This reference article will help you understand
- What a good KPI looks like
- Why Google Sheets is a good place to dump your performance data
- Examples on how to setup different types of marketing KPIs
- Lists of examples of connecting to your major marketing vendors via API (Facebook, Instagram, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Pardot, and others).
We won't delve into too much detail on any given analysis such as: SEO (search engine optimization), ROAS (return on ad spend), CAC (customer acquisition costs), LTV (life time value). But our goal is to give you the raw tools to import important marketing data into Google sheets so you can track your APIs and build Sheets based marketing dashboards.
Example of using SyncWith to pull in GA data to understand search trends and top landing pages from search.
What Makes a Good KPI
Good KPIs do 3 things:
Your KPIs need to COMMUNICATE something
- What ad campaigns are profitable vs unprofitable
- Which types of content my visitors are reading
- What content drives traffic to my competitors websites
Your KPI helps you take ACTION
- Remove unprofitable ad campaigns
- Write more content that your users are interested in
- Write more content that is effective for your competitors
Your KPI Should Define an OUTCOME
- Achieve a return on content marketing of 20%
- Ensure that the articles that represent 50% of the aggregate traffic to competitors sites have equivalent articles
Lets' sum that up:
Why Use Google Sheets to Analyze Your KPIs
Multiple data sources in one spot
For example get all your data from your top paid marketing sources in one spot
Keep it refreshed on a schedule
Why waste time logging in and hitting refresh on multiple reports, have the data there and sync'd. Check out our tutorial on Scheduling API Refreshes for more information on keeping your data in sync.
Analyze with Pivot Tables and Slicers
In the example of having spend data from multiple sources we can quickly create a pivot table to look at our CAC (cost of acquisition) by marketing source:
Share with your team easily
Google sheets has powerful features to
- Share your dashboard with team mates
- Publish to the web
- Embed graphs into presentations and download reports as PDFs
Examples on Building KPIs
- SEO KPIs: Analyzing Landing Page Performance with Google Search Console & GA
Try Any API Live on the Web
Before installing the SyncWith plugin for Google sheets, or even before reading this article if you want to you can easily try any API live on the web and get back data live in your browser
- See our listing of supported marketing APIs
- Try the Google Ads API
- Try the Facebook Ads API
- Try the Google Analytics API
- Quick tutorial to Sync Salesforce Leads into Sheets
Getting Started on your First Marketing Dashboard
- Install the Syncwith Plugin for Google Sheets
- Play around and connect to some data sources into Google Sheets