Tracking ROI metrics

More than our clients, we want to track the real ROI as we want to stay focused on ROI to survive for long. There is no way a business can survive without creating real value for its clients. Now there are different aspects of real value:

• Work is real value (Setting up the channels, building assets in those channels etc)
• Organic growth is difficult to come by but if we can get a start there, its of real great value (like 2 keyword ranking in Google Local, 1 keyword ranking in Google, first 1000 relevant fans in facebook etc)
• Sales is ofcourse the real value (This is where the money come in)

Now even if you look at sales, it has aspects:

• Branding for sales (People are introduced about your business, they talk about it and can recall at a right when needed)
• Referral for sales (People are introduced about your business, they are WOWed at your services, they recommend others)
• Direct Sales

For all these, you need to prepare your business. It’s one thing to create real value for clients and its another thing to prove it using a website that you are creating real value for your clients. People don’t believe whats written on websites (All marketeres are Liars by Seth Godin). For direct sales, you need to prove you are great, you need to prove you are better than others. For referral for sales, you need to go beyond direct sales, you need to WOW them many times and continiously so that they can remember you and recommend to their friends (most tough to come by). For Branding, you need to keep reaching out to people many times without being hated so that people can start finding you cool and can recall at times of need.

Now with so much complexity involved in marketing, how do we get to tracking ROI?

We must agree upon a costing and number of hours we will be spending (It goes as effort metrics). For result metrics, we put all metrics in one excel sheet and then divide the metrics in different bands and assign weightages. Using that we can see the score, we call it ROI Score. Also we calculate performance metrics (We compare current metrics with last week, average of last 6 week, best of last 6 week and give a score).

ROI metrics – Comparing with last month or week is not enough

When we started we used to compare with last week/month but we realized it is not real. Example: We website traffic went down from 10,000 to 1,000 in one month, then in next month if it comes to 2000 it will show a 100% improvement which is not a right picture. We track it based on average and best of last weeks/months. We also draw a graph for all the months and weeks to show a better picture.

Google analytics data is not sufficient for ROI metrics?

We also send client education series to help you understand different aspects of tracking. Different type of tracking, traffic from the real users, traffic from client’s company and Techshu’s company should be avoided. If sales is happening (online or offline, phone or email), it must be tracked to the channel being responsible for it.

Digital Marketing and Social Media ROI metrics in bands