Analytics

The Forgotten PPC Metric: Phone Call Conversions

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is used to drive traffic to your brand’s website, and is typically measured using online analytics. However, the most successful PPC campaigns are those that can capture and associate any form of lead conversion with a specific campaign, ad, keyword and landing page.

The missing, and often forgotten, piece to this lead conversion picture is the phone call. To effectively capture these offline conversions and tie them to your PPC campaigns, you need to integrate a PPC call tracking solution.

PPC 360° — Tracking a Complete View

When you combine phone calls with online form completions, you can gather valuable insight into campaign performance that will help you evaluate your PPC campaign and maximize returns. Specifically, you can use this information to evolve:

Keyword Selection: With call tracking and web analytics, you can identify the keywords that are driving lead conversions. Use this information to understand what terms drive the highest quality traffic, and then build out your campaigns using these terms, and direct synonyms, to increase conversions. At the same time, cut back on, or eliminate, the keywords that don’t result in conversions.
Bid Management: With the top lead-producing keywords identified, you can better manage how much you are willing to bid on each for top placement. If you know a keyword drives conversions, you can use ROI to justify spending more money per click. At the same time, you can reduce spend on keywords that are not driving adequate lead volume.
PPC Advertising Budget: With call tracking and web analytics showing you all lead conversions, you can make informed decisions on whether you are receiving an acceptable ROI on your PPC investment, and compare its return to other marketing and advertising initiatives. Depending on PPC rate of return, you may consider allocating more budget toward your campaign, or conversely, shift budgets away from PPC advertising to other, more effective marketing campaigns.
Landing Page Design and CTAs: The most successful PPC campaigns have a clear call to action, for example make a purchase, fill out a lead form, download content or call for additional information. Evaluate landing page design and CTA performance based on both online and offline conversion data. What may look like the best CTA in online analytics may not prove the best when you account for phone calls. Understand how your audiences prefer to communicate and what resonates with them, and then prompt them to take action based on their preferences as to improve conversion rates.

How to Integrate Call Tracking into Your PPC Campaign

The reason for integrating call tracking into PPC advertising is clear: it provides a full picture of campaign performance, helping you make informed investments.

Here are four quick steps to get started with call tracking for PPC.

First, work with a call tracking provider for initial setup.
Add call tracking numbers throughout your website, either by manually placing them on individual landing pages or integrating a call tracking Javascript snippet into your website’s HTML code.
Next, integrate PPC call tracking into your paid advertisements. Google offers a phone number ad extension, or you can also integrate numbers into ad copy or within the imagery of display ads.
Finally, assess complete ad performance and conversion rate by feeding your call-tracking data into web analytics and PPC platforms. Depending on the call tracking solution used, this data can be automatically piped into your PPC account dashboard.

With call tracking integrated into your PPC campaigns, you can have a complete view of conversions, even when a lead picks up the phone to call. Analyze your campaigns; test new keywords, ads, bid strategies and landing pages; then evolve based on conversion data, and start the process again.

What successes have you had using call tracking for PPC?

Analytics / Call Tracking / CRM / Integration / Offline Advertising / PPC / Sales — No Comments
14
Sep 11

Less is More…Funneling the Right Sales Leads for Higher Conversions

Poll your sales team: Would they rather receive three well-qualified leads from marketing next month, or 15 cold ones? Well-qualified leads will win every time.

Even with sales cycles lengthening and becoming more complex, a 2011 SiriusDecisions survey of B2B sales and marketing leaders found that top-performing companies are using business intelligence technology to approach the sales pipeline with an emphasis on identifying higher-quality leads.

The concept may seem counter-intuitive, but less, better-qualified leads are actually easier for sales to work with:

Sales representatives have busy calendars. Filling them up with calls or meetings with non-qualified leads is a waste of time and resources.
Cold calls or reps that come off as too aggressive too early in the buying cycle may turn off potential customers that are not ready to make a purchase decision, ruining chances of future sales.
When marketing is able to hand a lead over to sales with a complete history already established, it leads to a shorter process for the rep, and shorter sales cycle overall.
Sales can tailor messaging to leads that have qualified themselves, making each interaction more effective.

“Too many raw, unqualified leads can create a clogged marketing and sales process and an unhealthy sales funnel.” —Why Your Sales Force Needs Fewer Leads, PointClear, LLC

Today’s marketing and sales business intelligence technologies—including web analytics, call tracking, and CRM systems—enable marketers and sales reps to work together to maintain a tighter pipeline-to-quota ratio and grow sales.

Complete Analytics Qualifies Marketing Leads

Spending on online advertising specifically aimed to generate leads has grown by $12 billion in the last four years. Once you have a lead’s attention, tracking activity and scoring leads is made simple through comprehensive analytics that measure online and offline activity.

Web Analytics

Consumer buying habits indicate that overall, 43 percent of consumers go online to research before buying. This number increases for technology purchases, as well as other complex purchases.

Track online activity to target your most qualified leads. If marketing can remove the qualification process from sales’ plate by placing leads into a nurturing program, assessing actions, and profiling the most qualified prospects, it can confidentially deliver a narrow list of well-qualified leads (and their lead history) to sales.

Call Tracking

Web analytics are great, but all is lost when a lead picks up the phone. When a lead calls, he or she is taking a proactive step in the decision-making process, and you should have the technologies in place to track and report on these prospects.

Integrating call tracking with marketing activities through one-to-one and Javascript integration, you can monitor offline lead activity, including how leads found you and what prompted them to call. Analyze these reports to score and qualify leads that reach out to you by phone.

CRM Systems

What tools are best used to house lead history, and combine efforts of marketing and sales? A sound customer relationship management (CRM) system is a necessity to make the process between marketing and sales flow effectively.

Track lead timelines, history, actions, touchpoints, demographic and firmographic information, who’s responsible for the lead (sales vs. marketing), and more with CRM software. You can also use a CRM to evaluate and prioritze all leads in your database.

Good Lead, Bad Lead.

Another challenge for marketers is defining a qualified lead. Once you have compiled your lead history, what should you look for, and what information should you provide to sales?

What determines a qualified lead will change for specific business cases, but here’s a list to get started. Consider these parameters when building lead forms so you have the information needed to evaluate:

Budget
Decision-making timeline
How the lead found you
Lead history, interactions and touch points

Have you found success with a “less-is-more” approach to sales leads? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Analytics / Call Tracking / Social Media — No Comments
27
Jul 11

How to Monitor Twitter Lead Conversion with Call Tracking and Google Analytics

Twitter can be an effective and valuable option for your company to build brand awareness, exhibit expertise, share valuable resources and generate leads and sales.

If your business is using Twitter as part of a marketing campaign, you should be measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. Through technology solutions, such as call tracking and web analytics, you can gather valuable data on audience response to your Twitter activity and calls to action.

Tracking Conversations from Twitter

Ideally, your Twitter activities and marketing efforts associated with the platform will result in lead conversions, some of which may occur by phone. To track these
conversions, you should consider introducing call tracking into your Twitter strategy, and configuring analytics to track Twitter-related visitor activity.

Below are three ways you can integrate call tracking with your Twitter account to capture conversions that happen via the phone:

Within Your Profile — Assign a unique tracking number to your profile, and add it to the “bio” section under profile settings. The number can direct customers to your general business line, customer service center or sales department. (Remember that the bio has a 160-character limit, and a tracking number with hyphens will take up 12 characters).
Within Your Tweets — Assign a unique tracking number to an individual tweet or to your entire Twitter campaign. These numbers can be used to track responses from limited-time offers, customer service referrals, direct messages (DMs) and more. (Remember: tweets must be 140 characters or less).
Within Your Website — By integrating the call tracking Javascript snippet throughout your site, a visitor’s traffic source — direct traffic, search engine, referring site, etc. — will be recorded, and they will be shown a unique call tracking number. As soon as a call comes into this number, the call tracking platform associates it with the person’s traffic source and records it for later review.

When a visitor comes to your site from Twitter, then calls, the conversion is associated with Twitter and reported in your dashboard. This enables you to track calls from Twitter, thereby helping you to evaluate its ability to generate leads and evolve your Twitter strategy to increase conversions.

Twitter Conversion Tracking Through Analytics

Google Analytics can also offer insight on traffic received from different online sources, including social media accounts like Twitter. Under the Traffic Sources tab, you can set up Advanced Segment filters, giving Google Analytics rules for segmenting traffic from specific sources (such as Twitter and Hootsuite) as you define.

Once you’ve identified and setup Twitter, and any URL shortener sites, to be tracked as referring social sources, you can drill into the information — number of visits, pageviews, time spent on site, bounce rate and online form completions — that will help you better evaluate Twitter’s ability to generate leads.

If you feed your call tracking conversion data into Google Analytics, you can quickly obtain a holistic view of lead generation — both online and offline — that result from your efforts on Twitter, and you can more effectively measure and evolve your Twitter campaign based on ROI.

Has your company integrated call tracking into its Twitter account or other social profiles? If so, what have you found effective for enticing customer responses?

Analytics / Call Tracking / Mobile Marketing / PPC / Search Marketing — No Comments
19
Jul 11

Track Mobile Advertising Campaign Conversions with Call Tracking and Web Analytics

Smartphone adoption continues to explode with the ever-improving advancements in mobile technology. The introduction of faster networks and phones, greater data sharing capabilities and better user interfaces have enabled smartphones to dominate the mobile market.

According to a May 2011 report from comScore Inc., 76.8 million Americans use smartphones — 11 million more users than the previous three-month period. Additionally, Nielsen’s May survey of U.S. consumers concluded that 38 percent of all mobile consumers now own smartphones.

More companies are integrating mobile advertising into their marketing campaigns in response to consumer behavior and trends.. In fact, comScore Inc. reported that spending on mobile advertising in the U.S. is projected to reach $2.5 billion by 2014.

Mobile advertising offers companies the ability to reach busy consumers.. Using web analytics and call tracking, marketers can find the data needed to track consumer behavior and conversion rates, and evolve their campaigns to be more effective for targeting mobile audiences.

Mobile Advertising and Marketing Tactics

The following provides details on three common mobile advertising/marketing options, and how to effectively track results.

Mobile display ads

Display advertising strategically places a company’s ad and a concise call to action among relevant content — e.g. within an app, video or mobile site. Mobile display ads consist of text, logos, images, banners or maps whichdirect a user to the company site, conversion form or phone number.

Similar to desktop advertising, mobile display ads are tracked by web analytics and call tracking systems which monitor the conversion rates of individual ads.

While web analytics will provide you with information on visitor behavior and click through patterns, the call tracking number associated with a campaign will capture a caller’s mobile conversion source and other relevant information. Together, these tools will provide you with lead details needed to track campaign effectiveness and improve sales follow up.

Mobile PPC

Mobile PPC, or pay-per-click, is used for mobile search advertising. According to Google, mobile search queries represent approximately 15 percent of all search volume, and continue to grow at a rapid pace. In response to this growing opportunity, advertisers are turning to mobile PPC campaigns.

Click-to-call functionality makes mobile PPC particularly convenient and effective for mobile searchers seeking immediate information. However, to properly evaluate the results of your campaign, you should consider integrating PPC call tracking into your paid ads and web analytics and call tracking on the designated landing page(s).

Mobile Text Messaging (SMS)

Text message campaigns are used by a range of organizations to connect with audiences on the go, providing customers with easy access to relevant information.

For example, Scotts Miracle-Gro’s SMS campaign provides mobile users with a short-code texting option that automatically sends tips on lawn care, and upon activation requests an email address for delivery of the campaign newsletter. In essence, Scotts has leveraged mobile marketing efforts to further engage its customer base and drive email subscriptions.

Additionally, local and service-based businesses can include call tracking numbers within mobile SMS campaigns to better track customers who then make appointments or reservations, purchase tickets, cash in on special offers, or simply call with questions.

Tracking Mobile Campaign Performance

Smartphones offer users the accessibility to surf the web, find information relevant to their needs and take immediate action, such as access a website or call a local business or hotline. With effective mobile campaigns in place, along with data from analytics and call tracking tools, you can properly evaluate your efforts and capitalize on this fast-growing marketplace.

Have you integrated mobile into your advertising and marketing campaigns? If so, what have you found effective for monitoring conversion rates and overall success?

Additional Resources:

Analytics / Call Tracking / PPC / Search Marketing — No Comments
12
Jul 11

Determine the “Why” of Conversion Rates with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Whether you’re investing in a multi-faceted marketing campaign, or you want to evaluate the main calls to action on your website, one of the most important metrics in determining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is the conversion rate of audiences to leads.

However, looking at the conversion rate alone is not enough information to help you determine how to improve campaigns and increase conversions.

Instead, you must look at the full scope of data available to you through web analytics and call tracking tools. Together, these will help you paint a detailed picture of how your target audiences interact with your marketing efforts, and give you the information you need to better evolve your campaigns.

What Conversion Rates Tell You – Using Web Analytics and Call Tracking

The conversion rate, or frequency at which someone takes a desired action and becomes a lead, gives you the percentage rate of success your calls to action yield.

Utilizing both web analytics and a call tracking solution will help to you track both on- and offline conversions—for example, lead form completions and phone calls—for an accurate representation of marketing optimization. This is particularly important when analyzing campaigns across several mediums, such as TV, print and online.

The conversion rate will help you answer questions about what is working: which aspects of your campaign are, and are not, successfully converting audiences into leads. But, it won’t explain why: why individuals respond better to one campaign over another.

It isn’t until you are able to answer “why” that you can make strategic adjustments to your campaigns that increase lead generation and increase ROI.

Answering the “Why” of Conversions with Web Analytics and Call Tracking

Let’s say your PPC campaign yields 10 percent more leads than your TV ad. While that number is useful for identifying one campaign’s effectiveness over another, it doesn’t tell you why this is the case.

To gather this information, you have to dig deeper into website analytics and call tracking data. Below are key metrics to evaluate that can help you identify why and how different elements of your campaign impact conversion rates:

Conversion Source (i.e. PPC ad or offline TV ad) — What sources drove conversions? Use this information to analyze the headlines, messaging, calls to action, or promotions that tend to result in lead activity, and which don’t.
Conversion Web Page — If a marketing effort drove visitors to your website, what was the last page they viewed before completing a lead form or calling? Again, look for headlines, messaging and calls to action that motivate visitors to convert.
Exit Rate / Bounce Rate — What pages are least likely to encourage a visitor’s conversion? Where are visitors leaving your site from, and how do these pages differ from those that generate leads?
Pages/Visit and Pageviews — On average, how many pages does someone view before converting, and what topics are they interested in? If multiple pages exist on the same topic, which of these pages perform best? Is there a way to consolidate information into one highly effective page?

How often do visitors click through your site and then exit, signifying that they couldn’t find what they were looking for? What content can be added to your site that will help prospects find what they need?

Use the Data to Evolve Your Campaigns

Use the information available to you through website analytics and call tracking tools, in conjunction with your conversion rates, to take a holistic view of your marketing performance. Evaluate what elements of your campaigns work, which need to be adjusted and how these pieces work together to yield conversions and sales.

By analyzing this data, you can extract valuable details about what your audiences like and dislike, what information they’re looking for and what messages resonate best. Then, you can create an action plan to better meet these preferences. Use A/B testing to further test your theories before full implementation.

What data do you use to analyze conversions?

Analytics / Call Tracking / Integration — No Comments
29
Jun 11

Integrate Web Analytics, Call Tracking and CRMs in One Marketing Dashboard

The most useful marketing performance reports are built on a foundation of comprehensive data collection. They include accurate and complete information covering all possible marketing interactions, ranging from website visits to phone calls to customer conversions.

Digital marketing agencies and corporate marketers rely on these reports to effectively optimize marketing campaign performance, identify trends and opportunities, draw conclusions, and then make campaign update decisions based on meeting goals and increasing ROI.

Generating these reports requires the proper tracking tools, understanding which metrics matter most and effectively combining all this information into an easy-to-review dashboard.

Following are the main things to consider when building your own marketing reports:

Integrate the Proper Tools

You need to be able to capture and record audience interactions online and offline, from new leads to lead conversions in order to properly track campaign performance. This requires the use of:

Web Analytics Platform (e.g. Google Analytics) — To capture sources of website traffic, what actions visitors take while on your site and online form completions.
Call Tracking Software (e.g. Mongoose Metrics) — To track phone conversions and associate them with a marketing initiative and website activity.
CRM Solution (e.g. Salesforce) — To close the loop on your marketing efforts, show which activities generated leads that converted to customers, and accurately determine ROI of marketing activities.

Measure Performance With Metrics

With the appropriate tracking technologies in place, it’s time to define the metrics you are going to use to show marketing campaign performance.

This starts with indexing all the various activities involved in your marketing campaigns, and then identifying how your audiences may interact with each. In addition, you’ll want to track how they interact with your company over time. Some common metrics to consider include:

Source: Referring website, call source (i.e. offline ad), PPC campaign/ad group/ad/keyword bid, email click through, keyword search.
Engagement: Click through rate, ad impressions, page views, bounce rate, time on site, last URL visited, repeat visits.
Conversion: Conversion rate, cost per conversion, form completions, phone calls, resource content downloads, coupon submissions.
Sales: Cost per acquisition, lead-to-customer conversions, contract renewals, up-sells.

The metrics you select should help you answer the following questions:

Are your marketing campaigns satisfying the targeted business objectives?
Are your marketing activities generating responses from target audiences?
What topics, messaging, promotions/specials, or calls to action seem to resonate best with audiences?
How qualified are the audiences you are reaching?
Are they taking the actions you want them to take?
Is the conversion rate in line with expectations?
Are campaigns generating high quality leads?
What type of return are you getting on your marketing investments?

Create a Marketing Dashboard

To simplify creating reports that answer these questions, consolidate your critical metrics from your tracking tools into a marketing dashboard. Select web analytic, call tracking and CRM solutions that can feed information to each other through the use of APIs.

By connecting performance metrics across tracking tools and reporting silos, marketers can create a complete, closed-loop marketing picture and be better prepared to review, evaluate and make campaign update decisions.

The following Mongoose blog post outlines some of the benefits of marketing dashboard and how to identify what should be included — Putting Performance Metrics into a Single Marketing Dashboard.

What technology and metrics do you use when structuring your campaign performance reports?

Analytics / Call Tracking — No Comments
31
May 11

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?

Analytics / Call Tracking — No Comments
25
May 11

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 phone call 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 tracking 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?

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?

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog