Do You Have Proof Your Marketing Is Working?

If you’re not getting leads, your marketing isn’t working. The End.

Ok, maybe there’s a little more to it. Yes, leads are vital to the success of performance marketing, defined as a form of marketing that’s goal is to get the best leads at the best price, over the number of impressions (how many people were reached) for the best price, (this second form of marketing is known as brand awareness). For performance marketing, think quality over quantity.

With that being said, if you are in a service industry then your business relies on a certain amount of new leads per month (or day, however you track your metrics) and if you are not meeting your goal, then simply put, your marketing isn’t working. If you’re an e-commerce business and you are spending more money than you are making from the items you are selling, then again, your marketing isn’t working.

Care to understand why? Then keep reading.

First off, you need to define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), because all businesses are different and have varying goals and measurements of success. Using the example from above, if you’re in a service industry, then your goal should be generating a specific amount of calls or consultations per day, week, or month right? Technically you’re right — but ask yourself, if you receive 100 calls and none of them convert into business, does that actually mean your marketing is working? Yes and no – it depends.

What does THAT mean?

It means there is no one specific way to measure if your marketing is working, there are many, but they all revolve around this thing called a conversion.

What’s a conversion?!

A conversion is this magical term coined in the digital marketing industry as an ‘event’ which is any action (or lack of action) tracked by a person interacting with any part (and at any point) of your marketing funnel. Marketers can define almost any action taken online as a conversion. There are conversions in everything and you have no idea when you’ve become one. Well, guess what, if you’ve made it this far you just became a conversion. Congratulations!

But how did I just become a conversion? And why does that matter?

Conversion can be linked to: time on page, scroll distance on any given page (which is what you just converted through), checkout vs add to cart, sign up vs delete account, link clicks (in general vs specific links), bounce rate (which shows someone leaving your site almost immediately without showing interest) and the list goes on. Conversions, therefore, are the foundation to your success, IF you define them properly and make sure they’re determining what you are trying to obtain. Which makes sense right?

“But what about all that talk about leads?”

Conversions are leads if you define them to be. They can even go deeper by measuring who’s more likely to purchase your product based on what ads they saw. Thus defining a better quality lead and giving you more information to better future campaigns.

Google Ads makes it super simple to track conversions because you just have to set up a desired action in Google Ads.

Once the action is set up, you will give a tag that you can add to your website. After the tag is added it will show you 7 different data points on your website’s conversions: Cost per conversion, conversion rate, conversion value per cost, and more. All of these can further your knowledge of the quality of your campaigns, but be careful because over analyzation of the data can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.

You can also use Google Analytics which is very similar but they differ in who they attribute the conversion to. Analytics will give it to the most recent engagement with your website, while Google Ads will give it to the first interaction with your website. They also output conversion tracking records at different intervals, for Google Ads it’s every 3 hours while with Google Analytics it is every 9 hours.

Now, we all want to see amazing results from all of our campaigns but the sad truth is that it’s not gonna happen.

Campaigns will fail, but the difference between a strong marketer and a weak one is that the strong one will work to figure out what failed, and how it can be stopped in the future. The same goes for a good campaign, just because something worked doesn’t mean you can redo it, but there’s always something to learn and improve on. With proper data and understanding, there’s often more to take away from a failed campaign, because we’ll never know what works for certain but we can definitely learn what doesn’t work.
Many marketers will try and sell you on the clicks they can bring to your website, and they may say that you aren’t getting the leads you want because of your business or website.

This is the smoke and mirrors style of marketing where little value is generated but they’re able to show off flashy numbers.

Make sure you’re getting all the stats like Leads, Conversions, and Cost Per Conversion. If they aren’t showing you some of these measurements it’s a good sign to get the heck out of there.

This is a lot of information and there’s much more to Google’s Measurement tools, and there are many more tools to learn to become a Google Ad Master. Therefore, if that all made sense but you don’t feel like learning it all yourself or you don’t have the time. Call us! We’d be happy to help you out… for a small cut of the pie. 🙂