When we’re putting a strategy together for a client marketing campaign, one of the first essential tasks is to determine what kind of results they’re getting currently. Most new clients can tell me all about how much money they made this quarter as compared to last quarter. They can tell me what types of marketing they’re doing. They can tell me what they spend.
But almost no one can say which marketing method is working best for them. Almost no one can quantify which channel converts best. They have no means of tracking results set up.
This is a problem.
So one of the first things we often do is set up analytics and conversion tracking systems, so they can see very plainly what’s working and what’s not. After having done this obsessively with hundreds of millions of dollars of ad spend over decades, we’ve established benchmarks.
These benchmarks are not set in stone, but they’re a massively powerful starting point. See, one of the huge issues most business owners have with marketing online is they don’t even know what type of results to expect.
So many vendors out there can talk with you all day long about traffic, clicks and hits. But you can’t pay your damn rent or pay your people with clicks and hits. You need something you can sink your teeth into. You need something you can grow your business with.
This is where benchmarks come in.
What do clicks and hits even mean? What’s the context? How does the clickthrough ratio on your ad campaign factor into the large issue of growing your business? Do hits on your website even matter if you can’t tell your people how that factors into revenue?
You have to know what to track, because tracking everything is a fool’s errand. It’s easy to get buried in analytics to the point where you don’t have time for anything else. Don’t let that happen. Establish meaningful targets and make sure your advertising performs at or better than expectation.
If you want to run through your numbers one-on-one with a marketing coach, hit me up. Meanwhile, grab a copy of our Benchmarks document and get a snapshot of the basics. I’m here for you.