What's Your Digital Marketing Grade? How to Diagnose Issues Using Analytics

Using Analytics for Your Digital Marketing Grade

 

When you’re sick, you go to a doctor, right? Or, if you want to scare the shit out of yourself, you can Google your symptoms instead (spoiler: the diagnosis will always be brain cancer). So, probably don’t do that.

 

The same goes for your digital marketing: if you’re experiencing a problem, you’ll want to take a look at your symptoms to diagnose and fix it.

The problem is; there isn’t a doctor that you can go to for your marketing problems (unless you hire Revenue River for your digital marketing services, but more about that later). Instead, you need to look at analytics to diagnose and solve all of your marketing woes.

Because you’re reading this blog article, I see you went the Googling route for your symptoms, but, not to worry, this article won’t tell you that you have brain cancer. Instead, here are 3 common symptoms marketers tend to experience, and the ways you can use analytics to diagnose and solve them successfully.

Symptom 1: “I’m not getting enough traffic!”

When trying to diagnose an issue with traffic, it’s tempting just to throw your arms up in the air. You’re blogging, you’re doing social media, and you’re sending emails… why isn’t it working?!

Diagnosis: You may be creating content, but you might not be doing it right. Too often I see clients getting stuck in the weeds when creating content. Listen, your evergreen blog article doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winner; will wordsmithing the last paragraph through 4 rounds of revisions really have an overall effect on the traffic you get to this blog article? No, no it will not. But will proper optimization for SEO? Yes, yes it will. And this rings true for any content you create across your site.

Solution: Use analytics to truly determine where your marketing machine is broken when it comes to traffic. By taking a hard look at what is (and isn’t) driving traffic, you can begin to dive in and uncover the truth. If you see a particular blog article is driving a ton of traffic, see why. Maybe you find out the article is ranking on page one of Google because of a keyword you used, or maybe it’s an extremely relevant topic to your personas and you need to begin replicating it in other ways since it is performing so well. The point is, you’ll never get traffic if you don’t do everything in your power to get eyeballs (and search engines) on your content. By running audits in my marketing campaigns when I’ve had concerns about traffic, you can’t believe some of the silly things I’ve found. 

For example, one page that we wanted to perform particularly well had essentially zero views after we had been promoting it a TON. After diving into the analytics, I found out that the URL was broken, so our 404 error page was the one getting all of that traffic instead. (FACEPALM). Solutions may not be as simple as this, but you'll never know until you go through the rabbit holes that an analytical deep-dive will take you through and come out on the other side with some solutions to try.

Symptom 2: “I’m not getting enough conversions!”

Maybe you have another issue now; you’re getting the traffic, but none of that traffic is converting into leads.

Diagnosis: The content you’re generating and promoting is probably properly optimized; you’re getting eyeballs on it which is driving traffic. Fantastic! But, it might not be the most relevant to your personas.

Solution: Again, this is going to take a bit of detective work. Look at the data to see if any of your pages, blog articles, or premium content offers are converting at a higher rate than others. If this is the case, typically you built a conversion path that was effective and made sense to your visitors in that particular instance. Maybe you wrote a blog article that tied in perfectly to an eBook that you advertised with a CTA that naturally made sense for them to download. If something isn’t converting, you need to find out why. It could be that it isn’t relevant, or it could be a problem with your page layout. If you’re getting a high click-through rate on your CTA, that isn’t the problem, but maybe a lot of people are dropping off of the landing page before filling out the form. It could be an issue with the way you position the content, or it could be something else. You can use a web analytics tool like Lucky Orange to see where people are clicking and where they stop reading to get some insight. A simple change to where the form is placed on a page can do wonders. Being a marketer is a lot of trial and error when it comes to conversions, and using data and analytics to build an informed hypothesis before making a change will be much more effective than panicking and changing everything all at once.

Symptom 3: “I’m not getting any customers!”

Now you might be getting conversions, but none of the leads you are converting are turning into customers. Why?

Diagnosis: You might be converting a lot of unqualified traffic into leads, or your marketing funnel might be broken where it’s most critical. Or, the problem could be attributed to your sales team that is ultimately working the leads that you’re generating from marketing.

Solution: You know I’m going to tell you to look at analytics again, but only because it’s necessary. And, when your bottom line is on the line, it’s pretty important to take some action to fix what’s going on as soon as you can. A deep-dive into your CRM will be what really serves you well at this point. Take a look at the contact’s history; what did they convert on? How did they originally find your site? What pages have they been visiting? You may be able to gain some insight here and see that they are visiting your site a lot but can’t seem to find what they are looking for. If that’s the case, maybe you have some gaps in your funnel. You could have a ton of awareness-style offers but nothing to take them further along towards the bottom of the funnel. 

On the other hand, you could dig into the contact and find out they are somebody that your company would never want to do business with in the first place. If this is the case, you need to find out why a lot of unqualified leads are converting on your content and figure out ways to fix it; this could mean changing your keyword strategy or repositioning a piece of content, for example. If you dive into the data and find that you are actually passing off a lot of qualified leads to sales, then your problem may be with the way the sales team is reaching out and working the leads. Putting some analytics in place to close the loop and gain visibility into what happens to your lead after you hand it off can open your eyes to a lot of other issues you didn’t know existed. That’s why injecting sales enablement into your campaign is also extremely important.

I mentioned before that there isn’t a doctor that you can go to for your marketing problems. But the truth is, here at Revenue River, this is what we do every day. I’ve given you some tools and tips on ways that you can use analytics to diagnose and solve your marketing issues, but if you want a little extra help, you can get a diagnostic assessment from the digital marketing doctors here at Revenue River, too.

Either way, the data holds the answer to all of your marketing woes; you just need to know where to look!