Half of Your Ad Budget is Wasted Every Year
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” - John Wanamaker
That wise old adage tells us two very important things:
Analytics often fall to the back-burner in favor of novel marketing efforts
Businesses are often much more interested in expanding their marketing efforts without taking a slow, calculated approach at what works and what doesn’t
So how do we track what’s working? Let’s look at a case-study.
Case Study
Analytics: Measuring Your Efforts
The screenshot above shows the entirety of 2020, to date, of site visitors to a client’s website. When we were brought into the fold, the first challenge for us was to solve a puzzle: if the client has a viable product, how come people aren’t visiting their website to learn more about their services? It’s a fairly complex puzzle to solve, but without boring you with the answer to that question, we can show you two ways we know that our answer to that puzzle is working: data.
The data shows us that when we began implementing changes, the website traffic had an uptick. As we refined those changes, the uptick proved not to be a fluke, but rather a sustained growth pattern. Same ad-spend, different targeting, much improved results.
What were the changes we made? Website structure, website copy, photography, Social Media, and re-focusing of Google Ads search terms (not a Google Ads budget increase, mind you). How about Social data? Let’s look at the screenshot below.
This screenshot from the Facebook insights panel tells us a great deal of information. What data do we care most about?
Reach
Post Clicks
Reactions/Comments/Shares
When video is done right, these are the results we tend to see. A great deal of organic reach, a separate amount of paid reach, and a healthy amount of post clicks, reactions, comments, and shares.
What Does All of this Amount to, Anyway?
Brand Awareness is the goal, and while it was difficult to track brand awareness in John Wanamaker’s day and age, it isn’t nearly as challenging in 2020. We have the tools at our disposal to gain insights from our marketing efforts, we just need to know how to interpret the data and use it as fuel for growth.
