My lesson: assume nothing.
I recently met with a future customer. They have an awesome looking website. It has great photos which convey the epic type of work they do.
The look and feel ties in with their brand. I had approached them at the Power and Electricity Africa exhibition because I wanted to be a part of their vision and see if there is scope for an Inbound Marketing solution.
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In a follow-up meeting the conversation evolved to the point where it was appropriate to discuss website traffic and conversion ratio’s – maybe getting into some more detail like number of keywords they rank top 3 in Google for. I would be surprised if they could tell me how many keywords they were ranking for. But to my surprise they didn’t know what traffic the site generated. Could my ears be deceiving me? I confirmed the fact in a polite way… it turns out their website was built by an IT company and traffic was just not something they provided their client’s with. (I though everyone knew that Google Analytics was free and very easy. So this post has some very basic advice on measuring digital marketing.
Measure against a goal
Any metric you use should be tied to a goal. The purpose of measurement is to create action or justify inaction. You need a goal so that you can measure your progress towards it. Just knowing that you have had 4 365 visitors to your site means nothing unless its 110% of your goal for the month.
Communicate appropriate metrics for the audience
It could be considered obvious but: ExCo possibly don’t understand how Google works; that ranking top 3 in Google is a key metric for traffic success.
What they can probably relate to is:
- how many leads did the website produce this month?
- how many sales did the leads generate?
- what was the marketing return on investment?
You should definitely be measuring the ranking top 3 in Google metric for yourself and when managing your digital marketing agency. You just don’t need to communicate it.
Remember that measuring digital marketing is much easier
As a marketing manager having great measurement on digital can backfire when the audience turns to your print campaign and asks the same questions. To get around this start by firstly positioning up front, that print is just not as transparent and secondly apply some of the digital metrics to print as best you can. Have your sales people capture lead source in your CRM for example. Count the number of people who visit your sand at an exhibition and count the number of leads generated by the exhibition.
Conclusion
Measuring digital marketing is easy. Be sure to add the goal and distance to that goal. Communicate appropriate metrics to the audience and work to make non-digital more accountable.
PS be sure to fire your website company if they’re not already giving you free Google Analytics information.
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