How to Effectively Manage Your Marketing Costs
A question every ecommerce store owner should ask. On one side, we have data on orders and overall revenue, and on the other side, we have advertising investments. In between, we have the cost-to-revenue ratio (COGS), which needs to be maintained to ensure that activities, and the entire store, remain profitable.
The most common advertising platforms in the Czech market include Google, Meta, Sklik, Zboží, Heureka, Biano, Favi, and others. These sources bring traffic and generate orders, which can be easily seen in the Google Analytics 4 interface, but how do you track their return on investment? While you could list everything in a spreadsheet and manually update it, there is a more elegant solution.
Google Analytics 4 includes a Data Import from External Systems feature. With its help, you can import additional data, in our case cost data. Data can be imported manually or automatically.
How to Manually Import Data into Google Analytics 4
For a successful import, properly set UTM parameters (source, medium, campaign, id) in advertising systems and a data source in .CSV format are required.
Prepare the Data: Prepare data that includes costs, clicks, impressions, date, campaigns, source, and medium.
Create the File: Save the data into a CSV file containing all the necessary columns.
Set Up the Import:
Log in to your Google Analytics 4 account.
Go to the admin section and select Data Import.
Create a New Data Source and select Cost Data.
Upload the prepared file, define the columns, and save.
After a successful import, a new report called Non Google Cost will appear in the Acquisition section under the Lifecycle tab, where you will see costs, clicks, and impressions for the imported data, and, of course, the return on investment (ROI).
Automation with GA Porter
Cost import is most valuable when the data is current. While you can update and re-upload CSV files manually, you can also use the GA Porter tool to handle everything for you. Simply set it up once, and data will be automatically downloaded daily from advertising platforms and uploaded to GA4.
Benefits of GA Porter:
Automated Data Import: Save time with automated data uploads from various advertising channels.
Accuracy and Reliability: GA Porter ensures that all your data is correctly imported and synchronized.
Support for Various Advertising Systems: Easily import data from different advertising platforms like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Sklik.cz, and more.
Simple Configuration: The user-friendly interface allows you to easily set up and manage your imports.
You can try the tool for free for 30 days, during which support will help you with the setup. More information can be found here.
