Understanding Signals is Key for Successful Growth Marketing

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/15/in-growth-marketing-signal-determines-success/

In this article the author discusses the importance of understanding signals to successfully optimize the right parts of a campaign.  A signal in growth marketing in this context refers to the event data, or action of a customer/user, that is tracked and analyzed to guide decision making in where to optimize, i.e. invest more time, money, and effort, to achieve business goals.  The author explains that it can be tempting to optimize for events that are either generating a lot of clicks and therefore on a cost per click metric seem inexpensive or to optimize events that have a high cost per click but result in the ultimate goal of the campaign, i.e. signing up for your companies subscription as given in this example from the article.

However, as the author illustrates the conversion rate from landing page view to subscriptions is only 0.61% but it is higher for other events.  It’s important to understand the likelihood of converting on your main goals for each event to make sure you’re not throwing money away by optimizing what at first glance looks like a sure bet. This was a useful article for me in that it reminded me of how in digital product management you can sometimes be led down a wrong path by looking at what are referred to as vanity metrics.  It may look like your efforts are performing better than they are if you do not dig deeper into the analytics. 

Signal strength is a new term for a concept that is very familiar to me in my day to day as mentioned above.  Another interesting thing to learn was that there are solutions that can be implemented to enhance the signal of digital marketing campaigns which the article discusses further.  Ultimately, it’s important to not only understand how to read and action signals but to also make sure you are tracking the right events and there are solutions out there than can help.