How to assess the effectiveness of product categories, client segments, and landing pages

Marketers are interested in a lot more than just the most efficient way to invest money. For example, they want to know:

• Which items or categories are more profitable to promote?
• What is more profitable for business — attract new clients or motivate existing clients to make purchases?
• Which content pages convert visitors to buyers best?

In this article, we explain how to find answers to these questions using OWOX BI. This service automatically imports cost data from advertising sources to Google BigQuery and distributes it to sessions. This lets you know how much you spent on each session, as well as group costs and revenues by the user, cohort, or landing page. This helps to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns aimed at returning old users or attracting new ones, while planning the budget for different categories, regions, and segments. 

Attribution is designed to objectively link efforts and results. This allows you to understand the best efforts and best allocate available resources. The question is, what kind of effort does attribution rate? 

Digital marketing attribution is the most common. In this case, expenses and revenues from advertising campaigns are compared. For example, you can see that the most cost-effective advertising campaigns are 1 and 4:

Such reports can be built in most advertising and analytical services (Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics). They are used by marketers who are responsible for managing a digital marketing budget. 

But apart from allocating the budget to advertising campaigns, there are other ways to boost sales. For example, determining which groups of goods are more profitable to promote. This is important because an item that attracts a user is not necessarily the same item the user buys.

The report above shows that the "Bukinistika" category successfully attracts users who then move to other categories and buy goods there. 

To find the most cost-effective product categories to promote, you need to group your online marketing costs into categories. This cannot be done in standard Google Analytics reports because expenses are available in terms of UTM tags, which are properties of advertising campaigns. 

However, this can be done with OWOX BI, which transfers spending data from Google Analytics to Google BigQuery and distributes it to all sessions with UTM tags. That is, both expenses and income, in this case, are properties of the session. The report shows that it's most profitable to promote categories 2 and 4:

A similar need to group advertising costs by user segment arises when a business seeks a balance between growth and profitability. 

It's known that the best payback comes from brand campaigns and retargeting. But these campaigns hardly bring in new buyers who compensate for the outflow and ensure growth. Therefore, the marketer needs to compare costs and revenues in terms of user segments. For example, new and returned buyers. 

It's worth noting that the returned buyer is not the same as the returned visitor. In Google Analytics, such a report cannot be built because the cost data cannot be associated with specific users, much less combined with CRM transaction data.

Such a report can be built on data collected with OWOX BI, since expense and revenue are properties of the session, and the session has a userId for which it can be linked to a customer segment:

Marketing may also be interested in which topics are most popular with audiences. If content marketing spending is a significant part of the budget, you can estimate its profitability and choose the most profitable section for promotion:

The example above shows that it's more cost-effective to attract customers on topic 2, and the least cost-effective is to convert visitors on topic 5. Such a report can be constructed more than once because cost data is known at the session level and the landing page is a property of the session.

1. Set up automatic cost data import from different advertising services to Google Analytics.
2. Configure the collection of raw unsampled user behavior data from your site to Google BigQuery.
3. Upload transaction data from your CRM system to BigQuery.
4. With simple SQL queries, create the reports you want in BigQuery and visualize them in Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, OWOX BI Smart Data, or any other tool you know. 

With reports based on data collected with OWOX BI, the marketing team is able to manage performance not only based on the budget of advertising campaigns, but also based on customer segments, product groups, landing pages, and any other session properties.