What I Learned with 3 Months of Marketing Data

by | Jan 6, 2020 | Useful, What Excel Can Do, Why Use Excel | 0 comments

Back to Articles
What I Learned with 3 Months of Marketing Data

You’ve probably heard the saying that you can’t keep on doing the same thing, and expect different results. The big problem is understanding what works, and what doesn’t. We’re overwhelmed with all sorts of blog posts like this one, telling us which marketing platforms are the best. Most are written by people who are trying to sell you a marketing solution, so are probably shown from their point of view.

Before you take my findings as fact, or change your marketing habits to suit, please just remember than this post is more about you understanding your data than it is about me telling you about marketing. I am not a marketing expert, I create bespoke spreadsheets to analyse data such as this. This is what I have found about my business, and I would very much like to help you understand about yours. This doesn’t just apply to marketing, but all areas of your business.

Anyhow, here we go.

Clicks to the website per platform

As you can see, I have broken all my posts into campaigns, as I wanted to see which campaigns were working better on what platform. How do I gauge the success of a campaign? I simply look at the clicks to the website, the more clicks, the more successful I deem it. Here we can see that some campaigns seemed to have worked better on some platforms, and some were more successful overall. This helps me to decide which campaigns to continue in the new year, and which ones to change. It also makes me consider different campaigns on different platforms.

Just to be clear, in the case of Facebook and LinkedIn, this data is only for posts, posted via the business pages. It doesn’t include my personal interactions in groups and on the platforms. That also brings in business. 

Activity per platform
Posting on social media is not just about clicks to the website, it is also about interaction with your clients and potential clients.This means that interaction (or action as I have called it) on your posts is also something to consider. Here you can see how the different campaigns compare on the different platforms, based on actions taken on the posts. Actions could be anything from a like to a comment or share. This is interesting as it differs to the first graph. What action should be taken here? Well that all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
Impressions per platform
There is another aspect to marketing. Eyes on your material. Simply put, even if people don’t interact with you, if they see your material, it can have an impact on them. This is particularly relevant early on when you are building a brand. Making people aware of you is key, so this shows how each campaign compares on the platforms when it comes to views. Some say that this is a vanity metric, and I would tend to agree, but it may serve a purpose for you.
Website clicks per post
The last metric that I want to show is the clicks per post. This is quite key, as it shows how each post compares on average on each platform, per campaign. This shows which campaigns have performed on which platform. Similar to the first graph, but I don’t necessarily post the same number of posts in each campaign, so this one compares like for like as it takes the average. Seeing as my main aim with my marketing is to get clicks to the website, this is key for me. What is your main objective with your marketing?
The main purpose of marketing
Let us not forget that the main point of marketing is sales. Now I don’t have the luxury of tracking sales to a campaign, but I do track where my sales come from, and this graph shows that most sales come from existing clients asking for more jobs to be done. Having said that, these clients have to have originally come from somewhere, so they would have started from one of the marketing campaigns. Understand where your clients come from, and what works and what doesn’t, then you can adapt and improve. If you don’t know what works, how do you know what to change?

So there you have it. My marketing results from 3 months. It was pretty much how I expected it, based on how I use the different platforms. The one thing that I found particularly useful was the ‘clicks per post’ breakdown of the different campaigns. That gives me a good idea of what campaigns to kill, and what else I should try in the future.

The objective of this post is not to tell you what platform you need to use, but to show you how important it is to understand your data. This is not just for marketing but just about everything in your business. Sales, products, staff performance, project success, process tracking, and various other aspects of business, all produce data. If you have access to the data, we make spreadsheets to analyse that data and give you the information that YOU need to make the right changes. If that sounds like something you need, please get in touch, we’d love to talk to you about it.

Contact Us
Back to Articles