3 Not So Obvious Reasons To Outsource Marketing Analytics & Reporting
Not so obvious reasons to outsource marketing analytics and reporting.
Recently I have been talking to prospects who are interested in outsourcing analytics and client reporting for reasons that surprise me. In hindsight, it should not.
- You are probably not going to do a good job if you actually do it.
- The data is more and more suspect and corrupt. Third-party validation.
- Losing clients due to not showing how your efforts connect to revenue and ROI.
Road to Hell
I am sure you heard the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
I talked with an agency owner a few weeks ago with decades of experience. He summed it up nicely, “We plan to do it, we want to do it, but at the end of the month, we don’t get it done.”
At SaturnOne, we created many advanced tools to do marketing analysis. These included content conversion, keywords that drive conversions, ROI calculations with conversions, landing pages, customer journeys, trending, etc. We have signed up many customers that simply did not use them. Some actually paid us many months of subscription and do almost nothing. It was the companies and marketing agencies that paid us for the needed work that generated actual insight for their marketing efforts and were able to show their agency clients their ROI in a meaningful way. This is why we switched our business model to a don-for-you model. And to make it attractive we offer the services at a fixed cost. So save time and money, and deliver more value.
Let's face it, marketing analytics and reporting is a specialized field. If you're not an expert in it, chances are you're not doing a good job at it. Consider outsourcing to professionals who can deliver the results you need.
One of our most popular articles is an analysis and comparison of how to mimic one of our popular tools, an ROI trend report. With Google stack, some of which still need to be paid, it takes extension work, has a high learning curve, and would take 5 tools to match what we do one tool. The article is here if you are interested, “ROI Marketing Analysis: SaturnOne vs With Google Tools.”
Corrupt and Misleading First-Party Data
This has been a growing issue of late. And with the demise of the cookies, it is only getting worse. I am constantly hearing and seeing:
- Bot traffic is being measured
- Ad platforms are over-attributing conversion to themselves
- Ad traffic has a huge bot problem… that marketing is paying for, wasting money
I was surprised to learn that SaturnOne was doing a much better job at filtering out bot traffic than Google. Surely they have more engineers on coffee break at this moment than we have. Yet our analytics tracking snippet is more capable at bot rejection and event capture than their stack is. Ten times better, in fact.
We are also finding with our independent analysis that the ad platforms are over-attributing conversion. Their goal is really at ods with your goals. They want to maximize their revenue, your spending at your expense. And you want to maximize your ad ROI. Do not trust their conversion and tracking tools. There is ad platform bias.
Oh, and this great analysis by Stacked Marketer on bot click-by ad platform is eye-opening. And yes, we do pay for much of this. Perhaps it is even a cause of the ad platform attribution disconnections we see. If you are doing B2B advertising on LinkedIn over 24% are bot clicks.
Also, interestingly we at SaturnOne have seen outsourced ad management use what has to be bot farms to drive up their numbers. I recall we did a deep-dive funnel analysis for one agency client. There were so many ad clicks from small devices outside the ad region… click-farm probably… be careful who you outsource ad management to!!
Losing Clients Due to No Value-Based or ROI Reporting
I did an initial sales call with a mid-sized agency owner just one week ago who had just lost two big clients. My first sales questions usually are, “Why are you taking your valuable time to talk with me today? What problems do you have that you think we might be able to help with?” Then I listen. His first words were, “Just yesterday, we lost two clients because we did not show them how our work ties to their revenue.”
For marketing agencies, acquiring a new client costs 5X more than retaining an existing one ... So make them Sticky!
I interact with hundreds of marketers and marketing agencies and I am connected on social with thousands. I am seeing and hearing of agencies closing and B2B agencies closing their doors weekly. During this writing, on May 11, 2024, we are having inflation and companies are struggling or tightening their spending.
So it is more important than ever to maximize marketing budgets and prove the Value of marketing efforts from a business perspective. Confusing and frustrating agency clients, or your manager, with 100s of KPI that just confuse and do not connect revenue and investment ROI is just not going to cut it.
Remember, Your marketing agency's clients do not care about your actions!
They only care about your results! Their ROI!
Stop wasting resources on action-based analytics and reporting and switch to Value-Based. This is what we do for performance-driven agencies.
Show this, and you will have happy clients or managers.
Show this, and their eyes will glaze over…
