Marketing Success: Track Trends in Analytics
Start with benchmarks
Performance statistics help companies adjust efforts to constantly improve. Regular reporting and review, weekly or monthly, demonstrates progress and weak areas.
You will have various reports that provide excruciating detail for each service that you use: Google Analytics, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter including traditional media. Certainly, pull and analyze these individual statistics. But you will want a summary report, one that helps you evaluate the impact of your effort.
That summary starts with your first set of statistics, or your benchmarks. You’ll want to see the trends in total sales and leads for your first week of tracking. Calculate the cost to get a lead or sale. Report traffic to your site, your blog and new followers to your social media accounts.
Download the Benchmarks template below and begin to modify it to serve your needs. Worksheets include a total Summary (sales, leads call center, site), statistics for Core Assets (a few deeper site details, blog, podcast, for instance), Email and Press (emailings, releases, articles), Social Media Free as well as Digital Paid Media, Social Media Paid and Traditional Paid Media. Set reports up with the various media that you use and the figures that you want to collect, such as cost-per-click(CPC), cost-per-lead (CPL) and/or cost-per-order (CPO) or other measures; use your preferred time frame. The template uses periods ending each week. Note: The template often uses CPL and CPO.
B2B companies watch leads further, through a sales cycle process called a pipeline, to examine progress and point out speed bumps so they can form a strategy to tackle issues that slow down, and possibly lose, a sale.
List your goals and milestones to meet them. Track them regularly, documenting the percent achieved, such as a year-to-date (YTD) figure. Don’t just record your media results, if you had a goal to gain four new partnerships a year, record your progress. Then if you decided you want a certain number of cross promotions, mark that growth. As you identify new opportunities, you are likely to add new goals and objectives to measure.
Agencies as well as advertisers pull the initial status of their new client’s media sites so that they can track and show the impact their efforts have made. Advertisers may even choose to provide new links that are separate from those used to currently to create a brand, new slate, especially if the agency is working on a performance basis.
No matter where you are in the marketing process, if you haven’t been tracking and evaluating your results, start now.
Download your Benchmarks template by clicking the link below:
