Proving Growth

One of the things I always wanted to know in digital was not just whether campaigns were producing clicks or leads, but whether they were producing actual business.

That sounds obvious, but it is not always easy to measure. A lot of agencies stop at traffic, impressions or form fills and call it success. I never liked that. I wanted to get closer to the real number.

With this client, we were able to do that.

Over the course of the year, the company invested about $390,600 in digital marketing. Our campaigns ended up driving half of the company’s total website traffic, and traffic from our efforts increased 34 percent year over year. More importantly, that traffic produced a large volume of quote requests through the website.

From those web quotes alone, the potential revenue tied to the campaigns was about $23.8 million.

But I did not want to leave it at potential revenue, because potential can be a little slippery if you do not know what tends to close. So we went a step further. We surveyed the customer and used its actual close rate on website quotes to get a more realistic picture of likely return.

That close rate came in at 35 percent.

Once we applied that number, the likely revenue connected to those digital efforts was about $8.33 million.

That is the part that mattered to me.

Not just that the campaigns performed. Not just that traffic was up. But that we could look at the investment, look at the quote volume, look at the close rate, and make a pretty solid case that the work was producing real dollars.

For a company with an average transaction around $5,000, that is not a small result. It is a strong reminder that when digital is done right, it is not just a marketing expense. It becomes a meaningful revenue driver.

That was always the goal.