GOOGLE ANALYTICS & POWER BI
Tracking your Marketing ROI with Power BI and Google Analytics
Marketing, like so much in law, has firmly moved into the digital realm. We know that websites, blogs, podcasts, webinars and social media are an important driver of work, sitting alongside traditional methods like word of mouth and networking. In a post Covid world, the digital marketing trend will only grow.
Unlike traditional methods, digital marketing is tracked for you. From Google Analytics to WordPress stats to podcasts analytics tools to Zoom reports, we have a mountain of data to explore.
In fact, so much data can feel overwhelming. How on earth do you gather all that information, understand how it translates to new work and use it to inform marketing decisions?
One way to climb that mountain of data is through Power BI.
Power BI is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence platform and has a handy ability to connect to numerous different data sources.
Granted, connecting to some data sources is as easier than others but as they say – where there is a data source there is a way. (Okay, maybe I just say that).
Luckily, Google Analytics has an out of the box connector to Power BI so the way is clear. If your website is the central hub of your digital efforts, Google Analytics offers powerful insight into how your entire digital marketing efforts are working. It will track where your traffic has originated, meaning that you get a sense of how valuable your other digital marketing activities are.
But Google Analytics is pretty awesome in and of itself right? Why would you layer another tool?
Power BI allows you to combine different data sources. By combining your practice management data with your Google Analytics data, you start to understand how your digital marketing efforts are actually impacting your intake of new matters and generation of fees.
The below graph compares unique new site visits with matter intake numbers.
Sample report data comparing Google Analytics to Matter Intake using Power BI
How you can use this data
The above report is looking at a whole of firm perspective but you could break this down into practice areas.
This would allow you to see whether a popular blog post creates an influx of new enquiries in a particular practice area.
Depending on how your website is set up, you can see who is generating visits and leads by authoring content. You can also see how time spent and allocated to a digital marketing matter is translating to new work and fees.
Maybe someone on your team has a podcast and this data allows you to see how much traffic is being driven from that podcast and where it might be increasing new enquires. This, in turn helps with decisions on how best to support the pod-caster.
You can get a sense of where your traffic is coming from (including how successful any Google Ads are) and how that might be translating into actual fees.
There are ways to also include data from your webinars, email marketing etc. into the same report, but that’s a tale for another day.
We can’t draw a direct line between google analytics stats and your practice management stats, but we can identify how trends in one area are affecting trends in the other. These inferences can be a very powerful in a world where digital marketing is a major driver of new work.
