It’s the end of H2 at my company so now is the time you’ll find me with my head stuck in various spreadsheets as I look back over how successful the first 6 months of the year have been. Now is the time to adjust my spending and activity for the rest of the year, lessening the bad performing budgets and increasing those that are working for us.
I’ve also pondered over whether the KPIs I have in place for my online activity are the best ones? For a start we have always measured the first point of contact with the business as the lead source but what about the other contributing channels?
Google Analytics has recently given us contributing funnels where we can see how many conversions a channel was directly responsible for and how many contributed to a conversion. By looking at these we can be fairer as to where budget is allocated.
It will also show how many touch points a person has before converting – in our case it is mainly one so I know that contributing channels only count for 15% of the total. If you looked at yours and saw that people are seeing more than one channel then you should start thinking about how you can measure the contributors.
Check out this Google video that explains multi channel funnels, it’s very clear and should help you see how their free analytics tool can help you get better visibility of which channels work well together.
Another thing I start reviewing is whether my KPIs are detailed enough to answer to by marketing objectives. Do email opens tell me how successful my newsletters are being? Well that depends on what the objectives of my newsletter is – is it to drive downloads or revenue? If so then I should be measuring download volume and revenue numbers not opens. I’ve asked before what a ‘like’ means to your business, does it show true engagement? Is your social objective to spread your brand far and wide? If so then external mentions or volume of followers could be best. Like’s work if they are genuine and people haven’t been given something in return for their like – if they have then you’ve skewed your measure because they’re probably doing it to get the freebie.
I’ve presented lots of questions to you but halfway through the year is the time you should be questioning the most. Just because you set out to measure in a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t change that. It doesn’t even have to impact your trend analysis if you go back through previous month’s and amend the way you did it then to match how you want to do it in future.
