Going Granular in Your Marketing Analysis

Ice Cream Anyone?

I love ice cream and my friends know that. When someone asks my what ice cream they should buy my response is usually one of the following: 1) You should definitely get Häagen-Dazs ice cream. OR 2) OMG! Go get the Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Chocolate flavor. It’s to die for!

Now consider those two answers carefully. Which one allows you to make a decision easily if you find yourself knocking on the door of the Häagen-Dazs shop in the Burlington Mall at 6:45 am? If you like if chocolate ice cream (which I insist you should) the info in answer 2) would allow you to just walk up and say: “I’d like a medium cup of Belgian Chocolate Chocolate ice cream with jimmies on top”.

If however my reponse was 1) you’d have to window shop, look at the menu, perhaps leer at the others while they are devouring tasty ice cream till you can make up your mind. The same goes for your marketing.

In a recent blog post I wrote on HubSpot Inbound Marketing Blog I talked about tracking channel effectiveness. Let’s take a closer look at that. Consider the graph below:

Apart from knowing that your site visitors are trending up, how would you know what is driving that effect?

The reality is you get no actionable data from the graph above. You can’t see what is working and what is driving the growth of your site’s visitors. On the other hand the graph below provides some interesting insight:

By breaking down the number of visitors by each source or channel you can see that direct traffic in the graph above was cause for growth in March. At the same time there was a slight decrease in the Webinars channel because there was only one HubSpot marketing webinar in March instead of two.

The marketing takeaway is that you can spot trends by looking at graphs and stats at the high level. However the root cause of changes of trends in in the details. Go granular, dig deep and find out the root cause of your peaks or dips in your marketing reports. You will get a lot more actionable information from it.

Photo Credit: Uniqueo Manio