I spoke at ad:tech Sydney last week, the session Don’t Sell Me … Tell Me – The Attribution Of Digital Monetisation. In it, I put forward that marketers really need to learn to love measurement, because its the only way you can work out where your sales are coming from. How are your consumers going through your digital sales funnel in the way you’re expecting them to? Or are they jumping in from social channels? Which channels can you influence or buy your way into?
A big issue for retailers both online and offline is digital comparison shopping. Consumers can be walking around the store and checking out the price of those wineglasses on amazon.com. It’s consumers revenge because if we want to find the best price or don’t get good service, we can search & find or be vocal about what we want – on the go. Or as an online retailer, you could be winning the mobile race by having a mobile optimised product site, making it really easy for consumers to buy off their smartphone.
My top points for working out where those sales are coming from:
- Look at search trends to see what the category looks like and then compare your brand to competitors and see how you’re doing.
- Make sure you’re measuring all your own channels. Google Analytics is free. See where your customers are arriving from. Is it Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon? Search what the conversation looks like, where ever the customer has come from
- Have a mobile optimised website. Always look at how many visits are coming from mobile devices. One client I’m doing SEO for, I’ve seen their ecommerce site go from 6% mobile visits to 17% mobile visits in less than a year, while revenue from mobile devices is now more than 10%.
- How do your social consumers shape up? Do you know what your customers are saying about you on Twitter? Or forums? This is where social media monitoring tools are invaluable. Sentiment analysis, gauging your share of voice, identifying issues are all possible with a social monitoring tools such as SM2 and Radian6.
- Make your customer relationship database more social. At the point of sale, identify where customers heard about the brand (or offer) from, rather than asking for their postcode.
- Learn how much your social outreach is contributing. Track from a baseline to see the impact of your activity. (See the calculating return on investment graph in the Slideshare below)
Are their any other ways you attribute your return from digital channels?
Just one point re: using search volume figures; I thought 40,500 monthly searches for the query “3d tv” seemed high, and was interested. Looking at Google’s Keyword Tool, it looks like you were using the “broad match” figures for your base, which generally is not going to give you very reliable figures as it uses Google’s… well… broad-matched option; meaning some included figures are not actually related to your target query. If, for example, you change the option to “phrase match”, that figure changes to 22,000, and if you change to exact match, that figure drops to 1900.
Not a major issue, but I’ve seen quite a few campaigns led astray due to that default “broad match” setting 🙂
Hi Matt
Thanks for your comment. I used that slide from a presentarion that I worked on with my colleague and those numbers were from him. Thank you – you’ve taught us a new level of detail. I will change the presentation and update the post on the weekend.