If you only take a quick glance at analytics, you could make some seriously wrong assumptions. Take this image below:
This is Google Analytic data from Q1 & 2 of 2020 versus 2019. 2019 website traffic is in orange, and 2020 is in blue. A quick glance tells us we have way less users, a lot less pageviews overall, and a slightly less average session duration. If you only used this dataset to make judgements, you'd probably assume that the ad campaign Tracking Pixel Media kicked off in early January wasn't working. This couldn't be further from the case.
Quality versus Quantity
When we set up Google Ad and Social Media campaigns, Tracking Pixel focuses on conversions - phone calls, form fills, emails, etc. Frankly, we don't care about traffic. This is the crucial difference between our campaigns and other agencies. For this client, we set up conversion-tracking through Google Tag Manager. We'll have a post on that later, so stay tuned.
With Tag Manager, we can set up our Google Ad and Facebook campaigns to optimize towards the things that keeps a small business's doors open - phone calls, emails, and form fills. I know I'm being repetitive saying that, but it is a key difference in any media campaign that you're running. Do you have a component in your campaigns that focuses on delivering conversions? If you're only focusing on "building the brand" you're missing the boat.
Take a look at the picture above again. Notice the pages per session has increased. It means a visitor is going to more pages than before. While not always a good thing - maybe they are searching harder to find the information they need - in this instance, we believe it means the visitor is more engaged. Same concept with the bounce rate decreasing. The only way to know, though, is to look at more data.
Now take a look at this chart on conversions:
First of all, there's no comparison like the last chart because the last agency had goals like "Visited Contact Page" and other meaningless metrics. Therefore, we are showing you the trend of conversions over the course of the past 2 quarters. As you can see, as our Google and Facebook Ads campaigns began to optimize for conversions, there is a gradual increase over time...especially in the volume of phone calls coming into the facility.
On our end, we see metrics like this and get excited. Even more so is when you see conversion percentages off of Google Ad campaigns like we are seeing:
This client is in the professional services sector, which is not known for conversion rates this high. Their typical averages tend to be around 3-5%, at best! We are triple that rate - and mostly due to phone calls coming into the facility. So needless to say, Tracking Pixel is happy with this performance. However, we can only see one side of the story. Are these phone calls, emails, and form fills generating business?
What Matters Most is Business
This morning, when discussing business and trajectory of ad spend, our client said business has never been so full as it has in the past three months - even with a recent expansion of the facility's capacity. The client literally said, "I cannot handle more business right now without more staff."
That's awesome, right? We were definitely happy to hear the news, even though it means we are not increasing our ad spend and thus TPM's revenue. But that's if they don't have more staff...
And guess what our next campaign is all about?