analytics makes monitoring and tweaking easy and is a great way to ensure a better return on your marketing investment.
The businesses that will shine in Q4 aren’t just running ads; they’re also using data to optimise and improve their campaigns in real time. Start tracking today and be more confident in your marketing decisions and make every pound you spend on that marketing count!
Sometimes we need a little bit more guidance to get these things up and running, and that’s exactly what I’m here for! Whether you’re tight for time and need someone else to do the set up for you, or you’d like more of a guided tour around GA4 tracking before you start setting up, I’m on hand to make that happen for you.
Book a discovery call and let’s give your seasonal marketing campaigns the best chance of success.
