With over 30 years in various leadership roles in the software industry and technology-related businesses, William Goddard has seen and learned a lot along the way. He is a seasoned veteran of the sales and marketing trenches. For over 12 years, he has led GoTo Marketers Inc., an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Canada, with customers globally.
Can you share the importance of accurate and timely reporting for a marketing department?
Reporting can be a black hole for many organizations. One of the most common causes is that a company’s leadership doesn’t always know what they should look for in their reporting.
Without the data and understanding what the data tells you from your efforts, you could be wasting marketing investment on things that do not drive positive business outcomes. The return on the marketing investments you make comes in many forms. And it depends on where an organization is in its marketing maturity and the tactics it uses.
What are some key performance indicators that your team looks at to measure the success of your marketing campaigns?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to identify and track. Which KPIs we use depends on the type of campaign we are running. For example, if we execute a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan for a client, we look at organic traffic in the following ways:
o Is our content getting more impressions in the search engine?
o Is our content getting clicks, and is the percentage of clicks increasing?
o What keywords are we ranking for, and in what position do we rank in the SERP?
For paid campaigns, we always begin by tracking click-thru-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and conversion rate.
Depending on the ad spend budget and other factors, the different areas we look at are focused on KPIs such as cost-per-lead and conversion-to-opportunity rate in the sales funnel. Most small to medium size businesses usually do not have the budget and time to do campaigns with more granularity. However, these KPIs give our customers and us a solid foundation to build upon, and once we start seeing success, the opportunities to scale will be visible.
Do you have any tips or advice on how businesses can streamline their reporting process?
This is an excellent question because so many companies look at vanity metrics instead of the ones that matter and are aligned with sales goals.
I advise people new to the processes to start slow, ensure their data is clean, and improve as they go along. Website traffic, bounce rates, time on page, and behaviour flow are all important metrics. However, having goals and understanding what is working on your website in your sales funnel and advertising efforts cannot be ignored.
The things you measure must be critical to your business’s success. Meet with a professional who can help you navigate the reporting challenges to identify the things that are working, where there are opportunities to improve, and what you really need. Reporting is a team sport that requires a data coach to help you win the digital game.
How does effective reporting help to improve the ROI for marketing investments?
It is a very old and often used saying that is still true today. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Peter Drucker is often credited with saying this. Here is the challenge: there are too many things to measure in digital marketing. The trick is to measure the right things that deliver the ROI from marketing investments. We once had a client ask us for SEO help. We produced almost 500,000 words of content around a specific industry vertical. Their goal was to generate 10,000 new leads at the top of the funnel for their sales teams by the end of the project’s second year. We achieved the goal 75% of the time. They reported on organic traffic and volume of traffic to net new leads, two simple and measurable metrics.
Which aspects of marketing are most effectively tracked and reported on?
This is a trick question. The most effective for us is the digital signals we receive from specific actions on the website, in an email campaign, or in paid advertising campaigns or programs.
What are the top 5 things every marketing department should report on (and two they should stop)?
It is hard to pick just five things, but here it goes:
- Website Traffic Volume – This gives you a baseline to determine if people are coming to you online and whether the traffic is going up or down.
- Where is your traffic coming from (Organic, Direct, Referral, Paid, or Social)? What channels are helping you, and where do you need help?
- Website traffic to a new lead or e-commerce sale conversion rates – How does your website traffic convert and drive business growth and opportunities for the sales team? Measure something as simple as a contact form filled year-over-year or phone calls.
- SEO and important website page rank in the search engine results page (SERP). Are you on page 1 or page 20 on Google? People search for the problems you solve or the products you sell. In organic position 1 (excluding any ads you see on Google for your search term), this position gets approximately 1/3 of all traffic for that search term. The higher you rank, the more people will see your company.
- o Return on ad spend (ROAS) – Whether you are spending $300/month on Facebook or $10,000/day on Google ads, you need to know what your spending is actually delivering to the business’s bottom line. If you are spending $1000/month and closing $5000 per month in profit, you should spend 10x if you could handle all the new business. However, if you are spending $1000/month and only making $100/month in profit⏤, you get the picture, I hope.
When it comes to two things marketers should stop reporting on, the first and probably the most important is, DON’T report anything where the data is suspect. The better your data quality is, the more accurate the reporting will be, and you can make more informed decisions. Secondly, If you can’t tie a metric to business outcomes, like some vanity metrics that don’t move the needle, rethink your approach to what is valuable to your business and what is driving better results.
What is your advice to small businesses during this challenging time?
Marketing is part science and art; it takes time to achieve the desired outcomes. Take your time, understand where you rank online against your competition and get some good advice on what it will take to grow from people who have done it. There are a lot of marketing snake oil salespeople out there. Find a partner if you are a marketing rookie or want to take marketing to the next level. Develop a plan, and stick to it. There is plenty of help out there. You can look for government grants to even help with funding that plan. Two excellent resources are CanExport for international expansion and the Canadian Digital Adoption Program (CDAP).
As long as you are measuring the right things, making the right improvements to your tactics, and closely monitoring your marketing investments, you should get better results and give whatever tactics you choose to deploy the appropriate amount of time.
