this video is a part of the google digital marketing and e-commerce certificate providing you with job-ready skills to start or advance your career in digital marketing and e-commerce get access to hands-on activities quizzes discussion forums job search help and more on coursera and you can earn your official certificate visit grow.google digital marketing to enroll in the full learning experience today [Music] welcome back earlier in the course you learned about the relationship between digital marketing and branding you also explored the different parts of a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy including research goal-setting and selecting the right channels and tactics lastly you found out a little about some of the channels and tactics like seo sem social media and email marketing this part of the course is all about data how you measure it how you interpret it and how it can make your strategy better we'll explore the concept of performance marketing and examine some ways you might be working with data in an entry-level digital marketing or e-commerce role we'll discuss how data can help you find out what's working well and how to adapt to necessary change we'll also go over some ways to demonstrate those findings through data storytelling measuring the success of your marketing efforts may be the most important thing you learn in your digital marketing or ecommerce career no matter how carefully you plan your strategy measuring your results can always help you make it better from building your brand to engaging customers and maximizing sales the first time i really worked with data and digital marketing was when i began running paid advertising for my own e-commerce store i wanted to understand if the effort i was making was worth the extra cost this made me realize that there was a whole world of measurement beyond the paid campaigns i was running i could measure the health of my whole store through different dashboards and analytics resources this is where ecommerce and digital marketing really gets fun because you can actually prove that your tactics are helping you reach your goals you're almost to the end of the course and i'm so excited for you to cross the finish line let's get back into it [Music] throughout this course we've emphasized how important it is to measure the results of digital marketing tactics campaigns and strategies in fact these activities are so important that there is a special term to describe them performance marketing in this video we'll explore what's involved in performance marketing and how it allows businesses to set goals track results and improve on their work let's get started imagine this it's 1985 and you work for a marketing agency that's promoting a new breakfast cereal you run some focus groups to learn about your target audience and what they like you use those interviews and your past experiences as a marketer to create memorable ads for newspapers billboards and televisions and then you wait your sales go up the campaign works but what you don't know is which ads were most effective and how many of the new customers found the product through your campaign that doesn't mean your ad strategy is all guesswork just that there's limited information you can gather so you can keep going with that same successful strategy now imagine you're running that same campaign today only online with digital marketing there are dozens of ways to measure the success of your tactics and campaigns so if you place an ad for cereal online you can track the things that just aren't possible with billboards like how many people encounter and engage with your ad each week collecting and evaluating all of that information can help you rethink a weak strategy or make a good one even stronger that's performance marketing it's the process of using concrete information about customer behaviors to plan and refine marketing and sales strategies it focuses on measurable results like clicks and conversions performance marketers set specific goals and use metrics to find out if they've reached them you're already familiar with some performance metrics like the number of impressions or cost per click on paid ads another performance metric is customer lifetime value which refers to the average revenue generated by customers over a certain period of time there's also roas or return on ad spend roas is how much revenue is gained versus how much was spent so if you spend 100 on an ad but made 150 as a result of that ad the roas would be 150 so for the serial example if you were to set a goal of increasing overall revenue roas might be one of the metrics used to measure success there are so many ways to measure performance at every stage of the marketing funnel and those measurements are critical because the average customer journey takes about six touch points that number has doubled more than twice over a 15-year period performance marketing lets us gauge how each of those touch points contributes to our goals which helps us reach and engage with customers more effectively time to review measuring results with performance marketing is one of the most important things you can do to ensure success by tracking metrics like roas and customer lifetime value digital marketers can reach their goals and refine their strategies over time up next you'll learn more about performance metrics and working with the data they produce [Music] performance marketing generates a lot of data from impressions and clicks at the top of the funnel to conversion and sales numbers at the bottom data is critical throughout the whole marketing and sales cycle data is a collection of facts or information your company's total number of social media followers how many hours a team spends on a project or total year in revenue all of those numbers are data marketing data can help you answer questions in a concrete way by drawing on real customer behaviors and interactions the insights are useful for planning campaigns predicting future behaviors and finding out whether your activities are helping you reach your kpis you'll recall that a kpi or key performance indicator is a measurement used to gauge how successful a business is in its effort to reach a business or marketing goal your kpis could be certain metrics like roas but if you find that you aren't reaching your goals you might need to prioritize different kpis instead to know if you're meeting your kpis you'll need to collect and interpret the relevant data the process of monitoring and evaluating data to gain actionable insights is called data analytics and it's one of the most important skill sets you can develop for a career in digital marketing or e-commerce that doesn't mean you need to be a statistics expert to work in these fields what it does mean is that most entry-level roles you encounter involve working with data in some way let's go over a few of the main data analytics responsibilities you might have pulling reporting and analyzing data data pulling is the process of collecting data from analytics tools and putting it into a spreadsheet or database making it easy to access and work with for example you might have campaigns with similar goals running on different platforms like facebook bing and google to make it easier to compare and analyze your data you'll need to bring it all together one way to do that is by pulling the data from each source organizing it into a spreadsheet data reporting also called performance reporting involves organizing and summarizing data to track performance across marketing and sales efforts this process makes it easier to identify trends and spot unexpected results more quickly for example if you've pulled data from multiple sources reporting makes it easier to tell if one has a higher roas than another quality reporting provides a clear picture of the raw numbers it should help you shape questions that can be answered through analysis data analysis is the process of examining data in order to draw conclusions make predictions and drive informed decision making if reporting is the what then analysis is the why it helps you develop insights that explain the reported results and make suggestions for next steps like shifting your budget or prioritizing different kpis you'll learn lots more about working with data later in the program but i hope you feel like you've got a better understanding of what data is and why it's so important for marketing and sales success now let's recap the data produced by performance marketing is an incredibly valuable resource for understanding how well your strategy is meeting its goals in an entry-level role you may find yourself pulling reporting or analyzing performance data through data analytics you can find out if you're meeting your goals anticipate customer behavior and make plans for the future coming up we'll get into some ways to interpret data and present it to others [Music] all right you've set your strategy picked your channels planned your content and measured your results now what you know that all data should tell you which channels and content are performing well but what does good performance actually mean is it when an ad gets a lot of clicks when a tweet goes viral what about increased website traffic with so many different touch points and channels shaping customer brand interactions how do you know where to start in this video we'll explore how businesses use reporting data to find out which of their marketing and sales efforts are the most successful success can mean different things depending on your particular marketing and business goals but every digital marketer wants to know which touchpoints are getting customers to take action say you're running a campaign for a company that sells art supplies if tons of people are clicking on an ad for a new line of paints but only a few of them eventually make a purchase that ad might not be so successful after all in order to optimize a strategy you need to know which touch points are influencing customer decisions the most of course you can't know exactly what your customers are thinking all you have to go on is what they do but those customer behaviors can tell you a lot about where your efforts are succeeding and where they're falling short the process of determining which content and channels are responsible for generating leads conversions or signups is called attribution this isn't something you need to determine on your own most analytics tools include features that can use your data to find out which touch points and keywords customers interact with before taking action you'll get some practice with these tools later in the program by accurately attributing success to specific marketing and sales efforts businesses can make informed decisions about where to invest their time budget and resources now some people assume that the last touch point should get all the credit and it makes sense right people often think that the touch point right before purchase must be the one that convinces a customer to take action but that isn't always the case you know that the average customer encounters six touch points on their purchase journey and that the path isn't always straightforward say someone is shopping for a new computer and they decide which model to buy after the second touch point but then they put off actually making the purchase maybe they're waiting for a holiday or for the computer to go on sale maybe they just get distracted it might take another touch point to remind them of the purchase they already plan to make both of those touch points deserve some credit and attribution is how they get it businesses have some choices when it comes to attribution models we won't go over all of them here just a few to give you a sense of how they attribute success data driven first click last click and linear data driven attribution measures customer engagement with marketing content across channels to understand what's motivating them to take action it assigns credit to each touch point based on statistics like which ads or keywords most often lead to conversions data driven attribution draws on real customer behaviors to assign credit but if you don't have enough meaningful data for this model they have other options here are a few examples first click attribution assigns all the credit to the first touch point that eventually leads to a conversion let's go back to our art supply store if a customer's first interaction with the brand is a social media ad for oil paints all the credit for their purchase would go to that ad even if it takes a few more touch points for them to buy something last click attribution assigns all the credit to the last known touch point before conversion if our art store customer makes a purchase after the fourth or fifth touch point maybe a promotional email last click attribution would give full credit to that email linear attribution assigns equal credit to each touch point along the customer journey so for our art store customers journey the social ad promotional email and all the touch points in between share credit for the eventual conversion attribution isn't an exact science but it can give you a better idea of how customers are interacting with your content and what's leading them to take action using models like data driven first click last click and linear attribution businesses can put their resources in places that will maximize customer conversions up next you'll learn about communicating the insights you get from your data insights to other people [Music] working with data isn't just about the numbers you know that the process of data polling reporting analysis and attribution produces valuable insights that can change the course of a project or strategy but how do you turn those insights into action how do you persuade key people that something needs to be done by using your data to tell a story without a story data is just numbers those numbers can tell you what happened but they can't tell you why it happened why it's important and what you can do about it that's where data storytelling comes in data storytelling is the practice of conveying data insights to a specific audience using a clear and compelling narrative data has a lot of stories to tell and no two people will tell exactly the same one everyone brings their own perspectives experiences and biases to data storytelling and you'll find out about navigating some of those challenges in a bit for now let's think about how to create stories with data a data story has three main components the data itself a compelling narrative and clear visualizations together these pieces should engage your audience by explaining what you learned and how you can use that information to take action let's take them one at a time first data think of your data points like the characters in a play if they're all on stage at once it can be hard to know where to focus your attention so you need to be selective about which numbers you highlight the most important data points are your lead characters while others could play supporting roles and some may not need to be in the scene at all to decide which data points are important it's crucial to understand the questions you're trying to answer for example maybe you work for a toy company that's measuring the results of a new social media campaign your question could be as simple as asking whether this new campaign is more efficient than the last one for that question your main data point might be return on ad spend but remember you need to understand the question you want to answer to know what data to use being clear about your questions and the data you can use to answer them is also the first step in planning your next piece of your data story the narrative the narrative is like the plot of a play it's what happens in the story a well-structured narrative is engaging memorable and persuasive once you've picked the data points and insights that answer your questions you can start building a narrative that conveys them effectively in the toy company example you'd explain how the roas data you've gathered compares to the previous campaign and how those results can impact your future efforts in other words your data story should explain not just what your insights mean but why they matter to your audience and what they can do about them that doesn't mean you need to have all the answers in fact some of the best stories create space for discussion but appealing to your audience with a strong narrative can draw attention to your insights and encourage others to take action you'll learn more about how to create an effective narrative in just a bit now that we've explored a simple narrative structure let's get into the last element of data storytelling visualizations data visualizations are graphic representations of data that convey information data visualizations are like the costumes lightings and stage set of a play they focus attention and help the audience understand what's happening in the narrative visualizations can take the form of charts graphs infographics or other illustrations a well-placed visualization clarifies trends and expresses relationships between data points returning to the toy company example again we could choose to represent the roas data as a series of numbers but if what we want to do is compare the current campaign to the last one it's a lot clearer to convey that relationship with a bar graph it gets the point across quickly and clearly you'll learn more about visualizing data and making presentations accessible to different audiences in a later course data storytelling is a powerful tool and one that's in high demand for digital marketing and e-commerce roles using data narrative and visualizations we can engage audiences communicate insights and influence big decisions up next we'll explore more about how to structure data stories congratulations on finishing this video from the google digital marketing and e-commerce certificate access the full experience on coursera including job search help and start earning the official certificate by clicking the icon or the link in the description watch the next video in the course by clicking here and subscribe to our channel for more lessons from google career certificate
