May, 2011

Analyze Online and Offline Conversions with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Online marketing campaign success is often based on the number of quality leads generated.

As marketers, our ability to generate these leads is contingent on being able to effectively track and monitor campaign performance. Information related to which campaigns are driving conversions, and which aren’t, gives us the insight needed to make informed campaign updates and budget allocation decisions.

Gathering this information starts with making sure the right tools are in place to account for all campaign initiatives that may be generating leads. Effective campaign conversion tracking is reliant on two tracking tools — web analytics and call tracking.

Web Analytics

Website analytic programs, such as Google Analytics and Adobe/Omniture, are fairly commonplace at this point. They offer valuable insight into how visitors found a site, how they interacted with it and whether or not they converted via a web form, content download or online purchase.

When choosing a web analytics program, make sure it tracks traffic sources, pageviews, pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate and — most importantly — online conversions. In addition, it should allow for the integration of call tracking data.

Call Tracking

The one drawback to web analytic programs is they can only track and record online activity. So as soon as someone chooses to take his or her activities offline by making a phone call, all valuable lead information is lost, for example: traffic source, web activity and conversion page.

Fortunately, advancements in call tracking technology over the past three years have created viable options to record offline conversions.

Call tracking solutions document how a visitor arrived to a website, and then feature a dynamic, session-based phone number specific to that traffic source throughout the site. As soon as a visitor calls the number, the conversion and associated web traffic details are logged.

When selecting a call tracking solution program, make sure that it integrates with your web analytics. Through this integration, offline conversion data can be displayed right next to visitors’ website activity and online conversions, providing a complete campaign performance snapshot.

Campaign Conversion Audit

Once the tracking tools are selected, the next step is to audit and catalog the various ways a lead may convert. This involves indexing all the calls to action throughout your site, including phone numbers, lead forms, resource or coupon downloads, and online purchases.

Be as thorough as possible to ensure nothing is overlooked. Any conversion point that isn’t tracked is potentially an opportunity missed or budget wasted.

Set Up Tracking

As soon as all conversion points are listed, make sure each is set up to be tracked by either web analytics or call tracking.

• For web form completions — Make sure that upon completing web forms, visitors are redirected to a “thank you” page. This enables you to easily track form completions by looking at traffic to these pages. In your web analytics program, tag any traffic these pages get as a conversion.

• For resource or coupon downloads — Tag each PDF download link with a snippet of JavaScript that records a virtual pageview every time it’s clicked. In your web analytics program, make sure that every time a virtual pageview occurs, it is logged as a conversion. Reference your analytics program’s help section to find this snippet, and instructions on how to install and track it.

• For phone calls — Look closely at the various ways your campaign may drive traffic to the site. This may include organic search, PPC campaigns, websites featuring banner ads, social media activity and more. In your call analytics program, assign specific call tracking numbers to each traffic source. Once your numbers are assigned, install the provided call tracking code into your site.

Monitor and Review

Once you’ve got your campaigns organized and conversion tracking systems in place, it’s time to monitor campaign performance.

Compare each campaign’s conversions to the budget and time you are allocating to it, and compare them to one another. This should yield a good understanding of marketing return by campaign — which initiatives are providing a good ROI, and which are not.

For under-performing campaigns, test different ways to improve and monitor conversion results until you see the return you want. Using this data, you’ll be able to see which campaign updates are making the biggest difference, keeping things status quo or hurting performance.

Finally, study the data you’ve collected regarding what activities, updates and budget allocations seem to translate into additional conversions, and then apply the lessons learned to other campaigns.

How do you use web analytics and call tracking to optimize your marketing?

Improve Lead Nurturing Campaigns with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Lead nurturing email campaigns enable you to stay foremost in the minds of prospects, while educating them on the benefits of your product or service and motivating them to progress further down the sales funnel.

Additionally, with today’s highly sophisticated web analytics and call tracking tools you can quickly establish a feedback loop to assess success in real-time.

To motivate recipients to take action, you need to clearly express what you want them to do and describe the value they’ll receive in return. An effective way to communicate this is through calls to action.

Following are some tips to incorporate calls to action into your lead nurturing campaign emails and track resulting activity:

Call to Action Options

• Link to online content – Links to eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, brochures, coupons and other online content are effective ways to drive recipients back to your website where they can engage with you further. For peak visibility, add links to banners, feature them within or below content, or incorporate graphic, eye-catching buttons. For example, include a text link below your main email message that says, “Download a 10% Off Coupon Here.”

• Phone number – For those leads who are motivated to contact you but prefer to speak to a person, you should consider including a phone number with a reason to call. For example, “Call today to speak with a sales representative.” These numbers can be featured in your email banner, directly within content, or called out in a right- or left-hand email column.

• Contact form – Web forms offer a convenient way for recipients to request to be contacted, download a valuable piece of content or register for a webinar. Integrate these forms into your email’s main content section or right- or left-hand column and include a compelling message. For example, “Register Today Only.”

Whichever calls to action you choose, make sure to include a compelling message that clearly details which action you want a recipient to take and what they will get for clicking or calling. This message should always answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Assessing Email Campaign Performance with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

As with any other marketing initiative, to yield the best return you’ll need to continuously test and evolve your lead nurturing calls to action.

For this reason, it’s important to integrate tracking tools that will enable you to capture and record any resulting web activity, as well as both online and offline conversions.

Web analytics

With most analytics programs, you can add tags to the end of a link so that as soon as someone arrives to your site via that link, your web analytics software automatically associates the visit with a specific lead-nurturing email. For example, Google Analytics offers this URL Builder that can add multiple tags to the end of a URL.

Depending on your tracking needs, you may add the same tag to all your email links, or tag each link individually. Consider individual tags if you want to understand which link formats, locations or messages are most effective at generating clicks.

To record form completions, after someone submits their information via an email form, direct them to a unique thank-you web page. Within your analytics program, associate any visits to this web page as a conversion. Since only individuals who have completed the email form will land on this page, you can accurately track these as conversions.

Call tracking

Call tracking software enables you to associate any phone calls with a specific lead-nurturing campaign. This can be done in two ways:

• Assign and include a unique phone number in your lead nurturing email. Any calls that result will be automatically be associated with the email and reported in your dashboard.

• Integrate the small Javascript snippet (provided by your call tracking vendor) throughout your website. This snippet will automatically show a unique phone number to each website visitor and associate the number with how the visitor arrived on the site, for example via your lead-nurturing email. Any calls that come into this number are then automatically associated with your email and reported in your dashboard.

Remember, it’s important to continuously experiment with the format, messaging and location of your lead nurturing calls to action. Only through this test-and-evolve process can you ensure the greatest results on your campaign.

How do you use lead nurturing calls to action to improve campaign performance?

Call Tracking / Features, Tips, & Announcements / PPC — No Comments
19
May 11

HOW TO: View Call Tracking Data Inside Google Adwords

Mongoose Metrics customers have the unique opportunity to view phone call tracking data alongside Google Adwords PPC data within the Google Adwords dashboard. No other call tracking provider offers this feature.

This document outlines HOW TO view Mongoose Metrics call tracking data within Google Adwords.

Once you have integrated your call tracking data you are ready to begin (contact your sales representative or our dedicated support department if you need assistance).

1. Verify you are receiving Mongoose Metrics call tracking data within Google Adwords.

To view your data, log into your Adwords account and click on the “Reporting and Tools” tab and select “Conversions”

2. Verify that Adwords is showing Mongoose Metrics conversion data.

To do this, look for your conversion event. Normally this is titled “phone calls” although the title is up to you.

If everything is working properly then the column “Conversions” will display data — as long as calls have been completed through the Mongoose Metrics system.

3. Check your account to verify that calls have taken place.

Once you verify the integration is working correctly, you can view the conversions within your Google Adwords account. Keep in mind that when you look at data inside of the Adwords interface that Mongoose call tracking conversion data will combine with your other standard conversion data. When you look at the conversion column, remember that the data is a sum of all conversion events.

4. Segment conversion events to an Excel spreadsheet.

If you need to segment the conversion event you can do a data export from Adwords into Excel. To do so, go to the report you would like to generate and click on the “Download Report” button.

Then, click on “Add Segment” and select the “Conversion Action Name” option.

Chose the “Create” button and download the report.

5. Download the report and view the data.

Your report should look like this:

This report shows which keyword triggered a particular conversion event. The name of your conversion event is represented in column A.

If you do not see your conversion events, double check that you are exporting the correct columns. Do so by going back to the Adwords interface and click the “Columns Button” and select “Customize Columns.”

Make sure the following columns are selected:

By following these steps you will gain a clear picture of which keywords are driving calls. By understanding high and low-performing keywords you can further optimize your PPC spending.

For assistance with integrating your Mongoose Metrics phone call tracking data with Google Adwords, please contact your sales representative.

Analytics / PPC / Sales / Search Marketing — No Comments
17
May 11

Four Marketing Reports That Maximize Sales Efforts

Marketers rely on both web analytics and call tracking solutions to effectively track and record marketing campaign performance. The reports provided by these tools help marketers effectively analyze campaign performance, evolve activities and reallocate budgets to improve lead volume and quality.

From a sales perspective, these reports also are extremely valuable because they encourage the sales team to more effectively prioritize leads and customize pitches, which in turn helps to convert new customers and drive business growth.

Therefore, it is important that marketers provide this information to their sales departments, either by sharing access to tracking-tool dashboards or integrating these reports directly into CRM solutions.

Following are four tracking reports that, when shared with sales teams, can improve their ability to convert leads to customers:

1. Lead Source

Different marketing campaigns use different messaging, offers and calls to action. By tying a lead to a specific source (i.e. PPC, email, print advertisement, or billboard), you can show sales what motivated the prospect to convert into a lead. This information can then be integrated directly into sales pitches and follow-up communications.

In addition, if the lead source is a search engine, the keyword searched will also help sales professionals understand the specific need that brought in the lead.

2. Website Activity / Conversion Page

The pages a lead visits on your website — and particularly the conversion page — give sales professionals a good understanding of the topics the prospect is interested in, what messaging resonated, and what call-to-action motivated him or her.

Again, sales professionals can use this information to better structure sales pitches to more effectively satisfy the prospect’s needs.

3. Lead Details

The information offered by the lead, either via a web form or over the phone, is some of the most useful to sales professionals. Since the information comes directly from the lead, there is little guesswork or analysis needed to effectively tailor a sales pitch.

It’s important that your lead forms ask targeted questions, but without asking for so much information that leads are hesitant to complete it.

For phone conversions, make sure that your voicemail message asks the caller for exactly what you want to know, for example: name, phone number, reason for calling and best time to reach you. If you have inside sales representatives or customer service professionals answering incoming phone calls, you may also consider recording calls for future review.

4. Repeat Conversions

Each time a prospect completes a web form, downloads another piece of content or places additional phone calls, the hotter the lead.

By integrating your web analytics and call tracking solutions into your CRM software, you can accurately note when a lead re-converts, which further helps sales to prioritize follow-up communications, and ensure that motivated prospects get the highest level of attention.

How are you using marketing campaign tracking reports to support sales initiatives?

Analytics / Search Marketing — No Comments
12
May 11

Putting Performance Metrics into a Single Marketing Dashboard

What is a marketing dashboard?

According to Chief Marketer: “A marketing dashboard is a collection of what are believed to be the most critical diagnostic and predictive metrics, organized in a way to promote the recognition of patterns or performance.”

At a high level, a marketing dashboard will allow you to make connections between marketing information silos, such as: web analytics platforms, social media monitoring tools, call tracking solutions, email marketing tools, CRM software and more.

By combining the information from multiple tools into a single dashboard, you can:

• Gain a real-time, holistic view of marketing progress.

• Provide all decision makers with an easy-to-access hub to review and evaluate campaign performance.

• Identify sources of high-quality leads and customers to make more educated campaign updates and budget allocations.

• Simplify and save time generating customized progress reports.

Understand objectives and identify key metrics

To develop an effective marketing dashboard, it’s important to have a firm understanding of marketing, sales and organizational growth goals, which should be consistent from C-level executives on down.

“If the alignment amongst the senior management team isn’t tight with respect to the specific role of marketing, then neither are their expectations or definitions of success.” — ChiefMarketer.com.

Once objectives are determined, select the related metrics that decision makers in your organization agree will show success or failure for each aspect of your campaign. Think in terms of multi-dimensional interconnects — how metrics from various tools combine to show the true performance of marketing initiatives. For example, combine:

• Lead nurturing email campaigns (email platform) + sales data (CRM software).

• Social media traffic sources (web analytics) + online conversions (web analytics) + offline conversions (call tracking solution).

• PPC campaign, ad group and keyword bid information (marketing automation program) + online lead form submissions (web analytics) + offline call conversions (call tracking solutions) + sales conversions (CRM software).

Using open APIs, each tool should allow for data to be pulled on demand, structured in a specific format that you determine, and provided in a way that helps link imported data with the data from other silos.

With these rules in place, you’ll have a dashboard that is updated in real-time with the information most important to you, and one place to go for all campaign data.

According to MarketingProfs, “Marketing dashboards are an important tool for ensuring that marketing initiatives are on track. They help facilitate strategic decisions and recommend course adjustments, such as whether the marketing organization is on track to drive demand of products according to forecasts through higher-quality leads to sales, improved customer retention, or an increased marketing footprint.”

Is your organization using a marketing dashboard? How is it impacting your campaign performance?

Call Tracking / PPC / Search Marketing — No Comments
4
May 11

Google Call Metrics Pricing: What PPC Advertisers Need to Know

Five months after introducing Call Metrics, Google has started charging for calls placed to these tracking numbers. According to Greg Sterling, in a recent Screenwerk blog post:

“It must be the case that AdWords Call Metrics is wildly successful and lots of marketers are using it. Otherwise I don’t think that Google would so quickly be imposing fees.”

Sterling offers details on how Google’s pricing model works:

High-end mobile device click-to-call = Standard ad click rate

On smartphones, such as iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys, phone numbers in Google search results show up as click-to-call links, where the searcher can simply click on the phone number and the smartphone will automatically place the call. In this case, Google charges the same amount as it would if someone clicked on your ad to visit your web page.

Laptop or desktop computer = $1 per completed call

For those searchers that are using a laptop or desktop computer, Google charges a flat $1 fee for every completed, or answered, call to a Call Metrics tracking number.

Sterling asks, “How does this rate card compare to other call tracking vendors?” The answer is, it doesn’t.

Google is charging on a cost-per-action basis. This differs from most call tracking vendors, which charge on a per number, per minute basis.

The issue with the cost-per-action model is that Google is essentially charging advertisers under the assumption that all calls are leads, which may not always be the case. For example, a searcher may simply be calling for directions or hours of operation.

When call tracking solutions offer cost-per-action models, there are typically metrics in place — defined by the client, such as call length — to alert the software when a call should be considered a conversion, and thus charged accordingly.

Why Use Google Call Metrics?

As we wrote back in March, Google Call Metrics is a great way to evaluate your call tracking needs, and this continues to be true. However, with Google charging for these incoming calls, it is more important to closely monitor your campaign performance to ensure that you are maximizing ad budget. It is also important to understand when a more robust call tracking solution may be necessary.

Following are two items to closely monitor and evaluate during your Call Metrics campaign:

What types of calls are coming in?

Pay close attention to the types of calls resulting from your PPC campaigns. To do this, you need to set up a way to isolate and notate the type of calls that come in via Call Metrics. One way to do this is to assign an internal phone number so that it only receives calls forwarded from Call Metrics. Next, instruct your internal team to note if calls to this line are general inquires or result in new leads.

If there is an abundance of calls simply asking for directions, hours of operation, if so-and-so is working, or wrong numbers, reconsider Call Metrics.

Each of these calls, which likely won’t result in a lead, is eating up your PPC budget and limiting your campaign’s ability to reach more qualified audiences.

How many calls are coming in?

Consistent call volume is a strong indication that your target audiences are more inclined to pick up the phone rather than complete an online form. This likely extends beyond PPC to other marketing initiatives, such as organic search, offline advertising and email newsletters.

If this is the case, you may want to consider integrating a more robust call tracking solution to effectively track offline conversions that result from all marketing activities. Compare call tracking vendors to see which solution is a fit for your needs.

A complete lead conversion picture provided by the integration of web analytics and call tracking solutions enable you effectively evaluate campaign performance, evolve marketing activities and reallocate budgets to maximize lead quality, volume and overall ROI.

Are you using Call Metrics? What do you think of their new pricing?

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog