No matter the size of your business, the world of digital marketing can be intimidating. It’s easy enough to spend money online, but it’s much more difficult to figure out what you are getting in return for the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars you are shelling out every month on digital advertising.
It’s quite likely that your business is diversifying their online ad spend, dedicating a few dollars to social media, paid search, video advertising, and email marketing, among other tactics. Each of those individual campaigns will yield slightly unique metrics that may require some digging to uncover completely. It’s a pain!
It doesn’t have to be this difficult. In fact, there are now many tools available that make analyzing the overall performance of your digital marketing spend a breeze. Gone are the days of sifting through confusing web interfaces or looking through bland spreadsheets. Instead, businesses can view their campaign performance through easy-to-use (and easy on the eye) reporting suites.
There are plenty of free options for in-depth reporting that allow businesses to manage their own digital marketing internally. Chief among those tools is Google’s Data Studio, which can integrate with many platforms, including GoogleAds and Facebook. But it’s far from the only course of action.
Ensuring your marketing data flows into a robust reporting suite is of paramount importance in order to get the most out of your budget. Here are five reasons why:
Discover Your Most Profitable Channels
Where are you getting the best value? Which platform is leading to sales? Where is money being wasted? All those questions can be answered by a reporting dashboard that includes relevant performance metrics, making it as easy as possible to determine where you should keep spending and where you should make a change.
Save Time
Time is money. The less time you need to spend crunching numbers, the faster you can make decisions and allocate money. As mentioned previously, improved reporting puts a stop to scrolling through Excel files or navigating through complicated advertising platforms. It gets right to the good stuff, limits how long you must research your marketing plan, and lets you focus on running the rest of your business.
Learn About Your Audience
Any reporting platform worth its salt will go beyond the superficial numbers of clicks and impressions. It will also tell you about the real people who are seeing your ads and will breakdown performance by age range, gender, location, and just about anything else that may be relevant for your specific campaign. You just might discover that the type of people interested in your business are quite different than the audience you expected to reach.
Improved Transparency
It hurts to admit it, but not every marketing campaign is a success. However, that can be spun into a positive. An in-depth reporting suite will be able to explain why a particular campaign struggled. Perhaps the age targeting was all wrong. Maybe the ads themselves missed the mark. The reporting can segment these different aspects of a campaign and examine possible causes for poor performance.
Stay Current
You deserve to know about everything that happens involving your business, and you deserve to know about it as soon as possible. That includes the performance of your marketing campaigns. A robust reporting platform will provide nearly real-time (give or take a couple of hours) results. This provides you with all the information you need to make your next decision.
Are you ready to make the most of your advertising spend with the help of a robust reporting platform? Compulse Integrated Marketing’s staff is prepared to guide you through the process and help you dominate online. Contact us today!