Online Marketing - Marketing Don

Analytics, Why bother?

I have been interviewing people for an email marketing position we currently have available.  More often than not, when I ask about how they measured a successful email marketing campaign, they reply with “I look at open rates and click thru rates.”  I hear similar replies from people that work on paid search accounts.  They look at click thru rates.  If you have any type of form for leads or sell products on your site, conversions and revenue has to be a factor in the success of your campaigns.

High click thru rates do not mean high conversions/revenue

Scenario #1

You sell green widgets.  You have a subject line, maybe something like “Save Up To 70% On Green Widgets.”  People open the email.  They get to the email and your creative person designed a fantastic ad with call to actions.  Many of your potential customer clicks on the ad.  Notice I wrote “potential?”  They are not a customer of yours yet.  They get to your site and they are directed to your home page and cant find what they are looking for or, even worse, the sites landing page does not clearly describe the actual product and how to buy it.  The customer gets frustrated and leaves your site.

Scenario #2

You sell green widgets.  You have a subject line, maybe something like “We Sell Green Widgets.”  Less people open the email.  They get to the email and your creative person designed an ok ad with no call to actions, but professional looking.  Some of your potential customers click on the ad.  They get to your site and they are directed to an easy to read specific product page or category page.  They find exactly what they are looking for and buy.

Number 1 has a higher click thru rate, lower revenue.  Number 2 has a lower click thru rate, but higher revenue.  I would take number 2.

I see this in Goolge Adwords account as well.  If you have conversion tracking in your Adwords Account,  the ads will show click thru rate and the number of conversions that particular ad generated.  Hopefully you have at least 2 ads in each adgroup.  From there you can see that some ads have a higher click thru rate, but lower conversion rate.

Whether it is emails, paid search, natural traffic, etc.. if you do not track to the conversion (for leads) and revenue (for ecommerce sites) you are not measuring the true success of your campaign.