Marketing and Web Reports

Marketing is a huge subject, and there are a lot of marketing reports in NetSuite. In fact, there is a lot that can be done for a marketing department using NetSuite. In my opinion marketing is one of those areas of the system that is often overlooked, and that’s a shame. In this video, we’ll take a look at several marketing reports. Let’s start by going to Reports then scrolling down to marketing. There are quite a few of these here. They start with Campaign ROI Analysis, and continue going down. Broadly speaking we have categories of reports to look at campaigns, lead sources, partner activity, and keywords. For many of these we have a detail and summary version as well. Let’s go ahead and open up the Campaign ROI Analysis, Campaign Response, and Sales by Lead Source. I went ahead and opened these all in new tabs by holding down the control key as I clicked. The ROI Analysis is used to look at how much we spent on a marketing campaign, and how much we earned from it. If you remember, toward the end of chapter five we looked at marketing campaigns. We set some information related to spend when we were setting up a test campaign. This is where that information comes in to play, because now we can tell how much we spent, and how much revenue we generated. Our campaigns are broken down into categories, and we will see this as a recurring theme throughout the next three reports. Here we have Newsletters, Online, and Paid Keywords for example. We have columns for the different data that is most useful, including cost, revenue, profit, and others. If we go back to any of the categories, and I’ll just use Paid Keywords for this, we can collapse the data with the plus sign. Now we see just the summary for this category, and that’s the same summary that’s listed down here. We are looking at many years worth of data right now, and usually this is going to be a lot more than what is needed. We have a from and to date selector, and we have the option to pick from a predetermined set of ranges. Next, let’s take a look at the Campaign Response Summary. This is used to tell how many responses we received due to a specific campaign. It’s useful because there may be campaigns where we don’t expect to generate any revenue, but just want to generate interest. Our data is in categories, the same as the last report, for example newsletters up here. We have columns providing us with quantitative data about the campaign. One of the things that is important to know though, is not every column applies to every campaign type. When the column doesn’t apply you’ll always see zeros. For example, opened and clicked through may not apply to a television ad unless we were using some advanced tracking. We can collapse the campaign categories as well. I’ll go ahead and do this, so we can see these are the exact same categories we had in the previous report. The sales by lead source is going to give us a higher-level report for our gross total sales broken down by campaign category. We see once again that the categories are the same as the previous two reports. Right now, we are looking at the total for the period selected, however we can break this down a little further. If we select months in the column dropdown, and click refresh, we get this nice view broken down by month. This continues to the right, but you might also notice that only the months we have data are actually listed. If we scrolled down, we would see data in each of these columns for at least one category. What we are looking at here also looks a little wonky because it is test data. We have a detailed version of this report that we can get to by clicking on the View Detail link here. In this detailed version we see each transaction on its own line. We can drill down to the transaction by clicking it, and now we can review all the details if needed. I’m going to go ahead and close these tabs, and we’ll look at a few more reports. Marketing and Web often work hand and hand. This makes sense because you need great marketing to have a good website. The reports we are going to look at are all web reports, but they seem most appropriate to lump in with marketing. I want to preface this conversation by stating, if you have a website, my guess is that you are already using Google analytics, or a similar platform. The reports here, should be thought of as supplemental to that. There is some data that these reports can provide better or more easily if you are running your website or web store on NetSuite. There is some data that a full-fledged analytics platform will be better for. But let’s dive in. If we hover over Reports, then scroll all the way down to Web Presence, we see quite a few targeted toward management of a website and store. We have some broad categories such as page hits, reports about items, and shopping activity, as well as others. In fact, the list is too large to fit on one page. For some of these we have both a summary and a detail version, and for some we have only one. I’ll go ahead and open Page Hits, Cart Abandonment, and Keywords. These are three general reports that you should keep an eye on. Page hits is just the number of times a page on your site has been loaded by someone in their browser. We can see this for the different pages we have, such as Home, Technology, Ink & Toner, and our Shopping Cart page. When we look at any of these pages, we can see the total number of hits, and the number of unique visitors. The unique visitors is determined by a cookie that is set in the users browser when they visit your site. This number is almost always slightly higher than the actual number of unique visitors, due to users going between different computers, browsers, clearing their cookies, and other routine reasons. Right now, we are looking at all our traffic as one lump number, but this report is usually more helpful when it is broken down based on smaller time periods. We can look at this using a week by week view, by selecting weeks from the column dropdown, and clicking refresh. The columns scroll over to the right quite a bit, and this is with just a limited set of test data. Here we see the number of visits broken down by week, and can see trends. One of the things that is often requested for this report, is to see trends over time in a visual format. The first thought is to go to this chart icon here at the bottom. If we click it, we get a bar chart with pages and their number of hits listed. Right now, we are looking at this for Week 31’s page hits. The first thing people usually do is change this to a line graph. I’m also going to move this out of the way, so we can see the data in the background a little better. The next thing they will do is add or start working with alternate columns to show, such as column three. This doesn’t work too well though, because what we are now looking at has very little to do with data over time. Instead we are looking at the number of page hits for discrete pages, that are connected by an arbitrary line that means almost nothing. The red line represents this column, and the blue line represents this column. This report is better visualized using a bar graph, where we see each pages’ hits represented by a towering line. Alternately, we can view this as a pie chart. Viewing the data as a pie chart however prevents us from comparing columns. That’s the reason this “Also Show” option is greyed out. I’ll go ahead and close this now, and we can keep exploring. I want to talk about the Shopping Cart Abandonment report for a moment. An abandoned shopping cart happens when a user is on your website, and picks out one or more things they might want to purchase. Those items go into an electronic shopping cart, and that cart can either be emptied by the user manually, or by checking out. If the user leaves the website, without purchasing or otherwise emptying this virtual shopping cart it’s referred to as cart abandonment. We can see from this screen, that there is nothing in my report. I am running this against my NetSuite instance for as long as I have data as well. This is normally a great thing since it means there are no abandoned carts, however in my case it’s just because this is a test instance. If you have an ecommerce store on NetSuite, it is likely that you have more abandoned carts. Normally this report will contain a row of data for each cart, and columns of data such as the number of carts created and the number of items in the cart. If you are an ecommerce manager this is something you should keep an eye on, because it can indicate any number of problems in the sales cycle. This can also be used to help with retargeting efforts, and thereby increase sales. The last report we will take a look at is the Search Engine Keyword Summary. This used to be very helpful in identifying how customers arrived at your website and web store. Recently however, as search engines and other sites have moved toward fully encrypted https traffic, this report has lost some of its’ value. This is because the referrer does not come over the same way with encrypted traffic. This isn’t a problem that is unique to NetSuite either. All other analytics platforms have this issue. There will still be data here, but it usually will be a small subset of what used to be here, and it will be based on searches that are performed over unsecure channels. All that being said, if you have a lot of traffic, this can still provide a good representative sample. Also, there are some more advanced ways to get some of this data back, but we won’t be covering those here. For this report, we have a column listing the keyword that brought the users to the site. To the right of that we have information such as the number of visits and number of visitors this keyword has brought in. We can see how many leads, and how many purchases were generated, as well as the total revenue. We can break this out into columns, the same as we did with the page hits report, and it usually makes sense to see this over time rather than as a onetime total. There are far more reports that we didn’t cover, than we did. I invite you to review some of the others we looked at in the menus, and see how they can help you. There are also lots of reports that are not found under marketing but are useful to marketers, and you should go explore those as well.