SESSION NOTES #013. Digital diagnosis - data points to check BEFORE you come up with a strategy.

Off the back of last week's piece on "full funnel" ad strategies being overrated, I had a couple of people reply asking me for a piece on how I approach Digital Diagnosis. (Honestly I probably would have still written it for zero responses, I L-O-V-E this topic)

I've spent a lot of time workshopping strategies with agency teams and one thing that comes up frequently is how often channel and objective decisions get made without any real diagnosis first.

"The Google rep told me to run Demand Gen." "I saw it working on another account." "ChatGPT told me to build my media mix like this." (Just guessing on that last one)

Everyone is feeling the pressure to grow revenue, but not enough people look for answers in the data.

So if you want to build a marketing plan based on real data points instead of “vibes”, unvalidated assumptions or outsourced thinking - keep reading.

#1 Are enough people interested in our brand?

Personally I love using Google Search Console data to keep track of brand interest so much so that I include this data in my monthly reports to keep a close eye on it.

Red flags for me are:

🚩 brand impressions are not growing YoY

🚩 brand impressions are growing YoY but are slower than desired revenue growth

🚩 brand impressions are growing YoY but are slower than category growth

🚩 brand impressions are low relative to competitors (you can supplement with Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner to see competitor data)

If you're seeing any of these outcomes consistently over a 6 month period, you've found your problem. Your current activity isn't working to build enough brand interest - focus there.

Social-first brands may prefer to use social mentions or social followers as their data point. Brands investing heavily in awareness activity may want to run brand surveys over time to measure the success of it.

There’s no perfect way, there’s just a way that makes sense for your business.

#2 Are people making it through the site?

For this section we are building a good old fashioned e-commerce funnel using GA4 data. Pull sessions, item views, add to carts, begin checkout, and transactions - and look at where the funnel is leaking. I like to check in on this data quarterly.

📉The easiest problems to spot come from benchmarking yourself against your own historical performance.

📉Industry benchmarks are lukewarm at best but if your gut is saying the baseline could be better ask your CMS platform rep for this.

💡 If you have clean source/medium UTM tracking you can go one step further and build the funnel by channel - to distinguish between a holistic issue vs. a channel level issue. For example, a drop in add to cart % overall could be caused by one channel sending poor quality traffic to product pages.

The initial data will just diagnose the step, you will need to dig even deeper to figure out the “why”.

Remember: not every funnel problem can be solved with paid media. If the issue is a UX problem or a product offer problem then you will need to collaborate with the necessary team on a solution. Resist the urge to throw more money at it.

More ads = more people = more problems.

#3 Are people coming back?

Two metrics tell you most of what you need to know: Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR) and Average Time Between Orders (ATBO). Yes this industry needs more acronyms, I agree.

🚩If your repeat purchase rate is declining, or customers are taking longer to place their next order over a 12-month period, that’s a retention red flag worth investigating.

The harder question is knowing whether your numbers are actually "good."

Industry benchmarks can provide some context, but they're rarely the best benchmark. Every brand has different products, price points and buying cycles, so comparing yourself to the market only gets you so far. You’re best off working with a retention strategist to model out the opportunity.

Someone like my mate and lifecycle legend Mando who reviewed and edited this section - shoutout Mando! (and while you’re at it, head over to Yeah Mando to give his newsletter a cheeky subscribe - he’ll tell you how to turn customers into fans and turn you into one in the process).

What I will say from a paid media perspective: retention ads can be expensive - so only add in this support layer if there’s a clear opportunity worth chasing.

I never studied marketing at university. I learnt what the 8Ps meant, had a big Seth Godin phase* and that was about it.

By the time I was Growth Lead at Sparro I'd heard and talked about "the funnel" so many times it was starting to lose meaning.

Then I hit Module 6 in Mark Ritson's Mini MBA. He said something so simple yet so actionable.

Build the steps of your funnel and populate it with actual data. That way you can see exactly where the drop off is and focus your efforts there. It doesn’t need to be an exact science, just the closest estimate we can make with the data we have available.

For the first time, the concept of "the marketing funnel" felt tangible - and as someone who was "data-driven" before it was a virtue signal, that advice has been unforgettable in every way.

Cheers, Sarah

*Ps. Can I call it a phase if it lasts forever?

_{Brought to you by the King of the MiniMBA and Nat King Cole radio.}