In a HubSpot webinar Chris Brogan said that when it comes to social media you should give up control because you never had it. However, it is hard to give up control of all your marketing. A way of controlling your marketing or at least managing it is by understanding what works and what doesn't.
Most companies doing internet marketing take the multi-touch approach and use a variety of channels such as blogging, seo and more recently social media to generate interest in their products and services. But at the end of the day their traffic charts look like this:
What Does This Chart Tell You About Your Visitors from Your Email marketing, or Social Media Marketing?
The answer is absolutely nothing. Here's how I envision a conversation would go at your office coffee station:
You: Visitors are up this month!
Colleague: Oh Yeah? How come?
You: Umm...not sure. I think it was the email. I'll have to check to be sure.
To control your marketing you have to be sure. Here are some ways you can improve your tracking of channel effectiveness:
1. Go Granular
Your visitor graphs should like this one below, (fondly known as the mosaic) where you can see the volume of visitors you are generating from various marketing channels. If you had this graph, your answer to the colleague at the coffee station would be, "We drove a higher volume of direct traffic to our site this month. Our site and brand name are really out there!"
2. Analyze the Entire Funnel
Using the data from HubSpot Marketing Analytics I take this granular analysis a step further and create similar graphs (below) to understand what channels are delivering the most leads and, more importantly, what channels are delivering customers!
Remember, channels that are driving sales and business for your company are the effective ones -- where you want to invest more of your limited marketing dollars. Besides direct traffic, looks like the blog and webinar channels are driving customers in the example below!
3. Measure Conversion
While your marketing channels may be driving a healthy volume of visitors, leads and customers every month it is important to track the conversion rate of each channel on a regular basis to see if they are performing consistently.
In the example above the conversion rate for the Webinars channel (green) dropped for several months -- December through February and regained some momentum in March. At the same time, the blog consistently delivered a reliable conversion rate month over month. I can look at these charts and make pretty reliable estimates for leads for future months.
4. Track Business Results
At the end of the day, the job of marketing is to help drive business success. You should be able to look at each individual marketing channel and understand what is the yield for the effort and dollars to convert some number of visitors to customers. If you know how a channel performs you can make informed decisions about where to invest more energy and dollars to get an even higher return.
What strategies are you using to track the effectiveness of your various marketing channels? Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!
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Ilya 9:03 AM on April 30, 2009
This is a tantalizing post. Can you spell out a bit about the nuts and bolts of how you generate the graphs?
For HubSpot prospects, this is awesome because it lets them dream what is possible.
But for us HubSpot USERS, it would be cool to get the nuts-and-bolts of implementation (for example, I don't think HubSpot generates these charts; some of this is automatic, versus other stuff might need to get some URL source tagging, etc.)
thanks in advance.
Prashant Kaw 9:14 AM on April 30, 2009
@Ilya Great question! I do exactly what you said. I export the referrals data from HubSpot Analytics and tag them with the appropriate channel. A simple pivot table in Excel gives me the tally of visitors, leads and customers by by channel and that is easy to graph. Takes me 15 minutes to do this.
One might think it is a tedious task. However if you do it once, keeping up is very easy.
A good portion of your referrals are the same every month. A quick VLOOKUP command in Excel against your older reports can auto-populate your channels and then you fill in the rest. If you keep a consolidated list of "tagged" referral sources you can create this reports in minutes.
The beauty of HubSpot closed loop reporting is you have visitor, lead and customer data all linked to the original "found site via" or referral source.
Hope this helps / make sense.
Ilya 9:30 AM on April 30, 2009
Cool, thanks. You might want to make available a sample set of spreadsheets that people could literally cut/paste stuff into, to show the full workflow. Sometimes a template can be really helpful to get someone started.
thanks again,
ilya
Jennifer Shaw 10:02 AM on April 30, 2009
This is really helpful. I'm a big believer in promoting my good work and good results to my "uppers," but I often can't get around the "how do you know" part with myself, so I don't give all the analytical data I have... That, and so many small businesses don't TRACK ANYTHING AT ALL, which is infuriating job for a new marketing director trying to gather data. A how-to on the graphy thing would be great...
Matt Bertuzzi 10:37 AM on April 30, 2009
Prashant, great stuff man.
I too am a card carrying member of @avinashkaushik's PALM (People Against Lonely Metrics).
Very similarly, I look at bounce rates across channels. Combining % of traffic generated & relative bounce rate gives a sort of Value Index by channel.
Data can be fun.
Prashant Kaw 10:46 AM on April 30, 2009
@Ilya Great suggestion on the templates. I'll see if we can get one up on Success.
@Drew @Jennifer We'll work on getting a "how to" up for both public and customers. For a sneak peek, the second comment above (my first response to @Ilya) outlines how to do it.
@Matt Thanks, Avinash Kaushik is the Wizard of Oz! I'm a champion of extending basic analytics with meta data!
Abran 9:30 PM on April 30, 2009
"Visitors", "leads" and "customers" question: Visitors and customers are obvious.
Many times the funnel has only two steps: visitor x conversion rate % = customers (paying users).
What is your definition of the intermediary step "leads" exactly? I am assuming your funnel is visitor/CTR/CTA (so visitor/leads/customers) but I could be wrong. Also, forgive me, but what is "Success"? - I too am interested in checking out your excel template.
Many thanks...
Atul Chattterjee 3:37 AM on May 01, 2009
As someone suggested what is needed is a small download of how to work with pivots on a spreadsheet.
The ideas are beautiful because of their simplicity.
Bernie Borges 10:56 AM on May 01, 2009
One observation from the charts in this post is that direct traffic and partners have both been increasing. That tells me two important things. Continue to invest in partners. And, continue to invest in social media content marketing to create more impressions to drive direct traffic. The latter is often not well understood by CEOs as a metric attributable to inbound marketing.
Prashant Kaw 11:48 AM on May 01, 2009
@Abran - Great point. In many B2C / e-Commerce operations the measure of conversion is definitely visitors to purchasers (i.e. customers).
For most B2B companies with a slightly longer sales cycle there is going to be at least on intermediate stage around inquirers - some one who has questions about your product, pricing, filled out some offer on your site, etc.
At HubSpot we go a little more granular and of all our inquirers we only follow-up in person with qualified inquirers - what we call workable leads. And then we also look at the number of opportunities till we get to the final stage of customers.
This will vary from business to business and it is up to you how granular you want to get.
Hope this helps.
Prashant Kaw 11:53 AM on May 01, 2009
@berniebay Great point on investing in partners and social media. Partners are great sources of qualified traffic -- referrals always convert at a higher rate! And there is no better way to increase exposure to your brand and offerings than social media. It must be integrated into every part of your marketing, because it acts as a catalyst in so many ways.
Thanks for sharing!
Abran 12:57 PM on May 01, 2009
Prashant - ok, great. That's what we are doing. The action required for a "visitor" to become a "lead" varies depending on the revenue channel. For example, it could be registering an account with us or clicking on a personalized ad (but not buying the product yet). Then, we work on converting them into purchasing customers.
Thanks a lot...