Analytics and data shouldn’t be stressful, but it’s easy to feel that way when there are so many sources to draw from, each formatting the data differently, sometimes even giving different numbers for the same metric. Where do you put your attention? How do you compare the data from different sources? To start, give your data a job.
Principle #1: Give your Data a Job
One of the easiest ways to understand data is to think of the marketing funnel. This is a foundational concept that makes it easy to visualize customer acquisition in marketing. Your brand marketing creates awareness and attracts new visitors to your website. Some of these new leads will be interested enough to evaluate your business and products, and a percentage of them will go on to become customers.
For sales, that’s a good model, but we need to tweak the funnel to work as well for analytics and data. This model is a funnel metrics flowchart that not only maps the stages of a customer’s journey, it also lists the metrics that should be measured at each stage.
With this approach, we use the same 3 phases of the funnel but rename them like this:
- TOFU, or top of funnel, is the awareness phase
- MOFU, or middle of funnel, is the evaluation phase
- BOFU, or bottom of funnel, is the conversion phase
But we don’t want to stop there. We also need to measure what happens after someone becomes a customer.
So we add one more stage: the post-conversion phase, which focuses on how customers can be turned into repeat customers, life-time subscribers, and advocates for your business.
This is how you give your data a job. You don’t look at all your data at once. You assign different metrics to each stage of the funnel.
Rather than measuring your business’s health only by its bottom-line numbers, you measure its health at every phase—identifying leaks in your funnel, finding strategic ways to plug them up, and making it easier to convert.
References:
Digital Marketer. (n.d.). The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing. Course Hero. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from https://www.coursehero.com/file/94978188/Ultimate-Guide-to-Digital-Marketingpdf/
