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Insights are the bread and butter of performance marketing

They’re how we make decisions on what to optimize and adjust to increase performance. Whether we are looking broadly at the performance of a campaign or as granular as a single Facebook ad, insights can be found everywhere.

Now what makes an insight?

Contrary to popular belief, an insight is not just an observation of what is happening (such as number of sessions or impressions within a campaign). That doesn’t tell us anything useful or actionable. An insight becomes actionable when we have something to compare it to, like a benchmark. Better put, an insight is understanding discoveries and the identification opportunities that explain why something is performing the way it is. The best way to grasp an insight is to look at an example of where we put it into action.

With our client Zinpro, we have a great example of where we saw an insight that led to an immediate action. The analytics team in combination with the social media team, shared out quarterly insights that showed some web blog posts were not garnering as much engagement as we thought they warranted. On the other hand, select social posts were garnering high engagement, and the upside for boosting paid social to see even better engagement and reach was extremely high.  These insights around channel and blog performance led to the decision to test optimizing spend toward social and diverting slightly away from blogs. Don’t misunderstand – blog content is still extremely important for the brand, but calibrating spend and effort with social spend actually increased our overall success. The important thing is to look at the numbers, what they tell you and be brave enough as a brand to test new things.