Are You Using Data/Analytics To Make Better Decisions?

In digital marketing, every decision we take is based on real data. You can't do any assumptions or freestyle moves.



You don't analyze every data that you see, you first determine a list of KPIs.


How do you choose your KPIs?


You go back to the goals and objectives of your marketing campaign first.



Let me give you the example of the funnel of an ecommerce product.


The funnel looks like this.


Facebook ad => $7 product page => $97 upsell page


Here are my goals :


- Getting 50 people to purchase the $7 product the first month

- The $7 product should cover the cost of the ads
- Getting 10 people to purchase the $97 product.

- The goal of the $97 product is to generate profits


KPIs :


- Ad Click through rate
- Ad cost per purchase (The cost per purchase should not be more than $7 so that I can breakeven on the first product and reach the 2nd goal I stated above)
- Product page conversion rate

- The upsell page conversion rate
.... etc.


Some optimization scenarios :


- If the cost per purchase is $10 and my CTR is a bit low. Then I can improve the ad and get a better CTR and therefore more sales, which will improve my Cost per purchase and get it to $7 (my goal)


- If the Ad CTR is good and the cost per purchase is higher than my goal (ex : $10), then I should improve the Product Page conversion rate KPI.



That was just a simple example of how I use data to improve the performance of my campaigns and funnels.


That being said, there is no successful online marketing without Data/Analytics.



Hope this help.

Appreciate such a thorough reply. A few follow up questions:

The scenario you lay out above is pretty simple and straightforward, i.e. FB ads -> product page/upsell page. In a real world campaign, would you also be doing other forms of advertising to drive potential customers to the product page (e.g. Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, PPC ads, display ads, email marketing etc.)?

If the answer is yes, is the approach to optimization similar to what you described before? I.E. the goal still remains to divert your ad spend towards the specific channels that are generating high CTR at low cost? Or does it become more sophisticated than that?

Are there cases where the goals of your ads across each of those channels might differ? Like maybe certain ads are more for brand awareness and as such aren't necessarily trying to get clicked on?

Last question - what's the best way to keep track of all the relevant KPIs within a digital marketing campaign? Are you just periodically checking each channel's ad client throughout the campaign? Or are there any tools you know of that aggregate that data into a kind of dashboard so you can have everything together in one place?

Yes. I would do other forms of advertising depending on the budget available.



Before deciding on which advertising channel I should use, I first go back to audience research and see where they are actually living.



If my audience lives in Instagram & Pinterest. Then I focus on those two.


I split the budget on the channels depending on which goals I want to achieve and what I expect from each channel.


Goal differ from a channel to another, but also from an ad objective to another. In Facebook, I can do both awareness & conversions.



I Google Search, I do it only for conversions. Because it's a buying intent traffic.


In YouTube, I mainly focus on awareness & consideration, but not much on decision.


But keep in mind that most conversions come from retargeting.


I use Google Analytics to measure the KPIs and come up with insights and it's fine for me considering the size of the projects I work on.


There are advanced tools like Adobe Analytics which gives you deeper insights.

In Internet Marketing, the gambler's mentality is basically doing things based on assumptions or what heart tells you to do.
Each an every number will help in trimming the fat, discard what is not getting results and focus on what does.