All sorts of stats and online marketing data are of crucial importance to our affiliate campaigns. However, many marketers tend to miss the point on what to pay attention to and how to think of data when consuming various online marketing advice.
1. Traffic Generation And Revenue Generation Are On The Same Team
Traffic generation is about getting people to see your offer (through ads, SEO, etc.). Revenue generation is all about on-site optimization and tweaking your marketing message. Now, the trick is that separating the two has very little point. Only when you manage to understand the traffic generation data and revenue generation data as a whole, will you be able to improve your profits significantly.
2. Data-Based Decision Making
For example, many people like to allocate 50% of their ad budgets to search ads and the other 50% to display ads. In most cases, however, this decision is made based on a gut feeling of some kind. In short, always allocate your funds to reflect the real situation you’re in and not your gut feeling.
3. Media Buying and Media Optimization Are On The Same Team
When you’re buying media, you need to look at given promotional methods and the site’s performance as a whole, rather than treating them separately. In other words, just because some method of promotion is performing better on site #1 than on site #2 this doesn’t mean that site #1 is the better one.
4. Don’t Be Afraid of Having Many Keywords
Keywords are by no means a scarce thing on the internet. Micro-managing your ad campaigns by focusing on individual keywords rarely becomes effective. You’re way better off looking for data patterns and treating your campaign as a whole entity rather than a group of individual keywords.
5. Clicks And Impressions Are Not All That Matters
Online marketing has a very number-driven feel to it. Sometimes, however, numbers are not what we should be looking for. If you’re trying to build your brand online apart from getting sales then metrics like impressions and clicks are not the most crucial for you. Brands are not defined by numbers…
6. Focus On The Whole Path Of The Sale Instead Of The Last Click
Consider the following scenario. Let’s say you’re interested in some way to lose weight. You’re driving down the freeway and see an ad for Product X. Then you see it again close to the place where you like to buy groceries. Finally, you go home, turn on your computer and see a banner for the same product. At this point it seems quite familiar, so you click it and buy the product. So, would you buy it if it wasn’t for all those ads before the final click took place?
In short, the message we’re trying to send here is that raw data always has a backstory or a second meaning that you should try to notice and understand.