A while back I stated I was heading to Seattle after the Ads4Dough Meetup in San Diego. I went ahead and hangout with my cousin and niece for the weekend. Prior to all this I setup a meetup in Seattle at the HasOffers office to do my own mini meetup. I posted the event on the Meetup202 Seattle group to see if any one was interested and I got a good response. So I decided instead of a regular meetup why not just talk about a campaign.
Even though it rained a decent amount of entrepreneurs came out to the meetup. Affiliates from Portland even came out such as by buddy Kris from Xrev Media and Logan Thompson. Other familiar faces were James Seligman, Nate Whitehill, Tanner Vaughn, Chris Guthrie and many others.
The topic I decided to talk about is basically segmenting data to achieve high CTRs. I prep a campaign I was currently running and showed everyone my data, even spend. I wanted to show segmenting and deciphering data is crucial to any performance marketing campaign. The excel sheet I showed everyone is a custom dynamic report I use to look at my data.
It automatically segments my data. Base on specific criteria, it will organize the data and outputs it into a visual format for me to view. Some snapshot of the meetup.
This discussion was all about how to look at data and how to manipulate it to find amazing opportunities. With this PPC campaign, I have broke every aspect of this campaign. My excel sheet, literally breaks down almost every aspect of this campaign. I simply just load the raw data and it quickly breaks and tells me my strong areas vs my weak areas.
If you do not know excel, I suggest you take time to learn it. It is such an amazing program to manipulate data. I have made multiple tools to help with my own internal research. I posted 3 excel video tutorials about...
- Keyword Dissection with Excel
- Count How Many Words in a Keyword
- Manipulating Aggregated Data from SEOMoz
Anyways, I created this dashboard to show me time of day, popular days, daily spend, total day spend, day spend, total hourly spend and I even broke it all by devices (tablets, mobile, PC). This is a lot of data to look at. Numbers can be annoying to look at from time to time, especially straining the eyes. So I also added some visuals to my excel sheet to show me where the peaks are and my down time are. This allowed me to see my whole campaign and analyse it in under 5 minutes by simply just looking at it.
From looking at the data, you have to then decide what time of day is best to run your traffic on what device on what day. This details are important, I even wrote a post about day parting a while back and explained its importance. But looking at the time of day isn't just it, you have to also decide what day is the best. Is it better to run your day parted traffic on Sunday vs Tuesday? Then, specifically with this campaign - on what device?
As you can see there is a lot to go over and understand. Simply sending traffic to a landing page or offer without understanding traffic is just like walking in the dark. You are doing what you are suppose too but you still can't see what you are doing. Traffic is a crucial part of performance marketing, what is even more important is how you are looking at the data.
Remember all traffic is not created equal and you have to put in the effort to understand that traffic. How users interact with the advertorials, simple looking at time of day sometimes may not be enough, seasonality also takes into effect. If you are not gathering data then you are lost, even worst if you are not gathering historical data, you can't forecast.
My excel sheet, shows me 1 full year of data every time - if I run the offer that long - but in either case I keep the data, so I can see how each month differs. Spending money on traffic means you can easily lose your money. You want to be able to adjust the traffic to where it is beneficial to you.
Once you conquered the traffic, it automatically runs on auto pilot and you earn money on auto pilot. There are times you have to make minor adjustments, but you did all the analyzing upfront. With all the analytical and moving parts out of the way, you can easily generate income with ease, again with on going minute changes here and there.
I recommend you learn excel or have a program or software which can easily analyze your data. I like creating my own systems because I want to look at specific data, plus I know how my business operates. Utilizing other platforms is fine, but I also find something missing with what I need with my own campaigns.
Data manipulation is important and optimizing base on what the data gives you will increase your ROI, you just have to put in the time to analyze what the traffic gives you.
