Why Senior management can’t measure online performance

Quotes

• “One of the big challenges particularly in retail recently is they probably don’t understand the metrics that should be measured. Therefore, they don’t necessarily ask the right questions to ask with their team or their agency. They probably don’t be the guy who says, ‘Is it right to be spending $200,000 a month on Google?’, because it’s probably working.” - John“I think the other thing is, people are a bit scared to challenge whether or not it’s a good idea to just keep sticking into Google PPC. That’s the main problem.” - John“People get obsessed about traffic, or their conversion rate. If you’re a CEO and you can understand traffic and conversion rate, that’s great but I think the one that often gets missed is the margin or the profit.” - John“I think people do need to start looking at cost per acquisition and within that cost per acquisition, also looking at the margin and the profit.” - John“My takeaway here is not all metrics are created alike and not all campaigns are created alike. When you’re running an advertising campaign, it can have different goals. Some campaigns are awareness driver and really then you’re looking specifically for reach.” - Ben“Then some campaigns are retention campaigns when you’re retargeting and the goal might be to drive someone to a webinar and not necessarily a revenue-driving activity. If you have a long sales cycle, you need to stay in front of your customers which means you’re constantly marketing and advertising.” - Ben“And then, some campaigns are the direct-response monetization hammer and you’re looking at what’s the dollar spent on the ads.” - Ben “That’s the reason why we created the BOSCO Index. It takes into account all the different areas of your marketing and gives you what number you could obsess about. It’s not necessarily a KPI, it’s a different number and the BOSCO Index can measure yourself against your peers and your actual performance marketing.” - John “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the actual click past analysis of what has come to be to each sale and which channel should be given the recognition. And again, I don’t think the C-suite or the senior management within businesses understand attribution. These are difficult topics to handle.” - John“The Holy Grail for marketers, true multi-touch attribution. Actually getting a value for that middle of funnel click which isn’t the first and it’s not the last but it might be the most important click. That one that actually gets someone to move from awareness to consideration. What leads them down the path to becoming a monetized customer.” - Ben “We have different views on multi-touch attribution and we have one that we use with our retailers. I think it depends on what you’re selling.” - John “I think by the time you spent analyzing the data, you’re probably happy with the last quick wins. But there’s a separate conversation about Facebook which we could spend a long time discussing about post view and how we’re gonna deal with a lot of data issues between GA and Facebook but I think if it’s a low value product and last click is working for you and you’re getting more money at the tail by the end, you can keep going.” - John“When we’re looking at that impulse purchase buy, the last touch attribution model is not a terrible one and you wanna put value on what’s driving volume and getting someone over the finish line because it doesn’t take a lot to get someone over the finish line, if they’re your buyer.” - Ben “When you get that high-ticket B2B Saas level, you need to have a Hubspot equivalent where you can actually track them all the way through and measure them. So I think for something like that, it’s not all online and understanding if it’s a marketing qualified lead or a sales qualified lead.” - John“I think that the notion of keeping track of your customer relationship and marketing against what their behaviors are is incredibly important when it comes to multi-touch attribution. I think that there’s a couple of different models at play here.” - Ben “We use a 40-20-40. That waits 40% on the first, 20% splits across the middle and then 40% to the last. That’s the model that is more popular that our team use but then we have to analyze the date and it depends on how many touches there are in the process.” - John“My advice here is look at who your existing customers are, analyze what their past to becoming a customer was, and build your multi-touch attribution model around that.” - Ben