April « 2011 « Mongoose Metrics

April, 2011

How Keyword Data Can Improve Campaign Performance

Keyword selection plays a significant part in all digital marketing campaigns. In the beginning, you may target keywords based on relevance, estimated search volume, competition and estimated cost per click.

However, as the campaign progresses, keyword traffic and conversion data can provide highly actionable information that can be used to better target messaging, increase keyword traffic quality and improve lead conversions.

Identify Quality Keywords

To identify quality keywords, first integrate a web analytics platform and call tracking solution into your campaign. Together, these tools can capture:

• Traffic source information (i.e. search engines, keywords)

• Visitor website activity (i.e. pages/visit, bounce rate, time on site, pageviews)

• Online conversions (i.e. online form completions)

• Offline conversions (i.e. phone calls)

Using this information, attempt to answer the following keyword-related questions to determine quality:

• What keywords drive traffic?

• What keywords continue to drive more traffic? — This may signify an improvement in rankings.

• How are targeted keywords used in long-tail searches?

o Is the way audiences use these terms relevant to you?

• What keywords drive site interaction, indicating relevancy to visitors?

o Look for a low bounce rate, and high time on site, pages per visit and pageviews.

• What keywords drive visitors that complete online forms?

• What keywords drive visitors that call?

The answers to these questions will help narrow down the best keywords to target with your marketing activities.

It is important to note, prior to making any campaign keyword adjustments; make sure you have enough data to arrive at an accurate conclusion.

Where to Use Targeted Keywords

Brand Messaging and Content

Look at what keywords seem to resonate with online visitors and integrate them into your brand messaging and website content. Feature these keywords in taglines, marketing messages, headlines, page copy and website navigation options to show visitors that you speak their language.

Search Engine Optimization Efforts

Reevaluate the terms you’re targeting with your optimization efforts. Focus on keywords that strike a good balance between strong traffic volume and good conversion rate. Next, integrate these terms in specific locations throughout your web pages, including page titles, URLs, meta descriptions, headlines, body content, image alt text and link anchor text.

The following link is a great beginners guide to SEO from SEOmoz.com, with more details on keyword integration.

PPC Campaigns

Effective use of a PPC campaign budget is predicated on selecting and bidding on the keywords that will drive highly qualified traffic.

Make sure your campaigns are targeting keywords that have proven to convert into leads. You may also consider increasing the amount you’re willing to bid for these terms because you know they are more likely to convert.

Website Calls to Action

Make sure to integrate quality keywords into your call to action text, for example, “Call Today To Learn More About [KEYWORD].” Similar to brand messaging, your calls to action need to resonate with audiences before they will take action.

Also, remember that leads don’t just convert via online forms. Make sure to offer both a lead form and tracking phone number to give them the option.

How are you using keyword analytic data to improve your marketing campaigns?

How to Integrate Call Tracking into Google Adwords PPC

Offline conversion tracking is an important yet often overlooked part of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Depending on your market, product/service or customer preference, searchers may be inclined to call instead of completing a lead form. By integrating a call tracking solution, you can associate these offline conversions with a specific PPC campaign, ad group or even keyword.

Best practice is to place tracking numbers into your PPC landing pages, but you can also use them within your PPC ads to help simplify the search for your target audience.

This is an especially valid tactic to consider if your target audiences use smartphones to conduct searches. These mobile devices can show phone numbers on a web page as links and when clicked the phone will dial the number.

Following are the ways advertisers can integrate phone numbers into Google AdWords.

Headlines and Ad Copy

Google does allow you to integrate phone numbers directly into headlines and ad copy. However, with each section you are limited to a max number of characters — Headlines = 25 and one line of ad copy = 35. By integrating a phone number, which, with hyphens (877-784-0496) is 12 characters, you are limiting the space you have to deliver messaging that is compelling enough to drive searchers to call or visit your website.

If you choose to integrate tracking numbers in either of these locations make sure your messaging is as clear and concise as possible. The main objectives of your PPC ad are to capture the searcher’s attention and motivate them to take a desired call to action.

Phone Extensions (recommended)

With Google AdWords ad extensions, you can display additional information in your ads beyond a headline, ad copy and URL, including an address, site links, product images and a phone number.

For the phone number ad extension, you can use any phone number you prefer, including a tracking number. By using tracking numbers here, you don’t lose valuable ad space, your number is featured in a prime ad location, and you can still effectively track offline conversion data.

It’s important to note, if someone is using a smartphone and clicks your ad extension tracking number, you will get charged the same amount as if someone clicked on the ad link to visit your site.

Google Call Metrics

AdWords Call Metrics enables advertisers to easily measure phone calls originating from ads by showing a unique phone number in your ad that redirects back to your business line. As we detailed in a blog post last November — “Google AdWords Call Analytics Explained & Compared with Mongoose Metrics Call Tracking” — these numbers are effective for tracking calls from search result pages, but it cannot track any offline conversions that happen once a visitor is on your website.

If you’re using a call tracking solution there is no need to use Call Metrics since you can simply post tracking numbers in the phone ad extension as mentioned earlier.

If you are not using call tracking, but are interested in evaluating the need for a solution, you may want to consider using Call Metrics. It will offer good insight into how many calls your ads are generating. Here is a blog post we wrote on how to get started.

How are you using call tracking to improve PPC campaign performance?

Call Tracking / PPC — No Comments
19
Apr 11

How Call Tracking Works with PPC Advertising

The following is an excerpt from a blog post on the Wordstream Internet Marketing Blog:

Call tracking involves more than simply recording the number of calls received. It’s part of a sophisticated marketing methodology that gives marketers accurate, real-time campaign effectiveness figures.

Call tracking allocates a distinct phone number, local or toll-free, for each unique source you want to track. Reports can be as general as calls from all search engines or as specific as calls from one unique paid search term.

When a visitor arrives on your site, the software conducts a search to determine which phone number is associated with the visitor’s origin. That phone number is then dynamically added throughout the site and cookied within their browser, so even if they return at a later time, they will continue to see the same number until the cookie is deleted.

As soon as a visitor makes a call to this tracking number, the program logs call time, PPC campaign information, available ID information, geographic location and the last web page visited, among other things.

New opportunities to improve PPC performance

A complete lead picture shows how each campaign, ad group, ad and keyword is performing, helping advertisers more effectively identify best- and worst-performing elements to efficiently shift budgets and update or delete under-performers.

In addition, call tracking can help you better understand aspects of campaign performance that web analytics alone cannot:

* Preferred method of communication — Depending on the industry, audience and product or service, leads may be more inclined to call than fill out a form. This is true for local businesses, where, according to TMP Directional/15 Miles and comScore, audiences prefer to call a business (38%) or visit a physical location (36%) than complete a web form (9%). Understanding your audience’s preferred communication method is key to adjusting calls to action on PPC landing pages, and other marketing initiatives, to improve conversion rates.

* Landing pages — If your landing page is designed to generate web form submissions, but instead drives more calls, it may be an indication that the page content is confusing, the main call to action is not obvious or the web form is too involved. Making adjustments and tracking the number and type of conversions over time can help maximize performance.

* Call recording — Most call tracking solutions offer the option to record phone conversations. From a PPC campaign perspective, these recordings can be used to better understand the type of questions leads are consistently asking, so you can adjust the content on your landing pages accordingly.

Lead volume generated by your PPC campaign is often the most important metric for evaluating success. By simply tracking online conversions through web analytics, you may be missing a significant portion of lead data.

To most effectively improve campaign performance and maximize ROI, you need to track both online and offline conversions, which requires the integration of both web analytics and call tracking.

How do you track offline conversions?

Call Tracking / Integration / Search Marketing — No Comments
14
Apr 11

Mongoose Metrics “Closed Loop Marketing Overview” on Marketing Pilgrim

Sharing best practices about the vast topic of Internet marketing makes us all warm and fuzzy inside.

That’s why we were delighted with Andy Beal’s establishment of the Marketing Pilgrim’s Writer’s Garage. It’s a place where Internet marketing writers can hone their craft while educating the masses about their specific topic of expertise. As an added bonus, the best posts at the Marketing Garage are sometimes elevated to Marketing Pilgrim’s main blog for greater exposure.

On March 24, 2011, our post “A Closed Loop Marketing Overview” was featured on Marketing Pilgrim’s main blog. In it, we extoll the valuable steps Internet marketers must take to assure they track website visitors from the time they arrive at the website, to when they convert into a lead, and through to becoming a customer.

Excerpt: How to Establish Closed-Loop Conversion Tracking:

To enable closed-loop conversion tracking, Internet marketers need a constant stream of real-time performance data to understand campaign effectiveness, and identify opportunities to improve lead quality and volume. Specifically, they need to analyze:

Website Activity – Web analytics track and record traffic source, bounce rate, time on site, pageviews, pages per visit and exit pages.

Online and Offline Conversions – Web analytics also track web form completions and online purchases, and call tracking solutions record phone leads.

Lead-to-Customer Conversions – CRM systems collect and organize lead intelligence, and track leads that convert into customers and the revenue they generate.

Read the full post on Marketing Pilgrim.

Tell us how you track conversions from click to close.

Analytics / Call Tracking / Features, Tips, & Announcements / Integration — No Comments
13
Apr 11

Mongoose Metrics Call Tracking Partners with ion interactive LiveBall

It’s official.

Mongoose Metrics has partnered with ion interactive, providers of LiveBall, a cloud-based landing page software platform. The partnership brings marketers one step closer to seeing and understanding online and offline conversion data in one dashboard.

By combining the power of call tracking data with LiveBall’s landing page conversion data, marketers no longer need to scramble to marry offline and online conversion information in one place.

LiveBall customers now can immediately access Mongoose Metrics robust set of call tracking statistics directly within the LiveBall dashboard. Read the simple and specific directions on how to activate phone call tracking within LiveBall.

Customer demand prompted the partnership as more marketing professionals see the value in integrating online and offline data across silos into one manageable dashboard.

We’re working with a number of new partners to bring more intelligent offline data to more online platforms.

The possibilities are endless when you think creatively and integrate reporting systems to find better answers. For example, does your marketing automation software track leads from social media and report them to your CRM as well as populate Google Analytics with the data from conversions and phone calls?

What data points and diverse platforms make up your analytics and measurement wishes?

Call Tracking / Search Marketing — No Comments
12
Apr 11

How Digital Marketing Agencies Can Show ROI

In a recent blog post, “Marketing White Belt: Marketing ROI,” Christopher Penn offers some excellent insight which digital agencies can use to accurately track return on investment (ROI) from marketing activities.

The formula is fairly basic: (Income Earned from Marketing Efforts – Marketing Expenses)/Marketing Expenses = ROI). For examples and how to factor in costs associated with time, read Penn’s full post.

For this formula to work, digital agencies need to encourage clients to invest in a good customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to track which product or service was sold, the cost and the marketing channel that drove the sale.

The next step is to integrate marketing channel tracking tools that communicate with the CRM. Penn recommends a website analytics package, such as Google Analytics, which can provide the CRM with a site visitor’s traffic source and web activity.

To track offline conversions, he recommends surveying customers and statistical sampling. While these activities can be useful, they also tend to be fairly general and not always accurate. For example, if you ask a new customer about how they found your client, they may say Google, but that won’t tell you what keyword they searched, or if they clicked on a PPC ad.

An alternative option that more accurately tracks offline conversions is call tracking. Through a call tracking solution, you assign a unique phone number to a specific marketing channel, and then it automatically records every time that number is called. It also associates the offline conversion with its online traffic source and website activity data, such as last page visited, and then communicates this to your web analytics and CRM programs.

Using Call Tracking in a Campaign

Following are some ways digital marketing agencies use call tracking solutions to monitor offline conversions:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) — With call tracking, markers can associate a unique phone number with a specific PPC campaign or keyword. Traffic source data will help the call tracking solution distinguish between paid and organic search, and then show the appropriate tracking number to the visitor based on path to site.

• SEO — For organic keyword traffic that results in an offline conversion, marketers simply need to assign a unique number to a specific organic search term and search engine. Traffic source data will tell the call tracking solution which number to show, and then track any calls from that keyword.

• Email Marketing — To associate offline conversions with an email newsletter, marketers can assign a unique phone number to the email marketing campaign. This number is integrated into the newsletter to capture conversions that do not visit the website. For those that do, the call tracking solution will automatically show the appropriate number on the site to visitors that click through.

• Social Media — Simply assign tracking numbers to traffic that comes from a specific social networking site, such as Twitter or Facebook, and visitors from those sites will see the corresponding number. It’s important to also assign the same number to any third party application used to manage social media participation, such as Hootsuite, because traffic source data may appear differently.

• Offline Marketing Channels — To track conversions from offline marketing activities, assign a unique tracking number to each ad campaign, flier, tradeshow booth or any marketing channel where your call to action is a phone number. The offline conversions that result will be associated with these activities and accurately recorded in your CRM.

When to track ROI

One other important point Penn makes is, “ROI is not the ultimate measure of marketing performance. ROI is an objective metric (an end-game metric that tells you if you’re there yet) only if cost containment is a priority for your marketing. If you are in a growth mode with an objective of capturing significant market share, ROI can actually be a hindrance to your marketing efforts because over-focus on it will prevent you from taking short-term losses in exchange for long-term potential gains.”

This is a great point. Marketers should not be 100 percent focused on ROI when marketing objective is growth. Most marketing takes time to start generating return, especially content generation (i.e. blogs, ebooks, white papers) and social media. Think about other success factors aside from monetary, including blog subscribers, social media followers, inbound links and content downloads.

That being said, the information collected through web analytics and call tracking solutions is still highly valuable to understand how marketing channels are converting, which are improving and which are driving highly qualified website traffic. The better you can understand campaign performance, the better equipped you will be to make campaign updates and allocate budgets, which ultimately will lead to better marketing return results.

How are you tracking marketing ROI for your campaigns? Please share your methods in the comments section below.

Call Tracking — No Comments
6
Apr 11

4 Ways to Improve Phone Call Conversions

The goal of most B2B marketing campaigns is to generate new leads. To do this, businesses must offer information, resources, products or services valuable enough that a visitor is compelled to take action, either by completing a web form (contact form or ecommerce checkout), calling the business or visiting in person.

For customers that are more inclined to call, simply posting a phone number on a site is not always enough to maximize conversions. To entice visitors to call, consider these four tips:

1. Explain the Value of Calling

Concisely state, either above or below the phone number, what the visitor will get out of calling, and make sure this call to action is relevant to the content on the page. For example, if a page offers a product overview, but does not go into much detail, you may use the call to action, “Call Today To Learn More.”

2. Show the Number They Want to See

Toll free numbers are typically a welcome sight for customers who are either out of the state or country, while local area code numbers can serve as verification to local visitors that your business is, in fact, local.

Using a call tracking solution, run an A/B test to determine which your visitors prefer. Integrate each number on a different version of the same web page, and show one or the other an equal number of times over several weeks. If the results of your test are inconclusive, you may consider integrating both options.

3. Make It Stand Out

As a call to action, it’s important to make sure that the phone number stands out on the web page. To do so, consider the following design treatments:

• Bold it.

• Make the font size larger.

• Change the font color.

• Place a colored icon next to the number.

• Integrate it into a graphic button.

• Surround the number with white space.

4. Test Different Phone Number Placements

Experiment with the placement of the phone number on your web pages. A/B test different page locations, and track which generates more conversions. Following are some recommended placements:

• Top banner

• Right- or left-hand column

• Directly within page copy — If you include a call to action within page copy, don’t make visitors look for the number.

• Meta description — Often this is what appears below the main link on a search engine result page, and visitors may choose to call before even visiting your site.

Once you’ve determined the best place(s) for the phone number, make sure it remains consistent throughout the site, so when visitors need it, they know exactly where to look.

Finally, it’s important to note that web forms and call tracking numbers are not replacements for one another. You’ll want to make sure both are included so no matter a visitor’s preference, you don’t miss an opportunity to convert a lead.

How are you maximizing call conversions on your site? Please share in the comments section below.

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog