“What get’s measured, get’s managed”
Peter Drucker
We’ll be measuring traffic, conversions into leads and email subscribers. I want to share what’s working, insight as to why numbers go up or down and our goals.
We use Oribi to measure our traffic and leads, ActiveCampaign to measure leads and email subscribers and we’re now using Facebook analytics to measure our remarketing traffic and some lead gen. Also, I’m going to start measuring our YouTube as well, because I have big plans. Big, hairy, audacious plans. A BHAP if you will. I’m positive I’ve coined that exact term.
Traffic
Result
Smashed 3094 visitors didn’t I? This was a REALLY pleasant surprise as I STILL haven’t implemented a Facebook cold traffic campaign.
That’s 99 visitors per day. Almost 100 people a day think it’s worth reading my posts. Absolutely mental. It’s a solid 8% on last months traffic, and also beat our initial projections of 3045.
Interesting to see that on some days it peaks at 200 visitors a day, while dropping on weekends. The aqua dots represent a new post or page to the site. The yellow bars are weekends. The purple dot is a holiday (Memorial day) and the pink dot is a traffic peak.
This is Oribi by the way, the analytics tool that I use.
Insight
I know that traffic has increased, and remarketing is responsible for some of this. However I believe that one of our posts is going a bit mental. It seems to drive 1/3 visitors to the site.
Next steps
Cold traffic on the way I promise! I’ve got 3 posts I’m going to promote on Facebook, just cold traffic to a blog post.
Sources/channels
Result
Big jump in traffic from organic Google searches. Facebook looks to have dropped, but Facebook tells me they’ve sent more remarketing traffic. It could be that Facebook is ONLY organic traffic on the report below.
Also, we don’t do any paid Google ads, so that’s kind of weird to see.
YouTube has climbed in place which is great, as it’s a big part of our new content strategy.
Interesting to see paragraph from last months report, clearly I need to distinguish between paid Facebook and organic Facebook.
I’m still struggling to distinguish between paid Facebook and free, organic Facebook. According to Facebook, we drove 188 paid remarketing clicks (more on that below) which means we got more paid Facebook traffic than free, which is fine.
Insight
Traffic in general seems to be increasing, which should increase the rate at which I collect leads.
GDPR hit us this month, but frankly, I can’t see a huge impact anywhere.
Next steps
If I genuinely do start a Facebook cold traffic campaign this month, it’ll shed some light on how Oribi distinguishes paid and organic Facebook.
Email subscribers
Result
May saw a bit of a drop in subscribers, only adding 136 new subscribers. However, our unsubscribe rate was also lower.
In total, we added 136 new subscribers, and lost 57, leaving us with a net gain of 79 subs.
Insight
I think I might have been measuring email subscribers wrong. The maths just doesn’t add up. I understand that there could be dependencies, but I’m seeing error margins of around 50 people. So something is wrong, somewhere.
After investigating, I’ve been using the wrong numbers for a lot of the report. So I’m going to change what I measure and how using ActiveCampaign.
At the end of May, we had 902 subscribers.
At the end of April we had 843. After manually going through the data, I can see that I’ve been adding the number of subscribers, from all contacts, on the day I do the report! Rather than the number of subscribers from the end of the report month. D’oh!
So now, the numbers look a lot more stable. 902 as of the end of May.
Next steps
Learn how to write a report.
Facebook paid traffic
Result
Facebook is ticking over nicely, 178 link clicks, which came in at roughly £.21 per click. A total of £38.25 was spent. In total we generated over $2000 in tripwire sales. But it’s difficult to identify when those sales were made and if Facebook had any direct impact.
Insight
Let’s get the cold traffic started and we’ll have more data to play with. That’s a sensible reporting strategy right? Give yourself more variables.
Next steps
The campaign seems to be working…but I’ve been told it could work better.
YouTube
Result
May 2018 I’ve decided to publish a video a day, for 100 days. Why? Because I want to build our YouTube channel and audience. It’s crazy fast to create video content and it can be re-purposed in so many ways.
Eventually, we’ll start YouTube ads and I want to explore the platform before I commit to an ad strategy. I also eventually want to move the community from Facebook groups to our YouTube channel. Using each video as a mini forum/thread.
We gained 73 subscribers, where in April we only gained 34. For whatever reason, YouTube doesn’t let me see total subscriber numbers for a certain period. All I know is that as of writing on 6th June, we’re at 500 subscribers (nice).
Insight
I’ve started publishing a video a day. We haven’t been doing it long enough to see if it’ll have any effect yet. However on the 2nd May, we gained 14 subscribers. This is from one video we did with Miles Beckler.
Next steps
Keep producing 1 video a day and grow the channel.
