Being a marketer is not only cool, but also scary. Don’t believe me? Then get comfortable, pour yourself some valerian and let’s get started. We don’t recommend reading it at night or before compiling a monthly report.
Story One. A Terrible Discovery
Once upon a time there was a very brave marketer who was not afraid to use only Google Analytics. “Why would I need anything else? I’ll only get confused in the reports.” And although all the data except online conversions was like a pitch-black box for him, he was not discouraged. After the start of advertising, he usually crossed the screen and believed in his luck.
Once this marketer launched a dozen campaigns, for which the company allocated a considerable budget. He looks at Google Analytics reports and rejoices – high CTR, low cost per click, lots of additions to the cart. He thinks: “Well, that’s it, I’ll definitely be praised. Maybe even a bonus.”
And now it’s time to sum up. It turned out that high CTR and low CPC can’t be spread on bread. Users added products to the cart, but almost no one made it to the checkout. Some went missing, some couldn’t be reached. Only one bought – four boxes of paper clips and 10 ballpoint pens.
They say that that marketer still wanders the corridors like a ghost, and all the time mutters something about end-to-end analytics .
Story Two: The Lost Budget
One late evening, a marketer was walking home and thought: “Let me take a shortcut through the old cemetery, no one has been buried there for 50 years anyway.” He was walking along the path and then a voice from underground:
– Well hello.
“Who’s there?” the marketer jumped back in horror.
– It’s me, the October budget. Remember, you spent all of me, and there were no conversions.
– Well, I wanted the best. I even turned off Instagram ads just in case. And I invested all of you in Google search campaigns, they are somehow more solid.
– But you’ve buried me in the ground. Instagram used to bring you paying clients. You would have known that yourself if you’d looked at the reports carefully. By the way, I’m here with the sales you didn’t get in October.
That night, residents of nearby houses continued to hear the marketer’s screams and lamentations for a long time, which came from the cemetery.
Story three: Nightmares
One evening, a marketer is sitting at home, watching Netflix with one eye, glancing at Instagram with the other. Everything seems fine, but his soul is somehow uneasy. As if he forgot something. He thought and thought and then it dawned on him: “#$%*&! It’s been a long time since I asked for money to top up my account. And we just launched a new campaign. How long will my budget last?”
He rushed to the computer, but then the power went out. He rummaged around the table looking for his laptop, tried to turn it on – but it was dead. The marketer was almost in tears. He found his mobile phone and dialed his colleague:
— Sveta, save me! Open the last campaign for the down jackets. Did you open it? Look, are there any showings? My laptop is dead and the power is out.
Sveta was silent for a while, only the sound of clicking the mouse could be heard. And then she said in an ingratiating voice:
— Hey, your balance has been 0 for a week now. You didn’t skimp on the daily budget for down jackets either — instead of 100 hryvnias per day, you set it to 1000. So no one has seen our ad for a long time. And one more thing. What landing page did you set up in the brand campaign? The URL is missing the last character — it leads to a page with a 404 error. And the ad was launched 30 days ago. It turns out that the traffic has been wasted this entire month.
And then Sveta bursts into satanic laughter: “Ha-ha-ha! I should tell the mark director. Well, now I’ll be appointed team leader of the pipsishniks!”
The marketer’s hair stood on end in horror. And then he realized: “Stop, something’s wrong here. If I haven’t topped up my account, where’s the traffic coming from?” And as soon as he thought about it, he jumped up in bed in a cold sweat. What dreams you can’t have on the eve of Halloween.
Story Four: Taming
A marketer was sitting late at the office one night. It was already dark, the office was quiet. It was even scary. And then the boss bursts in. His hair was standing on end, his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. And he screamed: “Where are the sales?” And the head of sales was standing behind him and saying: “Yes, yes, no one is calling us. We just wasted our money on advertising.”
But the marketer was no slouch. He grabbed a marker from the board, drew a circle around himself, opened the call tracking log and began to read quickly: “October 12 — 10 calls from advertising, 9 of which were missed. October 13 — 22 calls from advertising. All unique, 15 missed.” He read and read until his boss said: “Lift my eyelids,” and gestured to turn the monitor toward him.
After looking at the report, the boss only had time to say, “Well, well…” – and then the roosters crowed. The marketer realized that he was saved. And he taught his entire team the same trick.
Tale Five: A Terrible Transformation
One B2B marketer never listened to calls. He felt sorry for the time, and he thought it was none of his business how salespeople worked. But one day, salespeople complained that the leads they were getting from a campaign they had launched were really bad. “That can’t be!” the marketer said confidently. “You listen to the calls,” one of the salespeople replied.
The marketer rolled up his sleeves and started listening. And it was just awful. A pensioner was calling, and a chicken was clucking in the background. Or a person from Ulan-Ude wanted to order Ossetian pies with delivery. The marketer grabbed his head. He thought that he was bringing in leads – and not just simple ones, but pure SQL . And they turned into garbage. Colleagues later said that he turned gray in just one day.
Story number six. Fatal mistake
A marketer is sitting there, chewing on a pen, finishing his tenth cup of coffee – nervous. They launched a new ad four days ago, but people, as before, call three times a day, no more. And even then, half of the people say that they are calling about a flyer that a hired student hands out in a shopping center.
The marketer thinks, let me look at the ads again. He looked and looked and suddenly noticed – in the phone number indicated in the ad, there is a mistake in the last digit! And the ad itself, frankly speaking, is inexpressive, pale as death. How did he not notice it before? “Team of professionals, guarantee, fast production, good service.” And it is also very similar to the competitors’ ads, which are shown above.
What to do? I googled and googled and found “Manual: How to compose an ad for contextual advertising” , and then “Cheat sheet: how to replace “fluff” in ads with specifics” . But it’s too late. It should have been done earlier.
Story number seven. The domino effect
At the meeting, it was announced that sales were bad last month and the advertising budget needed to be cut. There was nothing to do but choose what to turn off and what to leave. The marketer began to look at which channels lead to conversions. He saw that these were usually organics, social networks, context. What should he turn off? And then his gaze accidentally fell on the next table, where email marketer Lena was sitting, focused on her work.
Exactly. After all, this useless mailing has never led to a single target conversion. Why do we invest so much effort and money into it? It would be better if Lena managed, for example, social networks. And that would be more useful. In the end, I insisted that the mailing be stopped. At first, Lena was indignant, and then she resigned herself, but looked at the marketer with a very unpleasant look.
And suddenly the news – sales have become very low. As if something very important is missing. The marketer decided that Lena put the evil eye on sales. No wonder they say that all women are witches. Only from time to time the marketer heard his colleagues talking behind his back about multi-channel sequences and some chains. But what kind of nonsense is this? It would be better to put a talisman next to the laptop – this will definitely protect against a drop in sales.
Story #8: Vampire Playgrounds
Marketer firmly believed that advertising systems were already so smart that he only needed a dozen mouse clicks to launch a campaign. That’s what he usually did. He didn’t linger too long at any step and didn’t really change the basic settings.
But his superiors weren’t very happy with him. Sometimes he would develop a banner, launch the KMS – and it would be as if someone was sucking the budget out of the campaign. A million clicks, money was spent, but no applications, no sales. Already handing over the case to the new marketer who was hired instead, he understood what was going on. “Aren’t you deliberately disabling impressions on children’s sites, in applications and other similar platforms?” – asked the new marketer, looking with clear eyes at the fired colleague.
They say that after this phrase, he ran out of the office with a wild scream. And no one saw him again. It turns out that the new marketer, who utilized the best digital marketing services, was able to identify the critical missteps and optimize the campaigns effectively.
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