Marketing is hard when the economy isn’t doing well.
Your business might be struggling due the general nationwide downturn, or you might be impacted by one of the regional slowdowns. With Synthesis being based in Lower Hutt, we can tell you that the widespread impact of the job losses in central government in Wellington is very real.
If sales are down, how can you tell if your business has a problem with its marketing, or is just being impacted by bigger economic forces?
The answer, if you use your website as one of your marketing “hubs” and especially if you sell online, is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
Analytics is one of the Google big three that we recommend all businesses use. See this blog for more information.
If you don’t know if you have Google Analytics for your website, check with whoever manages the site for you. If you can’t work out if you have got Analytics set up for your website or not, or if you need some help setting it up, give us a call, we can help.
Traffic Acquisition
The key metric that can tell you what is happening with your website, and by extension your business, is called traffic acquisition. It’s under Report – Acquisition when you are in Google Analytics.
Seeing month by month traffic source data isn’t built into Analytics (amazingly). If you get a monthly website performance report from a marketing agency, they will be able to include a month-on-month graph. The other way to do it is to grab the data and make a graph yourself.
In the top right of the screen, you can set the date range that you are interested in, and in this case, you want to use the last full month.
Once you have set your dates, on the left-hand side of the table you will see the different sources of traffic to your website.
So, what do this all mean?
- ‘Organic Search’ is traffic coming from search engines
- ‘Direct’ is from people typing in your web address or using a bookmark or similar.
- ‘Paid Search’ is traffic coming to your website from your Google Ads.
- ‘Organic Social’ is from people finding you on social media (but not from paid posts or adverts on social media).
- ‘Referral’ is people that have come from clicking on a link on another website, blog etc.
Other sources you might see include:
- ‘Cross-network’ which is traffic from Google Ads that display in places other than plain Search, such as Display, Youtube, Gmail etc.
- ‘Unassigned’ means the source wasn’t tracked.
Seeing the trends
Add the ‘Sessions’ numbers beside each of those sources to your graph generating software of choice. We use Canva to do stuff like this as it’s lots quicker and easier to use than Excel.
Repeat the process of changing the date range in Analytics and recording the data for as many months as you want to go back, and you should end up with a table that looks like this:
Once you have got the data for at least three, and preferably six or more months, and graph it, you should start to see some trends.
If you see traffic from one source dropping when all the others are staying roughly the same month-on-month, that tells you there might be an issue with that marketing channel. In this case it’s obvious that there is an issue with Paid Search (Google Ads), and you need to dig into what’s happening.
If you see a trend of overall traffic to your website dropping, but all sources are decreasing roughly similar amounts each month, then this is a sign that your business is fighting economic headwinds.
While not as easy as fixing a problem with one digital marketing channel, there are things that you can do to make sure that your marketing is working as well as possible, even if the economy isn’t playing along. We’ve done a few blog posts on this recently, including Marketing in Tough Times and The Hard Or Hidden Parts Of Traditional Marketing.
In a nutshell, what you need to do is go back to basics and make sure that your marketing plan is up-to-date and reflects recent economic changes, and you are getting all the marketing fundamentals right.
Call in the experts
If you need help working out why your marketing isn’t working and what impact the economy is having on it, just contact us. We’re happy to sit down with you for a free initial chat to see what we can do to help.
Once we know how we can help, we’re happy to give you some quotes for getting you out of your marketing hole.
Synthesis Marketing, fighting tough times with better business and smarter marketing.
