4-25-13 UPDATE: Today we did a webinar on this topic that is available at the bottom of the post. Check it out!

I had a very familiar conversation with a new client last week. Let’s call him Sam:

Sam: “I send out a Google Analytics report every month, but no one reads it.”
Me: “What do you send in your reports?”
Sam: “Well, the guy who handled analytics before sent the pages with the most views.”
Me: “And what do you use that report for?”
Sam: “Well… nothing.”

I can’t blame Sam. “But no one reads it” has definitely come out of my mouth more than once. I used to bake cookies to bribe people to attend my analytics meetings, but then I dug into all of what Google Analytics can do.

So how do you get people to care about analytics? Make it actionable.

And how do you make reporting actionable? Tie the reports into your inbound marketing efforts.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term inbound marketing, you’re likely already doing it. Each and every blog post, social media campaign, video, white paper, infographic, podcast and enewsletter that you have poured your precious sweat equity into counts. If your goal is to drive qualified traffic to your website in hopes of converting those visitors to students and then hopefully to promoters, then grab an inbound marketer badge and wear it proudly.

So how does this tie into Google Analytics? Well unless you have unlimited marketing dollars, you’re probably going to want to know what’s working in order to allocate budget to successful tactics.

In that spirit, I’ve created some very affordable (okay, free) dashboards that you can download and apply to your own analytics to answer some critical questions around your inbound marketing efforts.

Note: these dashboards assume that you have your analytics set up correctly, have goals implemented, are using events were needed and use campaign tracking.

ATTRACT (download)

▪How’d they get there?

▪Which campaigns are performing?

▪Which referral sites are driving the best traffic?

▪Which social networks are driving the best traffic?

▪Which search terms brought our users to us?

▪Where are they entering our site (landing pages)?

CONVERT (download)

▪How are your landing pages converting for each of your goals?

DELIGHT (download)

▪What site content is popular?

▪What are visitors doing (events)?

▪How deep are visitors going?

▪How often do they visit?

These dashboards are a starting place and should be customized. They become EVEN more valuable when layered with Advanced Segments like: social media traffic (download to GA), specific campaign traffic (download to GA), visitors who entered through a specific landing page (download to GA) or visitors who achieved a goal (download to GA).

Use these tools to dig past that first level to discover the real, actionable questions that need to be answered so your institution can grow applications, inquiries, donations or engagement. Trust me, they work better than cookies.

(Bonus: Love dashboards? Grab this social media dashboard from Justin Cutroni.)