Thank goodness for analytics! For decades — heck, centuries — marketing reporting tools generally consisted of guesswork and conjecture (or old-fashioned polling) to determine which tactics were working.
Will Shakespeare would still love to know which tagline got more booties in the seats at The Curtain theater for “Romeo and Juliet”:
“Capulets get Capped!”
OR
“Montagues get Massacred!”
We’ll never know. However, thanks to ever-changing technology and algorithms, we are now able to pinpoint which efforts are delivering positive results for our clients. Marketing the Savoir Faire way with a new customer includes three essential steps, but for our longtime clients, we focus on “Running the Machine.”
That entails a lot of tactics, including regular blogging, website updates and SEO optimization, among others. While all those practices are important, they would not mean much if we weren’t able to see and provide results. Our SEO expert provides marketing performance reporting internally on a monthly basis for multiple clients so we can see which keywords are moving up or down in the organic and which new keywords those sites are ranking for, as well as any that may have dropped off.
We also look at how many searches per month per keyword to determine which ones we should focus on for blog posts, site page updates, emails, social media, etc.
For one client in particular, keywords posed an early challenge. The phrases their team used in-house did not match very well with what others in their industry were Googling. It’s not unusual for companies within the same industry to use varying terms for the same thing. And it’s also not uncommon for companies to get used to calling something they do an inward-facing term or phrase that people outside the company don’t use.
For example, when working in different newsrooms, I heard lists of articles referred to as “budgets,” “calendars” and “Itineraries,” and each term probably went back decades and was passed on to different generations of journalists.
For our client, we had to figure out what the most-common words and phrases in multiple industries were being used so we could attract more eyeballs to their website. We’re not big on tooting our own horn here at Savoir Faire, but we’re pretty darn proud of what we have been able to accomplish over a couple of years.
In 2017, our client had 16,609 website sessions, an increase of 109.92% from 2016 (which was when the new site was launched). A session is a single interaction with a website. That year, the client also had 26,100 site page views, a jump of 75.6% from 2016.
By this point, we were posting weekly blogs, updating and optimizing keywords and focusing on hot industry topics. That resulted a huge bump of sessions — 49,931 in 2018 which included 58,144 page views.
That didn’t mean it was time to pop the cork on champagne and forget it. We looked at those results and doubled down on lead generation efforts. For the first quarter of 2019, the site had 13,473 sessions and 18,355 page views. If we conservatively multiply that by four, we anticipate 53,892 sessions and 73,420 page views for the year.
In two years’ time, that is a 224.47% increase in sessions and 181.3% increase in page views. (You should have seen the smile on our client’s face last week when we met for happy hour.)
The important takeaway from this is that the work is never finished. Just this week, we brainstormed an entirely new strategy based on new reports and Google algorithm updates that could make a huge impact on leads.
As Juliet once so sweetly declared, “Wherefore art thou, Google snippets?”
Here’s how you can nab some wins with reporting tools:
