marketing

PASS Business Analytics VC has grown 123% in a year! #sqlpass @passbavc

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It’s been amazing to see the growth of Business Analytics community over the past couple of years as one of the chapter leaders on the PASS Business Analytics Virtual chapter…Here’s a data viz that I put together to analyze effectiveness of our marketing campaigns:

Here’s the chart: 

PASS Business Analytics Virtual Chapter Marketing Effectiveness Chart

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an “Analytics” virtual chapter is using data-driven marketing techniques! 😉

Calcs:

May’14 = 100 attendees. Jun’15 = 223 attendees. % Diff = 123%

Projections:

With this growth rate, we should have ~500 attendees in our future virtual chapter meeting in Jun 2016. Can’t wait! 🙂

Credits: 

A lot of work by Dan English (current president) and Melissa Demcsak (Immediate past president) went into growing this chapter!

Answering a question using data: Are marketers around the globe shifting their dollars to digital ads?

YoY growth - Digital Ad Spends vs Traditional Ad Spend
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According to the data shared by emarketer, we can clearly see that the Traditional Ad market is reaching a saturation state in 5 major economies (US, China, UK, Japan, Germany) while the digital ad market will see steady growth in some economies & explosive growth in US & China…but the market size of traditional ads will still certainly remain much bigger in US while market size of digital ads in china will overtake the traditional ads in 2017.

So to answer the question: Marketers are not decreasing their existing budgets for traditional ad channels but the increased marketing budget dollars seems to be directed to digital ads market.

Very interesting data-set, I encourage you to play with it!

Thanks Avinash Kaushik for sharing this interesting tool.

I was playing with the data using Excel & Tableau, here’s a public workbook if you’re interested: https://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/paras.doshi#!/vizhome/WorldWideAdSpend/Dashboard-DigitalAdSpendvsTraditionalAdSpend

YoY growth - Digital Ad Spends vs Traditional Ad Spend

Now, it’s your turn! What insights do you get from this data?

Business Metric #5 of N: “Conversion rate” (online marketing)

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Summary:

In this post, we will see an important metric in online marketing called “conversion rate”.

Description:

so, what is conversion rate?

Conversion rate = (Number of Goals Achieved)/(Total Visitors)

why is this important to track?

In my previous blog on leads (marketing), I mentioned it’s important to track number of people interested in your products/services but along with that it’s important to provide context while reporting on Leads – this is where conversion rate comes into picture and provides the necessary context. Conversion rate can tell us the Quality of the leads & visitors that you get from your online marketing efforts.

Let’s take an example of an e-commerce site:

An e-commerce site decides to increase their monthly online marketing budget and they see a spike in the number of visitors – so that’s great, right? They should continue to increase their marketing budget, right? Well – that might not be true. While the number of visitors may have increased how do we know that increased number of visitors results in increased revenue? It all depends on the quality of the visitors that’s being generated – so how do you quantify the quality of the visitors? That’s right – conversion rate with the goal: number of visitors clicking “buy” button. So you want to make sure that with increased online marketing budget 1) Conversion rate is good or better 2) Number of visitors/leads have grown.

This was a basic scenario helping you appreciate the power of tracking the conversion rate for your online marketing efforts.

Now, If your marketing funnel is more complex then you might also create multiple conversion rate metrics to track conversions at each stage of a marketing funnel. This is VERY powerful. Here’s an Example:

Conversion Rate #1: (Number of Leads)/(Number of Total Visitors)

Note: your marketing team would define a “lead” based on their criteria(s) like downloads a newsletter, submits a contact us form, favorites a product, etc.

Conversion Rate #2: (Number of Actual Customers)/(Number of Leads)

Note: Conversion Rate #1 is great to evaluate effectiveness of marketing campaigns and conversion rate #2 is great to evaluate sales effectiveness.

How can you capture this data?

A good web analytics tool (like Google analytics) should help you track your conversion rates.

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw that tracking conversion rate is very important metric to track your online marketing efforts.

Business Metric #4 of N: “Leads” (marketing)

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Summary:

In this post, we will discuss about a common metric used by Sales & Marketing teams called “leads”.

Description:

In simple terms,

Leads = number of individuals (or companies) that have expressed an interest in your goods or services.

why do we want to measure this?

For a business to grow, it’s important that the sales & marketing department work to make sure that there is a growing interest in company’s goods or services. It’s important to track this metric to make sure that it’s a positive upward trend!

Word of caution: It’s important to also note that this metric on its own can be misleading. It might be a good idea to also track “conversion ratios” (converting leads or potential customers into actual customers) to make sure that high-quality leads are being generated.

where can you get this data?

Depending on the channel that you use to capture potential customer’s information & the technology maturity of the company, it varies. I’ve seen CRM systems used to report “leads” data and I’ve also seen manual excel files that are used to generate leads report.

Are there any sub-categories?

Yes, it’s usually subdivided into 1) Marketing Qualified Leads and 2) Sales Marketing Leads.

usually, Marketing Qualified lead (MQL) is someone who has shown interest in your product or service but you don’t know if they fulfill your qualifications to buy your products or services. out of all MQL’s, those leads that qualify your criteria and are identified are someone who is ready to buy your products or services becomes your Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and sales department get’s ready to engage with these leads to make them an actual customer.

Marketing Funnel Sales Qualified Lead

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw a high level overview of a business metric used in marketing and sales called “leads”.  As mentioned earlier, don’t report on just “leads” – it can be misleading for marketing & sales executives since upward trend in number of leads doesn’t necessarily result in increased sales unless the quality of new leads is same or better. Marketing and sales executives would really appreciate any context  (example: conversions) that you can provide to their “leads” report. I hope that helps!

Guest Blog: How to measure ROI of Social Media Marketing?

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Introduction:

This is Guest Blog by Jugal Shah. Jugal is pursuing MBA w/ focus on Marketing from a premier university in India. He shares his views on marketing, sales and strategy via his Blog & Facebook.In this post, He briefly comments on “How to measure Social Media Marketing ROI”.

Jugal Shah’s Short post on Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI:

In social media marketing, ROI is not in just monitory terms. So, for social media ROI, my focus would be on
1) to how many people I have reached
2) How many people I have engaged through online activities
3) Becoming a conversation enabler and perception driver

Then focus on

1) how much increased revenue is due to social media reach (you can do this by tracking referred link)
2) How many leads you generated through social media
3) How social media efforts helped to resolve customer query/problems and led to more customer satisfaction (remember customer acquisition cost 10 times more than customer retention cost).

In a nutshell, It’s of utmost important to use Social Media as:

  • conversation enabler
  • perception driver
  • customer retention

Conclusion:

Paras: Jugal, Thanks for this post. I am sure, this short post would be a great food for thought for readers who are interested in Digital Marketing Analytics or analytics in general. Readers, Feel free to reach out to him on his blog and/or Facebook page.

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Business Metrics #1 of N: Customer Lifetime Value

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This post will briefly describe an important marketing metric called “Customer Lifetime value”.

What is it?

It’s an important metric in the world of marketing. It helps businesses measure a customer’s worth to a business during the entire business relationship. In other words, it helps a business calculate net profit associated with a customers relationship starting from first purchase AND subsequent purchases along with expected future purchases.

How is it used?

It’s used to measure return on investment when formulating marketing strategies. Here’s an example: If your strategy costs $100 to acquire a customer and the average lifetime value of customer is $400 – then well, that’s a great thing, isn’t it?

It also helps business focus on making the most out of the existing customer relationships.

To extend these examples in the Internet marketing world, let’s take an example:

Suppose that the cost of acquiring a customer via Internet marketing is $25. The customer buys a $10 worth of goods. Is this good? Not from what we’ve seen so far. But the lifetime value of customer is $120 – see, now it does makes sense to spend $25 to acquire a customer.

Conclusion:

In this post, I wrote about a key Business Metric that should be of help when you work on your Marketing analytics project. Note that accurately measusring this metric is NOT an addition of couple of numbers and there is some thinking involved. To that end, I would leave you thinking about this critical business metrics that could be used in marketing analytics project! Your comments are very welcome!

Google Analytics: How to Track an email campaign?

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In this post, I’ll share how I learned to track an email campaign via Google Analytics.

First up, what do I mean by email campaign?

let’s say you email 1000 newsletter subscribers a link (URL) along w/ a summary – How do you track the traffic that is generated via this email campaign? Well – that’s where Google analytics can help you track your email campaigns. One metric would be how may people clicked on that link and visited your site.

Why should I care?

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” – Peter Drucker

If you do not measure what’s working or what’s not working, then you can’t improve – can you? Let’s take a hypothetical example. supposing it’s cost you $25 dollars to email 1000 people. How do you calculate the ROI on it? Well – track it! And the tool you can consider using is Google Analytics.

Now, Here are the steps to track an email campaign via Google Analytics:

Here’s the visual:

google analytics track email campaign

Here are the steps:

1. First Step is to create an URL.

Why do you need this? Basically this URL would have “meta data” that helps Google Analytics identify this link belongs to one of the campaigns.

How do we create it? Use this web service: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867 to create an URL:

This is how an URL that I created looks: http://parasdoshiblog.blogspot.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UTDEmailCampaign

google URL builder google analytics

2. Create an advanced segment in Google Analytics:

> Open Google Analytics.

> Select your site

> you should be in the audience overview report

> From here, click on advanced segment and click on new custom segment

google analytics advance segments> Here I’ve configured it like shown in the image below. Note the name of the campaign is same as the name of the campaign in STEP 1.

email campaign track google analytics> Save segment

> next time you visit, you’ll see this custom segment – select it and you’ll see only from the campaign that you want to track:

google analytics custom segments traffic

That’s about it for this post. your comments are very welcome!

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Two ideas to make your social network activities “Searchable”:

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Some time back, I wanted to search one of my own social network post. It was a resource I had shared and somehow I was not able to “google” it (again). I eventually found it – but it took me 15 odd minutes to scroll down to my twitter feed. It was NOT fun! And I thought to myself – there’s got to be a better way! And I thought – It’ll be great if I solve it for not just Twitter but all my social network activities that includes LinkedIn, Facebook Pages, Google+. So here’s couple of things thats working for me, I hope it helps someone out there too:

Now, before we begin when I say “Searchable” – I mean searchable by YOU (or a human being) and not necessarily search engines. But it turns out, both my ideas increase your chances of getting your social media activities Indexed! With that, Here are the ideas:

1) Syndicate your Social Network Activities (Posts/Images/Updates) to Tumblr/Blogger

I use IFTTT to syndicate my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn activities to Blogger

2) Create a post about your social network activities on your blog:

Here’s an Example: Things I shared on Social Media Networks during Oct 19 – Nov 11

Though Idea #2’s main goal is to keep my blog readers updated about my social network activities – But it also acts as a good way to make my social media posts “searchable”.

And remember I said earlier that the chances of your social network posts getting indexed by search engines increases? That’s because WordPress, Tumblr & Blogger’s posts are accessible by Google (unless you choose to block it). So that’s about it for this post. If you like the idea(s), please let me know! And if you have other ideas – also let me know, I am always looking for ways to make my social media activities easily searchable to me as well as for anyone else.

Let’s connect and converse on any of these people networks!

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