I meet business owners, marketers and digital marketing folks everyday who try to gain new business, via the digital channel. When I say digital, I mean through their websites, mobile, social media presence, organic and paid search methods. I have to admit, there’s a lot of sophistication that marketers are using to launch their campaigns across various digital channels – and their spending big bucks to do it. But, I am surprised at the adoption rate of some marketers when it comes to measuring analytics correctly across these digital channels. Marketers tend to say, “I love digital because I can measure it”. Allegedly, digital methods conquered the question of where each marketing dollar actually goes. But when you get down into the weeds, you realize the measurement is half baked based on a few statistics – such as clicks, page views or other nonsensical stats.
By itself, your Adwords report is meaningless unless you know how much money those clicks made for your company. Your social media posts are great for perception but not much value if you don’t lead your followers to your business to buy, buy, buy. Your search optimization dollars are great, but do you know what happens when users reach your website? All in all, it doesn’t matter if you are number one in search if you are not making a high return on investment.
So how do you solve this problem? Here are a few key tips:
1. Spend some time ensuring that your analytics platform is installed properly and standardized across your organization.
2. Work with your agencies to define your requirements and goals of your website. Make sure those goals and conversions are correctly implemented on your site. Free and paid analytics products support this turnkey solution and this is an easy and critical component that will give you great data on what’s working.
3. Give dollar value to your goals and conversions. Attribution reports can tell you which channel is giving you the best bang for the buck.
4. When steps 1-2 are done, ensure that every campaign, post and banner follows a standard method to tracking. Use campaign parameters to ensure you can easily find your campaign in your analytics tool.
5. Analyze, analyze, analyze your data over time to see what is working what’s not.
6. Add more dollars to what’s working and ditch what’s not.
7. Make changes to your website and campaigns and then analyze, analyze, analyze some more.
In summary, digital has opened up multiple channels for us to market and attract new customers. But, in order to understand what is working and not working we need to be more sophisticated in how we measure. If you’re going to pay big bucks for a website, Adwords, social media presence, or even a simple banner, then challenge your agencies to confirm and provide data that show which of the strategies are working to meet your marketing goals. While clicks and page views are fine, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Savvy marketers should measure data that shows number of orders, number of sales leads, number of visitor inquiries and number of conversions.
