How "Action Tracking" Can Help with Market Research for Your Business
Katrina dropped by Stories of Market Research: The Insightrix Podcast, to talk through her Action Tracking digital marketing process, share tips on what to watch, and introduce librarian spiders. You can listen to it here
“The beautiful part about being a small business right now is all of the data that is coming from social media and from search engines is available to you, so you can make good decisions,” said Katrina to podcast host, Duncan McGregor.
She recommends the first place for business to start is in Google AdWords (now called GoogleAd), looking at the keyword planner. It lets you know “what exactly are people searching for.”
This is also where knowing about librarian spiders is important. Katrina uses the term librarian spiders as a way of describing the google algorithm that watches where people go for information and how long they stay there. If your business answers the keyword search and people spend time on the site, it’s a success for the algorithm.
“Basically, if they feel like they got it right, they tell all the other librarian spiders, ‘we did it, send everybody here this is the right place to answer this question.’”
Once you know what keywords work, it’s time to set up some ads to test messages in Facebook – there is lots of information available via social media, but most important is measuring the number of people that click through to a website.
As Katrina puts it, “engagement is good, but that’s not going to feed your family. You need people to be clicking through and buying.”
There is a great moment in their conversation that the title of Katrina’s book becomes clear.
“So, you really want to be tracking behaviours,” Duncan said.
“Thus, Action Tracking,” Katrina quips.
“By the end of the testing, you’ll end up with this beautiful message, you know exactly the photo, you know exactly the message that is going to cause people to go to your website.”
Social media is good, email is better is the second message from German. She calls it the super power that most businesses have forgotten. The people who sign up for marketing emails are already interested in your product, which means more people likely to visit your site.
A lot of data can be overwhelming for small-and-medium business, so Katrina breaks it down to three critical pieces of information:
What words are people searching for?
What is the click through rate?
What is the cost per click?
“It’s a bit of a process, but it’s so worth it because you can begin to predict your profit,” she said.
If this all seems like a lot to take on, Katrina’s book breaks it down to a step-by-step process that can be followed over 30 days. Coming up in April she will be sharing a video training package, so users can follow along.