IF YOU’RE INTERESTED in doing better in 2019, then January is a great month to understand what happened in Q4 2018. As a jeweler, you likely did more advertising, made more sales and had more website traffic in this quarter than in any other. So let’s take a look at four tips to help you create and understand digital reports for your business.
1. Focus on These Numbers
There are a seemingly endless amount of things to measure with digital marketing. To make things simpler, we’ll share of few of the metrics that we typically pay attention to for Paid Search and Social Media advertising. Include each of these numbers in your report broken out by campaign, so that you can tell how healthy your bridal campaigns are doing versus your fashion jewelry campaigns (etc.).
Paid Search. For ads that we show on Google or Bing, we usually keep track of the number of Clicks, the Cost Per Click (CPC), and the Click-Through Rate (CTR).
- Clicks – The clicks give you an overall idea of how many people visited your website for the particular campaign. It’s a good general number to know about.
- Cost Per Click (CPC) – Your average cost per click can go up and down based on a number of factors. Some are in your control like the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. Some are out of your control, like the amount of competition.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Your click-through rate is how often people click on your ad after seeing it. There are a lot of choices on a Google search results page, so something like 2% – 3% is generally healthy for a jewelry campaign.
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Social Media. For social media platforms like Facebook, we usually focus on the Results, Cost Per Result, and Frequency.
- Results and Cost Per Result – The “result” on Facebook depends on the goal of the campaign. It can be a click if that’s the goal, but for most Facebook campaigns, the goal is “engagement”. This can take the form of a like, comment, or share.
- Frequency – The Frequency metric tells you how often on average your ad was seen by an individual in a given period of time. A healthy number for a jeweler here is between 3 and 5 for a quarterly report. This is because Facebook doesn’t like too much repetition of the same ads and will add new people to show it to over the quarter.
2. Look for the True Meaning Behind the Metrics
As you track these numbers from report to report, you’ll find that you’ll instinctually judge the health of your advertising based on whether they go up or down. Understand that when the numbers look off, you always want to look deeper. Don’t simply assume that the ads aren’t working or that you shouldn’t advertise on that platform. Here are some questions to ask to help you dig deeper.
- How do my numbers compare to the same period the year prior?
- Were there any major differences between this year and last year that could affect these numbers (website was down, ran a major sale last year, etc.)?
- What are some other metrics that I can look at to corroborate what I think is happening?
3. Make Your Reports Look Beautiful
You’re more likely to be interested in your reports if they look nice. You could do this by using a nice looking reporting template. We use Google Data Studio which makes it easy to make nice looking reports with lots of features.
4. Do Reporting Quarterly
We recommend quarterly reporting. It’s important to give your ads enough time to show results before making dramatic changes or killing them altogether. Quarterly reporting helps you to gather enough data to make the proper decisions.
Conclusion. Use these four tips to reflect back on your Q4 2018 digital advertising this month and every quarter thereafter. You’ll gain a better understanding of the quality of your ads and how to do even better in 2019!