Anyone who’s worked in a digital marketing environment will probably recognise one of the following two scenarios –
1) You’re merrily working through your day when you check up on a KPI graph that normally bobs along nicely only to see some unpleasant looking change (generally a “drop” of some sort). Panic.
2) You’re merrily working through your day when who should turn up at your desk but your boss, looking less than cheery, holding up a sheet of white A4 with what looks like a graph on it. With a drop on the right hand side. Panic.
Of course scenario 1 is for those people who have better monitoring/dashboard systems, but the end result is the same – why has that KPI suddenly started slipping off the edge of the comforting plateau where it’s been sitting for the last 6 months?
NB: This is certainly more likely and relevant for things like “web site visits” or “whitepapers downloaded” than slower moving items, but the principle is still the same.
For me, the important question is “What do I do now?”. If it helps, here’s what I did when this happened to me two days ago…
1) Firstly, don’t panic – I don’t know about you, but, unless your whole website is down, I’ve never found panicking help to get a problem resolved. It just muddies your thought processes.
2) Communicate with the people who care about the figures. If you found the problem, there’s nothing to be gained from “trying to fix it before anyone notices”. They will notice, and it’s better coming from you.
3) On to the more practical help – in my example, we spotted that our leads generated from the website (from people downloading the free trial) were down around 20% for a specific product. Usually the daily run rate for leads is pretty steady, so it was surprising when this figure was consistently down for a few days.
4) Don’t panic (again). Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons why this specific KPI could be down, in an order which I hope makes sense:
* Customers are no longer interested in what we sell,
* We’d change something on the structure of the site which de-emphasised this particular product,
* We’d make it less clear how to get hold of the free trial (e.g. a design change to the page),
* People are finding the free trial but there’s a bug which means when they click to get it, they don’t,
* There’s a bug that means when they click to get the trial, they do get the trial, but we’re not recording this in our CRM system,
* Everything is working, it’s just that the analytics cube which we’re looking at isn’t functioning properly (i.e. it’s a reporting problem)
…and many other possibilities. As you probably spotted this list is ordered from “Our company is in trouble” to “Phew!”.
5) Analysis. As I say, there’s little point going through the details of how we found which of these was the problem, because every situation is different, but the most important tip, I think, is to take a methodical approach. If your symptom is “The leads shown in our cube are looking a little low” then the cause could be any of the above. You have to go through each in turn, discounting that option. As an example, my first thought was to discount the first, rather worrying possibility. I looked at the Google Analytics visitor numbers for the whole of our website and for the specific product in trouble. No change – within seconds I saw a re-assuringly unwavering number of visits for the immediate past.
6) Don’t jump to conclusions. And be nice to people. In almost every situation I’ve ever been in like this, the source of the problem is pretty far down my list – and it’s likely to be a technical problem (i.e. somebody didn’t test something fully). Going in with your size 13s, making unresearched accusations and being unpleasant about it turns a solvable problem into a horrible week for a lot of people – if someone has made a mistake they’re going to be feeling pretty unpleasant about it anyway.
7) Obvious really – fix it!
8) Learn from it – it could be a 100 things. Is it the testing process? Does your monitoring process need to be more finely-tuned? Do you need to slow down on making too many changes at once? It’s obvious and a cliche, but if you don’t learn from it, you’re doomed to repeat the mistake.
The above is all well and good, but a reasonable question is – so what? Isn’t this blog supposed to be about marketing? This just sounds like a data problem?
The main reason why I think it’s important for marketeers to be able to help with fixing this sort of thing is – you are the owner of those metrics. If something goes wrong, it’s up to you to get it sorted. You’re also most likely to understand the ins and outs of how the website and lead generation process works – just handing tasks like this on to someone else and saying “I don’t get what’s going on, let me know when it’s sorted”, is only going to lead to slower results.