Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

If I could get you to do one single marketing-related thing in 2010 it would be to start actively measuring – and acting on – the performance of your marketing program. If you’re already measuring, start holding people accountable. And if you’re already doing that, call me. We probably have some valuable data to share.

It doesn’t matter what size company you are. Setting objectives, measuring progress and holding yourself – or someone else – accountable may not be sexy, but it will make a huge difference in where you are this time next year.

I’ll admit my interest in getting you to start measuring is not without a self-serving factor. I know you and your company will get great benefit from it, and I also know the more aware you are of your marketing programs’ performance the more likely you are to turn to Clicks ‘n Conversions for help when the time comes.

You don’t have to take my word for the power of measuring. Just try it for yourself.

Over the next few articles, I’ll give you a little peak into how we measure things at Clicks ‘n Conversions.

What we measure

At the highest level, we track our progress with a weekly report that shows us the following:

• Deals in progress. Chances are good many of you already track this metric. We define a deal being in progress when an opportunity has been defined and we can put a potential revenue number to it. Ours is a complex sale and our website is a lead generation site. For those of you with a simpler (I didn’t say easier) sale and an e-commerce site, this metric might be something like free product trials.
• Warm prospects in the pipeline. This metric separates the casual inquires or simple website visitors from the people who really may have a need for our services and the resources to work with us. If you have a conversation with us by phone or by email and we agree there is something worth pursuing then you become a warm prospect.
• New business secured. This one is easy. It’s a sale. Who doesn’t track that?
• Website Visitors. This metric is important to me because I know how much traffic we need to be driving to our website under our current conversion efficiency to ensure we’ll have enough opportunities to hit our sales objectives. You can figure this out too (if you haven’t already done so) by using our Website Traffic Calculator.
• Current conversion rates. There are a bunch of these. At the top, we look at the percentage of website visitors who eventually step forward and want to communicate directly with me. You might call this a sales-ready lead. For an ecommerce site, this metric would be the percentage of website visitors who become paying customers.

There are also multiple sub-conversion rates we pay attention to. These metrics track how many people took the action(s) we wanted them to take – such as downloading a report or whitepaper, subscribing to a newsletter or contacting us.

• Deals lost. A sad metric but an important one as well. This tells us how well we’re doing at closing deals. We track not only those we lost to a competitor (fortunately a consistently low number) but also deals that were lost for lack of a decision (much more common in our world).
• Performance of individual marketing programs. At a more tactical level we also track how each of our marketing programs is performing.

Lots of companies track at least some of the information listed above – especially the ones that are closer to the point of sale. But most companies I’ve been exposed to fail to do the one thing that makes all of this meaningful In my next post – next Wednesday – I’ll reveal the secret.

See you then.