What are they and why do they matter?
One of the major benefits of digital and online marketing is the ability to actively track and monitor a campaign. Through Analytics, it is possible to collect monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and even real-time data on what your online marketing campaign is doing, and to answer important questions, such as: How many clicks am I getting? How many impressions have I received? How do my display ads compare to my native ads? (If you read that line and thought, “what the heck is a native ad?” check out our blog post about them here.)
Before launching your campaign, however, it is important to set some goals. The first thing that most people think of are clicks and click through rates, but is the true end-goal of your campaign to get as many clicks as you can on a digital ad? Probably not. It is far more likely that your goal is to increase your business revenue through selling more online goods or signing a new customer up for your service. Is getting clicks important? Of course. But it should not be your ultimate end goal.
As important as clicks are when it comes to getting the most out of your digital campaign, it is almost more important to first identify what your business goals truly are. Seems obvious, we know, but it’s a step that is often overlooked. With this two-part blog series, we’ve decided to go back to the basics and share a fundamental marketing strategy with you: identifying micro- vs. macro-conversion goals.
Your true end goals are what we call macro-conversion goals. These are the goals that most closely align to your business goals. A good example of a macro goal might be the completion of a sale or a new customer earned. Micro-conversion goals on the other hand, are all the little trackable events set up along the way to determine what steps a customer took before completing the macro-goal. Understanding this pipeline will help you understand more about your customer and how they got to the end goal (or where they may have fallen off). Your conversion pipeline is kind of like a game of Chutes & Ladders, and it’s our job to help all the players find the most direct path to the end.
It is very important for a business to understand and be able to correctly identify their micro- and macro-conversion goals prior to launching any marketing campaign. Otherwise, you are spending money in a “spray and pray” method without really knowing why or how something worked or didn’t work. This is a very inefficient way to spend marketing dollars, and one that we try to avoid at all costs (pun intended).
It’s entirely possible to run a hugely “successful” digital campaign that boasts high click-through-rates and a high impression share, but ends up with no new customers by the end of it. On the other hand, it’s also possible to run a “not-so-successful” campaign (from a click standpoint) that ends up bringing in more customers than you know how to deal with.
Our point is, in order to be effective and efficient with your marketing spend, you have to be able to link micro- and macro-goals together, and understand how one affects the other. Once you know this, you can make informed decisions and adjustments to try and achieve as many macro-goals as possible. Luckily for us, digital marketing is very fluid, which means we can fine-tune things as the campaign progresses, instead of waiting until the end and saying, “Okay, next time we will do this.”
Alright, alright, I get it now—micro- and macro-conversion goals are important. So, how do I go about identifying my micro- and macro-goals, anyway?
Find out in our next post, part 2.
Interested in learning more about our services? Contact Angela Harless at 918-938-7912 or [email protected] to discuss your business challenges and how AcrobatAnt can help you reach your goals.
AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901