You must track your marketing results

Thursday, March 20, 2008 - Tim Wall

This is a subject I tend to harp on from time to time, but I believe it is so important that it's worth the repeated iterations. Online marketing gives us the chance to track such a great amount of information about our efforts. We have to take advantage of this opportunity, else we will just be wasting money.

For all of Element Fusion's advertising efforts, we closely track our cost per account. Through our analytics software, we can tell whenever anyone signs up for an account on our products, and therefore we can establish our conversion rate from various sources. So, if we place an ad on a website, we can tell how many people click on that ad and what percentage of those people sign up for an account.

So, recently, I ran a test ad campaign on a new website. At first glance, this site looked like a great opportunity. It hit our target audience and generated a lot of traffic. Everything looked great on the outside. But no matter how perfect a site looks, I only care about how well it returns conversion. So, I always like to try out new sites with a small campaign to see how they perform before I jump on board.

After we ran the test, we found that an extremely low number of accounts were created off of those ads. The cost per account was sky high as compared to the benchmarks we shoot for. So, I walked away. There are better places to put our money.

It's an easy decision when you have the right data in front of you. The sales rep for the site tried to convince me that longer campaigns establish familiarity and click-through builds up over time ... yada yada. But I'm not buying it because I have the data. I know that if I put our money into some other sites I've tested, I can get a conversion rate that's 20 times better than what I got on that site.

But if you don't have the data -- if you aren't tracking this cost per conversion information -- how do you make smart decisions with your marketing dollars?

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3 comments (Add your own)

1. Tim Wall wrote:: I would also like to add that just because our campaign didn't produce results on the website I mentioned, it doesn't mean that website is worthless. Another company or product might advertise on the same site with stellar results. The point is that you can't know what works and what doesn't unless you track it. That website was a perfectly viable place to advertise, but it just didn't work for our product, and we can tell because we're tracking conversion data.
March 20, 2008 @ 8:50 AM
2. Advertiser wrote:: -- "I only care about how well it returns conversion."

Tim, you have a skewed view on marketing. There's this age-old concept called awareness. People may not be in the market for a product the day they get clicky with your ad, but they may have stored some information in their mind in which they can pull upon at a later date when they actually need or can utilize that product. This would be called "brand awareness". It's a beautiful thing! You've become slave to instant, measurable, trackable information and statistics. These things are great, but should be measured over lengths of time. I will stress lengths, as no great brand has ever been built overnight. You can actually not track most advertising at all and still know that you're building awareness. It's not about tracking, it's about writing, designing, creating and delivering advertising that works... and then continuing to do so.

But when it comes to the site you were referring to, it's very possible that a site that returns no conversion at all is setting you up for the biggest return you'll ever know. Great advertisers have seen it before. They were patient and it paid off. I would urge you to do the same.
March 20, 2008 @ 12:14 PM
3. Tim Wall wrote:: Advertiser,

You make a valid point, and it was a bit overstated for me to say "I ONLY care about how well it returns conversions." Obviously, we do care about brand awareness and we do actually spend money on brand awareness (one example is the big ol' "Element Fusion" sign on the side of our building).

But, I still contend that tracking results for ads is critical. In fact, why should I put ads on sites that don't produce conversion when I can put them on sites that do? It seems to me that I'm building brand awareness either way, so I might as well do both.

Plus the fact that tracking conversions gives us an indication of whether we are hitting our target market. After all, I'm not just measuring clicks, I'm measure people who actually sign up for accounts. If a site generates a lot of accounts, I know that site is attracting people who are likely to use our products and services. So, I would much rather build brand awareness with visitors who are likely to one day use our products instead of putting our brand out there on sites where it is not as obvious that the visitors would ever be interested, especially since we (as well as everyone else) have limited funds to spend.

That seems logical to me. Would you agree?
March 20, 2008 @ 12:47 PM

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