A common challenge marketers face is that they have data from various campaigns that reside in disparate systems.  In order to make meaning out of the data and gain insights about marketing performance, the data needs to be merged.  To add to the complexity, marketing organizations often use different systems than sales organizations making it more challenging to connect the dots between marketing investments and sales activity that it helps drive.

What’s a marketer to do?  Here are several ideas to help create closed loop systems along with the rationale why they are beneficial.  All of the suggestions within are meant to help understand what is failing and what is working in an effort to optimize campaigns.

1. Create a system that allows all key constituents to access the same key metrics.  Use the key metrics to derive data driven insights and continually improve performance (websites, campaigns, email, seo, ppc, etc.).  I know, blah, blah, blah.  What does this mean?  Its so vague.  It means that anyone in your organization, regardless of their department, can access a dashboard or reporting system to see how marketing campaigns perform.  Within the system there are key insights that drive action.  If a campaign is failing to meet its goals, you can see it is failing.  You can drill down deeper to see what might be causing it to fail.  Same for the campaigns that work.
2. Develop a system that closes the loop between marketing and sales.  The system should demonstrate how many sales are generated and associate the sale back to the lead source along with campaign metrics such as cost, exposure, response rates, and break it down by offer, message, creative, medium, etc.
3. Focus on key, actionable metrics.  Having data and reports for the sake of measuring is a futile effort.  You need to identify the metrics that matter to your organization.  Is it time on site?  Is it videos viewed?  Perhaps white papers downloaded?  Sample requests?  Online sales?  Visits and pageviews don’t give you much to go by in terms of actionable data.  What matters is behavior.  Driving a call to action.  Making the phone ring.
4. Always test.  As marketers, we are never done tweaking, refining and making things better.  When you find something that is working, test another version or message to see whether it can work better.  Test a different list.  Test a different call to action.  Never stop testing and learning.  If you are not testing, you’ll never improve performance.
5. Incorporate anecdotal evidence of success and failures into results (customer feedback, client feedback, agency feedback, vendor feedback).  Don’t rely on empirical data alone from web analytics, third party ad serving, social media insights, call tracking etc.  Factor in the feedback you receive from internal constituents, social media comments, vendor feedback.  These data points are important to round out the results of a campaign.  They add flavor and context to the learning.
6. Did I say test.  I can’t say it enough.  Always test.  Learn from tests.  Grow.  Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing is where we often learn our greatest lessons.
7. Converse to failing, don’t only look at what went wrong.  Look at what went right and figure out how to socialize that across other campaigns, business units, tactics, etc.

If you are not measuring your marketing today, how are you making decisions around your marketing investments?  If you are measuring your marketing, are you troubled by having many systems that don’t ‘talk’ to one another?  Start small.  Find ways to integrate.  Test.  Learn. Refine.  Rinse and Repeat.

Flickr photo courtesy of OliverN5

Much has been written recently about the proposed Do Not Track bill that will allow web users to opt out of being tracked online.  As I consider the implications of this bill, I am preparing myself for irrelevance.  We’ve made such great progress developing technology that makes our web experiences more personalized and relevant. Implementing a Do Not Track requirement will force several steps backwards.  Steps back towards less relevance for users and lovers of marketing analytics.

Behavioral marketing is made possible with the very technologies that Do Not Track wants to control.  For example, ads you see online today are relevant to you because of cookies.  Without cookies, you’ll begin seeing ads that you have less interest in.  And, it does not end with ads.  Your search history is at stake.  Search results which just about all of us have come to rely on to find useful, relevant information will become less relevant.

When you do a search on a topic, that information is stored for future use in order to make your subsequent searches more relevant to you.  With Do Not Track, the search engines will not be able to store data that enables relevance.

Other potential implications involve the storage of data that personalizes your online experience.  You may  find yourself needing to enter passwords every time you visit certain websites.

While these changes may sound trivial to some, they have significant financial implications for marketers as well.  By improving the targeting of advertisements, the ads have better performance which creates efficiencies in ad buys.  More efficient ad buys means more competitive pricing when it comes to the products we buy.

While this proposed bill has some similarities in relation to Do Not Call, it is not the same thing.  It can’t be compared as it is designed to serve a completely different purpose and it will be administered much differently.  As noted above, the implications are also much different.  Do Not Call limits marketers from calling you.  Do Not Track limits web tracking.  These are two very different things.

Regardless of how you view this potential bill, there is no debating the impact this will have to the relevance of our web experiences.  To Congress, the FCC, the FTC and any others involved in the proposed legislation, I strongly urge you to rethink Do Not Track.

Flickr image courtesy of Gopal1035

You have a business and sell stuff.

Congratulations.

Chances are you have a website as a way for people to learn about your company, your products and services.  Do you know how people find your website and how they contact you?  Do you want to know what marketing and advertising is working and what’s not working?  There are several ways to gain these insights.  One key tactic is call tracking.  Call tracking is key whether you sell to consumers, or B2B.  It does not matter if you sell paint, insurance, furniture, food products, lighting, or widgets.

If you manage a website and you don’t track your call volume, you may be suffering from myopia.  Web analytics myopia that is.  You see, you’re only able to see the results of a portion of your marketing efforts.  Call tracking is a critical component of a successful marketing analytics system. There are many flavors of call tracking, several of which have become much more robust recently due to advances in technology.

Recent advancements allow call tracking at the organic keyword level.  Using unique phone numbers at the keyword level is a bit too granular for many companies but consider the benefits.  By understanding call volume and outcomes at the keyword level, you’ll capture conversion data that you may not see through only web form conversions.

Certain keywords may have a higher likelihood to generate a phone call vs. a web form depending on the intention of the search.  For example, someone might search a general term related to your product or service that brings them to your website.  They may not be ready to commit yet so they don’t fill out a form but are comfortable with a call.  If they are in the information gathering stage of their search, they may pick up the phone to call.  The call may be prompted by lack of information found on your website or simply wanting to speak to a rep from your company.  If you are tracking just web forms, you’ll miss these conversions.

Taking call tracking a step further can be accomplished using call recording.  Speech recognition technology can be used to understand the outcomes of the calls generated from an ad.  Using keywords in the speech recognition process, advertisers can understand whether calls generate leads or sales and the associated value of sales.  If speech recognition is a bit much for you, consider using call recording for training and call quality.  In several cases, we’ve worked with clients using call recording to identify opportunities to improve the call experience and have implemented actionable training that led to higher conversion rates.  By randomly auditing recorded calls, you’ll find areas to improve through ongoing training.

Underscoring the importance of call tracking is comScore research that indicates up to 63% of people complete their purchase offline following their search activity.  Sure, some portion of these are people that visit a bricks and mortar store.  The remainder pick up the phone and call.  So, almost two-thirds of people searching online and visiting websites are not using the web to make contact or buy directly online.

There are many potential reasons why people are not buying from you online or contacting you using your web forms.  Below are several reasons this may be the case.  Take a look at your sales process, your competitors, and your website to understand which of these may apply to your company and website.

1. Your website does not have the information necessary to complete an online transaction.
2. Your website does not convey the trust that a consumer or B2B buyer wants and needs to trust giving their information.
3. Many people simply don’t like to use web forms to supply their information.  It could be due to privacy or security.  They may not want their information sold or used for other marketing purposes that typically results when completing web forms.
4. They are not ready to commit and prefer to make an anonymous phone call to get information from your company about your products or services.
5. You are not offering the ability for the web visitor to contact you through a form or email.
6. Your website navigation or content makes it difficult for the visitor to find the information necessary to make an online transaction.
7. Your website simply can’t answer every question that every visitor might have.  As hard as you try to develop content and FAQ’s that you  think addresses everyone’s needs, you’ll never think of them all.

If all this is not enough to convince you that call tracking is important, consider that one of the most successful companies online is now in the call tracking business.  That’s right, the big GOOG has done it again and introduced a new way to be accountable and prove their worth.

Google recently announced their plans to get in the call tracking game.  Until Google proves this out and collects enough data, these calls won’t have an associated cost.  It is likely only a matter of time until the GOOG starts charging advertisers per call.  Using Google Voice, they are providing unique phone numbers that a consumer can call to respond to an ad on Google.  With this feature, Google is able to prove more value associated with ads run on their network because it goes beyond just clicks.

Remember, there are several flavors of call tracking.  It can be done to track as granular as the keyword level from an organic search or simply at a campaign level.  It can be used to track offline advertising as well as online ads.  Call tracking works for both search ads and display ads online.  You can choose to record calls or not.

Regardless of what flavor you choose, the benefits will be the same. You’ll know when a consumer calls to find out more about an event you are promoting through an online ad.  You’ll know when a foodservice customer calls to buy a new product for their catering business based on an email blast you recently sent out.  You’ll know when an architect contacts you to receive product samples due to an online campaign.

Interested in learning more about how Point to Point can assist with your call tracking?  Give us a call at 866-979-5822.  Not interested in calling? No worries, you can find our form here.

Flickr image courtesy of randomduck.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with many marketers in the building products sector.  A common topic of conversation related to their marketing is how they can better understand the effectiveness of their marketing investments.  In most cases, the best way to get a handle on marketing’s effectiveness at generating leads and sales is measured by sales data such as leads and conversions and connecting this activity back to costs.  This is exactly where the challenge typically exists in most organizations.  Marketing and sales are not working together to allow the deep insights necessary to understand marketing effectiveness.

Marketers that desire to better understand marketing effectiveness exist across many types of organizations.  However, building products manufacturers face unique challenges as they must get a grasp on how a variety of constituents are interacting with their brands and products.  For example, when an architect specifies a product in his or her design process, that specification data can precede the project being developed by months, if not years.  Connecting the specification data to a sale presents unique challenges.

On the other end of the spectrum, when a contractor works from the specification, there exists an opportunity to change the product selection, although this happens at a relatively low frequency and will vary depending on the type of product and project.  Gaining an understanding of products used in a project relative to the original specification requires access to specification data and building project data.

Many marketers acknowledge these unique challenges in the architectural and design community, however there are systems and databases in place that can allow for building product manufacturers to measure and analyze marketing effectiveness over time.  So, why are most of the BPM marketers not measuring effectiveness?  It has not been made a priority within their organizations.

Like in many cases, things start from the top and work their way down.  Senior management needs to make marketing analytics and ROI a priority and charge their sales and marketing groups to work together to solve this problem.  The marketing and sales teams must then be held accountable for budgets and ROI.

Here is my road map to getting started towards developing more measurement and insight towards marketing effectiveness for building product manufacturers (although this applies to many B2B organizations).

1. Start at the top – Presidents, CEO’s, CFO’s, CMO’s, COO’s, GM’s, you know who you are.  This group first needs to make it a priority to understand marketing effectiveness.
2. Invest – again, this starts at the top but when a priority is set, investments can be made in the resources necessary to measure effectiveness.
3. Collaborate – Okay, business leaders have given the marching orders to figure out the ROI on your marketing and handed you a check to develop the systems.  Its time to play nice and share the sand box.  Marketing and sales need to come together to make this happen.  If the two groups don’t work together, the process won’t work.  Make a pact and get started.
4. Identify your key metrics – this can include any combination of the following or others that you find appropriate:  third party project reports such as Dodge, specifications written, specification downloads from your website or third party spec sites, request for information (online forms, and phone leads), orders, sales, and associated cost per each of these metrics where the marketing cost is divided by each of the key metrics.
5. Find the human resources (e.g., analyst types) that can create a process and system to capture the data that feeds key metrics.  This includes identification and implementation of the systems and technology to capture the data.
6. Implement in baby steps – this is an huge undertaking to go from having no analytics to putting a full dashboard in place.  Prioritize and implement in phases.  Start with the top of the marketing funnel and work your way downwards.  Bottom line is be realistic about how much you can accomplish and by when, then implement in chunks.  Get small wins and build on them.
7. Close the loop – marketing and sales must communicate to one another about how much is being invested and where.  Sales needs to communicate back in terms of what is working and what is not working.  Use this as your opportunity to improve and make your marketing better.

The time to start this process is now as budgets continue to be highly scrutinized and ROI must be demonstrated.  The more efficient you can be with your marketing dollars by optimizing spending towards more effective channels will create a more successful business outcome.  You’ll have an edge on the competition that does not have the deep insights and solid working relationship and communication between marketing and sales.

If you question the value of this type of activity then marketing analytics are not yet a priority in your organization.  I would argue they need to be.  For more rationale on why this is a priority, see my post that explains in very simple terms how to determine the value of knowing your marketing ROI.

By now, most web-surfing adults have heard of or know what a cookie is.  I’m not talking Toll-House here.  This is about the type of cookies placed on computers that track web-surfing.  With the integration of Doubleclick into Google and also available through most third party ad servers, any website owner can leverage cookie technology and re-target visitors to their site.

Here are the basics of how this works.  A tag is placed in your website code which sets a cookie on the hard drive of your site’s visitors’ computers.  This cookie contains code in a file that is then tracked as a person visits other sites.  When they visit a site within a larger network (e.g., the Google content network), the cookie is recognized and that computer (person) is re-targeted with your ad.

The key advantage to a website owner doing this is their ads are now being delivered to people that have visited their site.  The site visitors are familiar with your brand and products or services and the re-marketing ads can be segmented to correspond to the specific page on your website that was visited.  For example, lets say officemax.com is using re-marketing cookies.  If I initially visit officemax.com and check out a page about chairs, officemax.com can set a unique cookie on my computer corresponding to this page.  When I later visit another  website as part of a content network (as in the Google example above), the cookie will trigger an Office Max ad for chairs.

The benefit to going to this level of targeting and re-marketing is that Office Max knows I was shopping for chairs.  The re-marketing/re-targeting ad will see higher returns than if Office Max placed the same ad on a site that is served to someone that never visited officemax.com.  This creates efficiencies in a media buy through higher response rates and conversion rates.

For those that are concerned with privacy, there is no need to worry.  Cookies can be disabled and they don’t track a person, they track a computer.

To learn more about using data for re-marketing to improve your marketing efficiency, check out our marketing analytics services and media planning sections.  Or, give us a shout.  We’d love to talk about this more and show off our geekiness.

Flickr image courtesy of Werwin15

Extreme Makeover, the healthcare edition is wrapping up in Washington D.C.  The outcome of the sweeping changes will mean one thing for certain.  Healthcare organizations must take a close look at their operations, including their marketing approach, and continue to evolve.

In the wake of the recent legislation on the  insurance front, it is more critical now for healthcare organizations to improve efficiency.  If they don’t become more efficient across the board, they will be less competitive and produce less profit.  In order to assist in the effort to be more efficient, here are 5 analytic-oriented healthcare marketing tips.

1. Change your mindset from brand marketing to acquisition marketing.  Building a brand is extremely important.  However, when push comes to shove like it did in Washington last week, it is going to force you to take a closer look at the bottom line.  What are you spending to acquire patients?  What are those patients worth to your organization across the lifetime that they will be using your services?
2. Change your advertising to include more mediums that are in line with your specific target audiences.  Do the research and understand the demographics of your desired patients.  If you want more privately insured patients, figure out who they are then determine the media they consume.  Target the specific media where you’ll find the desired patients.  You’ll get more of the patients you want and there will be less waste in your media buy.
3. Invest in marketing analytics solutions.  Implement tracking to understand which ads and media are performing more efficient than others.  A capable marketing analytics consultant, such as yours truly (getting in my shameless promotion here), can assist with designing a system that allows for tracking and measuring the efficacy of your marketing and advertising.  By integrating marketing systems with your patient databases, you can begin to understand the value and return on your marketing investments.
4. Test new ways to reach patients and measure the effectiveness.  Through new technologies, such as social media, mobile apps, or personalized URL’s you can customize messaging and engage audiences in new and different ways.  Use technology to improve response rates and reduce your marketing costs.  Better response rates and conversion rates mean you can cut wasteful spending.  As I mentioned above, you need to measure these efforts in order to know if they are working and to what degree they work.
5. Consider how you communicate with current and past patients and create strategies to leverage those relationships.  Patients that are advocates for your organization should be tapped to promote your services and refer friends and family.  Use email, newsletters, direct mail, and other communication vehicles including the necessary tools and incentives for the recipient to pass along a message and make a referral.

We’re making it through one of the worst economic downturns in our country’s history.  We can also make it through this dramatic change in our healthcare system.  It will take some different thinking and hard work.

What are you going to do differently in your healthcare marketing strategy in light of the new legislation?  If you want to take a fresh, creative look at how you approach healthcare marketing, give us a shout.  Our marketing analytics services team is ready to assist.

Flickr photo courtesy of foolish adler

Spring is upon us
Do you know your ROI
Or is it a wish

To discuss Haiku’s or analytics, drop me a line.

Flickr photo courtesy of cygnus921

The ANA and Forrester recently surveyed a set of national advertisers.  The purpose of the research was to gauge marketers attitudes towards TV and video advertising.  The findings were that TV spending is expected to be about flat in 2010 compared to 2009.  However, 2009 was down from 2008.  What wasn’t down in 2009 compared to 2008?

The results also indicate where marketers plan to invest in 2010 (if not on TV).  Again, the results were not surprising.  Marketers plan to invest more online through vehicles such as social media, web advertising, search engine marketing and email marketing.  The common theme between the reasons why TV remains flat while the online advertising segment grows is that marketers want better measurement.  On one hand, marketers indicate through the survey results that they are not satisfied with TV measurement and ratings systems.  On the other hand, online advertising provides more measurement and accountability.

Marketers, don’t give up on TV yet.  While TV is often more challenging to measure than online advertising, there are many ways to determine the efficacy of TV.  If your TV spending is measured purely on ratings, frequency or reach, you are not looking deep enough at how well it is working.  You need to dig deeper and understand the return on investment.  Questions you should be asking and answering include:

• Is my brand awareness increasing?
• Are more people considering my brand or product?
• Is my website traffic increasing?
• Are more people visiting my stores?
• Are my leads increasing?
• Are my sales increasing?

By isolating markets and testing TV levels while keeping other marketing variables consistent, you can better understand the impact of your TV buy.  If done right, you can answer the set of questions above and compare test vs. control markets allowing TV value to be quantified.

How are you planning to invest marketing and advertising dollars in 2010?  How are you going to measure the ROI on your spend?  We’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss your media and ROI challenges.  Let us know here on the blog or contact us to start the dialog.

Top image courtesy of: mynameis.jeime (flickr.com)

Would you take a flight if half the flight crew was not present?  Not me.  I’d walk, drive, swim or find some other transportation before taking a flight like this.  Marketers need to think about this.

According to a recent marketer survey by Unica, 72% of respondents had no full time resource devoted to managing web analytics.  That’s almost 3 out of 4 respondents!  So, what does this mean?  In almost 3 out of 4 companies, there is nobody at the wheel of the website when it comes to watching who is coming and going.  What content is being consumed.  What is working and what is not.  Huh?

Think about it this way.  U.S. advertisers spend about $280B annually.  Ads generally include a call to action directing you to a website.  If not, the consumer goes to a search engine and finds your website.  Thousands of websites have been developed and continue being updated.  Imagine the investments in just web design and development alone.  How can marketers rationalize hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and web development and not pay attention to an important set of metrics such as what is happening on the website?  How do you optimize content?  What is the basis of your decisions?

While the same survey found challenges with analytics packages and linking data back to business results, I find it troubling that marketers are not reaching out and asking for help in this area.  This is too important of a business function to not devote adequate resources.  Your website is often a first impression.  It might be the last impression but you won’t know if you are not managing analytics.

Marketers need to be intimately familiar with their web analytics and how web data relates back to overall marketing measurement.  This is a critical resource and one where companies need to be investing.  Marketing dollars continue shifting towards digital.  Consumers continue spending vast amounts of time online.  Without a pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit checking the gauges, you are flying blind.  Without the appropriate web analytics resources in place, marketers are going to throw more money at the web and not measure it.  There is so much data available and such a great story to be told with web analytics.

Here’s my advice to get started with web analytics:

1. Get familiar with your options – sign up for a web analytics group on LinkedIn and read the discussions.  Start learning.
2. Subscribe to web analytics blogs such as Occam’s Razor.
3. If you don’t have analytics on your site, install Google Analytics.  If you do have analytics on your site, get familiar with what it offers.
4. Begin monitoring the key performance indicators (KPI’s) on your website.  Choose the metrics that matter most or you’ll get lost in the data forest.
5. Ready to make an investment?  Hire an agency or consultant that has the requisite experience in analytics.  Or, hire an analyst to join your staff.  Another way to go might be to train an existing resource on using web analytics.
6. Start implementing changes to your site based on insights from your analytics.
7. Test, test, and test content.  Make updates based on what you learn.
8. Rinse.  Repeat!

]]> http://www.pointtopoint.com/2009/11/are-you-flying-blind-a-web-analytics-dilemma/feed/ 0 http://www.pointtopoint.com/2009/11/are-you-flying-blind-a-web-analytics-dilemma/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PointToPointMarketingAnalytics/~3/T0BgOUyaXq0/ http://www.pointtopoint.com/2009/10/whats-the-roi-on-knowing-your-roi/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:57:52 +0000 Brady Cohen http://www.buildamovement.com/blog/?p=440

Figure A

What is it worth to you to know your advertising and marketing ROI?  I bet it’s worth more than you realize.

Do you know what the response is from your current marketing and advertising?  If not, would you like to know?  Let’s say you are spending $1,000,000 on marketing and advertising each year.  At an average $10 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and a response/lead generation rate of 0.25%, this yields 50,000 responses/leads.  See Figure A.

Suppose you convert leads to sales at an average rate of 20%.  Using an average profit per sale of $10.00 after factoring in all costs, you made $500,000 in profit.  It’s all in a day’s work.  Right?  While these numbers are not based on an actual company, you can insert your company’s marketing spend, all other costs, response and conversion rates to understand your current state.

So, what is it worth to you to understand how to improve your response rate by 10%?  Is it worth $150,000?  What is it worth to you to improve by 20%?  Is $300,000 profit enough incentive?

The bottom line:  You need to know how your marketing and advertising is performing and where you can improve efficiencies.  Do the math and it will become clear that there is an ROI on your ROI and analytics systems and processes.  Want ideas on how to get started?  See this recent post with some measurement tools to get started.