Nothing is more frustrating than being told things will work by a so called ‘expert’, while in your gut, you know its all gone wrong.
I’m going to share the process I go through for evaluating digital marketing performance for my own stuff and my clients’ accounts, which is strictly in the realm of businesses wanting to generate leads online. This step, all by itself, will help you escape the frustration of not knowing what your online marketing is doing and bring you the comfort of being certain around what’s working and what’s not.
And it all gets done with these three questions:
- What is it costing you to generate a lead online?
- Who is engaging with you online and how are they doing it?
- How do your competitors’ online presence stack up to yours?
It’s not easy, but I will make it simple and straightforward because that is the hallmark of any process in successful marketing operations.
What’s it costing you to generate a lead online?
I can tell you what’s worked for me when figuring out what I’m paying for every lead I get online. I find the CPL at the top and work my way down.
Finding the top-level CPL. I keep it simple and direct: Divide the total cost of your web presence by your total number of digital leads. Your web presence costs include everything you spend money on to be online: website hosting and maintenance, graphic design costs, paid advertising (e.g. – Google Ads, Facebook Ads), your marketing tech stack, contractors, vendors – everything.
Except wage costs. There’s too much variance in roles and responsibilities with small to medium size businesses. I’ve come across clients that have employees splitting time with marketing and other essential duties like sales, business operations, fulfillment – you name it. In other companies, the roles have more separation. So add wage costs at your own discernment.
Once you have that ‘total web costs’ number, then go tally up your online leads. Every single one you got; the good, the bad, the ones someone never followed up on, all of them. Do some arithmetic and boom – you have your benchmark online CPL. This is the closest to a “if you’ve gotta ballpark performance, this is what it is” number.
Want a bit more accuracy? Do the same exercise but based on monthly totals and then take the monthly average as your benchmark. Next level accuracy is using the median monthly CPL as your benchmark over, at least, a year’s time.
The next level down is segmenting performance by marketing channel. As an example, say you have activated (read – performing activity you hope will generate business leads) three advertising platforms in 2024: Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads. You would do the following to find out your ‘paid social’ CPL (Facebook and LinkedIn):
- Tally the total spent for Facebook and LinkedIn Ads. This includes media buying, asset creation – any costs incurred so you can serve ads to an audience on Facebook.
- Tally the number of leads you’ve generated from those ads.
- Divide the total from #1 by the total from #2 and get your ‘paid social CPL’.
Now, maybe you can’t tell what leads are coming from your Facebook ads and which are coming from organic posts. Or maybe you can’t tell what leads on LinkedIn are coming from Sales outreach versus the Ads. This highlights gaps in online tracking and trying to segment CPL by channel will be a frustrating process that yields little value. In this case, refer to the “ballpark” CPL method above – just limit it to LinkedIn or paid social in general.
So you’ve got one channel’s CPL – how does it compare to the rest? You need to do this exercise with each activated channel: email, organic search, paid search, print, and so on. At the end of this exercise, you should be able to point to the channels that generate the most leads and which are most efficient.
Note: One additional consideration for evaluating leads by channel is ‘lead quality’. That deserves it’s own separate write-up that I’ll do in the future. But ideally, you want to know if leads have a higher closing rate from one channel or another.
You can go down even further. If you’ve really got your tracking setup well, you can segment by audience, product or service, landing page, and more.
What I’ve outlined is the way successful businesses and agencies go about finding CPL. Starting at the top, you get an idea of how much it costs overall to get that lead online. As you move down a level, you find out what activity is working and what activity isn’t; and which channels are most efficient. You can already feel the relief washing over you.
Who is engaging with you online and how?
You know why Google, Facebook and other businesses are so good at making money? Because they track everything you do with them online. EVERYTHING.
If you track your website visitors even a tenth as well, you will make more money.
Knowing what users do on your site is like being able to tell the future. It is a literal superpower, so I’m going to share how I’ve gone about it for the last 10 years. Confirming who is engaging with you online and what type of engagement you’re getting may not be the primary goal, but it is part of the overall result.
Website engagement is first. Ideally, you would already know what actions you expect users to take that are higher up in your marketing funnel (read – that are not conversions). If you don’t have an idea of what engagement to expect outside of conversions, then this next step is even more crucial. Let’s briefly run through the way to do this evaluation and then do a sample one.
- List out every website engagement you’re tracking. Go to your analytics platform and navigate to the area where tracked events are listed. Ignoring actual lead conversions, this is the list you want.
- Segment the list by top- and mid-funnel engagement. I highly recommend creating reports that track performance for each of these segments. In many cases, this data reveals engagement that helps move a user from being a ‘hand raiser’ to ‘considering’, and then to ‘converting’.
- Answer these questions:
- What mid-funnel event happens the most?
- What top-funnel event is closest in volume to the above mid-funnel event?
That’s it. Take the steps above and you will know:
- What users are doing when they visit your website (outside converting)
- What events are likely moving users down your marketing funnel towards converting
If these two things still aren’t clear, then you’re not tracking as well as you need to be and/or you have gaps in your marketing funnel that need to be addressed.
A sample run-through of this could look like the following:
- List out every website event you are tracking
- click
- first_visit
- form_start
- page_view
- scroll_100_percent
- scroll_25_percent
- scroll_50_percent
- scroll_75_percent
- timer_1_minute
- timer_1_minute_30_second
- timer_2_minute
- timer_30_seconds
- Organize the events into top- and mid-funnel events
-
- Top-funnel
- first_visit
- page_view
- scroll_25_percent
- Mid-funnel
- form_start
- click
- scroll_50_percent
- scroll_75_percent
- scroll_100_percent
- timer_1_minute
- timer_1_minute_30_second
- timer_2_minute
- Top-funnel
-
- Answer the two main questions:
- The highest volume mid-funnel event is ‘scroll_50_percent’
- The top-funnel event closest in volume to ‘scroll_50_percent’ is ‘timer_30_seconds’
The take-away from this sample evaluation would be: Users that have taken ~30 seconds to digest at least half of the page’s content are the most engaged segment. There are more insights to gain from this simple exercise, but let’s keep things brief (this article is long enough already).
With just this basic tracking setup, you get an educated guess as to what actions users take on your page that may correlate best with conversions.
If your tracking is really on-point, you’ll be able to segment performance on your site in ways that are similar to what we talked about for finding CPL – by marketing channel, audience, landing page, product or service; so on and so forth.
In-platform engagement is next. If you have invested resources (i.e. – money, time) into having a presence on a specific platform, then make the most of the data to figure out if your getting real interest or just bot clicks. The first thing to do is separate organic engagement from paid.
Evaluating organic engagement
You can really go down a rabbit hole here, so again, let’s keep things simple. I have gotten the most insight by trying to answer two questions when it comes to organic social performance.
- How well does the activity catch attention? This is your in-platform engagement rate that basically tells you how likely someone is to stop scrolling to interact (like, react, share, comment, etc) with your content.
- Are they interested enough to leave the platform and follow my link? Every platform has a certain stickiness – the unwillingness for the users to stop what they are doing to leave the platform. They must be curious enough and trust you enough to follow your link, outweighing that stickiness.
There are a lot of other ways you can dice this up for meaningful performance insights:
- What topics get the most engagement
- Which content formats are working best
- Which creatives are working best
- What time of day is best to post
- How valuable is a share versus a comment?
And so on. Staying focused on the primary goal will keep you sane. When you are at the point of figuring out the details for specific tactics, you can come back to these myriad rabbit holes, pick the ones most relevant, and dive in.
Evaluating paid engagement
If worrying about organic engagement can have you falling down rabbit holes, then paid engagement can be a box of stress keeping you up at night as you count the dollar bills leaving your account.
But the truth is, it’s not that different from how you look at organic. If you stick to being concerned about getting clicks from your ads to your landing page and what those users do when they get to your landing page, you’ll be alright.
Most businesses aren’t using insta forms on Facebook or the in-ad forms on LinkedIn. If you are and have specific questions, reach out via reddit and someone from my team can answer your question: @campaignfixers. So I’m only going to focus on the standard setup most businesses have on any paid ad platform, which is getting a user to click their ad and be taken to a landing page.
That makes your CTR an area of focus because it tells you how well you’re capturing someone’s attention AND convincing them to “check it out”.
The other half of the battle is knowing what those users are doing when they get to your site. Evaluating this outside the bounds of only looking at conversions is crucial. Most paid ad campaigns are solely focused on bottom funnel activity – driving conversions.
But what if you’re not getting any conversions or getting enough conversions? What then?
Well, that’s when knowing how well your campaigns are doing at generating any interest (getting clicks to the website) and engagement (getting users to take action on your website) takes front-stage.
So, from website to organic to paid media – judging your online engagement gives you a full view of the marketing funnel you intentionally or unintentionally created. My method will reveal where you have gaps, so you can plan out how to fill them.
How do you stack up against your competition?
I’m going to tell you exactly how I gauge competitors for myself and clients to make sure the marketing we do will create an advantage.
If you’ve never heard of a S.W.O.T. before, then you’re missing out on using a great framework for analyzing your competitive position. Forbes has an explanation about it that’s maybe a 3-minute read.
If you’re already familiar, then you know what you need to do; and you can consider this a refresher, and a not-so-gentle push.
Much like finding your CPL, I would take a top-down approach to this analysis. Start with evaluating your competitive position in the overall market for your company. Then move down to view this at a channel-specific level.
Overall market positioning. You need to know what to focus on and where you’re vulnerable if you want to make sure any marketing initiative you take is pressing an advantage.
Channel-specific S.W.O.T. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. I haven’t convinced a client to allow me to use one I’ve done for them, so I’ll use my own as an example.
Here’s the scenario: One of my competitors (I use that term loosely since my offer diverges from traditional marketing agencies) is active on social media and so am I. They’re a boutique agency with less than 10 employees –that offer all-in-one digital marketing services. We’ll call them GetDigital. Great, let’s see how I stack up against them for the social media channel.
Strengths.
- I engage more. I like, comment, reply and share regularly (3-4 days a week on X and Reddit). They don’t do this regularly on any social platform
- I created a profile on the popular platforms for my business (LI, FB, Reddit, X). They only have an LI and FB page.
Weaknesses.
- Time management. I spend too much time engaging and need to limit it to an hour a day probably.
- I don’t have a graphic designer so I either take too long to make something crappy or don’t make a creative at all to go with posts. This reduces the ability of my posts to catch eyes.
- My messaging isn’t consistent around my offer and so I’m not doing a great job reaching prospects.
Opportunities.
- Social media is filled with more and more clutter and content that offers real value will standout
- Social media is being used as a search engine more and more
Threats.
- Videos, especially long ones, are doing better. I haven’t delved into this type of content yet.
- YouTube Shorts are killing it. Again, an area I haven’t explored
- Leveraging AI. I haven’t figured out how to best leverage it for social media yet.
So I did this S.W.O.T. on my social media presence back in March of this year (2024). From the above, you can probably guess that I wasn’t getting a whole lot out of my social media efforts (read – not getting prospects). The only platform that was working in any way for me was Reddit, so I stopped all other activity and focused my efforts there because my engagement was leading to DMs from potential prospects.
I threw spaghetti at the wall to see what would happen and found out what works and what didn’t. Then I made changes to focus only on the things that were at least kind of working and, in the background, went back to the drawing board to address weaknesses, leverage opportunities, and double down on strengths (I’ll address Threats in my next iteration).
Combining this analysis with knowing your channel CPLs and effectiveness at moving prospects down your funnel, are a powerful process for improving your approach.
If you have activated a marketing channel with competitors active in it as well, then this will reveal the ‘Why’ behind what is working and what is not.
The key to successful marketing is process
You have to:
- Analyze what is working and what is not
- Come up with adjustments
- Then execute
- Go back to #1
If you made it this far, then you now have a process for doing #1. Adopt it and you’ll definitely only go up from here.
