It is hard to believe how much marketing numbers vary daily, weekly, even monthly.
FastF runs a click ad campaign for our own marketing.
Day to day, the number of impressions and the total daily cost vary up and down by 50%. The average cost-per-click varies by 20%. The number of clicks is almost double on some days than others.
There is no pattern to this. It isn’t that “people shop for websites less on the weekends” or any such.
So NORMAL variation is more than almost anyone would guess.
There are two challenges then:
1. To determine what typical numbers are.
2. To detect when an actual trend is occurring – up or down – showing something you need to deal with or an opportunity to take advantage of.
There is really only one answer.
Time.
Because normal variation is so large, you just have to let a campaign run for a while.
There’s a moral to this story.
One-shot mailings, single or short run ad placements, short-term campaigns of all sorts, are almost useless.
They don’t build awareness. But mostly, how can you establish any successful marketing if you don’t even let it run long enough to find out if it is working, or how well?
There’s another point to this.
Don’t start a marketing campaign you can’t afford to run for a while. Budget something you can sustain for a while. So you CAN run it long enough to see if it is working and to fine-tune it. Adjustments to a campaign can double, triple OR MORE its effectiveness.
Listen to me folks.