In the enVisioning Success podcast episode, Spotting the Posers: Red Flags in Marketing Service Offers, co-hosts Laura and Julia talk about working with businesses that have been burned by marketing agencies in the past, culminating in their top-five list of red flags that prospective marketing agencies show. A lack of transparency and communication is a common theme for bad agencies, so one thing to look for is if they offer marketing reporting—analytics and data about the marketing they provide. Let’s go over what’s commonly included and further reading to make sense of it.
Tracking Marketing Successes
The amount of reporting you’ll get from agencies varies—usually by how much you’re willing to pay. This might include the agency setting up data tracking and providing automated reports, all the way up to compiling monthly reports that go over all services and projects. You get to decide how your marketing resources are spent, but getting these as part of your marketing means more transparency.
Google Analytics for Websites
Once installed on your website, Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your business—such as how people find your website and what they do when they get there. It can be an invaluable tool for better understanding what does and doesn’t work on your site and how other marketing is channeling traffic to your site.
Social Media Metrics
Every major social media platform has some form of analytics, from the Meta Suite for Facebook and Instagram to LinkedIn and “X” or Twitter (though the latter platform has suffered from API issues). Here, you can understand how both organic and paid social media are putting eyes on your products and services and what potential customers are doing after that.
Email Marketing Milestones
From newsletters to automatic email series, email marketing can be a critical part of any marketing push, but it’s important to review results—especially when it comes to your subscribers’ actions and retention. Knowing what does and doesn’t work from email campaign to email campaign can produce better results, leading to better drip campaigns and other forms of automation.
Understanding Marketing Analytics
Now that we’ve talked a bit about the types of marketing reporting you can expect and how reviewing them can improve marketing results, how do you get started understanding them? Here are a few more blogs to get you started:
- Reviewing and Making Strategic Changes with Marketing Analytics
- Obsessing Over a Single Analytics Metric: A Marketer’s Take
- Marketing Analytics: What Are KPIs and Which are Important?
- Marketing Analytics: Understanding Website Traffic Sources
- Marketing Analytics: CPC Isn’t Advertising’s Only Important Metric
- 4 Tips for Building the Right Outsourced Marketing
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision Advertising CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox. Interested in working with Vision Advertising? Learn more about our services and contact us today.
