Common question I get asked a lot by Media Buyers, by people that are responsible for driving results for their business with paid media is why do my Facebook ads results and my CRM and my shopping cart all tell different stories?
The numbers are all over the place!
There are a few reasons why that may be. It might be that your UTM parameters aren’t applied correctly. It might be that your tracking is broken between one site and the next or it might be the ad network itself is over reporting the benefit that they’re bringing to your business.
This is a common problem with networks like Facebook because they’re in the business of making money, obviously. And the more beneficial that they look to your business, the more money you’re gonna spend. And that drives profits for them.
You can’t trust their numbers.
They’ve got an incentive to lie to you.
You have to get your own data, clean data, reliable data.
You have to get all your revenue sales, lead data and also add cost data into an enterprise analytics package like Google Analytics, Piwik, Adobe Analytics, amplitude analytics.
These are all excellent analytics packages. Once all of that data’s in there, then you can start telling somewhat accurate stories about what actually happened in your marketing.
If I’m doing an analysis starting today, I see that a hundred sales came in. What caused those sales was that the ad cost from today, this is the first big mistake that most people make when they’re looking at the results.
They go, okay, I spent, several thousand dollars and a hundred results came in, great! Tomorrow I’m gonna do the same thing. And then the results are different. Now, the reason why that’s faulty is because the results that you’ve got coming in today were actually caused by multiple events that happened in the past.
For example, somebody may have first found out about you on a YouTube video. Then they may have bookmarked you, they might have seen a Facebook social media post, then they might have saw a Google ads link and clicked it. They might have ended up on your email autoresponder. And now, finally, months later, they’re coming back, and they’ve heard about you from a friend, and they remember the URL and they came straight to the page and now they’re buying.
So, it’s important to first understand most people have multiple touches with your brand, with your product over multiple weeks and months at the very least. And sometimes that sales cycle is a lot longer than you realize.
You can’t divide today’s results and revenue by today’s ad spend.
That’s nonsense.
It’s like comparing Apples with elephants, it’s not even apples with oranges.
Getting this concept of understanding historical events causing today’s results is really important.
You’ll see, if you look at your results in Google Analytics for example, if you look at the results that were caused by today’s ad spend, it’s generally very few… mostly zero for a lot of businesses.
It’s not until maybe seven or 14 days has gone by until you start seeing significant results.
The further back that you look in time the higher those results and also the model that you’re using to understand your data is important too.
It’s so important to understand this concept… understanding why that Facebook ads over there are telling you a different story from your CRM, which is telling you a different story from your shopping cart.
Really critical to get this concept to get a handle on your numbers.
Hopefully that was helpful.
Leave a comment, talk to you soon.
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