 You try to make sense of your online marketing data, but what do all those numbers mean? What story is your data telling you? Well, why do characters in any good story do what they do? It’s ultimately a combination of their motives and their circumstances. Your job is to find characters (visitors) with the right motives (through behavior targeting), and provide the best circumstances (through optimization).
We all know that a good story is built around Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. Those last two are out of order from the way I learned them, but for good reason. All the others are merely facts. Important pieces of the story, but they all lead to the Why. The Why is what makes the data actionable. So let’s take a look at the elements of our story:
Who: segment & target
Believe it or not, data can reveal a lot about your characters and their motives. Search keywords and specific pages viewed are two ways to reveal motives or intent. You can segment on common keyword themes or sections of your Web site to group your characters by motive. You might also separate visitors who are familiar with your company (email campaigns, returning visitors, or those searching for you by name) from those who are not. This can help you see where they are in the buying cycle.
What: choose the right goals
Most online marketers are at one end of the spectrum or the other. They’re either satisfied with simply getting traffic to their Web site, or they only care about conversions. But you might see from exploring motives and your buying cycle that some of your characters might be better measured by other goals, like whitepaper downloads, email newsletter subscriptions, or even simply the average time on site.
When: establish baselines & watch trends
You’re always changing something, right? You’re sending a new email marketing campaign, tweaking search marketing campaigns, launching new products or content. A changing environment affects the way your characters respond. Choose report date ranges with an awareness of these changes, and compare recent performance to longer-term baselines. The Lyris HQ What's Changed Report makes this easy to do.
Where: follow the click path
We tend to focus only on comparing campaigns, assuming that our email creative or search keywords are the only critical points in the process. But what if the real problem is with a landing page or a step in your conversion process? Separately measure each key “plot twist” in your characters’ journey. Compare email campaigns, search keywords, search ads, landing pages and critical steps in the conversion process.
How: put the pieces together
As you compare these various steps, a picture should begin to emerge. It might help to compare groups of visitors in the Lyris HQ Funnel Report, and to create more specific segments on suspected trouble spots (such as “visitors from my latest email campaign who abandoned their shopping cart”).
Why: test your theories
This is where you get to play detective. By segmenting visitors based on their motives and observing how they responded to their circumstances, form some theories about what circumstances might match their motives better. Consider targeting your email marketing or search campaign more precisely. Consider changing the landing page or the conversion process. Test, measure, repeat.
Your customers are the protagonists in the story you’ve created for them. But you can’t expect them to be superheroes that overcome impossible odds to succeed in the end. It’s way too easy for them to jump into your competitor’s story instead. So focus on characters whose motives match your solutions, and continually measure and improve the circumstances you’ve created for them.
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About the Author
Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.
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