Multichannel Marketing Metrics
with Akin

Lots of questions came in from the viewers of our recent webinar with the CEO of Apogee Search, Bill Leake. Many more questions than we could answer in the limited time. 

No wonder. Who doesn’t want to increase their leads sourced from the web site?

And of course you will employ web analytics, SEO, and PPC. But where do you start? What do you prioritize?

As promised, Bill has been kind enough to write up his responses to the remaining questions. I get to post the Q&A here.

This is a great resource for those who are ready to make time now for improving results. Or, of course, you can also recruit the services of an experienced agency such as Apogee Search. 

Question: What simple, inexpensive steps can I take to get the attention of a narrow segment of B2B prospects using SEO, online advertising, and web analytics?

Answer:  1. Start a PPC campaign.  Test both “Gartner/Analyst” market category keywords and search phrases as well as more narrow “tactical pain” keywords. 

2. Get web analytics installed for your website and talking to your CRM system  

3.  See what keywords work best. 

4.  For the keywords that work best, do SEO aggressively on those top keywords .

5. For the keywords working less well on PPC, consider a “cure” or “kill” strategy –can they be saved with new content/offers?  If not, turn them off.

Question: 1. What percentage of medium and large businesses outsource or plan to outsource SEM efforts?
2. What is the typical technology background of marketing teams assigned to SEM?

Answer:  1. From what we’ve seen in medium and large businesses, in over 2/3 of cases SEM is primarily, but not entirely outsourced.  Most successful large businesses have a blend of outsourced and in-house labor. 

2.  In terms of typical technology background, what seems to work best are folks who are both marketing people (not techies) and very quantitatively comfortable.  In other words, marketing people who are comfortable with numbers.  Technical skills often just mess up SEM, while marketing and quant skills seem far more critical from what we’ve seen

Question: What are the best ways to prequalify click-throughs?  We already put the price in, and that helps, but how can we maximize our clicks in regard to commercial intent?  Of course, keywords are critical and Microsoft has their limited Commercial Intent Tool.

Answer:  Ad copy and keywords (and negative keywords).  Price helps, definitely.  Add negative keywords to filter out searches like “Free” “Cheap” “Discount.”

Question: Please provide suggestions to increase the number of visitors filling out a form in the landing page.

Answer:  Keep the form short.  Have some sort of compelling offer to make it worth their while.  Make it easy (pre-fill elements of the form if possible).  If a long form, break it up across several pages (like a survey).

Question: 1. How do you get, manage and find appropriate one way links?
2. Registering additional domain names – does it help bring in traffic to your main site using 301 redirects or must they have content, etc.?
Answer:  Link building could be a whole different one-day training.  Basically, have good content, and beg / borrow links.  Appropriate links are one-way, contextually themed, and from sites that Google already likes. 

2). I wouldn’t register additional domain names to bring in traffic.  That industry used to exist, but the trafficked domain names are already for the most part long gone, and Google is taking steps to strip out that value anyway.

Question: 1. Is there any data that supports PPC advertising success on Google Ads as opposed to Facebook or vice versa?
2. Is there a source that outlines the details of the current various PPC advertising options?

Answer:  Our Apogee Search Marketing Glossary would be a good place to start.  In a nutshell, your general answer will be that most of the traffic is at Google, and the bargains are at Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.  And nothing else is really worth wasting your time on.

Question: How many keyphrases should be utilized per landing page?

Answer:  For SEO, 3-5.  For PPC, it depends, but it could be a whole category of 100’s of keywords if you were doing a geographic landing page, for example. Generally, the fewer the better.  The more targeted the better.

Question: How fast can the online work be made profitable?

Answer:  It depends.  Can vary from 1 hour to 1 year, depending on how good your offer is, how good your online properties are already, how long your sales cycle is (ecommerce can be instantaneous, while selling an MRI machine to a hospital can take years), and how good your sales force is.

Question: How do you really convert leads into sales? What’s the magic?

Answer:  A good product at a good value proposition, combined with good tracking, good qualification, and a good sales force. 

Question: How are on-page organic search optimization for websites and on-page quality score optimization for landing page mini-sites different?

Answer: They are becoming more and more similar.  The primary difference is that mini-sites will probably never achieve as high of a quality score as a landing page attached to an existing trusted web property.  But things like trust rank, age of domain, clean HTML are common across the two.  One other difference is that on-page quality score optimization these days requires stripping the HTML of obvious affiliate links, while on-page SEO optimization can still do just fine leaving in affiliate links.

Question: How accurate is web analytics-PPC data in general, especially if you are dealing with a low sample size, number of conversions, etc.?

Answer:  Any 3 web analytics tools will disagree with each other somewhat (from 5-10%), even when properly hooked up.  They all measure things somewhat differently.  However, the tracking discrepancies are far less than just about any other form of marketing.  The important thing is getting ONE system in place, and then growing to the point where it is cost-effective to audit that data, and see whether that tool still makes sense.

Question: Will these techniques also assist in increasing organic search results?

Answer:  They will assist in converting organic search results.  They will assist in keyword selection for organic search efforts.  Choosing the right keywords is absolutely critical for increasing organic search results.

Question: With a limited online marketing budget, do you see any value in adding banner ads or geo-targeted banner ads on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.? We are doing targeted PPC and micro-sites to drive leads. Or is this just awareness advertising?

Answer:  This is primarily awareness advertising.  However, once you’ve topped out PPC, display and geo-targeted campaigns can help further improve your ROI.  But they are generally best done as a second step, not as a primary effort.  Again, your mileage may vary, testing is always recommended.  But as a general rule, display and banners are a waste until you’ve first taken PPC to diminishing marginal returns, and are looking for the next uplift.

Tags: Uncategorized by Akin
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Here is a quick take-away from our webinar with Apogee’s CEO Bill Leake today: Don’t be shortsighted in applying analytics for boosting success from online lead generation, specifically paid search:

• Don’t just measure conversion rate. It is a tricky metric that can often lead in the wrong direction. Instead be sure to measure further down the funnel, as Bill  emphasized
• Measuring further down the funnel means getting closer to ROI metrics, e.g. a cost per sale or cost per lead.
• Ideally you measure even further down the funnel to get to an ROAS or ROI metric.
• If you are selling offline rather than online then you can do this by adding the data on individual’s keyword referred visits into the CRM system

Continuing on the theme that Bill started, I also recommended using web analytics in more than just shortsighted ways:

• Don’t just stop at reporting results
• Don’t even stop at improving results by making informed changes to fix funnel leaks indicated by your web analytics
• But open up the gold mine of making web analytics personal, i.e. behavioral targeting or what we refer to as Interactive Marketing at Unica.
• For example, if Mary searched for blue shoes coming to your web site then:
  • Of course the web site should take that into account in targeting content to Mary.
  • But your email marketing can leverage the same info to personalize its outreach
  • And there is no need to forget about Mary’s interest in blue shoes when you send her an offline brochure or she calls your call center. Rather, today’s marketing automation solutions enable you to extend the dialog beyond  online to the  offline channels.

If you missed the event, here is a replay link for the webinar with Apogee and Unica.

Thanks for all the attendees that dialed in. Bill and I will post the question to which we couldn’t get shortly.

Akin

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by Akin
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The value prop of being better at SEM is that you can achieve the same outcomes with less spending.

• Reduce spend on PPC keywords
  • that attract visitors who would have clicked on your organic search result anyway
  • Reduce spend on PPC keywords that don’t carry their weight
• Lift the results for all PPC and organic keywords
  • by fixing the leaks on the web site
  • through intelligent targeting, lead-nurturing, and re-marketing that takes into account the keywords through which prospects spelled out their interests

Come, join Bill Leake, a former McKinsey & Co consultant and CEO of Apogee Search, and myself on a webinar, Feb 18, where we will fill these bullets with life. Ping us with your own questions and keep us real.

Register here.

Tags: Business Metrics, Web Analytics by Akin
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Here is a small nugget from the Feb 5th Webinar with Josh Manion and Bryan Eisenberg. I touched on this in my little intro during the webcast because it is the source of a fascinating disagreement. It is also in the Multichannel Metrics book in chapter 3.

When an online and an offline direct marketer discuss their approach to outbound marketing, this is the one that they disagree about. I am talking about email or SMS channels for the online marketer and direct mail, telemarketing, or direct sales for the offline direct marketer.

Say that you want to cross-sell brokerage accounts to customers who have nothing but a checking account at your bank. This will grow the wallet share that you have with customers and make them less likely to leave to competitors. You design an attractive offer with appealing creative.

But who should you send that offer to? Everybody for whom you have contact information and permission to market?

Certainly not, says the offline direct marketer. The table below shows different sizes of mailings and their effect on your profits. Click the table to expand it in a separate window.

The big apparent difference between online and offline is that offline marketing has a higher variable cost per contact, e.g. call center costs, postage and production fees for mailings or direct sales costs. In contrast, sending an extra email or SMS or serving an extra banner, mistakenly, seem close to free.

Therefore, the offline direct marketer has to take these costs into account from the beginning. 

The cost per contact is the economic pressure for targeting before testing.

1. Look at column 1 of the table, This is the untargeted and untested campaign. Since the target group has been selected too broadly, you will have no chance to break even. The campaign is simply too costly and typical conversion rates these days are too low.
2. Column 2 is after applying super star testing. We now increased the conversion rate to 1%, a whopping five-fold increase!!! Yet, the untargeted campaign still loses money because it is too costly.
3. This is why the offline marketer has been obsessed with improving conversion rates by targeting the most promising segments.  Column 3 shows that. Reduce the campaign to the most interested 10%. Costs go down and conversion rate for this segment goes up. Now we have a profit.

How to Target? 

Various ways of targeting campaigns range from predictive analytics at the high end to simple common sense list selections, suppression rules, etc at the minimum end of the spectrum. There is a lot to be said about the data to use for better targeting. May I recommend a new whitepaper on just that subject: Making Web data personal.

What’s it to me, says the Email and SMS marketer

Having a negligible cost per contact for email and SMS, the default approach online has widely been to ignore targeting, especially predictive analytics.

But there is a hidden cost that we have too often ignored online, namely the opportunity costs inucrred by spamming audiences and wasting our future permission to market.

In the sense that Peppers and Rogers emphasize in their recent books we incurr a real cost when we spam. Namely, the future potential purchases by a prospect become a little less likely since they aren’t listening to us. Peppers and Rogers would say that our expected life time value probably goes down for those recipients who feel spammed.

If the online marketer takes that cost into account, the economic pressure is now very similar to offline marketers. There now is a real variable cost per contact to reckon with.

Therefore, the calculation in the table above is just as relevant to the online and shows why targeting has to come before testing.

Tags: Customer Centricity, Direct Marketing, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing, targeting by Akin
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