Many companies across the globe are affected by the condition I call “The Marketing Blur.” The Marketing Blur is what happens when you’re engaged in marketing through several different channels but you don’t have a clear picture of how each channel is performing. You end up lumping all of your marketing efforts together and judging them based on how many new customers you get each month.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t allow you the best use of your total marketing budget. In order to optimize your marketing efforts, you have to be able to track the return of your time and ad spend investments by giving the credit for each new customer to the marketing channel it came from.

If you are engaging in any form of direct marketing, whether it be Print ads, SEO, Google AdWords, YouTube, Facebook, Radio, Direct Mail, or even coupon book mailers; you absolutely must have a clear picture of how each one of those channels is performing. Not doing so is like actively trading in the stock market and not keeping track of how much each stock moves up and down before you sell it.

To prevent this Marketing Blur from happening you have to be able to effectively track each one of your marketing channels. It’s helpful if you can do this all in one place, which is why many people shell out big bucks for high-powered tracking platforms such as the Adobe Marketing Cloud or Mixpanel.

The goal is to be able to look at all of your marketing efforts in one dashboard and compare their spend vs. their ROI. You’ll also want the ability to see how your different marketing channels are working together, in instances when you use one medium such as YouTube for creating awareness and then AdWords for getting leads to contact you.

To learn how to rid your business of the Marketing Blur, read my post here on how to effectively track your advertising.