“What’s going on with the digital marketing for our brand?”

How often has this question of yours been responded to with something like
“The Google ads are bringing in a lot more clicks than before and we have also started with Facebook ads that look like they are working well. We are driving a lot of views and getting a ROAS of 2.”

And how many of those times have you wished to get a response which is more like

“The Google Ads ROAS has increased from 1.6 to 2.9X which can be attributed to the branded keywords being tested in the account. The CPC has also decreased for both branded and non-branded keywords by 23% and 31% respectively compared to last week.

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The initial set of Facebook ads setup this week spent $500 wherein we are testing 2 sets of video ads in parallel to find out the more compatible content theme. The 2 themes being tested are Result & testimonial content. They are currently having CTR values of 5.2% & 5.9% respectively. The revenue generated is $1050 putting the ROAS to ~2X”
Relatable, right ?

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That being said, how do you make sure you put your best foot forward to be prepared for the ever dynamic digital marketing ecosystem ?
Rely on something that is free of Bias - conscious or unconscious and that’s DATA.
Although very straightforward, it's very easy to overlook this aspect especially when you have external stakeholders like marketing agencies or freelancers involved.

Growth is a high velocity game and you need to stay up-to-date with the numerous factors that affect your businesses’ digital marketing efforts & consequent growth.

How do you look at data ? How do you know what’s important to look at and what’s not as well as WHY so?
Well, it starts with a good tracking and attribution setup, but assuming that part is already done, how do you ensure data-driven decision making all throughout ?

The answer is pretty simple, it's about changing your outlook wherein you understand the criticality of your marketing process being data-driven to give you the best bang for your buck in terms of ROI on the money spent on advertising.
Your hard earned dollars should not be at the mercy of an individual’s intuition and rather be driven by processes and metrics.

Here are important aspects to keep in mind:

• The process of setting up the right sets of ads on the social and search ads platforms has to begin with a thorough audit of your ad setup, the market landscape and your business.
  Without a holistic understanding of these aspects, an inhouse team or an external stakeholder like a performance marketing agency would be setting up ads with an incomplete understanding and consequently making a lot of intuition-based decisions.
  

• The audit process eliminates this and helps you make data-driven decisions on how the competitors are leveraging paid ads in terms of the content themes & formats being used, the brand messaging being leveraged etc to which you then draw parallel in terms of your business offering. The audit of your ad setup then gives you a clear picture of where you currently are and where you want to be.

• To assess the market and the competitors effectively, it's not only recommended to analyze the kind of content being used in the ads but the whole funnel right from the landing pages to the point of conversion. This becomes all the more critical for businesses having custom funnels and conversions for example SaaS businesses, service-based businesses etc.
  This is a tried and tested foolproof process that is proven to give your business a robust foundation for effectively leveraging digital advertising.

• The marketing analysis and its effectiveness is not at all limited to setting up the initial set of campaigns but will also be a very crucial part of scaling up your operations when it comes to digital advertising.

Effective analysis of data that your ads produce shall be key to understanding what works & what doesn’t and consequently helping you effectively scale or scrap campaigns.
This would give your business the edge when it comes to scaling up.

Below is a snip from analysis of the campaign that we do for our clients, here at Tealbox digital, that shows you the kind of details these analyses can provide resulting in a much more accurate data-driven decision making.

• Content is becoming an increasingly vital part of ad campaigns across platforms as it often is the differentiating factor for your brand and what makes the user click on an ad. The content analysis can further be detailed out to a degree wherein you have specific content themes laid out for analysis with respect to how each is resonating with your target audience.
• Here is a snip, for reference, on how that might look like.

• Segmentation of your resources becomes very crucial for success and that is something that streamlines your data and consequently your decision making. The cleanest form of segmentation is A/B Testing. Running one variation vs. another at the same time to see which works. Is this new ad copy performing better than your existing ad copy? Is this new landing page performing better than your existing landing page? Is one content theme resonating more with our Ideal Customer personas than the other ? Is a certain content format performing better than the other for us ?

As long as you’re always beating your old campaigns, scaling & stopping campaigns on time, you’re growing.

And ultimately, that’s the whole point of marketing analysis.

Not to pull reports or to produce shiny graphs, but to drive real growth for your business.