Performance Benchmarking for Marketing Campaigns: How-to
Posted on 15. Oct, 2009 by Franz in Web Marketing
When I was driving back from a morning appointment just now, I was thinking to myself:
How the heck am I going to convince
old folks“China-men” business people from accepting that less than 10 years from now, their 1880 business models may not work as well anymore?
Ironically, magazines like BusinessWeek and local newspapers like NST and The Star over and over again ring the ‘technological advancement’ bell on those baby boomers. On and on again these thriving minds of the decade were bombarded by tingling quotes from notable names and brands in almost all industries making the same noise: “The world’s market is evolving. We’re about to move into a new era/age. Your 1960 hip trend is about to lose more than 60% of its original value.”
Can’t they read between the lines? Technology belittles anything that does not flow concurrently with the stream of advancement. Time is but a factor to change. And change is what we need to move forward.
Let me explain how all of this happen and how is it related to “Benchmarking Figures for Search Reports” I’m about to explain to you here.
Benchmarking Figures for Search Reports
How ‘benchmarking’ happened
When I face clients who know nuts about search and the Internet, I have some troubles explaining to them the whole concept of it. Problem is, it’s like science to them – Since I cannot use general terms such as “Sales vs. Marketing Dollars” report due to high fluctuation of activities (volatility), it’s difficult for me to sometimes explain to them how are they performing.
At the end of the day, all I get is “Hmm.. I see. So how does that contribute to my sales figure again?”
So I figured: Instead of just providing benchmarking for my search campaigns during proposals and presentations, I’ll also give them ‘conceptual‘ benchmarking figures for them to look at during and after campaigns.
Benchmarking conundrums
When we look at web marketing campaigns for any business, it’s always the same – Short & long term marketing goals, sustainability of marketing campaigns over the course of next quarter, flexibility towards favorable goods, etc. But how do you know:
- Your short/long term goal achievement if you don’t provide a benchmark (objectives towards a goal).
- Your campaign’s sustainability in the market if you don’t provide benchmarks to success (and see what to do to improve, where to go next, etc.)
- Your current and/or AB performances if you don’t have benchmark metrics?
- How to explain to your client your achievements if you don’t have any benchmarking metrics/dimensions?
So I decided: Let’s put common terms to describe our general benchmarking dimensions, with a short Twitter-length (140 characters) explanation on each and every term I want to explain.
Common Benchmarks
When you perform search marketing campaigns for your clients, it’s always about results. It should be. And results come with measurement. And measurement comes with dimensions, dimensions come with metrics.
- Visits – Not a very good benchmarking indicator, but could be good for overall (ignore and pass all factors) performance on the surface, for complete idiots to Analytics.
- Visitors – It could mean ‘human’ visitors, but it’s still fairly inaccurate because of some technicalities. Measure this metric with negative (-) 6% to 8% difference (subtract).
- Bounce Rates – Important to look at: But meaning to low or high bounce rates vary accordingly. It could be bad design, slow loading, bad flow of thoughts, page not found, etc. Use this only when you want to look at “Visitor’s Response in General measured in Percentage”.
- Length/Depth of Visits – Google Analytics don’t show this well – But SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, Woopra and Clicky does a better job.
- Top Landing/Exit Pages – If your campaign targets the “Services” page, combine metrics available on Google Analytics and draw out a comparison chart.
Of course, there could be more. But I won’t discuss this here. If you want to understand more about Analytics’s metrics, you can view Elioe.com’s Whitepaper on Google Analytics.
Search Report: Inside
For every search report that I check, I understand what’s going on inside. But for our clients, they don’t. They just don’t get what Direct/Search/Referral visits mean. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Can these 'search' figures become your benchmark?
Take a look at the picture above – You can see that majority of the traffic for that week comes from search traffic. So, does that mean the search campaign is working? Look: This is extremely straight-forward. For example, if I were to perform SEO for you, increase of figures in unique visitors (and also % of New Search Visits) could be the benchmark.
Wait, not so fast. Have you considered:
- Whether 6,713 of all those Unique Search Pageviews for that week actually convert better than Direct or Referral Traffic?
- What are the top exit and landing pages – And where do they go from there, and did they actually convert?
- What happened at the exit pages? Why did they leave? Where did they go next?
- That you’ll have to compare it with sales volume and individually track down sales from website before saying, “It’s a success!”
- That if Bounce Rates are 33.96% for all visits, what content are they reading?
Come on – You don’t expect the client to understand these, isn’t it? So, what can you tell them?
I then concluded: Let’s dive into their operations and teach them about what they know best.
Un-noob your clients
Here’s the logic: If you can’t kill your competitors then join them.
The one thing that has worked out well for me is using terms in their arena to explain to them these figures. For example, conversion rates could come close to ’sales’ or ‘inquiries’. ‘Bounce Rates’ could closely mean Interest, Viewership & Audieceship. Unique visitors could closely mean ‘Interested potential client’.
Drive them into dimensions of their own. If you can’t dig their brain, then you probably shouldn’t become their service provider in the first place.
