Business is down across many industries and small businesses have been hit the hardest with the COVID outbreak. As a small business owner, budgets are tight and resources are limited so every penny and every minute has to be stretched as much as possible.
We all know that if we “aren’t growing, we’re dying,” which is why advertising is an important part of the marketing mix. Last week, we mapped out your customer base in Tableau to provide a visual of where your customers are located. Visualizing where your customers are located can help you to best determine where to spend your dollars. Maybe you have only a few clients in a particular state and a lot of clients in another area. Having a ‘view’ of your client demographic can help uncover helpful insights.
Now you can take a look at your advertising spend and how you have distributed your money to specific locations and categories. If you don’t get into that detail in your accounting software, you can always download your google analytics data and make some adjustments to your spreadsheet prior to performing analysis in Tableau.
The first step you will take is to pull your state and category dimensions into your columns and rows accordingly.
Next, you will take your ad spend from your measures and drag that into your rows next to your category. Make sure your ad spend is set to a percentage of the total. You can do this by clicking to the right of the Ad Spend button and when you see the drop-down, select quick calculation and select ‘percentage of total’
Lastly, in order to change the colors by year, you will drag your year in the Marks box to the ‘color’ box. When you do this, the colors per year should adjust and a legend will show up automatically in the top right of the view to reflect what years are what colors.
Once you have your ad spend data, in just 3 steps you can see where you have been spending your money and compare that to your customer map. Do you see any patterns? Does the location of your advertising spend match that of your customer growth? Are you advertising in the right categories and promoting the right products? Are you seeing growth in those products or decline?
Uncovering visual insights help to not only understand or highlight certain patterns but also open up new considerations. Using visualization software to create ‘actionable insights’ helps with your decision process and make sure that you are focusing on the right areas at the right time in your business.
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