How do you compare the absolute first?
A friend of mine, let’s call him Rick, just shared a little dilemma with me – and then with you. Rick is dealing with a difficult client and wants your opinion.
Rick is the Digital Media Manager at Kroxxi (made up name). His client is a heath care provider in the U.S. who just spent $500,000 on a three-month campaign to increase their online exposure.
Kroxxi planned and launched a campaign including PPC, bus ads, magazine ads and other goodies. Three months later the client’s site shows an increase in visitors by 30%.
When Rick reported the 30% increase to the client’s representative, who I’ll call Trevor, the response was, “is that good?” And here’s the dilemma.
Rick assured his client that a 30% increase in visitors is a good sign, but that didn’t satisfy Trevor. Trevor needs more convincing proof that the effort worked. He wants to be able to approach his company’s president and show the campaign was a success, ask for more funds, and look good, of course
It seems to me that Trevor wants some kind of case or universal benchmark so he can compare the results.
The problem is that since this is the first tracked online campaign for this client and universal benchmarks don’t exist, he can’t compare it with anything.
Kroxxi doesn’t have a client similar enough to make a valid comparison; and profiled case studies on the Web are no good since they’re either unusually good or unusually bad.
So, how do you convince such a client that the effort worked?
Please share your opinion bellow. (Rick will be reading but, since he wants to remain anonymous, I’ll relay any comments on his name.)
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After reading the blog post, it seems to me that the client isn’t necessarily difficult – just uninformed. This client admittedly doesn’t know what a good ROI (via traffic to their site) target should be. Now “Rick’s” job if he wants continued business is to convince the client that the dollars were well spent.
Has the client been tracking traffic to their site prior to hiring Rick? Does the client know about how much each visitor is bringing their company?
Rick has two jobs: First, he must figure out roughly how many new visitors were brought to the client’s site. This means looking at the site’s history and seeing how many visitors the site usually gets this time of year, as well as factoring in projected traffic growth. Once you have this number, Rick can say that all visitors above this number were likely a result of his firm’s actions. Lets call this number X.
Rick’s second job is to estimate how much money the client will receive because of the firm’s actions. This is a bit trickier because Rick can’t necessarily know his client’s sales or profit margins. Let’s call the revenue per visitor Y. If X * Y > $500,000 (being the amount spent by the client), then the campaign was a success, and it can be easily communicated to the client.
If the number is close, remember that there are also a few other things to consider, such that each visitor may be inclined to spend more, or that the trend in traffic may have been slowing down before the campaign was started. Just keep in mind that while statistics can be used to say anything, you’re much better off being honest and up front with the data presented.
I wouldn’t think of this in terms of universal benchmarks but instead I’d focus on original goals of the campaign. What were they hoping to achieve? Increased visibility, an influx of new visitors, increased sales conversions, more repeat visits, longer visits, more time spent on site? The only way you can really measure the return on investment is to establish measurable goals in the beginning then use the analytics to see how it all worked out.
In theory a 30% increase is great. But it depends on who they are and what they do on the site. If those new visitors have a 95% bounce rate, don’t spend much time on the site and don’t buy your widgets/read your informational materials or whatever you want them to do, then the increase wasn’t a success because the new visitors didn’t contribute to the main goals.
But if they did buy/read/whatever then you are on track. Now you can also compare your analytics results to sales figures or lead generations. Did this new 30% lead to increased revenue? Did the increased revenue amount to more than the cost of the campaign? If not, can you show that a continuation of the campaign will continue to increase the growth in useful visitors? Will that growth bring you to a tipping point at which the increased revenue pays for the cost of the campaign?
If the goal was something else, like an increase in name recognition or brand reputation, what was the original plan to measure it’s success? For something like that one might have arranged to do surveys before and after the campaign to show how visibility and reputation were enhanced.
I think the key here is to match the results data he provides to the original goals. If he frames the results in terms that clearly explain the return in investment, then the company should understand if the campaign achieved as they’d hoped.
.-= Heidi Cool´s last blog ..Your Flash site won’t seem so cool if visitors can’t use it. =-.
Definitely agree w/ Heidi’s post. As a PR consultant it has become harder and harder to demonstrate one’s efforts, specially online. I suggest establishing metrics at the begining would be a wise thing to do, that would allow to compare results to something achievable and justify the investment.
Danny, Heidi, Lara and all of you who answered through LinkedIn, thank you for your input.
The answers have given great suggestions and brought up many good questions I think Rick can answer.
Rick’s a busy guy, but I’ll try to catch him one of these days a write an interview with the most relevant points of this conversation.
Cheers – Jose
“Trevor needs more convincing proof that the effort worked.” How would you prove this? Not very simple. That’s why it is important to answer the question from “the client’s perspective” which should have been established before Rick started. Find the pain points and try to address them and more importantly, keep the client informed of the progress, may be more frequently in the beginning. Again was the 30% increase, a gradual increase or a result of spiked visits in response to some advertising efforts. Of course next question is, can you sustain the 30% traffic and increase it going forward?
Another thing that the client would be interested (in my opinion) would be the percent of traffic that each advt. channel brought in. Rick would easily help the client in doing this. The client would then concentrate the resources (time, effort and money) on the ones that were more productive.
Still trying to catch Rick… I think tomorrow is the day.