How do you know your marketing is right? How do you know how what you’re getting by word of mouth right now is right? How do you know if how you’re asking for people to review your products is right? How do you know your salespeople are reporting numbers properly to you? How do you really know? Numbers trump opinion all day, every day. That is how to know you’re right. The only way you will ever know is to let the numbers tell you and get another set of eyeballs to validate what you think numerically and do it objectively at the same time.
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How To Know You’re Right
How do you know you’re right? How do you know you’re not wrong? What the heck am I talking about here? We just had the results from a 90-day split test. The results were to the likes I have never seen before. I cannot wait to explain. Over the last X amount of years, we have accumulated assets that we own that do not have website partners. It’s just ours.
We found a group of sites, about 170 of them that our team deemed ungrowable, toxic and dead. We created a list, 400 sites, 172 of them expressly have a checkbox under closed down, sell or incinerator. I was going with my gut and I’m like, “It’s great that these people have a thought that these sites are toast, but is there any data? Is there any evidence that supports it? How do they know they’re right?”
I appreciate one of the people who has eleven years of SEO experience, but I have 25 years of experience that number’s trump opinion all day, everyday. I just decided to do my own test. I reach out to another company because we have no time to do this internally. I set a marketing budget of X dollars per domain x 172 domains. To my shock, the cumulative revenue for these 172 pieces of garbage, was $18,200. To my shock, the cumulative revenue from this portfolio of 172 dead pieces of garbage is $35,800.
In a 60-day period, these assets grew 84% the month before they dropped $300 from $18,500to $18,200. What makes this so astounding is that is an eight-week response, of which four of the eight weeks was the month of December. It’s the second worst traffic month in a website calendar because it’s the Black Friday Blahs. The next seven weeks, everybody is into the holidays and this and that.
What is the point of this short podcast? Here’s the key, how do you know you’re right? These guys, they’re not stupid. I would call them experts. I was proud of them. I paid them a lot of money to make major decisions and I trust them. They said these 172 sites are dead. I wasn’t sure and I just needed numbers to verify and validate. The cost to do the trial was insignificant compared to the potential cost of being wrong. If they’re wrong, this $18,000 could turn into say $100,000 a month or we’d be losing a million a year by just closing them down.
I sent out for bids to X companies. With one company that said I can take them all on at the same time, but we’d have to do it quick because of the holidays coming up. We did it quick and needless to say, $18,000 to $35,000 factoring in a typical 20% drop in December, that makes that $35,000 closer to $39,000. That jump is with 40% of the 170 sites still dropping even with a bolster of marketing coming in from the outside in addition to the marketing we were already passively doing. I’m a little amped up right now because I just got this information. I could not wait to podcast on it.
Numbers trump opinion all day, every day. Click To TweetHow does this relate to you? The hair salon owner, you the furniture repair person, you the airline pilot, you the desk maker. How do you know your marketing is right? How do you know how you’re getting word of mouth right now is right? How do you know if how you’re asking for people to review your products is right? How do you know your salespeople are reporting numbers properly to you? How do you know?
The only way you can know you’re right is if you get another set of eyeballs to validate what you think numerically such as that’s why companies like Andersen and Accenture Consulting, Frost & Sullivan do billions of dollars a year as consultants. Sometimes they’re not even consulting. They’re just checking numbers and replicating what a company is already doing objectively so the company can know they’re right. How do you know you’re right? You now know. Take care.
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