This is a great quote:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker (1838-1922)
Business owners can be rightfully cynical of agencies: some agencies thrive on valuable retainers where revenue is certain regardless of work they achieve. Some agencies hide behind confusing data where the more of anything they get, the better they look. It takes a different type of agency to stand by delivering tangible benefits.
Relevant
Back to the quote. Wanamaker, a consumer retailer, is accredited with this statement, made some 100 years ago. It reflects a time where consumer advertising was in print and distributed through press, flyers, billboards and transport. In fairness, many companies today might say the same words even in today’s digitally-distributed world, where, at least for marketers, data is critical to business growth.
I have had the privilege of working alongside a business with growth ambitions. When I started it was running PPC advertising, had a website and was in the early stage of adopting a CRM. It was doing many things right. The reason for me going in was that there was a need to better structure the marketing for growth. The phrase “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” wasn’t said by the MD, but Wanamaker’s statement really applied.
Wasted Advertising Spend
In order to make sense of what was going on, I dived in to the data. Something was clear; the PPC was expensive and there was no evidence that it was effective. The incumbent agency was tracking ‘Time on Site’ and ‘Page Views’ of the contact page as Conversions. (If you don’t know what that sentence means, please get in touch.) This meant that the company was under the impression that the campaign was doing awesome! The reality was different. It didn’t know which half of the money was wasted advertising spend.
Within a couple of months of taking over the PPC account, I was able to realise significant changes:
The first metric to note is that the traffic has been reduced by 53.5%. In some companies that will be bad (for example, those that believe marketing is a numbers game). For my client, this was actually good; we identified that most of the PPC traffic was not what the company wanted. This was because of lazy keyword management and other sources of poor quality traffic. In reducing these we have realised some notable changes indicating an improvement in quality: reduced Bounce Rate, an increase in Page Views in spite of a massive reduction in Users (which has resulted in a massive improvement in Pages Per Session).
Results Driven Marketing
Most importantly, we have been able to identify what advertising budget was being wasted and correct it. Headway Marketing is about results and this metric is just one way that I demonstrate success.
For businesses that are on a plateau, this approach to revitalising marketing is great. It offers an accessible and quick to implement approach to take back control of marketing and advertising spend in order to begin the exciting journey to growth (and begin to eliminate wasting money on ineffective marketing).
Need help? Get in touch.