How to conduct a traffic audit if there is little data. I’ll tell you using the example of the wolf from “Just You Wait”
We'll tell you how to conduct an audit with a minimum of data, using the example of the wolf from “Well, Just Wait!” At the end we provide a template for analysis.
Hello everyone, this is Alena Mumladze from HotHeads Band, analytical agency for digital advertising. We are engaged in contextual and targeted advertising, and we are also great at analytics and love to do audits.
In this article we will tell you how to carry out analysis of ALL lead sourceswith a minimum of data.
Disclaimer: The client has many contractors who run advertising. Some of them do not collect data and They don’t even put UTM tags! And they are needed to understand the effectiveness of the channel. This situation is not uncommon, so it is important to know how to conduct an audit “on the knee”.
We also did not have access to advertising accounts.. We took all the data for analysis from the CRM system. Extracting the necessary data from it is quite a task. But despite such difficult conditions, we We did a full audit and found where 30 million rubles are leaking annually.
An entrepreneur without an audit is like a wolf without eggs.
Imagine that you are a wolf from the game “Well, wait a minute!” (the one who caught the eggs). You have only a few channels through which your future scrambled eggs slowly rolls. At first, catching the eggs is not difficult, but over time they rush faster and faster. What if there are not 2, but 6 channels? How about 15? You can’t make eggnog here anymore. Entrepreneurs feel the same way if they have more than 2 traffic channels.
Let’s imagine that a marketer named Volk from Nu, Pogodi LLC works with only one contractor and drives traffic to Vk Ads and Yandex Direct. He understands where customers are coming from and can calculate the return on budget.
Some time passes, Wolf adds affiliate programs, drives traffic to 4 different landing pages and invites new contractors. And now he no longer knows what to grab onto — the budget in the hundreds of thousands is allocated every month to 30 different channels, but it is not clear which of them converts well and which one is a money hog.
What if contractors don’t even use UTM tags to track leads? You'll never find the end here.
To avoid losing all your eggs, you need to conduct regular audits. We describe how to do this below.
Dividing data into groups
Divide all channels into groups depending on the heat. Someone could take all the channels en masse and calculate the arithmetic average for them. And then compare the conversion of an individual channel with this indicator.
⛔ Don't do that!
While for some channels 5% conversions will be a great result, for other channels even 60% will be a failure.
For example, Yandex Direct cannot be compared in terms of effectiveness with affiliate programs – it works for colder users, and an affiliate program immediately gives a credit of trust.
✅You need to compare like with like.
Your temperature is 35.2, and mine is 38. On average, we are healthy with a temperature of 36.6, but in reality we are both sick.
Therefore, before analysis divide all channels into three groups depending on the heat. The degree of heat is determined by the channel type and conversion. They are individual for each niche.
Divide your traffic sources into:
▪ hot,
▪ warm,
▪ cold.
Below we will tell you which channels belong to each group.
When calculating, focus on your niche
Consider the length of the deal cycle and your niche. For our client’s business with high checks and a long transaction cycle, a conversion of 5% from a cold application was an excellent indicator. But for example, such a conversion would kill an online flower shop.
Who are the hot ones
Hot springs include:
partnership programs,
recommendations,
applications received through personal acquaintance with the manager.
These are the sources that generate the most qualified leads. They themselves turn to the sales manager, which means are at the very bottom of the funnel, one step away from purchase.
For our client, a conversion to purchase of 30% for hot springs is a gun, a bomb. For your business, conversion must be counted separately. We'll tell you more about this below.
Who are the warm ones
▪ incoming call,
▪ exhibition (if visitors come to the exhibition),
▪ conferences (after the speech),
▪ SEO.
Warm traffic sources:
Warm customers are those who They contact the company themselves, but are not yet fully familiar with its services. They already trust the company, but they compare.
Our client experienced an anomaly – warm springs converted worse than cold ones. It turned out that there was a glitch in the CRM – calls were duplicated. Without our audit, this error could have been found much later.
Who are the cold ones
Cold springs are usually the most abundant.
These include:
▪ advertising on social networks (Vk Ads, Inst*, Facebook*, Telegram Ads, etc.)
▪ advertising in search engines,
▪ cold traffic to a website or social network,
▪ outdoor advertising,
▪ advertising on marketplaces and message boards,
▪ advertising display of already published posts to subscribers of a group or company channel.
Yes, your subscribers are still cold traffic, as they may not interact with or even see the content. Therefore, you need to additionally launch a target for showing posts to subscribers.
For our client, the best cold conversion was 5.4%.
We are looking for effective sources
Count conversions across all channels in the group and highlight the most effective sources. For each channel you need to know
▪ number of applications,
▪ how many of them are qualified,
▪ number of purchases.
How to calculate conversion
Conversion is a percentage that shows the percentage of users who completed the desired action.
Let's imagine that VK Ads brought 35 applications. 15 of which are now at the qualification stage, and 8 applications have already resulted in purchases.
We calculate the conversion for Vk Ads:
1) conversion to qualification – 15 / 35 * 100% = 42% of targeted leads from the total number of applications.
2) conversion to purchase – 8 / 35 * 100% = 22% of purchases from the total number of applications.
Count all channels in this way. You will get a table like this:
We We calculate the percentage of buyers from the total number of applications, and not on the number of qualified leads. It is important to do exactly this in order to see a clear picture of traffic. If you calculate the percentage of sales from qualifications, then you will not understand the effectiveness of traffic, but you will find out how effectively the SALES DEPARTMENT processed applications.
Pay attention to the metric “Percentage of good leads (qualifiers + buyers)”. In CRM, the metric “total qual. leads” shows how many people NOW at this step. And how many customers are there in total purchases? ALREADY made a purchase. That is, CRM subtracts purchases from qualifications. Therefore, when analyzing, you can safely summarize these two indicators.
Now the fun begins
We cannot compare by eye which channel converts better and which converts worse. This will be biased. We need:
find the arithmetic mean of conversions for each group – separately for hot, warm and cold.
then compare the conversions of each channel with this value.
Example:
LLC “Nu, pogodi” has 15 sources of cold traffic.
1) Marketer Wolf summarizes conversions in the purchase of all these sources.
2) Then divides by their number and receives 7.8%.
GIVEN:
Conv source 1 = 9%
Conv source 2 = 6%
Conv source 3 = 8%
Source conv 4 = 13%
Source conv 5 = 11%.
(9% + 6% + 8% + 13% + 11%) / 5 = 7.8% – the arithmetic average of all conversions.
All channels with a purchase conversion rate above 7.8% are excellent converting channels. Don't turn them off, raise budgets for them and be happy.
What to do with channels below the median?
“Okay, Valera, turn off your target!”
Need to disable all channels below the median? NO!⛔
More precisely, not all. Some channels will have to be turned off, while the efficiency of others will have to be increased.
How to improve channel efficiency?
There are many options, we will tell you about a few.
Look at the reasons for refusals
For example, for our client, 38% of deals failed because “the lead bought from others.” This means that the traffic is great, the leads are qualified, but they were poorly processed at the sales stage. In monetary terms, the client lost 30 million rubles in revenue! Thanks to the audit, we saw in numbers that it was not the traffic that brought bad leads, but the sales department was underperforming.
Compare the percentage of conversions to qualification with the percentage to purchase from the same channel
If you see that, for example, the percentage of qualified leads is 46%, and the conversion to purchase is 3%, it means The sales department has imperfect scriptsand it’s worth working on increasing the percentage of purchases.
Compare the percentage of qualified leads across different channels
For example, a channel generates 22% of qualified leads, which is below average but 2.4% of purchases, which is close to average. At the same time, the budget allocated for it is much less than for other channels. Increase your testing budgets and see what results this channel produces.
In this article, we told you how to use numbers to understand which traffic channels are effective.
Hold table templateto independently analyze the traffic on your project. All the formulas are listed here, you just need to download it and enter your data.
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