Why Marketing Reports Should Never Live Alone

We’re Used to Seeing Marketing Analytics

We’ve all seen, in some capacity, a Google analytics report showing your website visitor totals, bounce rate (probably confused you), and the most popular devices people use to visit your site. Yet, most business owners are not used to seeing the full scope of their businesses visualized in this way. The fancy visuals are reserved for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and all the standard services from the digital marketing toolbox. These reports are great. Data is great. But they’re only one slice of your business pie.

The Marketing Agency Dilemma

Many companies work with a marketing agency, marketing contractor, or digital software that is meant to drive more people to spend more money with your business. I’ve been in the digital marketing service business with Eighty6 for many years. We’ve provided countless reports to our clients, tracked an incredible amount of conversions, and exported more PDFs than we can count. No matter what the reports say, there is always more to the customer’s story. 

As a marketer, let’s say you have a client that you’re crushing it for. The numbers are through the roof. By all accounts, things are going well. It surfaces later that financially, the business is not doing as well as your reports on the marketing side might suggest. You’re perplexed and not understanding how things could have gone so wrong. The answer lies in your business analytics as a whole. 

 

A “Conversion” Sounds Better Than It Is

You’ll always hear marketers talking about conversions. I do it all the time. It’s your value currency to your customer as a marketer. It verifies your efforts. But unless you’re selling something directly on your website that involves a shopping cart and a credit card, conversions can stray far from the real picture of your business health. Here’s a basic example: Let’s say there is a conversion setup that tracks form submissions on your contact page on your website. Your marketer is running some Google Ads encouraging people to submit on that form. Ideally, you’ll start your ad setup process with a sales conversion rate. An easy way to do that is to track out of every 10 form submissions how many convert to sales. For this example, let’s say 3 out of 10, or a 30% conversion rate. Combine that with the average value of a transaction, let’s say $1,000, and you’ll have your building blocks to begin calculating another favorite term of marketing: ROI, or return on investment.

In theory, every time you get a form submission, you make $300. If you spend $5,000/month on ads and that generates more than 17 form submissions on your contact page, you’re making money. Easy, except I’d argue there are almost infinite factors that go against this being an exact science. What if the potential customer clicked on your live chat instead? Or decided to find you on LinkedIn and message you there? Or, they Googled you a week later after they saw the ad and reached out then?

In the end you get a report from your marketing agency or contractor specifying how the Google Ad campaign did based on the form submissions. You decide to fire them because there were not enough submissions on the contact form or because revenue didn’t match up to the ROI calculation. But what if you were able to see that your revenue increased alongside this marketing data found in the report? What if your website was down for extended periods of time and you didn’t know, and customers reached out another way? What if a good salesperson left the company during this time, and leads were not handled correctly? What about all the visibility you received on Google Maps with the ads running that are now gone? My point is that there are multiple things to assess as a whole when looking at your business. Your data needs to be brought together.

 

Bring All Your Data Together Into a Single Dashboard

At Pulse, we’re making this a reality by creating customized dashboards that give business owners and managers access to key information at all times. We’re bringing in data from all your business applications, agencies and contractors, into one place. So you have a single point of truth for your business. See the health of your business at a glance, or dive deeper into the data you care about. We don’t believe in being robots, but we do believe you should be making decisions with the knowledge your business data provides when you can view it together.