Successfully Analyze your Digital Marketing Efforts
The search for the “right” media channel gets more complicated as more and more new options arrive daily.
If you have a budget like Marvel Comics, and you want to spend between $450,000 – $750,000 per day on a Snap filter, then that’s certainly one option. BUT, if you are like the rest of us whose budgets aren’t that deep, you have to be more strategic and selective.
The usual tools in the digital toolbox include, but are not limited to: paid search, organic social, social advertising, SEO, email, and content marketing.
Which are the best for you and your budget? And more importantly – which are effective?
There are a lot of people that choose their deliverables prior to landing on a strategy. If your goal is simply branding, then there are tools and tactics for that; however, if you’re like me and you want more leads, then it will take a more strategic approach.
This is where digital tactics come to play. Without a doubt, digital tactics make it very easy to spend all your money, but often it can leave you scratching your head on whether or not any of it worked. The metrics for success that providers deliver seem impressive, but at the end of the day: it’s all about results.
It’s easy to get lost in all of the reports, statistics, and percentages – and that can result in the lack of any sort of interpretation of what actually happened. In order to navigate through the information (to find what’s really effective) you have to break down all the silos of information.
A report by itself is one thing, but when you combine it against all the other sources of information, you get an entire story.
Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about:
Running a Google Adwords campaign and only looking at campaign performance metrics isn’t going to reveal the overall success or failure of your digital marketing efforts – certainly not to a degree to which you can refine your efforts for the future.
You have to look at the analytics. For example, the combination of Adwords reporting and Google Analytics will give you important insight regarding the keywords you’re using in your campaign. Not only will you know which keywords are effective, you’ll also learn what happens after the keywords feed traffic to your site.
Then it’s important to understand which other channels help send traffic to your site. Sometimes channels like paid search may take last click attribution but also may have been assisted by other channels. These channels are, in most cases, equally as important as the channel someone clicked on last to reach your site. You can identify your assisting channels through analyzing different attribution models.
But you’re still not done – when you start interpreting those analytics you have to take it a step further and compare that information to your CRM to see which channels affected lead flow and actual sales. Impressions and reach are great, but they’re only vanity metrics compared to the knowledge of what’s actually leading to sales.
In my career, I have found a lot of marketing strategies are the result of simple math. The math always determines where we go and how our money is spent. We have to reach beyond what’s easy to report on and look at what’s actually affecting the bottom line.
The digital world has accountability. There are breadcrumbs of data to analyze in any and every campaign. Follow this data to determine whether or not you are on the right path.