Track Business Goals Using Data Studio

A common theme of our articles, as well as our projects with clients, is Business Goals. We outlined in a previous article the importance of starting with, and tracking, Business Goals when it comes to Digital Analytics. 

As a quick reminder, Business Goals are measurable objectives that you wish to achieve. They should be tied to specific goals that the business itself. 

Example goals could be:

1. Reduce cart abandonment by 35%
2. Increase retention of new users / customers by 42%
3. Increase average engagement (i.e. purchases per customer) by 22%
4. Increase activation rate (i.e. conversion rate) of paid traffic by 40%
   

In a systematic approach we outline the Business Goals for our customers using a thing called a Tracking Plan. In short a Tracking Plan is a master document that outlines: 

1. Business Goals
2. Key Metrics: how those goals are measured
3. Key Actions: how those goals will be achieved by your team
4. Implementations: what tools will be used to achieve those goals
   

Once this document is complete with 3-5 realistic goals we then need to build the right reporting dashboard to track the progress. There’s multiple ways to do this, but one we recommend for our customers is to use Data Studio. This is because it’s flexible and easily accessible to anyone. You can connect directly with Google Analytics or use BigQuery to combine multiple data sources (offline and online) then create visualizations in Data Studio. The choice there depends on your business and desire for a data warehouse. Luckily both are very much feasible and cost effective. 

We have created a template for Business Goal tracking which you can see below. This is an example of a report that we’d use with customers to track their Business Goals. What’s most important is the way the report is used. We help our customers understand and routinely use these dashboards.

This is great. Instead of managers having to ask their heads of marketing (or product): ‘What is the progress on goal ___?’, they’re able to directly monitor the progress using this dashboard. 

This also helps prevent the trap of focusing on Vanity Metrics. 

These dashboards are a win-win. We get to measure the success of our projects and our customers get to measure the results they want to achieve.