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Last week, I wrote about how startups should gather all the analytics they can.  This week, I want to give you a couple of free marketing tools you can download to help you tell your story in the next board meeting.  Hey, we’re a startup too and this is helping us, so I figured why not share it.

Free Marketing Tool #1

The first tool is what I call the One Page Marketing Breakdown.  It’s essentially a “waterline” that shows the board what marketing and advertising is working really well, and what not working so well.  You got it – above the waterline = good; below the waterline….well, it might be drowning so keep a close eye on it, or do whatever you can to optimize the hell out of it.  Yes, there are other facets of marketing I am not considering here, but this is the stuff you’re likely paying for, and I did compare it with free stuff.  For my company, I set out to test several target websites where I thought the people who are most likely to use our product would be hanging out. (click the image below for a larger view)

Free Downloads

Download the file below so you can edit it to your liking with your numbers, and use it in your next board meeting.

Get the Keynote for Mac here
Get the PowerPoint for PC here

Now where did I get this information?  I went into Google Analytics and ran a report on Top Traffic Sources, and segmented it by conversion rate (you have to have goals set up).  That easily gives me the conversion rates per advertising channel, and I compared them to all to what organic (free) visitors convert at.  The thinking here is that it’s probably worth paying for (and keeping) an ad channel if it is converting better than your free traffic – hence the waterline.

Next, I calculated my cost per report ran.  I took the monthly pro-rated cost of the ad (like if it was $100/mo, then it’s around $3.33 per day), multiplied that by the number of days the ad ran in the month, and divided that by the number of conversions – so you get cost/conversion.  These are real numbers for Pear Analytics, and our conversion priority are folks who enter their website and run a free website analysis.  For other startups, this may be folks who create an account, request a beta invite, or accounts that convert from free to paid.  I would caution you to keep it simple, as in our case the conversion comes from the last referral and is fairly immediate.  Once you start getting into original referral source, things get really tricky, really fast.

As you can see, for the most part, our conversions can cost around $1 or less, with a couple of sources going up to the $3-4 mark, and Influads getting up to almost $14 (there wasn’t enough data on this since it was only running a couple of days, hence the shitty CPL).

Free Marketing Tool #2

The next free marketing tool is what I call The Simple Conversion Funnel you saw in last weeks post on analytics.  This is such an important aspect of your business, and sadly, I see few utilizing it.  The funnel is simple, and you can get most of it from your Google Analytics account.  We get the information from a combination of Google Analytics, and information we store in our database (we cookie visitors and do session tracking too).

This is just an example of the various stages in your funnel, but you’re going to want one of these for each activity.  You can see step-to-step conversion rates, the overall conversion rate, as well as the CPL (cost per lead), and CPA (cost per acquisition).  Don’t worry, your marketing guy should know what this stuff means.

Free Downloads

Download the Keynote version for Mac here
Download the PowerPoint version for PC here

Now go off an be marketing and analytics ninjas in your next board meeting.  These are sure to impress!  Now, stay tuned for next week’s post where I show you how I changed my Google AdWords campaign and got a 400% improvement on the conversion rate.