Infusionsoft users know that there is gold in their Infusionsoft database. Infusionsoft stores so much data about your contacts, it’s ridiculous. Sometimes, getting that data into an format that makes sense for your business can sometimes be tricky. Luckily, the Infusionsoft API allows us to tap directly into that data and display it in any way we’d like.

As the VP of Marketing at Infusionsoft, I often want to see a high-level view of what’s going on with our website conversion in addition to our marketing and sales funnel. I also want to know at-a-glance how we’re doing with our advertising and its performance. I regularly provide a report to the executive team on how things are going in marketing (including the company as a whole). Mutually, we could be easily overwhelmed by this all the data and lose focus on what’s really important. That’s why I built a custom report.

A while back, I created a “Marketing Dashboard” report that displays relevant data see current trends in our marketing activity. Let me walk you step-by-step through the different sections of the report. At the end, you’ll know what other data is available and how to download the script for this report if you’re interested.

Click the images for a larger view.

• Google Analytics Mashup – The first thing I did was use the Google Analytics API to bring that data into my marketing funnel. To me, it’s important to start at the very top. The first part of the report shows the important stats about our website traffic. I created it to display 7 and 30 day trends with red and green arrows to indicate performance. That way you can tell at a glance if things are looking good or bad. Keep in mind, this is without logging in to Google Analytics – it pulls this data via the API in much the same way you’d pull data from Infusionsoft via the API.



• Traffic source and Keyword Data – I like to see where our traffic is coming from and what keywords people are using when they visit our site. In this chart the report displays the top 15 traffic sources and the top 15 keywords. It also displays whether the traffic is paid (cpc), organic, or referral traffic. This data combined with the pages/visit, bounce rate, and time on site can give you what you need to immediately make decisions about which paid traffic sources you should cease and which you should increase. You can also deduce which organic and referral sources and keywords you should target more heavily. This data comes out of Google Analytics, too.



• Marketing and Sales Funnel – The next part is where we visually display the marketing and sales funnel performance. Starting with website traffic volume, the funnel drills down to “Suspects” (opt-ins), “Prospects” (leads we give to sales), “New Units” (or new customers). These names are ones that we give for our insight and may vary depending on what kind of business you own. The top of the funnel shows us where we’re at in the month as a comparison to where we’re at with each of our goals. Conversion rates between steps are also calculated and shown. This saves a lot of time in breaking down the funnel and determining performance.



• Managing Marketing Budget – If you use lead source tracking within Infusionsoft, this chart is golden. You can track each advertising/marketing activity and make decision based on “cost-per-lead” (CPL) or “cost-per-sale”. (CPA)  The chart below shows data from many moons ago of our media buys and shows us what message what used, what medium was used, how much we spent and what the cost per lead was.

If you’d like to use this same report in your business, you can download the source code at http://bit.ly/customreport. You’ll need to upload it to a server that runs PHP and a moment or two to configure your API keys into a file — don’t worry, it has been commented to help.

Infusionsoft allows you to pull all kinds of extremely important data. You can create custom reports by pulling data from Contact Records, Tags, Order History, Opportunity Records, and many other database tables. If you’re interested in using the Infusionsoft API to create custom reports, please visit http://developers.infusionsoft.com to get API documentation.

Another thing to keep in mind is this isn’t ideal for novices. It may take time to experiment and get the results you desire. If you need additional help with the API, we have a number of partners who specialize in using the Infusionsoft API on our directory.

Finally, don’t forget that most of this type of reporting is available inside of Infusionsoft through your User Home Dashboard. You don’t have to be a programmer or a genius to setup reporting – but you can read this help article to get started. Effortlessly create Saved Searches for the data you want and then add those searches to your dashboard.  Personally, I like the “Little Box o’ Stats” the most.

[Image credit: Jason Dirks]

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