How to Identify Your Most Profitable Digital Marketing Channels

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Things change quickly.

Whether it’s an AdWords campaign, a really big email send, or content you’ve invested time into creating, most marketing teams can’t afford to wait to measure its effect.

Why?

For starters, you need to be able to report impact to your clients, bosses, and/or team. That’s table stakes.

Secondly, and perhaps less obvious is that you need those insights to help prioritize and direct the rest of your week, month, quarter, and year.

No matter how big your team is, resources aren’t endless.

When it comes to identifying the specific website traffic sources that are showing a return, you and your team need to be able to know this quickly in order to prioritize the right work, in the right channels, going forward.

At Impulse Creative, we stress the importance of keeping the right data front and center so our clients know the things that influence traffic and lead flow without having to pour through spreadsheets to get those insights.

One of the things we do is break down website traffic sources in order to get a more granular look into how each channel is performing…

How to track the performance of your digital marketing channels

Video Transcription

What’s up, everybody?

I’m Remington from Impulse Creative, and I’m super excited to be able to share some information with you for this Data Snack.

We’re super, super in love with Databox dashboards and one of the reasons is that day-by-day, hour-by-hour, it can influence decisions that can allow for you to modify your strategy on the fly.

And what I mean by that is we’re in a super busy world of marketing and sales and things change on a dime. You could be having content that you’re writing or strategies you’re working on in depth and you can’t afford to wait to see whether it flops or whether it is awesome.

So what we’ve done at Impulse Creative, and what we strive for all of our clients to do, is keep the numbers front and center and available to everyone.

You want to be able to know what is influencing traffic and what is influencing your lead flow without having to fully investigate it. And that’s one of the beauties of the Databox dashboards.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you one of the dashboards that we’ve set up and you could do this with Google Analytics or HubSpot in order to grab information to understand at a glance how well your marketing and your sales are doing.

So when you jump into Databox, we have created a dashboard that just goes over traffic and general lead flow. What we’ve done here is we’ve broken up each of the website traffic sources into larger buckets. So for your organization, you may have different people that are responsible for different segments of your market depending on the size of your company, but a lot of smaller businesses are just looking at increasing traffic and leads, and they’re not specifically looking at the different areas where that traffic can happen.

So what you can see here is we have a dashboard that is separating organic traffic, social media traffic, paid traffic, and direct traffic. The idea would be that all of these would be in the green month-over-month.

What we do is we roll on the last 30 days for our template so that we’re looking at just in general, whether there’s a continuous increase. We want to be able to see where all that website traffic comes from. But when you look at organic traffic, what’s important is to break it down to understand whether you’re improving from an organic search point of view or whether you’re declining.

So social media and this example are great because what we can do now is we can kind of show an example of, “wait a minute what’s happening?” You wouldn’t notice too much overall if you looked at just your traffic in a big picture, but you can see our traffic is up 20% just over the past couple of days. Of course, we have paid traffic and it’s zero because we have a significant lead flow Impulse Creative, where we don’t necessarily need to do paid traffic, so obviously zero at the moment, but if we had paid search, we obviously want to make sure that we’re understanding of budgets and we’re understanding of the traffic being driven. Then you’ve got direct traffic, which is every marketer’s thorn in the side, but at the same time, it can show brand exposure.

You also know that there’s going to be some overlap of direct traffic that is going to be essentially from all the rest of the channels. It’s just not being reported correctly.

So when we break down and look at all of those areas of traffic, the idea is we want them all green, but the beauty of these charts is you get to see these spikes. So immediately, the first thing I look at as, “wow, we’ve got a spike in social media. I wonder what we did.” But if you notice down here, we also have a spike in website leads that have almost the same shape. And so the idea is to understand what happened and what can we do to embrace and leverage this further? So we can dig in and we can start to look at that.

Now, if we look over here, you’ll see that the lead flow, based on the two charts, you would assume that the lead flow was up in general for social media because the traffic and leads were.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case. So if we’re just looking at the charts alone, without looking and referencing the data against each other, we would see based on this chart that social media is up and so we’re getting more social media leads. So it’s very important to break this stuff down so you understand what’s happening.

The other area is organic search. You want to keep track of how much of your traffic is coming from organic search versus all of the other channels you focus on.

On a month-by-month basis, you can understand how much traffic is being generated and break down and understand the specifics of where that traffic is coming from. Because we do a lot of content at Impulse, we want to know the top performing blog posts a month-over-month.

What you can see here is we’ve got some blog posts that are performing well. You can start to see what is starting to drive traffic just from the blogs that you’re creating. That can be a very easy way to influence new blog posts that you write going forward.

So at the end of the day, I want you guys to segment out the metrics that matter for your business so that you, at a glance, can share relevant insights with your team, boss, board, etc.

I’m Remington from Impulse Creative, and that is your Data Snack. If you have any questions about what I’ve done here, please feel free to hit me up on Twitter. Or, you can reach out to me or anyone at Impulse Creative. Have a great day.