[This article first ran in PRNewsOnline.com. Go check them out! -Shabbir]
In the last few articles I’ve described the importance of measurement to your website, and how to examine whether your social media efforts are working or not. Now it’s time to look at the big picture. Are your efforts in each medium actually working, and how should you budget in the coming year?
If you haven’t discovered yet, when you start using twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and press releases written with search engine optimization in mind, you’ve become a marketer who uses PR as your medium. Congratulations! PR is a very valid way of approaching marketing, and if it hasn’t already happened in your company, PR and marketing staff overlap. (In smaller organizations, they can be the same person or even the same department!)
In this article we’ll examine some data from each medium, and give you a method for examining whether your efforts there are actually working and planning for next year.
First, gather your data
For a defined set of time, you’ll need to gather data from your webs statistics that show you the conversion rate and total numbers of goals you’ve accomplished. This is pretty straightforward in a program like google analytics. You can do this with a month’s worth of data, but six month’s worth is better. Make sure you’ve tagged the “thank you” or “receipt” pages of your lead generation forms or e-mail subscribe forms.
Next, compute your return on investment
Once you’ve got the data, create a custom report that measures each goal’s conversion rate, and total number of completions. Have it break out these results by the dimension “medium” and voila, you’ve got your website results broken down by medium.
I used this technique to pull the results for a lead generation effort from a client engagement. Here’s what I got:
I measured one of the three ‘asks’ on the website and then the different activities that fed it. The partners category are simply referral web links from specific partners that support the organization. It’s a quarter of the goal total, a small effort, and has a very high conversion rate and return on investment.
Generally when you look at what’s working with your website, you want to approach it with an open mind. Only then will you see the unintended successes, and only then will you discover new techniques. Ask someone who manages AdWords advertising and they’ll tell you that sometimes the keywords you throw in as an afterthought end up performing surprisingly well. If you’re only examining the efforts you have made predictions on, you won’t discover these gems.
Then, figure out where to optimize and where to reduce
For this data, the first question you should ask yourself is “Are there more partners we could be asking for links here?” Sometimes you max out a particular channel. You buy all the inventory on a perfectly targeted website, for example. If this isn’t the case, this is where you should start funding your efforts. Find more partners to link to you. If their link pages are generating only a little bit of traffic, ask them to feature you for a short time.
In this data, the second best performing marketing technique in this example is your organic search work. It contributes to over half of your total goal accomplishments, and has a good return on investment. If you haven’t already, you may want to start a more formal SEO program to garner more leads from this channel. It may be a good time to look at some new terms to develop to diversify your traffic.
In this case, your e-mail list is definitely producing leads, but while it’s conversion rate is good, it’s not producing a volume of leads that justifies the time invested. Unless you can easily raise your conversion rates of your e-mail list, I would suggest looking at ways of bulking up your e-mail list. It’s the equivalent of pouring more into the top of the funnel.
Your cost-per-click campaigns (search marketing like Google AdWords) are about a fifth of your workload, and a fifth of your results. This is great, but it would be nice if it was more productive. If you’re managing it entirely internally, you may want to get a marketing audit from an agency.
If you’re already using an agency, you may want to rebid the work.
The social media data is quite real. This particular client just isn’t seeing the results from Facebook and twitter. I would recommend cutting back the weekly effort to just 10% or 15% at the most. That doesn’t mean you can’t re-energize it later on, but someone has to demonstrate some results before you would put in your precious resources.
Conclusion
People always complain about the budgeting process cutting things they need, but wouldn’t it be awesome, for once, to have a real concrete basis for your budget requests? What’s more, wouldn’t it be great to directly tie your budget and efforts to the company’s bottom line?
You can do this with a little preparation and a little discipline, but you have to be prepared to live with the consequences of what the numbers tell you. The data will set you free.
Shabbir Imber Safdar spends his days at Virilion Inc, an eleven year old full service interactive agency. He still can’t decide if he should have “marketer”, “online pr guy”, or “digital public affairs” in his title. He blogs about all of these at TruthyPR.com
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