Overview

The project experience was overall very hands-on, useful for our client and practical for me as I could utilize the tools and concepts we discussed in class. For a class such as Internet marketing, client project is definitely the best way to put the in-class knowledge to practice as much of the learning is by doing and trying out different things.

Our client

Our client was a café in Point Grey, Vancouver called “Professor and the Pigeon” run by Tim O’Brien. He is the owner of this one-man cafe shop who does everything from preparing the food, coffees, muffins to running the cooking classes; therefore he does not have time to invest in marketing the café online to attract more customers. While his macaroon classes are popular on social media through Yelp and Groupon and usually fully booked 2-3 months in advance, he would like to increase the traffic to the café. Embarking on this project, his goal for us was to improve awareness of the café among UBC students specifically and promote it as a great study place that offers spacious space, free wifi, student discounts and gluten-free food options.

While Tim (the owner) was very eager to have us work on this project to bring more awareness to the café, it was at the same time overwhelming for him due to the number of requests that we had. To be able to start the project, we needed his help to add Google Analytics snippets into his website codes and his permission to run a number of promotions to get email addresses, Facebook check-ins, Instagram engagement. He also had to arrange foods and drinks for us to take “artsy” photographs for Instagram, approve the content for social media, all these while running his café and classes. However he made great efforts to accommodate us and was thrilled as we showed him progress along the way, like when we had a lot of likes on an Instagram pictures or good responses to an Instagram contest. When we finally presented all the findings to him, he was very impressed and pleased to learn about his target audience, what worked and did not worked and where he could make changes to improve the business.

Key Learnings

I was in charge of Google Analytics and even though I’ve learnt about the tool before, this was my first time actually applying it on a real life business and it helped me a great deal in understanding the actual problems and nuances facing a small business, as well as how to use data to tell stories that would turn into performance improvements.

Below are highlights of the learnings I got from this project:

  • It is important to have hypotheses so you could test them while doing the analysis

This would be more efficient than roaming through the data to try to find common patterns. Once the hypothesis has been established, it would be simpler to look for the data to support or disqualify that hypothesis.

  • Make no assumptions; let the data tell you the story

This might sound like a contrary point to the previous point, but it is important to know the difference between a hypothesis and an assumption. While it is helpful to have hypotheses, making assumptions and letting it affect the integrity of the data could lead to dangerous biases. To be able to come up with useful analysis, we have to let the data tell the true story and learn from the mistakes fast so we could move on. One example in our project was in AdWords where we tried to target UBC students, but did not receive any clicks through from UBC’s postal codes despite spending a lot of money. In this instance, we learnt that we had to move on and accept that AdWords is not a good way to target this audience.

  • “Metrics that matter” are important, but you start with the basics first

As outlined in my book report, it is important to look beyond basic metrics such as page views/ time of page/ session durations etc. because they do not say much, but after this project, I learnt it is also important to understand the stage where the business is in. For our client, it is the first time he had the Google Analytics snippet put in his website, learning basic information such as who are visiting, how many people are visiting and what they are looking at is already very eye-opening.

Although he has a portal for people to book cooking classes on his website, a mechanism to track conversion is not in place because there is no separate page that customer sees after they book (it’s a built-in booking widget). When the business gets more matured and has more human resources, Google Analytics can be set up to have goals and track conversions, so ROI can be calculated on clicks through AdWords campaigns if they decide to run it.

Opportunity

One thing I would have loved to learn more was the impact of the digital marketing campaigns on actual foot traffic of the business. We were not able to establish this relationship since we did not have access to the sales report from the owner, and also because he felt sick and closed the coffee shop for 2 weeks during the project which could have negatively affected the overall traffic.

 

Overall the project was a very positive experience both for the team and for the client. We learnt more about how to put digital tools to understanding and solving business problems, while our client learnt more about how to have better conversations and engagement with his customers online and make his website work harder for him.