This is my series of 30 brief interactive marketing tips. I’m posting each business day at 8:30 a.m. EST. Catch them all by subscribing to my blog or bookmarking the site. All of the posts will be tagged “30 interactive marketing tips” and listed on this page.
#4 – Set Yearly, Quarterly and Monthly Goals
Part of the reason people stare at web analytics blankly is because they have no context to determine what’s “right”. Is $50K in revenue good? Is 10,000 unique visitors enough? Should I converting more than 1% of my visitors?
Many of these questions can be nipped in the bud if you spend time setting goals before you start measuring. Here are a few ways to get started:
- Past + Growth: Look at your previous year’s data and set some growth target that is reasonable given your investment, financial targets and changes in the marketplace.
- Return on Investment: Set a threshold return-on-investment (ROI) target and then figure out what’s realistic within that threshold based on your limitations.
- Channel Specific: You may have specific goals for channels based on known performance of a channel (say the amount of SEO vs. paid search traffic) or just the performance of other channels (e.g. comparison shopping engines convert 2x better than email).
The goal setting process is never easy. You have to make a whole raft of assumptions that are guaranteed to need refinement over time.
The point is that by having these conversations before you measure, you’re forced to think through what success means and reading results moves from “what does this mean” to “what should we do about it”.
