Many of us trust our gut about how to run our companies and marketing campaigns. The problem with that is that we have biases and preferences about how to do things, that may not be accurate.
On the flip side, numbers don’t lie. They tell a clear story about what’s working and what’s not. Yet I’ve found that many small business owners don’t actually take the time to look at analytics, and sometimes it’s because they simply don’t know how.
So, I’m going to tell you about an exercise I just went through with a client, both to illustrate the importance of using data to make decisions, and to show you how to do it.
Step 1: Identify the problem
This client has used webinars as a way to gather new leads for years. He reached out because he had heard some feedback that finding the webinars on the site was difficult and suggested putting a permanent banner on the homepage directing people to the webinars.
Since homepage banners are considered premium real estate, we decided to dig into the data to figure out if webinars were leading to sales.
Step 2: Identify your data sources
Many simple questions can be answers by checking a single source, like Google Analytics. However, more complex questions will require you to pull data from several sources.
In this case, we needed:
- Webinar registrations and attendance reports
- Membership information, including the dates when their subscriptions began
- Newsletter signups to determine if we were reaching new leads
Step 3: Running the data
Starting with the webinar registrations, we found that:
- 10 webinars were offered over the course of a year with a total of 623 registrations
- 309 of those registered attended, which was a drop-off rate of 49%
- There were 284 unique people that registered
Using this data alone, we could draw a couple of conclusions:
- Because the majority of people are registering for multiple webinars, you could argue that people have to know to look for the webinar and we need to do a better job exposing them to new people.
- Half the people registering aren’t actually attending the sessions, telling us that while the idea is somewhat appealing, attendance isn’t a priority for many.
Since those are opposing conclusions, we keep going with our analysis. We take our list of 284 people and compare it to the list of paying members.
We found that 155 people (55%) on our registration list are in the membership system. Once we look at the date their membership began, we find:
- 147 people were already members before attending a webinar
- Of the other 8 people:
- 4 joined shortly after attending a webinar, making it likely the webinar convinced them to join.
- 3 others attended one or more webinars several months before they joined, so it could have helped, but didn’t directly influence their decision to join.
- 1 person registered, but did not actually attend the webinar, so it’s unlikely to have influenced their decision to join the service.
Even if we decide to count all 7 of these as sales generated by webinars, we are still averaging less than 1 sale per webinar.
However, we know that sometimes people can sit on an email list for months or years before a sale happens, so we look at one final piece of data: newsletter sign ups.
We find 43 people that were not on our list prior to registering for a webinar, meaning that the average webinar is picking up 4 new leads.
Step 4: Validate your conclusions
At this point, I’m pretty convinced that webinars aren’t actually creating enough value for the time it takes to do them. However, my client is convinced webinars are a valid sales channel, we just aren’t promoting them properly.
So, I decide to look for a couple other pieces of data: website traffic and keyword data.
- Google Analytics tells me that the webinar registration page was viewed 977 times, which means roughly 1/3 of users visited the page, but decided not to register.
- Next I used Moz, to do some keyword research and found that there was only 1 search every month on webinars for the topic. That’s not people finding their way to the specific webinar page, that’s Google’s average monthly volume.
Step 5: Decide how to move forward
Now it’s time to make decisions based on the data. My conclusion is webinars are not supporting sales, and not a strong enough source of leads to warrant a permanent promotional banner on the homepage.
If it was up to me, I would actually eliminate the webinar offering, but since I know my client likes doing them, I’m aware we that’s not going to happen. We compromise and agree to do one webinar per quarter for the next year to see if scarcity will create more interest.
We also agree to make a few tweaks to the website in effort to make it easier to find and register for the sessions when they happen. We will then run a similar analysis next year to see if there’s been a change.
