How to calculate your search engine marketing ROI with Google Analytics

You’ve spent hours learning the most effective SEO tactics, but they won’t be useful if you can’t measure them.

Measuring SEO Return on Investment (ROI) includes two factors: KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the cost of your current SEO campaigns. The monthly tracking of these key metrics enables you to optimize and optimize your strategy as well as make informed business decisions.

To get the most for your money (or time), Consider using Google Analytics (GA) to calculate your ROI. GA helps you determine where your audience is coming from, set goals to stay on track, and include the most attractive keywords to rank better on search engines.

How to calculate your SEO ROI with Google Analytics

# 1 page value

Page value is an important aspect to consider when talking about ROI.

Think of it like money. In the United States, paper money was dated to the late 17th century to symbolize the value of something. Instead of trading, citizens began to assign value to a $ 10 bill or $ 100 bill in order to get an item they needed that was of the same value.

The page value assigns an average monetary value to all pages that were viewed in a session in which a transaction took place. Especially for e-commerce sites, it helps to assign a value to non-transactional pages like articles and landing pages. This is useful to understand because while a blog didn’t necessarily generate revenue, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t contributed to a customer’s buying decision in the future.

On lead generation pages, a goal like submitting the contact form can be assigned a value so that you can more accurately measure whether or not you are on the right track.

Is underneath a picture this shows how the page value is calculated according to Google:

In the first example, page B is visited once by a user before proceeding to landing page D (which was assigned a value of $ 10) and receipt page E (which generated $ 100). This means that a single pageview from page B generated $ 110, which gives us the page value.

In equation form it looks like this:

Page value for side B =
Ecommerce Revenue ($ 100) + Total Target ($ 10)
Number of unique page views for page B (1)
= $ 110

But not all page views result in a conversion. Because of this, it’s important to keep track of the data and recalculate your Page Score as more information comes in. Let’s see how this works in the second example.

Here we see two sessions, but only one of them has been converted into an e-commerce transaction (session 1). So even if we have two unique page views for Page B, the ecommerce sales will stay the same. We can then recalculate the page value of our side B with this new information.

Page value for side B =
Ecommerce Revenue ($ 100) + Total Target Value ($ 10 x 2 sessions)
Number of unique page views for page B (2)
= $ 60

With more sessions and more data, you will get a better idea of ​​which pages are contributing the most to your website’s sales.

# 2 ecommerce settings

If you don’t manage an ecommerce business, skip this section. For those of you who do, there is an advanced feature of Google Analytics that can come in extremely useful. By enabling ecommerce settings, you can track sales amounts, number of orders, billing locations, and even average order value. That way, you can equate website usage with sales information and better understand which landing pages or campaigns are doing best.

How to enable e-commerce settings

• In your left sidebar of Google Analytics click on ADMIN> click under the VIEW panel (panel on the far right) on “E-Commerce Settings”> Enable E-Commerce> Enable Enhanced E-Commerce Reporting.

To complete this, go to “Checkout Labeling” under Advanced Ecommerce Settings and under “Funnel Steps” enter:

1. Checkout view

2. Billing info

3. Proceed to payment

Below is a picture to better explain these steps:

If you have Shopify or Woocommerce make sure that Set up tracking also there, so that Google Analytics can provide you with this important information and pass it on.

Once you have set up ecommerce tracking, you will have access to the following data:

• An overview of your sales, your e-commerce conversion rate, your transactions, your average order value and other metrics

• Product and sales performance

• Shopping and checkout behavior

These will give you a better understanding of how your customers are interacting with your website and which products are selling the most. In terms of calculating SEO ROI, knowing the steps your customers are taking and the pages they are viewing before buying will help you analyze the value of individual pages as well as the effectiveness of your overall SEO content strategy .

# 3 sales performance

Again, this only applies to e-commerce. The sales performance feature shows sales from all sources and media. You can only view data for organic traffic and identify their earnings.

How to show your sales performance

This will give you an overview of your earnings and a breakdown of each transaction. Tracking this over time and seeing how it develops will guide your content strategy.

What is the average transaction amount and what does it tell you about your customers? Does optimizing your text to promote up-sells or cross-sells have an impact on your revenue per transaction?

Another data set that helps you calculate your SEO ROI and optimize your content strategy is the purchasing behavior of your customers.

In this way you can see the purchasing behavior of your customers in detail

At a glance, you can see how effective your buying funnel is – how many sessions go from one step to the next? How many people viewed your page and didn’t buy it or put it in the shopping cart but didn’t pay?

This will help you identify areas that need more SEO attention. This also helps you forecast how much your sales can increase by optimizing your copywriting and implementing SEO to increase organic traffic, which will give you a better idea of ​​your SEO ROI.

For example, if a high percentage of users visit your page, but not through the Buying cycle, you may need to tweak your copy to include searchable keywords or to make a copy that your audience will read better.

Also, keep in mind that while this shows organic sales, you cannot identify the keyword that led to that sale, but organic traffic can be an indicator that holistic marketing efforts are working. For example, PR can increase brand searches on Google.

Quick tip: You can use the Google Search Console to get an idea of ​​which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website and then follow the navigation history of Google Analytics to link certain keywords to sales.

Overall, to really measure the ROI of your SEO, you need to figure out which keywords will work for your business. To really hit this one house Select purchase intent keywords. This way, you can attract more qualified leads for your website.

# 4 engagement events

Unless you’re working on an ecommerce site (note, note, my fellow B2B marketers) this is the place to watch out for. Both e-commerce and lead generation sites can take advantage of engagement events.

Coordinate with your sales team to assign a value to a goal based on average order value, average number of signups, and conversion rate. While these analytics are useful for ecommerce, they are probably most beneficial for lead generation websites that have longer sales cycles and transactions that happen off-site or after multiple sessions (e.g., B2B SaaS or a marketing agency ).

Examples of engagement events are:

• Subscribe to Newsletter

• Submission of the contact form

• Downloads

• Put in a shopping cart

How to view your campaign engagement data

Below is a picture for you to join in:

This type of tracking gives better insight into how people are interacting with parts of your website and how engaged they are at different points in the journey. Use it to set goals for your lead generation and to study whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.

Let’s say you find that your website is getting a lot of traffic to your service page and a high percentage of those visitors are downloading a case study. This means that they are interested in your offer and would like to see more case studies from you.

Use ROI calculations to make better strategic decisions for your company

Ultimately, when using Google Analytics for SEO, you should work on balancing business goals with certain measurable metrics so that you can create a long-term plan for sustainable growth. It’s no secret that SEO is a powerful tool for your business, but it matters to incorporate it into an actionable and personalized plan to keep the band moving continuously.