Tips for reporting on campaigns and making recommendations for your future solar marketing activity
Outcome of the Insights Doc:
This is a task that involves reporting & analysis.
The Insights doc reports on:- Existing campaigns
- General marketing activity
- New opportunities to test or improve
- Recommendations
- Action items for the Project Owner to then assign to the team with priorities outlined
- i.e. if you are looking at the data, notice something odd or something that can be fixed/improved, make it an action item and a task! Don't just add that data to the Insights Doc and forget about it.
- The overall outcome is proactive planning and implementation.
- Keep it high level (dot points). Think about what will be most useful for your delivery team to improve, and what will be most useful for the key stakeholders of the solar business to know.
When to use the Insights Doc:
- Add monthly insights to the doc. This can be Google Ads and Facebook Ads monthly insights, as well as insights from the CRM or Google Analytics.
- The insights doc should be ready and update before the end of each month.
Sources to get Insights from:
These are definitely the key ones to start with:
- HubSpot Portal (Marketing Dashboard, Email Reports, Reports)
- Facebook Ads Manager
- Google Ads Account
- Email platform (HubSpot or MailChimp)
Insights Doc Template:
Here is a guideline/framework you can use for your Insights Docs. This will ensure you are capturing key information. Feel free to add anything extra that doesn't fit into these categories if you feel it's valuable. You may not include all of these each time you get insights - just use what's relevant.
Insights Doc framework:
- What did I spend this month?
- What was the total spend on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and any other platforms?
- How to find: Check FB Ads and Google Ads accounts for client, set date range, check total spend.
- Example: $2000 total across FB Ads and Google Ads, with most of the budget skewed to FB Ads.
- What was the total spend on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and any other platforms?
- What campaigns are we running?
- What campaigns are we currently running?
- How to find: Check Active or recently finished campaigns in FB Ads and Google Ads accounts.
- Example: Solar Rebate conversion campaign, branding campaign and Considering Solar conversion campaign.
- Worth including a screenshot.
- What campaigns are we currently running?
- How many leads came through?
- How many total leads in the month did we get from all the advertising we've done?
- How to find: How many new contacts/leads came into HubSpot during the date range?
- Example: 30 contacts this month so far, majority from X campaign.
- How many total leads in the month did we get from all the advertising we've done?
- What's the cost per lead?
- What was the cost per lead?
- How to find: The number of leads that month divided by the amount spent on advertising that month. Directly in FB Ads and Google Ads this will be a part of the reporting columns.
- Example: Cost per lead on FB Ads is $10, cost per lead on Google Ads is $30.
- What was the cost per lead?
- Difference from previous month?
- How are we doing compared to last month? Better? Worse? Why?
- How to find: Look at all of the same data, but from the previous month (change date range). HubSpot Marketing Dashboard usually compares to previous month on some reports.
- Example: cost per lead might be better, email open rate might be worse - maybe we have a lead quality problem and should look at our targeting (this is something to note in the Insights Doc, then create a task for the relevant person to investigate).
- How are we doing compared to last month? Better? Worse? Why?
- How are visitors behaving on the website?
- If visitors land on our site from ads or organic, how are they behaving/what are they doing?
- How to find: Hotjar insights, Google Analytics traffic acquisition and page view reports.
- Example: Most visitors this month came from organic. Visitors from the X campaign from FB Ads had pretty low engagement on the site, with session lengths under 10 seconds (why are the sessions so low - probably low quality traffic from the FB ads - can we test different targeting or ad copy to see if we can improve this?)
- If visitors land on our site from ads or organic, how are they behaving/what are they doing?
- Email marketing insights?
- If we are running email marketing campaign/s, how are they performing?
- How to find: Either MailChimp or HubSpot (wherever we are sending emails from).
- Example: Open rate is 26% (improved from last month), click rate is 1.5%. Email #X has the best performance (opens + clicks).
- Worth including a screenshot.
- If we are running email marketing campaign/s, how are they performing?
- Traffic insights?
- What are the most popular pages on the site and where are people coming from/finding it?
- How to find: Google Analytics (GA4: Engagement > Pages and screens) (Universal Analytics: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages)
- Example: Our landing page for X campaign is the most popular page this month. X pageviews and bounce rate of 80%.
- Worth including a screenshot.
- What are the most popular pages on the site and where are people coming from/finding it?
- What are our competitors doing?
- Get some insights around what their competitors are doing
- Are they running ads?
- What is their social schedule link? What types of things are they posting?
Summary
- What’s working?
- Based on all of the insights, what worked this month?
- Example: the changes we made to the email subject lines last month have helped improve the email open rate this month.
- Example: the number of leads are up! Could be seasonal, could be the new campaigns we introduced.
- What’s not working?
- Based on all of the insights, what didn't work this month?
- Example: social engagement was down this month, we only had 3 posts.
- Example: the new campaign has not produced any leads this month, we need to review and check for any issues.
- Based on this, what can we test this month?
- Opportunities, recommendations, action items.
- This could be as a direct result of things that are working/not working.
- Could also opportunities/ideas from what we have seen work for other clients.
- Example: start planning out at least one social post a week for next month
- Example: review campaign, check targeting and landing page
- Example: the email campaign we tested was a huge success, let's plan what we can do next month
Further Notes about Insights Sources
HubSpot Marketing Dashboard
What to look for here:
- Contacts by source
- What's the best performing source and has this changes since last Insights? Are there any opportunities to improve the lower performing sources?
- Email performance
- If sending emails from HubSpot, what are the open and click rates like, have they improved?
Ads Reports (Facebook Ads, Google Ads)
What to look for here:
- Clients want to get good value for the money they are spending on ads, so they will want to know how much they are spending and what the cost per contact is (the lower the better)
- Also look at campaigns with high cost per click vs low cost per click (lower is better)
- Why are they high or low? Is there an action item for Google Ads or Facebook Ads to check on the performance of a campaign with too high cost per click? We don't need to leave things as they are, we can check the data and make improvements/changes.
HubSpot Traffic Analysis
What to look for here:
- Campaigns + sources
- What is the bounce rate, session length from campaigns and different sources (FB Ads, Google Ads, email etc)?
- High bounce rate and short session length could mean there's a problem with the LP, or room for improvement.
Google Analytics
What to look for here:
- Acquisition > Traffic > Source/Medium (where is the majority of sessions coming from?)
- Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages (what are the most popular pages)
- Campaigns + sources
- What is the bounce rate, session length from campaigns and different sources (FB Ads, Google Ads, email etc)?
- High bounce rate and short session length could mean there's a problem with the LP, or room for improvement.
Facebook Ads
What to look for here:
- Specific Campaign Insights
- New campaigns
- Need to start getting insights from the start of the campaign - don't leave it until the campaign is over, but give it a few days to get started and collecting data.
- Key results (landing page views, clicks, conversions?)
- Cost per result
- Cost per click
- Impressions
- Existing campaigns/always on
- Check for any delivery errors (learning limited, creative fatigue, errors) and resolve
- Key results (landing page views, clicks, conversions?)
- Cost per result
- Cost per click
- Impressions
- New campaigns
In general for any campaign you can split out Insights like this:
What was tested:
What worked:
What didn't work:
Key insights:
Recommendations:
Example:
Google Ads
What to look for here:
- Specific Campaign Insights
- New campaigns
- Need to start getting insights from the start of the campaign - don't leave it until the campaign is over, but give it a few days to get started and collecting data.
- Key results (landing page views, clicks, conversions?)
- Cost per result
- Cost per click
- Impressions
- Existing campaigns/always on
- Check for any delivery errors (learning limited, creative fatigue, errors) and resolve
- Key results (landing page views, clicks, conversions?)
- Cost per result
- Cost per click
- Impressions
- New campaigns
In general for any campaign you can split out Insights like this:
What was tested:
What worked:
What didn't work:
Key insights:
Recommendations: