What gets measured gets done! What gets measured gets managed. In this episode, Joe and Tami talk about the importance of marketing analytics, what metrics you should track, what those metrics tell you about your business, and how you can use them to make decisions for your business.
Episode 18 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us, the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics, and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast where I asked Joe questions about different topics and trends and marketing based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book at ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
Today is the 18th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing and we’re going to discuss marketing analytics.
But first, a little housekeeping. Rate us on Apple podcasts, that purple icon. Give us a five-star rating, leave a review, and let us know if you’re enjoying listening to this podcast series. Before we jump into our topic of the day.
Joe, do you want to hit us with an inspiration minute before we get started?
Joe: Absolutely. We hear a lot of people saying “ I’ll get this done someday”, I’m gonna get that certificate “someday”. I’m gonna buy that house. I looked through the whole calendar looking for someday. And I found Sunday. I found Monday. I found Tuesday. But I couldn’t find “someday”.
Why are you telling me that “someday” you’re gonna be going doing what you love? Why are you committed to starting “someday”? Think about this for a minute. The concept of “someday” means that you’re not ready right now. It’s an excuse. “Someday” is a placeholder for “Not today”, not now. And possibly never.
When you put “someday” as the category for where you’re putting your important things, you’re giving yourself permission not to do something today. And you’re also saying that you don’t know when you’re going to engage with it, which leaves an open loop in your time in your mind in your psyche. So unless you redefine what “someday” means to yourself, “someday” is going to hold space in your mind.
So what I love to do, instead of saying someday I’m going to do this, I’m going to make a date for when I’m going to decide what my priorities are, is this part of my priorities today? No, I’m going to put this on a list.
And then on this date, I’m going to check that list to see all the different things that I want to add to my priorities over the course of the next 90 days and determine which one of these things I’m going to do, and then put a date to it.
If something doesn’t have a date to it, it doesn’t exist. So today, sit down and decide that you’re not going to push off that thing that you know you need to do into the world someday. And instead, you’re going to have integrity with your word, you’re going to be clear. And when you do that, you will get motivated, and you’re going to have a better life.
Tami: Thank you so much, Joe. Let’s jump right into our topic of the day: marketing analytics. So first, why is it important to have marketing analytics? What is marketing analytics?
Joe: Analytics is the way that you measure things, the numbers. what gets measured gets done. What gets measured gets managed. If you want to measure your results, you want to manage your results. If you want to get results, you got to measure something. It’s hard to manage something you can’t measure. So marketing is about testing. Write that down. If you’re taking notes, if you’re driving, just keep listening: marketing is about testing.
So you need to understand your goals, your target market, and what success looks like, and need to review metrics on a regular basis to see what needs to be optimized in your marketing funnel.
If you don’t review your analytics, it’s like you’re not looking at your numbers. You don’t know what’s working, you don’t know what’s not working. Imagine trying to run a business without looking at your P&L ever.
Like you have no idea what’s in your bank account. You have no idea how much money you made or how much money you lost. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Driving a car without a speedometer or a gas meter will cause serious problems and make you either get stuck on the road or get in trouble for speeding. There are basic metrics that you need to keep your eye on to make sure that your marketing campaigns have a chance of performing traffic could be measured by how many new visitors landed on the landing page.
If you get a daily report on visitors, suddenly you see there’s a spike, ask yourself, why did I get this spike? Unless the spike caused more quality unqualified leads as usual, then you can celebrate that. The truth is you want to avoid doing things that are going to harm your marketing and the only way to know what’s going on is by looking at metrics.
Tami: Okay, so what are some basic meant metrics that we all should track? I heard you say website visits. So that’s something that we should be tracking. Are there others?
Joe: There’s a concept called the bounce rate. And I’m sure you heard of this idea called a bounce rate, but if you’ve never heard of it it’s when somebody comes to your website, and then they bounce from your website. So if you have an extremely high bounce rate, there’s something wrong with your website.
Why are people not going to various pages if you have people clicking in, but they’re not filling out the form? If you have people going places, and they’re not downloading things, whatever the goal is, in your business, whatever you want people to do, you got to track the metrics.
And marketing analytics doesn’t just apply to websites, it also applies to your email marketing. It also applies to your social marketing, it applies to all the different areas in your business that are related to marketing. Because like I said before, what gets measured gets managed, you want to be able to manage your results, you got to measure metrics.
Thinking about it from a website perspective, how many clicks did you get? How much is your bounce rate? How many conversions did you get? How many leads did you get from your conversions, and how many sales that you make as a result of that?
Think about your marketing analytics as the numbers that will dictate whether your business will be successful, or will fail.
It kind of helps you predict the future as well. Because if you know that for every X amount of visitors, you get x amount of form fills, you get x amount of unqualified leads, you’ll get X amount of qualified leads, which will get X amount of opportunities in demos which will get X amount of clients.
Now you know the path to how much traffic you need in order for you to be able to get clients. So think about visitors and leads, cost per lead, cost per qualified lead, cost per conversion, best traffic sources, and best source of qualified leads, and think about how these numbers change over time.
Understanding this concept called ROAS, or return on ad spend, is different than your overall ROI, which is different than your return on investment.
Tami: So how can you tell when a metric is low?
Joe: The way that you can tell when a metric is too low or too high is by knowing what your expectations are. Because for one company getting five qualified leads is amazing per month. And for another company, getting five qualified leads per month means you miserably failed. So you want to think about what is your business goal first, and then you set a goal for how many leads you need. And based on that, you can determine if it’s too low or too high.
If you’re expecting to close 1000 deals, but you only get 100 visitors, it’s not going to work. 100 visitors are too few if you’re trying to close 1000 deals.
But if you’re trying to close one customer getting 1000 leads is going to be overkill. So you want to make sure that you have the right amount of leads to however many deals you want to close based on whatever you’re investing.
Tami: So how often should I check my metrics? And is there a way that I can make that process easier? Or is it always manual like “oh my god, if I have to check website visits plus Google traffic plus LinkedIn ads information plus, you know, form fills.” I mean, it’s just very manual. And then what can these metrics tell me?
Joe: So here’s one metric that’s really important to look at, which is what I mentioned earlier: ROAS. Stands for return on ad spend. You can easily measure this, and determine if you should be investing more money on advertising or less money for you to be going to market.
If it’s Black Friday, and you’re investing in Facebook ads, you might see a dramatic increase in cost per lead as advertising or tripling their investments during Black Friday. If you’re a business-to-business, you might want to wait a day and not invest a ton of money during an unreasonable time when advertising is very expensive.
One of the numbers that freak many people out is the bounce rate. We often see 50% or more of your traffic leave your website within seconds of landing on your website. The question is, why did they come in the first place? What if they came to watch a webinar and they didn’t need it? They didn’t register?
It’s a bigger problem that they actually got to your website and didn’t register. If your bounce rate is normally 30%. And now you see it’s 90% for the week. What happened? There all of a sudden, people just start leaving. Did everyone get like a sudden allergic reaction to your website? Did your visitors start using mobile and your website’s just not mobile-friendly?
This will give you insights to determine how you can improve your marketing. Take the time to log into Google Analytics on a regular basis or have a marketing agency do it for you. It’s something that you just have to make time to do. And you could also have reports emailed to you on a regular basis.
We create custom dashboards that tie in everything from Facebook ads, and LinkedIn ads to Google ads, to lots of different metrics. And we create these custom dashboards. So a CMO just gets a dashboard once a week, they look at their numbers, and they can make business decisions based on that.
Invest your time into learning the basic numbers that you need to be reviewing and set up alerts so that you get reports via email and you don’t have to log in every time when you start working with companies.
We create reporting that helps executives understand the most important metrics in their marketing campaigns and how they’re tied to the business results.
So here’s a question I have for you. Do you really understand the most important key performance indicators or KPIs, the ones that you need to be looking at to make business decisions about your marketing?
If you don’t, you should probably speak to a marketing strategist that will support you to help you understand which ones you need to use to be more successful.
Tami: Thank you so much, Joe. That was amazing information. I hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did.
In next week’s episode, we’ll be talking about the three main traffic sources for leads. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so you can catch that next episode.
You can follow us on Instagram @ajaxunion and follow Joe on all social media platforms @JoeApfelbaum. Find him on LinkedIn Joelinkedin.com. And check our description for all social media links. You can also find more about the podcast at ajaxunion.com/podcast.
Have any questions? Shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com.
Our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much. See you next week.
