About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Dashboard activity rarely tells leadership what it needs to know.
Digital marketing platforms give us an overwhelming amount of information. We can track impressions, click-through rates, bounce rates and average session durations with pinpoint accuracy, and these are excellent diagnostic metrics for practitioners to use internally when evaluating the day-to-day health of a campaign.
Trouble starts when we take these highly granular activity metrics into the boardroom. When a marketing leader presents a report highlighting a big increase in website traffic or social media impressions, the executive team expects to see a corresponding increase in revenue. If revenue remains flat, the marketing team loses credibility, because executives care far less about search visibility or click volume than about customer acquisition cost, pipeline velocity and profit margins.
Proxy metrics fail to prove business value.
If we want to secure our budgets and prove the value of our work, we have to stop reporting on vanity or proxy metrics. Metrics like traffic and rankings are top-of-funnel indicators, and while they show that people are finding your brand, they do not prove that those people are actually qualified to buy your services.
We often fall into the trap of celebrating a high volume of leads without stopping to analyze the quality of those leads. Marketing return on investment (ROI) starts with math as much as with digital metrics, and we have to build a framework that connects the top of the marketing funnel directly to the bottom of the financial spreadsheet.
True business impact can be measured with disciplined planning.
Connecting daily activity to actual revenue requires disciplined planning. Here is how we build a reporting structure that the entire organization can trust.
1. Map key performance indicators (KPIs) to business outcomes.
Before you launch a campaign, clearly define the ultimate business goal, such as increasing the lifetime value of existing clients or reducing the cost of acquiring a new enterprise account.
Once that outcome is defined, work backward to determine which specific digital metrics actually indicate progress toward that goal. If your goal is enterprise lead generation, raw website traffic is largely irrelevant, and your KPI should be the number of form submissions from users with qualified corporate email addresses.
2. Track the middle of the funnel.
The gap between a website click and a closed deal is where campaigns often fail, so you have to define the milestones in the middle of the journey.
Track the sales acceptance rate of the leads generated by your search campaigns, and monitor the number of users who move from reading an educational blog post to downloading a highly technical white paper. These middle-of-the-funnel milestones prove that your visibility is generating qualified demand.
3. Share the scorecard with sales.
Marketing cannot own the revenue number in isolation, and sales and marketing should share the exact same scorecard. When both teams agree on what counts as a qualified lead and both are held accountable for pipeline velocity, the internal friction disappears. Marketing stops celebrating empty traffic, and sales stops complaining about poor lead quality.
Clear data connects marketing activity to business outcomes.
We can no longer afford to celebrate vanity metrics. If your search strategy looks successful on a dashboard but feels like a failure in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, your reporting is broken, and it is time to ask for clarity from your data.
Connect your technical indicators directly to your business outcomes, establish shared milestones and learn to speak the language of your executive team. The question to ask is whether you are measuring true business impact or just tracking activity. If you want reporting your leadership can trust, our analytics and reporting team can help you build it.