Paid Search and Visitor Insight

Paid search programs can provide a certain amount of basic insight into your campaign success, allowing you to see which paid ads brought in visitors. With this information, you can figure out what sorts of things people are searching for when your website catches their eye, and you can tweak your marketing efforts based on this. However, systems fall short of automating continued, targeted messaging to your paid search visitors and often can’t link ads viewed through the sales cycle to closed opportunities.

Marketing Automation Enhances Visitor Insight

From the start, marketing automation makes paid search easier. You can quickly and easily create a number of branded landing pages that are very specific to each of your paid search ads. Having landing pages that are closely related to your paid search terms improves your Google quality score and helps you gain better positioning at a lower cost.

Once you’ve converted some prospects with your killer offer, they are entered in your marketing automation system and you can begin nurturing them until they are sales ready. Segmenting prospects based on which ad they responded to will result in tailored communication that helps move prospects forward in the sales cycle. Segmentation may be based on their product of interest or perhaps a pain point that was addressed in your ad.

Once a qualified prospect has begins working with a sales rep, connecting your paid search data and your CRM data in the marketing automation system give you the ability to keep track of a prospect through all stages of the sales cycle. Ultimately this results in you being able to see your cost-per-opportunity rather than just your cost-per-click, leading to more effective future spending.

For the productive marketer, spring cleaning has involved updating the company’s marketing materials (white papers, email templates, etc.) – the main part of the house – to reflect product improvements and service upgrades. But chances are that your marketing automation vendor has also been busy this past year rolling out new features to make your life easier. So, instead of taking Sunday afternoon off, finish up all of your spring cleaning and revamp your marketing automation strategy to take advantage of all of the new features.

Key Marketing Automation Upgrades

• Compatibility – A versatile marketing automation solution strives to integrate with as much technology as possible. You may have been reluctant in the past year to upgrade your software in fear that your marketing automation solution would be incompatible. Take the time to find out if your vendor has achieved compatibility with the latest web browsers, email connectors, and CRM solutions.
• Reporting – Given that a huge selling point of marketing automation is marketing ROI, it’s important for marketers to be using the latest tools to demonstrate the value of their marketing efforts. Most vendors know this and are constantly updating their reporting features to let marketers create better tables, charts, and graphs for the higher-ups. Often when you first implement a marketing automation tool, you get caught up in the tactical campaign elements and you don’t spend time understanding how you can report on your data. With the end of the quarter approaching, this is a great time to think about how you can use reports to show that your hard work is paying off.
• CRM Integration – Most marketing automation vendors are continually improving their integration with the different CRM systems. Because each CRM has its own API and functions differently, the engineers are having to learn each system and figure out ways to implement the new features. This means that little upgrades are constantly being made to better improve CRM integration and you may have overlooked some. Now is a great time to revisit your vendors blog or feature list to find out what new improvements have been made. Often, to take advantage of new features you need to update your integration package, so be sure you’re working with the latest and greatest edition of your tool.
• Automation – The key to marketing automation is the ability to take time-consuming tasks away from marketers and automate them. Ideally, when you first started marketing automation you handled the basics of automating scoring, grading, drip nurturing, etc. It’s probably time to take automation to the next level and really see what the possibilities are. Think through what other areas of your marketing campaigns you may be able to automate, and work with the sales team to find out how you can use automation to help them as well.
• Other Features – Luckily for marketing automation customers, the industry is continuing to grow and the landscape is getting more and more competitive. The only way for vendors to succeed is to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Keep tabs on your vendor’s blog and other outgoing news to be informed of the next big announcement. For instance, your company may have recently added connectors to plug in to other marketing resources like a chat solution to sync on-site chats with with prospect activities or a Jigsaw connector to help you find more information about people in your database.

With your marketing automation strategy revamped and your marketing materials refreshed, your company is ready to generate some great leads and exceed quarterly goals.

• Noise is the total amount of social buzz about a brand or company. This includes every mention of that brand, no matter how trivial, along with all relevant conversations. Facebook Fans comprise part of this noise, as do followers on Twitter. Noise might encompass a lot of (nearly) meaningless fluff, but there is some real value to be found amongst the chaff. Noise serves as an important baseline for measuring future marketing activities.
• Sentiment combines human context with automated analysis of data. Because computer algorithms can only go so far in making sense of buzz, it is crucial that the data also be considered from a human perspective. For example, a strictly automated data analysis of a Twitter conversation would likely interpret as positive a string of tweets about “how great Brand X is” — totally missing the sarcasm that the actual participants all understood as an insult. Applying this human context is crucial if you want to get meaningful results from your analysis of social buzz.
• Topics allow us to classify and organize what would otherwise be an endless stream of thousands of conversations. Categorizing conversations by topic makes it much easier to make sense of social buzz. People might be talking about your product, but are they raving about new features or complaining about shortfalls? Knowing these sorts of details can give entirely new meaning to what might have previously been an amorphous social media mess. Topically sorted conversations also provide a window into what popular search terms might be.
• Where are these conversations taking place? If the social buzz is coming from a wide range of people carrying on discussions in a very broad forum, you know you’ve done something right. Conversely, if buzz seems to be concentrated among niche groups, you might want to consider more targeted marketing based on these groups.
• Who is talking about you? One tweet from an industry expert or a mention on a well-known blog is worth many thousands of conversations between low-profile spectators with no real influence.

Ray discusses the valuation of Facebook Fans and concludes that it is impossible to put a dollar figure on the ROI of such followers. He emphasizes that when it comes to getting a real return on social media investments, having followers in and of itself is not nearly so important as what a company does with those fans. In other words, your conversion rate is really what matters.

Marketing guru Seth Godin touched on this same topic in another recent blog. His conclusion nails it: “Commitment is the essence of conversion.” Becoming a “fan” requires little commitment and more or less amounts to being a digital spectator. But marketers don’t just want a bunch of spectators — they want participants, because participants are where you get your return! Accumulating spectators shouldn’t be an end in itself, but it does lay the foundation for conversion. The more spectators you collect, the more potential participants you could have on your hands.

But it’s ultimately up to you, the marketer, to convert those spectators into active participants.

Abandonment Rate most often refers to purchases started but not completed; so-called “shopping cart abandonment” has always been an issue of concern for online retailers. However, you can apply this metric in other areas as well, the most relevant of which would be form abandonment. Form abandonment is when visitors to your site begin filling out a form but do not complete or submit the form. The abandonment rate is a measure of just one aspect of a website’s conversion rate.

You can’t always be certain of the reasons for form abandonment. It might be that some visitors changed their mind, but most frequently the problem lies with the form design. Forms that ask for too much information at once or are difficult to fill out lead to a high rate of form abandonment. Redesigning your forms to make them simple, streamlined, and user-friendly is the best remedy for a high form abandonment rate.

In today’s installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we’ll be discussing Net Reach.

Net Reach (also just “Reach”) refers to the number of people viewing an ad at least once. This metric gives you an idea of how widely the ad is getting dispersed throughout a population. But maximizing exposure isn’t as simple as just maximizing reach. Ads with wide reach but low frequency can get lost in the shuffle, while an ad with limited reach coupled with high frequency risks overexposure — think of how many times you’ve seen the same late-night TV ad over and over, and how sick of it you’ve gotten. Strike an effective balance between reach and frequency to optimize your ad’s distribution and impact.

Total Impressions / Frequency = Net Reach

Visitors are the number of unique individuals who view a website in a given time period. This differs slightly from the Visits metric in that it allows you to measure a website’s reach, as opposed to just its traffic. Visits measure the volume of traffic itself, but comparing this number to the number of visitors will help you understand what type of traffic your website is generating and what sorts of visitors you’re attracting. If you consider that one visitor can have multiple visits over a certain timeframe, you can begin to judge the quality of your visitors. For example, you can tell whether your site has a small group of die-hard fans who visit the site repeatedly and often, as opposed to just a bunch of casual visitors who stop in once for a peek but never return.

By tracking visitors and visits during a specific timeframe, you can also use this metric to measure the concentration or urgency of activity by repeat visitors. Therefore, the time period you look at can be an important factor in calculating this metric. If one visitor makes repeated visits to the site in the course of a day or two, you can bet that they’re seriously interested in your site — they may be doing research before they take the next step. These are good visitors to target and reach out to since their interest has been demonstrated by their repeat visits.

Cost Per Customer Acquired measures the cost-effectiveness or ROI of advertising by dividing total advertising cost by the number of customers acquired. Cost per customer acquired goes a little deeper than cost per order in that it conceptualizes customers not just as a single order, but as a possible source of multiple orders. This metric helps marketers determine if customers are worth the cost of their acquisition and is useful for comparing to customer lifetime value.

Advertising Cost / # of Customers Acquired = Cost Per Customer Acquired

Cost Per Order measures the cost-effectiveness of advertising by dividing total advertising cost by the number of orders generated. This metric is tied to successful conversions, so it applies more directly to profit than does Cost Per Click (CPC), which measures a marketing function. Ads that have strong clickthrough rates but that fail to result in lots of conversions have an unacceptably high cost per order, which is often indicative of an unconvincing or disappointing product.

Advertising Cost / # of Orders Generated = Cost Per Order