Do impressions even matter for digital marketing?

All right, in this video, we're going to discuss leading indicators and trailing indicators, specifically for digital marketing. So what exactly is a leading indicator? A leading indicator is something that you can look at that you can say, if this is increasing or decreasing, it's going to lead to this. So it's going to be something that when this happens, it leads into something else. A trailing indicator is something that if this happened, then how did it happen? Trailing or lagging indicator is if this happened, then what exactly happened so that this happened. And so in our funnel here, a leading indicator is creating visibility for a company so more people discover you online. For example, on your Google My business, you can see your discovery searches performance over the past 28 days, and they actually give you a percentage of growth over the past 28 days. So if more people are discovering you, that doesn't necessarily mean that you got a bunch of leads. Right? That's a leading indicator. Before you can get more leads, you have to have more people find you online to turn into leads. Right. Similarly, if we look at Google Analytics, we can see impressions. An impression is how many times someone saw your website online. And so we could look at a specific amount of time. For example, September 2021, and we could say overall we had 56,000 impressions. Or people see our URL on Google and then we can look at a more either either year over year or another specific time frame. We don't have data year over year for this customer, but we can at least look, you know, six, seven months down the line and that increased by 20,000 impressions. Right. So these are leading indicators on this funnel. Creating more visibility will lead to converting more customers, which will then lead to more pay, more, higher revenue. Right. More people paying. So a trailing indicator is typically, how many leads did I get? Right, because you have to do this stuff before to get more leads. So we could look at year over year. In March, for example, last March 2021, you had nine leads from your website. This March, you had 23 leads. So that is a trailing indicator, which means that if we look backwards, how do we get more leads? It was because we got more visibility. And so when we look at marketing as a whole, people typically get frustrated because they mostly focus on the leading indicators, which are, oh, you got so many impressions, you got so many likes, you got so much reach, which in theory should lead to more customers. Right. And so what we've tried to do with, with working with us is to close the gap, which is how granular can we get? Can we get into your CRM, can we see how many leads that you actually got? And then how can we work ourselves backwards into the leading indicators? And then how can we work our way forwards into the trailing indicators? And so I'll be curious to hear what your thoughts on are on this. I think there's a big opportunity in with digital marketing companies to disclose these leading indicators and these trailing indicators and to really work with businesses to come up with some, some baseline goals and targets for these trailing indicators of okay, yes, you got me all this visibility and all this stuff, but does it actually turn to leads? And how many leads did I get? And even further than that, can we get into your CRM and say, okay, how many customers did turn out from this? Because really, at the end of the day, when we want to look at our return on investment, we want those numbers and then we can work our way backwards. So if you like content, we post videos about ways to grow local service businesses. And we do these three things really well. We create visibility, we convert more leads into customers, and then we help retarget those prospects and customers back into the funnel. I'll put some links down below and I'll see you in the next video.