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January 18, 2007
The Secret to Making Money with Organization
I'm addicted to organization. It's so satisfying to take a tangled-up mess of a situation (whether it's a shoe closet or a business process) and straighten it out into a neat and tidy condition. Another area of potential organization nirvana has recently come to my attention: Google Analytics.
Oh, I hear you laughing out there!
But it's true, and it can have a huge payoff. Comparing all of your online marketing campaigns will be MUCH easier if you remember to organize your marketing efforts from the campaign, medium, and source level.
Campaign:
Let me show you what I mean. The campaign level is like the bucket all your different marketing programs will fill. It is the "why" - why did the visitor come to the site? So if you decided to run a promotion for your online shoe site advertising your special on tennis shoes, then you might name the campaign "Tennis Shoes".
Medium:
The different media would be the avenues you use to advertise like PPC, direct mail, email, etc. It is the "how" - how did the visitor get to the site? Media are like drops of water filling your campaign "bucket".
Source:
Your sources would be the "who" of the medium you are using, and it is kind of like the molecules that make up the larger water droplets. So the source for a PPC medium would be Google, Yahoo, and MSN since you have a PPC campaign on all three sites.
Going back to the shoe store example, your campaign is "Tennis Shoes". You have some PPC ads running for your tennis shoe sale as well as some direct mail planned, so you have two media: "PPC" and "Direct Mail".
The PPC ads are going to run on Google and Yahoo, so the source would be "Google" and "Yahoo". For your direct mail, there are 3 pieces: a letter sent on 12/01/06 promoting a 1/2-off sale, another sent on 12/15/06 to your shoe representatives, and the third on 12/21/06 promoting free shipping.
So if you outlined the organization in a flow chart, it would look like this:
View Larger Version of Image
So now everybody is wondering what in the world would make all this effort worthwhile?
Well, now you can pull up your campaign, and easily compare the performance of all your different marketing efforts. You can compare PPC with direct mail (comparison of different media). You can compare different pieces of your direct mail campaign against each other (comparison of different sources). Which worked better, the offer of free shipping or the 1/2 off promotion?
You can also compare how well your Google PPC campaign worked compared to a direct mail letter (comparing the media of different sources). The possibilities are limitless, and so is the potential!
Over time you will be able to detect trends of what works best for your industry. Perhaps free shipping is the best offer around the holidays, and the best way to promote that is with postcards to your house list. Whatever it happens to be, when you achieve this new plateau of knowledge you can utilize your discoveries to generate the best response rate yet.
Does anybody have a success story they want to share about how this worked out well for you?
