Marketers often ask about benchmark data. But what marketers often forget is that building up benchmark data requires testing and time.
Basic metrics can include clickthrough rate or email open rate, and even more data-driven benchmarks such as when is the best day to send email. One major problem with relying on these types of surveys and reports is that when you get right down to it, they may not be really relevant to your specific audience and how it’s engaging with your messaging.
Having any number, say for a broad aggregate for display ad clickthrough, does offer some sort of meaning when first running a display campaign. You can see how your effort performed against all other display campaigns, across all sorts of industries and marketplaces. But it’s clear why that aggregate number really doesn’t have much value as an ongoing benchmark or goal. If you can find results that are more highly targeted for your particular marketplace, those numbers are somewhat more meaningful, but they still don’t help you uncover how your specific audience is interacting with you.
Benchmarking your own metrics
The better approach will take more effort and time, but in the long run will pay off in more effective and optimized campaigns. You can take as formal, or informal, an approach as you like, but make sure to actively track, and record, the results of every campaign. It's crucial to look for trends in places such as the time of day (or day of week) where your email open rate is higher, or your social media engagement improves, or specific pages within your website that are specifically being visited by people using mobile devices and pages where people on mobile devices are immediately bouncing.
An informal approach that involves little more than keeping a simple spreadsheet and collecting all the basic key performance indicators (KPI) data from each campaign will allow you to compare similar campaigns and provide more value and insight than just taking a benchmark from survey. It will help you better decide whether your campaign was, or wasn’t, successful based on how it performed against that figure.
Where you can really begin to see value is by taking the process to a more formal level and developing a testing and optimization program. Formalizing the process and engaging in A/B testing allows you to find out what elements of your campaigns are directly impacting your KPI metrics. By doing this you are now competing against your previous campaigns, and not reaching for a benchmark figure that probably doesn’t fully apply to your specific marketing efforts. Plus, you are continually learning what your audience responds to and making continual improvements in your marketing to make sure you are providing that audience with what they want.
Testing is deliberate process, not a race
When performing A/B tests, remember that it’s important to only test one main element in a campaign at a time. If your control and treatment are completely different, you’ll never know which change between the two made the most difference. (One exception to this is when you are testing major changes, such as a radical redesign of a webpage, and you want to find out if one of the dramatically different versions performs better.) The second key thing to keep in mind is make sure your test reaches a confidence level with statistical significance. Most testing tools will handle this aspect of the test for you. Otherwise, the results could cause you to make changes based on bad information from the test.
Once you begin a testing and optimization program, what you can test and improve is almost limitless. Here are just a few examples of marketing pieces to test:
- Layout of landing pages
- Calls-to-action within email copy or on landing pages
- Color and size of buttons within emails or on landing pages
- Time of day or day of week emails are sent
- Time of day or day of week social media posts are sent to your followers
- Paid search ad copy
Really, almost anything in your marketing can be broken down and tested. If A/B testing is new element in your marketing, take your time. Don’t try and test everything at once, apply a rigorous process to determining what to test, learn from previous tests, and allow those results to inform future tests. Testing and optimization isn’t an end goal – it’s an ongoing, iterative process that gradually improves your overall marketing strategy and tactics.
And as you build up benchmark data on how your marketing pieces are performing with your audience, your benchmarks will provide much more meaning and insight than any aggregate survey of what your peers might be doing and achieving.