Step 3: Collect the Measures - Visits: Let’s Take A Look at Tukaluk

This is the third in the series called “Let’s Take A Look at Tukaluk”. This series of articles will apply the concepts of the Intentional Marketing System outlined in the book recently published by Joanne O'Connell and myself. 

For a full description and more details, use this link to purchase a copy of Intentional Marketing: A Systematic Approach to Optimizing Performance. You can get a FREE PDF copy of Part 1: The Big Picture using the same link. 

For this series, we are developing a customer acquisition model for the marketing operations of Tukaluk Campground and Cabins. Calgary-based investor and entrepreneur David Cooper owns this business. He has kindly allowed us to use and publish selected marketing data.

In our first article, Step 1: Asking Important Questions, we laid the groundwork for understanding key questions before starting this project. This article followed our previous series, "10 Things I Learned from Joanne," which began with Each Level of the Model Must be Measurable.

In the second article, Step 2: Design the Model: Let’s Take A Look at Tukaluk, we took a look (pun intended) at designing the customer acquisition model. This step is critical for defining the levels of the model and the marketing channels. The financial aspects of the model are implied, but not listed explicitly. We will get to this later. 

This article will look at how to collect the measures to add to the model.

Step 3 - Collect the Measures

As a refresher, the diagram below is what we designed in the previous step. This is the design of the customer acquisition model. 

In the diagram, we have listed:

• Investments as the input

• The levels of the model

• A list of the marketing channels

• A list of the sources for the measures

• The 2 outcomes of the model

• Revenues as an output

• A target for ROMI to be within the sweat spot of 10 and 20

Although we have listed the sources of the measures, actually “collecting” or getting the measures is another story. In practice, it can be quite daunting. But let’s give it a try.

Attribution

Before we start collecting, we need to understand “attribution”. In our book, we define attribution as (page 157):

A process that includes the decision to assign a marketing channel to
an outcome (often a sale). This is valuable when a marketer wants to
determine the impact of advertising such as on Facebook or the radio.

Most marketers would prefer that there be only one channel assigned
for each outcome, but this is rarely the case. Most companies use
multiple channels at the same time. A few ways that attribution can
be defined include first click, linear, last click, weighted, or some
combination of these.

That’s a bit technical, so let me break it down. What we want to know is if it is a good idea to invest in Facebook or Instagram. Or between SEO (basically free) and Google Search Ads (pay-per-click). Etc. 

In an ideal system, we would know which investment in marketing generated the most sales and for the lowest cost per sale. Getting to this point will take some work and some thinking, but we will get there — not right away but by Step 5—Generate a Marketing Statement. 

Although the definition for attribution is specifically for a sale it is important to know the source for each person at each level of the model. This isn’t always possible, but this is the intention. 

The Process of Collecting

In the model, the levels are: 

• Impressions

• Visits

• Offers

• Prospects (Spoiler alert: we may drop this level. More on this later.)

• Sales, as the outcome

Remember that visits are Users of the website not visitors to the campground. If you think about this, once they drive up the road to the campground, they are already prospects. At this point, they are going to decide whether to stay the night or not. If they decide to stay, they will pay and become a sale. 

Note to some readers: This may sound elementary. It is. However, it has taken Joanne and me years of research and thinking to develop a model that is simple. Stick with me. What appears to be simple can get complicated very quickly. 

Once we understand the measures from Google Analytics we can go to each marketing platform to get the number of impressions. 

To get offers we need to do some fancy filtering, but the measures are in Google Analytics. 

In the diagram of the model, we have included prospects. Upon reflection, there is limited value for including prospects. We could include them, but there is quite a bit of work involved and I’m not sure that there is any benefit. There are always prospects, especially with a business like this but developing processes to track prospects isn’t worth the time. So, for the time being, we are going to drop the level of prospects. 

Once we have invested in a marketing channel we want to know how effective the investment was in driving people to the website which is measured as a visit. 

Collecting Measures for Visits — Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a valuable tool for our purposes. In my experience, Google Analytics is the best starting point for collecting measures because attribution reporting is built-in and relatively straightforward to access. This allows us to retrieve measures, such as website visits. As we will see we can also get measures related to offers.

The report that we want to use is “Traffic acquisition”. The path is Reports \ Life cycle \ Acquisition \ Traffic acquisition

We are looking for the number of Users who came to the website during the month of May 2024. As with all levels of the model, (except impressions), we are looking for people. As a result, we don’t want:

• Pageviews because this is the number of pages users looked at—we want people

• New users because this includes only people who have never come to the website before—we want a count of the people who visited the website

• Sessions because this includes multiple visits by the same person—we want the number of people

• Hits because that term is from 1995 and is useless for our purposes—we want people

We want the number of unique people who visited the website during the month of May. The period of a month is about right for our purposes. For smaller businesses, a month is good. Larger companies may need to look at shorter (or longer) time frames. The number of days varies from month to month but using this framework makes year-over-year comparisons easier. 

This is the report that we want from Google Analytics:

We can see that for May 2024, 624 Users visited the website. 597 of those were new (95%). On average, each visitor stayed on the website for about 1 minute. We can ignore “Total revenue” because this has not been set up in Google Analytics. We may do that later. 

The next part of this report has the information that we are looking for. 

Let’s define each channel to understand where people came from to get to the website. Note that Sessions are on the right side of the image. We are ignoring Sessions for now. 

Direct includes people who know the domain name and typed it into the browser address bar directly. In other words, they are familiar with the brand name. The way to increase the number of people visiting the website via the Direct channel is to improve the power of the brand name. The power of building a strong brand is that people who are aware of the brand visit the website just by typing the website name into the address bar. This assumes they are interested in what the company has to offer.

There are complications with visitors from Direct. People who bookmark the website are considered to be from Direct. People are considered to be from Direct if a business sends out an email blast (or any type of email) which has not been coded correctly with a UTM code. This is a very common problem with small companies and marketers who are new to the industry.

When done correctly, visitors who click on a link with a UTM code to the website from an email will show up as Email on this list. 

Organic Search includes people who did a keyword search using a search engine. They would have seen a variety of links and clicked a link to some page related to tukaluk.ca. Businesses will use search engine optimization (SEO) to add keyword phrases to their website pages and improve rankings. 

Paid Search and Display are not included unless investments are made in these channels. 

Organic Social includes people coming from organic postings on social media websites. Businesses can increase this number by posting more on social platforms and creating better content (from the reader’s point of view). 

Paid Social is not included unless investments are made in these channels. 

Unassigned includes visitors where Google Analytics cannot identify the source. Ideally, this should be zero.

Referral includes visitors who have been “referred” to the website from other websites. In other words, the user was looking at another website, saw a link to Tukaluk.ca, clicked the link, and came to a page hosted by Tukaluk. 

Next Week

Next week we will look at how to collect measures for offers. Hint: We will still use Google Analytics, but we need to filter the results to get measures that are meaningful. We will also look at a prototype of the model in Google Sheets.