Internet marketing is all relative
As I write this, I am in a cab in my way to a speaking event for the New Jersey Advertising Club in central New Jersey. I wasn’t planning to take a cab–I had my train ticket and was all ready to go, but the trains were canceled. So I had to scramble to figure out how to make the event on time, stressing over whether all the attendees would show up to no speaker. And the cab driver was confused about how to get there–constantly calling his dispatcher and getting lost. Sounds like a terrible morning for me, right? Yes, only if you don’t compare it to anyone else. For example, the reasons the trains were canceled was because a woman was struck and killed by a train this morning, so I am definitely having a better day than at least one person. I don’t know about you, but thinking about that poor woman and her family and friends puts my petty troubles in perspective. It’s all relative, isn’t it? So is Internet marketing. So if there are no rules for what is success, how can you reduce your stress over how you are doing in digital marketing?
Often, people are dying to know how they are doing in Internet marketing. “What conversion rate should my Web site have?” “How do I know what the right clickthrough rate is for my ad?” “How many visitors should I be getting from search?”
These are all good questions but they have no good answers. Because the answer is that it is all relative. There are no best practices that tell you the answer. You can’t look it up in Google. It doesn’t matter what your competitors’ numbers are.
The only thing that matters is your own numbers. The right answer to all of those questions is “A little bit better that yesterday’s.” You are striving for continuous improvement. Conversion rate, clickthrough rate, visitors–it doesn’t matter what metric–should always be getting better.
It doesn’t happen in a straight line. Metrics always vary. They always go up and down. But you need to correlate the actions you take with the results that you get. Each time you change something–anything–you should know beforehand what numbers you expect to improve. And then you look for that improvement afterward. If you see it, that’s great. Do more of that. If not, it is time to try something else–possibly the same idea executed differently or a completely different idea.
But all success is relative. You are constantly comparing what you see now to what you saw before and making a new decision each day on what to do next.
Oh, and yes, I did make it to the event. New Jersey Transit even gave me a free ticket for my trouble, even though it isn’t their fault that the trains had to be canceled. Because I always expect something to go wrong, I had left early for the event and I worked my way through whatever happened and it all came out OK, with as little stress as possible under the circumstances. If you similarly take the right approach in Internet marketing, you’ll succeed and lower your stress at the same time.
