Lies, Damn Lies and Analytics
For many of the same reasons statistics gets a bad rep, Analytics is even worse.
Let’s just look at two points here out of many:
1 – All traffic is not equal. Banner traffic can easily be 10 to 100 times less effective than organic search.
2 – Some sites get most of their traffic from organic search where others get over 100 times or more traffic from banner and paid search than organic.
Now take the first two points and try talking about what a good conversion rate is or what a good bounce rate is in general. The truth is unless you break down web analytics questiosn down and evaluate them on a per traffic source basis, then you are comparing apples to oranges.
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November 15, 2010 - Posted by Steve Wright | Agency Life, Internet, Media Buying, Search Engine, Sponsored Conversations, Web Development | analytics, banners, internet
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Passionate about seeking out the best talent to partner with in the digital marketing arena. Currently involved with some very exciting opportunities. Owner of MaxNumerics and Tactic1. Former VP at Intouch Solutions, Former Director of Practice Management and Sr Technical Architect at VML.
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Great topic of conversation, Steve!
How do you see small businesses surviving against organizations affording large payouts for the top spot on the search results page?
Taking this to the next level – How does one identify the success rate of an e-marketing campaign? Wouldn’t most shareholders require a significant increase in Sales or Revenue generated by that online campaign? Plenty of online marketing specialists claim to increase a company’s SEO and drive more traffic to the organization’s website, but what these organizations need to ask online marketing companies should include – “What percentage of Sales or Revenue can you guarantee our company if we contract your services/expertise?” How many SEO experts or e-marketing companies would guarantee an actual percentage of increased Sales or Revenue? Do you think they would put this in writing…? Probably not.
What do you think…?
Thank you for enlightening us! Always a pleasure…
Thanks for the comment Liane!
Small businesses can survive by being smarter and more efficient. With rare exception larger companies with larger budgets are buying digital media with people devoid of digital talent. The challenge is to get to these companies and convince them that you can spend their money more wisely.
Here is an idea that I wish companies would try. Given proper campaign tracking, it is possible to do some A/B testing of actual e-marketing companies. Pretend you are a CMO and you have a list of companies willing to compete for your business. what you do is give each x dollars and one month. At the end of that month, track back all sales (and profit) to the company/campaign. From there pick your winner.
Now of course there are problems with that idea…but you get the picture. And of course not all campaigns have sales as a primary or even secondary goal. But again, you see what I’m getting at.
As to would an e-marketing company grantee a percentage of sales increase? I would and they should! That is you are dealing with a trust worthy client that is — The thinking is if you are not willing to take a risk on the one thing in the world that you are best at, then why not?
To that point, an interesting way to try to win business is to agree to only work for a % of the increase in profit or perhaps a simple commission of sales. If the company you are working for does all the business via the web, then calculating your cut is easy enough.
What do you think?