Test your way forward
Change it just a bit or turn it upside down. #
Experiment, go crazy, be unorthodox, follow your instincts (or not). #
Succeed or fail big time. #
Mistakes can only be extremely harmful when they linger. So don’t let them. #
Test. Analyse. Optimise. And test again. Regularly. #
Squared Online Module 4 is called Think Optimised. A way to do that? Data collection, analysis & reporting, understanding what your data has to say. Focussing on the important things, not the noise. And taking action. Running tests. A/B or multivariate (with a clear preference towards the latter).
Let’s google-analyse it #
I was introduced to [Google Analytics](www.google.com/analytics/) a few years ago and was immediately amazed at how powerful it is. The number of things you can measure, the insight it gives you and its importance in making decisions to better distribute your advertising budget among different channels and sources, improve your website, landing page and campaign content, redefine your target market and understand the ‘what, where and when’ behind marketing, advertising and e-commerce successes and failures.
We need to approach our audience the way it wants to be approached.
And there might also be other audiences out there, really eager to be approached - but we just haven’t been doing much to reach out to them. Google Analytics can definitely help identify those, too.
Beautiful data, not overwhelming data #
However, beware: the data ocean can be perfect for getting drowned. So don’t go in there without knowing what you’re looking for and why. There are practically a million things that can be measured using a billion of metrics. Are you trying to generally raise awareness around your brand or want to drive highly relevant traffic to your website and improve your conversion rates? An ultra-targeted campaign could result in a drop in overall traffic, but a substantially higher quality of leads and thus goal completions.
No one-man show: channels need one another #
By now, and especially for all those that embarked on the Squared Online journey and are now close to the end, it’s almost intuitive to think about multiple touch points that influence customer decisions all the way through from the Stimulus and ZMOT stages to adding a brand/product to their consideration set and finally making the purchase. Marketing & advertising activities on different channels either complement each other or overlap and always collaborate to amplify the brand message. It’s vital to know which paths your audience follows before completing a goal. And to do this you need to know how multiple channels interact within & across the different stages of the funnel. This is why’s there is a lot more to conversion attribution than “the last click takes it all”. Marketers need to define the attribution model that best works for them and tailor it to the structure and characteristics of their campaigns.
So, test, test and test again. And, as we say on Squared, fail fast. It won’t hurt you, it will only make you wiser.
El.
