When it comes to promoting a small or medium business, marketing can take many forms. It is vital to be aware of the tools that can help you keep an eye on the key moving parts within your business’ advertising and marketing strategy whilst you are on the go.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of the leading apps you should consider installing to measure the impact of campaigns. They can help improve your observability and delegate changes to be made in real-time, based on the insights you can more readily notice.
Google Analytics (IOS/Android)
Suppose you are the owner of a business that brings in the majority of its revenue from digital sales. Now suppose you are also often away from your desk because of work-related travel or offsite meetings. Therefore, it is highly likely you’ll need a way to view sales, revenue and other key performance metrics from Google Analytics.
Thankfully, Google Analytics provides an intuitive mobile app that presents all of this data and much more, without your having to set up your laptop every time you wish to view how sales are performing at a given time.
I’ve personally found this app very useful for checking in with how digital campaigns are performing on high traffic days. These can be Black Friday, Cyber Monday or other seasonal sales where stock is moving fast. On-site changes may need to be taken quickly to relocate available inventory and push these changes to a live eCommerce site to avoid disappointing customers.
Beyond top-level eCommerce data, you can also view real-time user metrics, sessions and goals by geographic location and insights to assist you in improving your marketing performance.
By observing your Google Analytics app often you will also be able to notice abnormal trends. Many businesses may not be already using a service such as Pingdom to detect when their website has gone down. For these businesses, the first indication that something is wrong may well be not seeing any live sessions in the Google Analytics real-time overview.
In addition, there are a wealth of additional settings and segments that can be applied for viewing your data. It is well worth experimenting with this app to set up reports and configurations that suit your business’s goals.
Google Ads App (IOS/Android)
If you have paid search advertising campaigns running through Google Ads then it is worth complimenting Google Analytics by also installing the Google Ads app. That way you can control the settings of campaigns, adjust budgets, edit max CPC and view your campaigns on the go.
Google Ads is quite known for its tendency to overspend your daily campaign budget by a significant degree. As a result, it is vital to ensure that you can pause campaigns or edit the budget. This is especially true if you are operating highly targeted campaigns that are relying upon smaller advertising spend (as can often be the case when advertising for smaller businesses).
One critique of this app would be that it isn’t the most user friendly due to the sheer amount of available columns, which, while useful on the Desktop view, is overwhelming on a mobile device. It would be a great move if Google were able to observe how the average paid search professional has their columns configured to standardise the max amount of filters/columns available.
Due to the amount of targeting and campaign settings that can be configured within Google Ads, I’m not sure there will ever be a comprehensive version that achieves all of the same goals on desktop. I think you may always have the issue of how to give the user access to every adjustment without overwhelming the user interface.
SEMrush App (IOS/Android)
The SEMrush app can be connected to any paid subscription of SEMrush to give you access to your keyword rankings at your fingertips. The app manages to convey keyword visibility across multiple projects in both an informative and organised view.
The UI that isn’t overwhelming to the user and relays insights into keyword position movements. These are then segmented by their importance (1-3, top 10, top 20, top 100) and overall estimated website traffic based on your rankings.
The app also has basic filtering which, unlike the Google Ads app mentioned above, has reasonable limitations in comparison to the desktop view. SEMrush seemed to have chosen the ones that would make the most sense to your average SEO professional.
One thing that is missing from the SEMrush app experience is their log analyser. This is a great tool to discover what errors are found during a crawl of your website and helps you discover if your crawl budget is being spent efficiently.
Logs can also be used in connection to measure website uptime and can be key during the process of migrating your website, for discovering show-stopping issues that need to be resolved quickly.
If you are looking for the features of a logging aggregation tool that can be accessed remotely via your mobile device, then Logit.io might be helpful. Whilst they might not have an official app, Logit.io can be used on both desktop and mobile devices, so you can see exactly what is triggering alerts or errors and access Kibana data visualisations and marketing reports on the go.
We hope you enjoyed this overview of the most essential tools you can use to gain marketing and SEM success.
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