Every CMO,VP, or Director of Marketing is asking the same question: What is the return on investment on our digital efforts? Sometimes ROI is easy to see, for instance an A/B testing tool or a conversion funnel optimizers. For example: My landing page was converting at 2% and my A/B testing platform just found a variation that converts at 2.5% causing a $5,000 lift in revenue!
But what about a slightly different situation? How can you secure funding for a project that doesn’t have a clear ROI.
We recently started working with a company in need of justifying the ROI for installing an additional level of analytics to track enhanced Google Analytics e-commerce. Their Director of Marketing was getting push back from the C-level’s on the price of the investment so the question became: If we invest $20K in this new analytics setup, will it generate $100K in return over the next year?
It’s a reasonable question, one that’s even good to think about, however, there’s a more important question here to consider. What is the opportunity cost of not answering high-value questions for your company at the right time, especially when it involves being able to react to customers and market demand.
So here it is, if you find yourself in this situation, a concrete way to make a case for an analytics project is to list the valuable questions that cannot be answered now with the current state of analytics. The key here is “valuable”.
Questions like: “If we knew X at the right time, we could make decisions and dramatically grow our business”.
Creating a list of questions allows you to focus the conversation on long-term strategic wins that are in-line with the business. A proposal that lists out the numerous questions of high importance that are currently unanswerable will be much more likely to be approved because you will be showing the executive team that the investment will directly result in answers to their questions.
In our experience, here are 5 common questions that executives are looking to answer:
- Why are visitors dropping out during the checkout funnel?
- Is my e-mail marketing strategy capturing the right customers at the right time with the right product?
- What lessons did we learn from last year’s promotions that we can apply this year?
- Are there parts of my site that are not mobile ready and because of that I’m losing customers?
- Am I applying the right marketing spend mix to win my customers this year versus last year? Should I adjust?
Whether you know you want to improve your Google Analytics implementation or just aren’t sure if you’re setup quite right (or somewhere in between), reach out to us, we’d love to help you out
With Metricstory, we’ve built a powerful system of intelligence to analyze your data, but everything starts with the quality and granularity of the data you collect in the first place. We’re passionate about getting you the important insights you need and by now, we’ve seen just about everything during our time building Metricstory.
