Improve marketing effectiveness with deeper analytics

First things first, let’s begin with what’s the sales pipeline. This is the way your target audience goes through from the first time they saw your ad or link up to the moment when they have made the action you wanted them to do, let’s say, launched your game. The very basic rule of building such a pipeline is easy: make it as short as possible. Every time you add another click or screen or text field in your pipeline you lose customers.

Let’s say someone saw your ad and clicked on it – this is going to be step 1. Then they get to your landing page and have to click download – this is step 2. When they download it, they have to install it – this is step 3. After installing it they have to launch your app – this is step 4. There may be any number of additional steps on the way – both before the app launch and after it.

However, keep it in your mind that the less is better. If you want users to register on your site before they are able to download your app, this is definitely going to drop the conversion in your pipeline since not lots of users just won’t want to register in another service, no matter how great it might be. So keep it fast, keep it simple. Think about as if users scroll the news feed on their phones very fast and then they see the attractive picture from your ad. They are not too involved yet so there is a huge possibility of losing them somewhere on the way to the goal you have for them. So no matter what happens on the way – the link did not work, it was loading for too long, it required some additional registrations or huge downloads – any of these and many more can be a reason why users can leave and just keep scrolling.

But what can you do to increase the conversion rate of your pipelines? Well, it’s obvious that you should have some kinds of analytics to track the effectiveness of your actions and ads. Just make sure that you are tracking every step of the user’s way. You can even calculate the conversion rate from clicks to each step or from each step to the next one. Make it a number, not just a theory. Make sure you know exactly who leaves when and who keeps going through the pipeline. This way when you analyze the effectiveness of multiple pipelines or it’s steps you will easily be able to see the weak spots you should pay specific attention to.

For example, if you see that all the ads have great conversion to click, it means that your ad is interesting enough for your target audience. However, for example, on the next step you may find that most of the users left it here and never came back. There are two theories of what it could be: a misleading ad which does not correspond to the contents of the link when it’s opened or just a bad landing page.

Another example: you may find that your users successfully click on your link, download the app, install it and then never launch it. It may indicate that there might be some technical issues with the app itself.

And another example: let’s just say you haven’t done any of these steps and just added a tracking link and then you just see the amount of registered users from it. This way you will only be limited by one option: either your ad campaign is good or bad. All the campaign. All the steps. And you won’t be able to improve it based on the facts.

However, when you track your every step, you’ll be able to compare your ads on each step of the way and then create some great pipelines with the most effective pieces from other campaigns. So the more details you track the more you’ll be able to optimize your effectiveness not on the gut feeling but based on the facts you’ve got in your analytics.