Is Your Number Up?

I worked with this kid lately who, although being a nice guy, is clueless when it comes to business.  His market is a great one, especially in this recession, and he strikes me as a hard worker, and over-all intelligent.

So it surprised the hell out of me when we went to look at some copy on one of his sites.  He said something to the effect of, “Dude, the copy’s not working.”

Okay, easy enough to fix.  Let’s look at your metrics.  ”My what?”

What’s your conversion rate?

“Not quite 3%!”

With short copy, that’s pretty good.  Okay, let’s look at your traffic sources.  Where do your prospects come from?

“I don’t know.”

Uh… well, how many unique visitors are you getting per day?

“I don’t know.”

What is your customer acquisition cost?

“Can’t you just go and look at my web logs and Google stuff and tell me?”

Sure, if you want to hire me for analytics, reporting, and testing.  At this point, I had no choice but to give him some tough love:

If you don’t know your numbers, you’re not in business.  You have no idea what is working and what is not, nor can you prove it.  Chances are, you are not maximizing your advertising, because you don’t know where it’s effective, and where you are just throwing it out the window.  Nor can you prove that the copy is great, it sucks, or it’s barely adequate, unless you split-test and measure the results.

And those are just the basics.

Haven’t heard from him since.  Too bad.  I hate to see wasted opportunity.

Wanna hear something even more scary?  I discussed this with a few copywriters, and was astonished at the conversation.  There are some copywriters who don’t even know that “something like metrics” even exist.  All they want to do is write copy.  They’ve never even heard of anything like a “customer acquisition cost,” let alone show their clients how to slash it to a level where they’ll kill their competition.

They wouldn’t know junk traffic from revenue generating traffic – nor have they ever heard of taguchi or multivariate testing.

Even Al Capone kept track of his numbers.  He used them to grow one of the biggest enterprises of the day in his field.   And sure enough, what was it that brought him down?

Not reporting.

-Kevin Dawson