Staggering Digital Results – Sample Monthly Report

For our current blog, we decided to show a typical monthly digital report that we send to clients. This demonstrates both our reporting format as well as the power of helping our clients to provide great industry content, especially website and blog content.  This is an actual report, but the names and some text have been changed in order to protect company information.

June 8 2015

Hi Greg

Per your recent request, we’re sending you this 2nd monthly progress report on your digital program. This report will focus on the previous three months as well as last month’s progress.

We essentially like to track four metrics representing the different periods of the sales cycle: Impressions-> Clicks -> Leads -> Clients. As only you can track client acquisition, our bottom line is the number of leads that we deliver to you. From a year to year time frame, this has been moving forward rapidly as seen below. Since the current 90 day leads number is still well ahead of the corresponding 2014 leads number (+148%), I recommend tweaking the program rather than making radical changes.

However, the recent slowing of leads growth could indicate that a substantial modification in the overall program may be needed shortly. (Note that minor changes are implemented frequently.) Alternatively, it could mean that we’re approaching a natural maximum market share for your current geography, at least in the consumer sector, obtained via digital marketing. Currently, a lead arrives roughly every 90 working minutes, through this program.

Leads Delivered Via Digital Marketing
(30 and 90 Day Views – Organic & PPC – Sponsored)

                               Month                  Previous 90 Days Including Listed Month

April 2014                        53                                                                    178
April 2015                      145                                                                    462

May 2014                         71                                                                   190
May 2015                       139                                                                   471

Looking at recent 90 day figures, out of the 471 leads (phone calls mostly and a few form fills), 58 have been from the sponsored section of search and 410 have been from the organic search section. BTW, most of this data is also available via your dashboard.

In the three months from March to May 2015, you’ve had a massive organic search volume of 3,840 visits to your website. Approximately half of these have been via the blog and the other half via your home page and new website pages. For comparison, about 18 months ago, you had 1,395 organic web visits during the corresponding three month period. Clearly the blogging and new web pages appear to be working.

During the previous three months, your display ads have appeared 159k times resulting in 2,432 clicks. Search ads have appeared 19.7k times resulting in 329 PPC search clicks. That’s a very high PPC call through rate of 58/329 =18%, which is two to four times higher than usual. This tells me that visitors must like what they see, i.e. the website landing pages & website in general. BTW, we shifted budget away from display towards search last month due to the demonstrated high performance of the latter.

On Youtube, your main video has been viewed 3,607 times and your secondary video has been viewed 1,010 times during the three month period resulting in 160 and 67 clicks respectively. The video “play to rate” for 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% has been 45%, 24%, 19% and 15% of viewers respectively. The videos only cost 14 cents each, net, per viewing.

Again, there were zero apparent leads resulting from either the Display or Youtube campaigns. Basic marketing tells us that these platforms are more for awareness than conversion and that they are needed to enhance converting platforms such as Organic and Sponsored Search. Nevertheless, one would expect at least a few clients, even from Display and Youtube. As a result, I continue to move funds from these two campaigns to Search.

New Google Search Enhancement Implemented

Google is constantly innovating and we like to help you to take advantage of these innovations. Last September, they introduced Ad Extension Callouts . Ad Extension Callouts are a type of Ad Extension, meaning it makes your search ads longer and packed with more information. They also raise what’s called your keyword quality score, meaning your adwords program becomes cheaper and more effective. The bottom line is that we added four new lines of text (max 25 characters) to every ad as follows.

• XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX
• YY YYYY YYYYYY YYYY
• ZZZ ZZ ZZZZZZZ ZZ ZZZZ
• 1111 11 11111 111 1

Please advise any changes to this text.

Commercial/Industrial – I also think that we should consider targeting a larger geography of New Jersey for the commercial/Industrial sectors that you target. Your organic content such as your website and blog appear to be garnering lots of leads and doing the job of what PPC-Sponsored used to do, so perhaps we can divert some of the PPC-sponsored funds towards the commercial/Industrial sector, in a wider geography.

Form Fills – These seem to have been a minor casualty of building a beautiful website. Form fills used to appear on every page and attracted about 12 leads per month. However, this minor loss has been totally eclipsed by the increase of 90 leads per month via the organic section, i.e. new web pages, blogs. So it’s probably not worth revisiting the idea of putting a form fill on every page. Also, the form fill is still available via the “contact us” page, but only attracts about one lead per month.

I look forward to your comments.

Best regards

Dan Rudy