Unless you’re completely naive, it should come as no surprise that your online activity is tracked and recorded at every step by a growing number of interested parties. If we speak about websites alone, over 55% of them use the world’s most widely used analytics platform, Google Analytics to track your data. Unfortunately, it’s not the most approachable or interesting program for most website owners. After a hard day at the office, the last thing you want to look at is something reminding you of that university statistics subject that no one liked, but had to do. The problem is that this data is immensely valuable if used in the right way and with some analytical expertise, could have a massive positive effect on your company’s success.
To pretend Data Analytics is new would be a lie. It’s been used for decades. If we consider an offline context, the Census is a gigantic data collection exercise by the ABS to inform public policy at periodic five year intervals. Imagine if you had the same data from all brand contact points of your business. Demographics, topical interests, online usage habits, device preference, user-interaction data, media usage…the list goes on. With this insight you could plan highly reliable and measured marketing campaigns to the sorts of prospective customers that are more likely to be interested in your products or services. At the same time you could exclude the people who have little to no chance of being interested. Your marketing budget’s effectiveness just went through the roof.
If you’ve ever tried measuring a print advertisement, TV commercial or outdoor billboard you would struggle to measure anything respectable while having to reply on some second hand data from the advertiser themselves. With online marketing you can measure everything, independently, comparing the effectiveness of a Facebook ad versus a Google ad, all with complete independent integrity.
If you don’t already measure how effective your social media agency or SEO company’s work is, you are already in the dark when you don’t have to be.
Advanced Data Analytics allows the careful measurement of user-interaction on your website and landing pages, clicks to websites connected to yours, phone calls and much more. All of these metrics can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your current online marketing efforts and make informed decisions – without guesswork. At any particular time, you will instantly know which media channels are the most effective to achieve your business goals.
At JH&C our Advanced Data Analytics program is most popular with service business, because it’s quite straightforward when selling products online. They either buy the product at the end of the process or they don’t and automated technology can be easily put in place to manage these prospects accordingly.
With a service business’ intangible product offering, we find management struggles to implement solid data analytics into their business processes, instead relying on gut feeling. They measure conditions on their assessment of the general economy, seasons and worst of all, biased feedback from their front-line staff who’s performance criteria can present a direct conflict of interest.
Let’s look at an example. Perhaps a potential customer calls after finding your website from a Google ad paid for by your PPC agency. This call is answered by one of 5 front-line staff who might answer the call. Perhaps they don’t really have an interest in converting that person into a sale for the business because they get paid a low level hourly wage. Every call is just another task they have to do. They might be covering for someone on a lunch break or just don’t have incentives in place to bother talking to this customer. The customer doesn’t get a good feeling while on the call and moves on to the next company. All the while, management is oblivious to what’s just happened. Multiply this situation by 100 and when reporting season comes around the figures are down and the blame game begins. The marketing manager berates their PPC agency for lack of performance and perhaps fires them all based on a misinformed hunch.
This reality is all too common, but the most frustrating thing part of this situation is that is doesn’t have to be that way.
There is a sound, consistent and scientific way to measure the success of any online marketing campaign. Firstly we have to determine the goals of the business, which may include:
a) Increasing enquiries/leads via phone or email
b) Increasing the number of people on the email list;
c) Increasing awareness of the company in their industry or complementary industries
d) Increasing the number of Facebook likes
Each of these goals can then be assigned one or more metrics which can be measured through data analytics – for example, a certain number of enquiry forms submitted on the website might constitute the achievement of an enquiry goal.
In response to huge demand, James Hammon & Co has created a service centric solution to independently measure the effectiveness of your online campaigns. It doesn’t matter if one agency does your social media, another does your PPC and another your SEO. Everything can be measured independently and performance assessed without bias.
Step out of the past and into the future. Contact us today for more information and take your online marketing to the next level.
