Business and marketing data can become meaningless markers when they lack the right context. For example, it’s easy to get excited or discouraged by statements like “ROAS was 15x last night” or “Revenue is down 15% again” without seeing the whole picture.
There is a lot to say about this, but I want to share three of my favorite ways to give numbers like these good context at the outset.
Three Ways to Provide Context for Your Data
1. Search Demand
Did you know that you can run any search term you’re curious about through Google Search Trends to see how many people searched for that term this year, last year, and even as far back as 2004? Having the context of search demand is invaluable for interpreting metrics.
For example, if you are a rafting company in Banff National Park and 30% fewer people are searching for “Banff rafting” and your traffic is down 10%, that could actually be a really big win.
2. The Local Market: Occupancy, Flight Traffic, and Local Market Revenue
Most larger markets will have data on hotel occupancy and inbound flight traffic, and many of them even release things like the average amount of money that people are spending at their destination over time. Again, this is super helpful information to have when considering metrics like average order value, revenue, ad performance, and others.
3. Your Competitive Landscape
This last one is really easy to overlook. I would suggest keeping it really simple initially and doing three things, at least weekly.
- Google your brand name – just see what pops up. Maybe a reseller is running a rogue set of ads, maybe a new advertiser is taking up space. We recently had a client that Groupon was buying up all their branded traffic and sucking tons of full-price direct revenue away from them and towards itself. Putting a stop to that saves potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Google commercial intent terms that you care about. How are you positioned? Do you like what you see? What offers are your competitors running?
- Use Facebook’s Ad Library to see what your competition is paying Meta to promote. This can be super enlightening. What offers are they doing? Do you need to match them?
If you always start with search demand, your local market, and your competitive landscape, your data is going to have a lot more context and will make a lot more sense. Of course, there will always be nuance and endless pursuit of data accuracy and comprehensiveness, but context is an essential place to start.
