It's not hard to calculate ROI in GA. The author's gripe is that there's no big ROI number on the dashboard. If you ran an ecommerce site with known prices for each item, and your only marketing channels were paid and organic search, I could see how this would be possible. But what if your site is for lead gen. How is GA supposed to know the value of a lead, or your company's closing rate? For many sites, having a dash widget for ROI would be misinformed. And that's why I presume most analytics platforms don't include it by default.
This is something you can assign to any value to a series of events, a single event, or any other combination in GA.
We had a notorious marketing manager who assigned a value of $3,000 every time someone landed on the contact page of our e-commerce page. He did this because you had to sign up and pass a credit score before actually becoming a customer. No matter that you didn't know if you actually got the email or if the customer actually signed up. But man, did it make the ROI numbers look good.
> We had a notorious marketing manager who assigned a value of $3,000 every time someone landed on the contact page of our e-commerce page. He did this because you had to sign up and pass a credit score before actually becoming a customer. No matter that you didn't know if you actually got the email or if the customer actually signed up. But man, did it make the ROI numbers look good.
Heh. When I open up clients' GA I see things like this often. For example, counting visits to a checkout page as a purchase conversion, whether or not the person completed the checkout, assigning dollar values to non-conversion events, etc. To be fair, these were not set up by marketers, and they readily admitted that they were not using GA properly. But to have a marketing manager do that... Ugh.
Right. You can assign a value to events like lead gen in analytics! You just have to tell it what the value of a lead is, and, as demonstrated by your marketing manager, that's not always easy to know precisely. I suspect this is why ROI on GA isn't more automatic.
But yes, if you have a lead value, ROI shouldn't be difficult. So I still don't see what the authors problem is.
