Advanced Integration: Form and phone conversion tracking when a landing page is not the first click.

Landing Page Conversion Cycle

In a perfect world, web visitors will convert when and where you want them to. If only it were that easy!  For many campaigns, particularly where there is a B2B service or complex product, it is unreasonable to expect the site visitor to convert on the landing page without first browsing other areas of the website. Maybe the site visitor wants to explore your products, your pricing, check out you company background, look at your documentation. Your visitors may want to learn and fully examine your services before converting.

To allow for this degree of interaction while still tracking the user’s actions, the integration will need to be completed in a different manner. The key integration difference is that the Mongoose Metrics code is installed directly onto the website, rather than through Unbounce’s landing page, while still providing you with all the measuring and testing functionality you love in Unbouce. Mongoose Metrics’s custom global variables are key and must be installed in order to track from which page a tracking phone number call was made.

Here’s the high level overview of how the advanced integration will work.

Integration Steps – High Level Overview

1. Install Mongoose Metrics’ JavaScript code on every page of your campaign website.
2. On a wrapper page of your campaign website, include the Unbounce landing page using an iframe.
3. On the wrapper page, that already has your Mongoose Metrics AccuTrack code installed, and has the iframe included to your Unbounce landing page, also install a JavaScript snippet that declares to a JavaScript variable the name of your Unbounce campaign.
4. In Unbounce, complete the hidden form setup as described in the basic integration in Part 1.
5. In Mongoose Metrics, complete the post-back URL setup as was also described in the basic integration in Part 1.

When this advanced integration is complete, a user can now freely browse your website and upon landing on the Unbounce landing page, which is pulled into your site via an iframe, a tracking phone number will be published. The correlation will be made between the visitor data and phone number and will be captured in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

By integrating call tracking technology into your landing page or website you will be able to more effectively and efficiently measure online to offline conversions, providing you with reliable, clear and actionable data that can be used to optimize marketing campaigns and maximize return on investment.

In this post and in the upcoming post we will be exploring how to track and report both form submissions and phone call conversions – and to report both sets of data in a unified fashion using Google Analytics.

You will learn:

• How to report both landing page form submissions and offline phone calls driven from the landing page visits in Google Analytics.
• How to integrate session level (keyword and IP address) phone call tracking into your landing page optimization campaign.
• In this post we will be covering a simple integration where the landing page is the first click destination from an ad source, such as paid search.
• In the upcoming post we will be covering an advanced integration where the landing page conversion is later in the click funnel.  This advanced integration is perfect for measuring white paper conversions and any other campaign where the visitor may browse around before converting on the landing page.

With your newly learned tactics you will be:

• Empowered to place phone call tracking numbers on your landing pages.
• Capable of conducting A/B split testing where you measure both web form submissions and phone call conversions.
• Capture all paid search keywords, including long-tail terms that drive phone conversions and use this data to further optimize your advertising efforts.
• Measure and report your hard work in the same campaign within Google Analytics or your web analytics package of choice.
• Capable of measuring and getting credit for phone calls driven from website visitors who viewed your landing page – yeah!

We’ll be demonstrating these tactics using Unbounce. Unbounce, a leader in landing page development, empowers marketers to create, publish, test and optimize landing pages. Unbounce is a self-serve hosted service that provides marketers with landing pages that can be built from templates and used for lead generation forms, click through, product launch and social media. These templates allow a marketer to take control and publish paid search campaigns, banner ads and email landing pages, without the need to consult an IT resource or developer.

This integration will be conducted using Mongoose Metrics’ session level phone call tracking product, AccuTrack Session.

With this integration we will show you how to push both the Unbounce form conversion data and Mongoose Metrics phone call conversion data into Google Analytics.  This will allow you to measure and report both form submissions and calls in a single environment and to see in-depth all of the dimensions, which drove the conversion.

Simple Integration: Form and phone conversion tracking when landing page is first click from advertising source, such as paid search.

This integration tactic is ideal when you are driving traffic, such as paid search, to a landing page and you expect the site visitors to fully convert on the landing page. For this integration Mongoose Metrics’s AccuTrack Session product is installed into the Unbounce platform using Unbounce’s handy JavaScript insertion feature.

Integration Steps – High Level Overview

1. Install Mongoose Metrics AccuTrack Session code into Unbounce system using Unbounce’s JavaScript insertion feature.
2. In Unbounce, create hidden forms to track form submissions in Google Analytics.
3. Include a phone number on the Unbounce landing page.
4. Drive traffic to the landing page from an advertising source, such as paid search.
5. That’s it!

With the above method you will be able to track both form submission and phone calls, measure what keywords drove both, and push everything into Google Analytics to produce a combined single report.  So we made this look very easy, and now for the details:

Integration Steps – The Details

With our integration steps overview above, the following steps below provide a deeper look into the exact steps needed to complete the integration.

Step 1 – Install Mongoose Metrics JavaScript Code.

In Unbounce, there is a powerful feature that allows you to include JavaScript code. Using this feature, you can add the JavaScript code that is necessary to link the landing page to the Mongoose Metrics service.  To add the JavaScript code, in Unbounce, click the ‘edit’ button next to the landing page variant you wish to add JavaScript code to. Next, in Unbounce, click on the JavaScript icon in the menu bar and add the Mongoose Metrics JavaScript code using the tool.

Step  2 – Create Hidden Form Fields To Integrate With Google Analytics.

Next, you’ll want to push your Unbounce form submissions into Google Analytics. There are many ways to represent this information in Google Analytics, for this example the conversion data will be stored as a campaign. To do this, you need to make use of Unbounce’s hidden form fields in order to make use of Google Analytics campaign tracking features. More about Google Analytics campaign tracking can be seen here using their URL Builder Tool.

To add the hidden fields, simply click on any form field on the landing page variant page and in the right side-bar menu click on the “edit form fields” button.  Use the Unbounce tool to create three hidden fields.  The three hidden fields you’ll need to create are for utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium.  Populate the default hidden form values with information needed to track your campaign.

For our example we used:

utm_campaign  – White Paper campaign
utm_source – www.mongoosemetrics.com
utm_medium – Unbounce web form

Tip – You will want utm_campaign and  utm_source to be identical in both the Unbounce hidden form and in the Mongoose Metrics’ postback URL. If it is not, you will not store both form conversions and phone calls in the same location in Google Analytics.

Unbounce - Hidden Form Fields

Step 3 – Include a phone number on your landing page.

This is the easiest step of all!  Because Mongoose Metrics’ javascript is installed, it will take care of the rest by dynamically replacing the phone number on the Unbounce landing page with a tracking number served by Mongoose Metrics. Along with serving the number, the IP address, keyword, and other visitor metrics are also logged. When a call is made from the tracking number, the call is correlated back to the visitor session and Mongoose Metrics will execute a post-back to your Google Analytics account with the data.

Step 4 – In Mongoose Metrics, configure the postback URL

To complete this step, login to your Mongoose Metrics account and on the campaign configuration page, edit the postback URL. Use the postback URL builder to build a URL and be sure to include utm_source, utm_campaign, and utm_medium.

In our example, we used the following settings:

utm_campaign – White Paper Campaign
utm_source – www.mongoosemetrics.com
utm_medium – phone

Setup the post back in Mongoose Metrics to push the call data into Google Analytics or elsewhere.

Be sure to select what call data to post back, including keyword, in order to track what landing page phone calls where driven from keywords.

That’s it! If you are familiar with Unbounce and setting up Mongoose Metrics Accutrack Session campaigns, the above integration steps will be quite simple.  You can get fancier too, by using utm_medium to store ad variant and nothing is stopping you from storing this data in Google Analytics as a goal as well!

With the above integration complete, you can now track both Unbounce form submissions and Mongoose Metrics phone calls made from visitors who called from the Unbounce landing page.  This data will all be reported into Google Analytics as a campaign for easy viewing and reporting. Best of all, by filtering the secondary dimensions in Google Analytics to Keywords, you will see the form submissions and keywords which drove traffic.

From a landing page testing and optimization perspective, these steps will allow you to measure your PPC initiatives and content changes in order to optimize the conversion path. In today’s world of justifying advertising dollars, it is important to accurately and efficiently track the performance of form submission and phone calls!

In our upcoming, Part 2, blog piece we will be reviewing a more advanced integration in which the landing page conversion is later in the click funnel and the JavaScript is installed directly into the website, rather than through the landing page. Look for our upcoming post in the next week!

The Mobile Readiness Study included in this post outlines the research method utilized and the results of the mobile study, which analyzed mobile-readiness for the QuantCast Top Million Websites.

A brief summary of those results, which show that mobile readiness is lagging is shown below:

- Only approximately nine percent of the QuantCast Top Million Websites can be classified as mobile-ready.

- The rate of mobile readiness for the top 100,000 Websites increased to 14.8%.

- Despite a much larger marketshare for Android phones (47.3%) versus iPhone (29.6%), there is a slight preference to serve mobile device specific content to iPhones. Speculation as to why this is the case could be iPhone’s longer time in the smartphone market.

- Server-side redirects and JavaScript redirects are the preferred method of delivering mobile content among high-traffic websites.

- 73% of Websites ranked in the QuantCast Top 100,000 used a URL redirect as the method of delivering mobile content

To capture the state of mobile, we also developed the infographic included in this post,  which conveys some of the data from the study as well as other sources.

If you’d like to see the Mobile Readiness Study’s raw data, let us know. Feel free to comment, and share the report and infographic with anyone interested in mobile technology and mobile marketing.

The Data Series will consist of a number of topics including mobile, ecommerce and social media. Each month the Data Series will publish an original data-set and then invite industry experts to analyze and comment on the data.

The data-set for mobile has been published. Search Engine Land columnist Michael Martin’s article titled “Less Than 10% of  The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready” presents some of the mobile data results. The Mobile Readiness Study will be released on the blog soon. Be sure to sign-up for real-time updates for the Data Series.

Interested in reviewing or writing about our research? Have an idea for a topic? Send a note to marketing@mongoosemetrics.com.

Essential Tools

After some research and feedback, we’ve compiled a list of SEO tools. These tools exist so that you may better optimize your marketing efforts. When using SEO tools for your business, you have the ability to become more productive and efficient in your search efforts. The options are endless when looking for SEO tools, so having an expert opinion helps to reduce information overload. Sage Lewis, Founder of SageRock Digital Marketing provided his list of SEO tools he uses the most. A few of his favorites are listed below:

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth for finding broken links
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence for key phrase research
• Raven for social media
• Spyfu for Google AdWords specific keywords
• SEOmoz as an overall SEO resource

As more tools are introduced and technology gets better, some options may better serve your business. For now, our advice is to focus on keyword research and ensure your website is content rich. To achieve the best results in SEO – a combination of strategy, content placement and the use of SEO tools are required.

What does the future of SEO look like?

Most marketers have a solid understanding of how to improve both organic and paid search. However, with 50% of mobile users relying on their Smartphones for searching the web, new mobile features may pose a threat. For instance, the questions swirling the web right now involve the importance of Apple’s new feature, Siri.  Voice recognition software is now gaining traction in the mobile space. Just the iPhone alone has raised the bar of importance on how these advancements ultimately affect SEO. Siri is touted for being an iPhone user’s personal assistant that can do anything you ask it to. This looks good and sounds good, but can mean big trouble for local SEO.

How much trouble? Apple reported selling four million iPhone 4S models since its release. Going by statistics, there is a potential for two million iPhone 4S users to search the web via Siri. The problem lies in local search, where it may be convenient to ask Siri, it’s becoming less common to rely on the accuracy of search engines. Siri works by automating search for you, so it chooses how it gets that information. As stated in the article, How Apple’s Siri Could Destroy Local SEO, “Little is known about how exactly Siri collects and processes information, although it’s reasonable to assume that the program is drawing on well-cultivated public data sources, including Google Places, Yelp and similar sites.”

With Siri’s potential to use third party applications as part of the search information gathering, traffic from traditional sites could deteriorate. In order to make sure your site will survive the voice recognition threat, it needs to stay as accessible to search engines as possible. Going back to the basics of SEO, being active on social networks and enhancing your site for mobile are key factors to success. As long as your information is accurate and your site is easy to navigate, your business – with Siri’s help or not, will stay strong.

In her book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, Ardath Albee tells us that creating an e-marketing strategy to reach, attract and engage buyers through digital content and communication is critical to building trust with today’s buyer.  Why should we believe her? For starters, Econsultancy claims 70% of B2B buyers use search engines at the start of the B2B buying process. If you aren’t capturing the attention of your prospects through digital content, chances are, they won’t find you. Once you have their attention, you need to make sure it is relevant to their needs. Pushing out content just to grab someone’s attention won’t work for gaining new business. Albee mentions in her book that we must engage buyers; make them feel as if you are talking only to them. Personalize your content by better understanding your prospects.

Another key in today’s buying process is that time is of the essence; the shift in the buying process has shortened our ability to focus. Marketers used to have 30 seconds to grab the attention of their prospects. Research shows that span has whittled away to less than 10 seconds. Today, marketers need to focus more on capturing interest, where before, the focus was soley on awareness.

As Sally Hogshead outlines in her book, Facsination, there are seven fascination triggers at your disposal to capture your prospect’s interest. These triggers will help jumpstart the buying process and aid in addressing common sales objections. We have taken our own spin on these attention triggers, and define them in greater detail below.

Power – Take command. This is about being confident and being in control. Leaders have power and in order to be better than your competition, you need to become a leader in your industry.

Passion – Invoke emotion. Let your audience feel the desire to want your product or service.

Mystique – Arouse curiosity. You always want a call to action, a chance to provide as much information to your prospects as possible. Pose questions to them; don’t reveal all your secrets and curiosity will prevail.

Prestige – Earn respect. If your prospects and customers envy you and see you as a model for success, your respect and admiration will quickly appeal to the masses.

Alarm – Change urgency. If your buyer feels their time is running out, or the deal won’t last long, they’ll be more likely to buy.

Rebellion—Change the game. Help your prospects think outside the box and challenge their standards. If we never took chances, life would be boring. Your prospects want something new and different.

Trust— Build loyalty. Once your buyer understands your intentions and learns enough about you, trust will follow. People like to feel confident in their choices, especially their purchases. With you as their trusted advisor, they’ll feel better about their decision and most likely keep coming back.

As Jeff Korhan states in his blog, content marketing is “creating useful or desirable content, distributing it to those that can benefit most from it, and personalizing it to encourage engagement.”

Once you have crafted your message to reflect an attention trigger, the content will work for you. A prospect reads your engaging content, feels the need to act upon it, and calls your company for more information. Ta-da! You have just exercised the power of content to convert a prospect to a customer in the new buying process.

Key takeaways

• Know your audience – research your buyers. Invest content where your prospects spend time.
• Create content that appeals to all seven triggers. Make sure you convey the proper emotions for the right buyer persona.
• Focus your content around customer needs, not selling your product. Content without value is considered spam.
• Build trust and add value through your content and interactions. Respond to Twitter messages, Facebook updates and blog comments. You’ll be surprised who’s listening.

For more information on marketing for the new buying process, download our eBook here. Watch for our webinar date to be announced soon!

After some research, I have compiled three insights on the marriage of social + mobile, which are highlighted below:

1. Create Compelling Evidence That Proves Social is Working (aka Content)

One of the questions asked at the social media meeting was, “How do you convince a client that they need a Facebook page?” First, we know that in order to convince someone to do anything – you need to convince them. Creating quality content is a great way to communicate the benefits of whatever it is you’re trying to get across. Within that great content, sprinkle statistics and value targeted to your audience. People are resistant to change by nature – especially if the materials being presented to them are from 2001. Be in the know with your audience and prospects on where they’re spending time and what they like. Invest part of your day reading news articles and comments in blog posts on what is relevant to them. Keeping your content fresh, new and exciting will not only help sway an opinion – but will also demonstrate your knowledge on the subject. This content can be in a proposal you present, your own Facebook page or Twitter feed and blogs on your website.

Sometimes convincing your client to change requires you having to make that first step. Once you open those lines of communication and have reasonable data to back-up your claims, the road to transition will be smoother. Instead of just telling a client they should be social – show them why.

2. Be Where Your Clients Are

What are consumers doing on their mobile phones? The answer is – consuming content. Not just via search but with social as well. Content isn’t going away. Neither is mobile technology. According to a recent study, the number of mobile users in the U.S. who accessed a social networking or blog site has grown 37% in the past year.  In addition, half of these users are accessing social networking sites on a daily basis via their mobile phones.

Here’s some food for thought, these mobile users aren’t just looking around and logging out. They are engaging with each other and sharing content multiple times a day. Even if that content is a status update or a post to a link, they’re becoming comfortable in the social space for mobile. Why should you, as a marketer, care to know how they’re spending their time on these sites? The more comfortable and engaged your audience is on a social networking site, the more likely they’ll interact with you.  Since they’re already doing it and expanding into the mobile space, all you have to do is be there. The data speaks for itself. Millions of mobile users are reading social posts from brands and companies, sharing coupons or deals, and clicking on ads. Mobile and social are newlyweds, so integrating your current marketing efforts with this new couple can be challenging. As long as you create a social and mobile strategy that aligns with your buyer personas, you’ll quickly see the benefits.

3.  Use the Right Social Site

Today’s marketing world is full of terms like SEO, mobile sites, social marketing – but the key to walking the walk is understanding these terms. Most business aren’t sure what social networks to join, so they do as many as they can. Then they write blogs and compute keywords that might interest a few customers to their site. This is not the way to successful networking, branding or marketing.

Choosing the right approach is different for every business – not everyone benefits from the same social sites. To be successful you need to be in sync with your customer. If your customers don’t use Foursquare, don’t invest in it. It sounds simple, but it is a common misconception that having a presence on every social site is good for business. Remember the saying, “quality not quantity?” This couldn’t reign truer than in the social and mobile worlds. Social sites are tools for your marketing strategy to aid in moving your customer along in the buying process. Once you realize where your efforts have the most impact, dedicate more time and effort to those sites.

My perspective on social media is as follows: At the end of the day, it’s about keeping it simple. Don’t overload your audience with information. Make sure you’re being social and active where it makes sense for your business. Lastly, create compelling content that speaks to your buyers at specific points in the buying process. Understanding your prospect’s needs and wants is the key to creating valuable content that will get them to notice you and continue to engage with you.

Who does this impact?

In a blog post, Google says less than 10% of searches will be affected by this change. Additionally, in a Search Engine Land Article, Matt Cutts a Google Software Engineer estimates the affected traffic to be 1-2% of search volume.  Aggregate query data will continue to be available and include visits from users who are not signed into a Google account. This change only concerns organic search results while the user is logged into a Google account. It does not impact direct traffic, PPC traffic or affiliated traffic.

How does this affect the user experience?

In the Search Engine Land article: Google to Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default with SSL Search, Danny Sullivan does a great job of describing the setbacks from this change. This encryption prevents sophisticated keyword-based targeting from being used. It is almost as if we’re taking a step backwards in the progression of custom and personalized information. Instead of creating a better user experience, this is essentially making the consumer work harder. Take for example someone searching for a specific product, but since referrer data isn’t passed along to the company, the user lands on a basic web page. Now the user has to navigate through the website in order to find their particular product – essentially making the entire process more time consuming for the user. As a marketer, having the capability to track and analyze specific keyword information will become harder to obtain.

Why the change?

There is much speculation and controversy around why this change has been made. The majority of comments we have seen believe it is a way for Google to make more money and gain competitive advantage. Google mentions there is a growing importance of protecting the privacy of personalized search results. In an effort to protect users and their privacy, Google feels this is reason enough.

There are two additional facts we find to be confusing. First, Google will continue to offer this data to their paid advertisers, which seems inconsistent with the goal of protecting user privacy. Second, Google will continue to gather this organic search result information without passing it on, thus giving them exclusive intelligence related to search results. Some say this will hurt small businesses that cannot afford to pay for online marketing services, while others mention that this is a step in the right direction towards protecting the privacy of the consumer. The debate will be ongoing as more people become aware of this change in the marketing and SEO world.

With change, there is naturally going to be resistance. Like many changes, there will be pros and cons. At the moment, Mongoose is more interested in the long-term effects. Specifically, we’re curious to know how this will impact the way we search and if this will become a standard across all search engines. Will referrer data one day disappear for good – paid or not? Again, going back to Search Engine Land’s article, Sullivan claims that the future is clear:

“Referrer data is going away from search engines, and likely from other web sites, too. It’s somewhat amazing that we’ve had it last this long, and it will be painful to see that specific, valuable data disappear.”

Let’s say he’s right and this data disappears from search engines, what does this mean for social? Most users are searching via social already; perhaps this is an attempt by Google to gain traction in the social space as well. Although Google+ is not the most popular network in the social world, this might be the first step towards making that a reality. For now, Facebook and Twitter continue to own the social search arena. Users trust their friends’ feedback, comments and likes, which is something you don’t have in search engines. However, with Google, you do have the +1 option – but you need to be on Google+ for that function.

Your thoughts?

What do you think about what Google is doing? Are you for or against this change? Please leave any comments and suggestions below.

So what did I learn at the eMetrics show? Below are just a handful of insights that I feel are worth sharing.

• Research shows that transparency equals trust. We all know that today’s consumers trust each other more than marketers.
• Of course we all want good, reliable customer and analytical data to make good business decisions. But decisions must be made nonetheless. Go to war with the data you have, not the data you wish you had.
• When trying to see a holistic view of your online social data, combine mentions from all networks at least to record the data – even if you’re not entirely accurate on the sentiment.
• Be aware of the audience you’re in. Marketing speak isn’t going to cut it. As marketers we have to listen. Over time that listening leads to learning. Monitor social & understand what your customers say. Use their language in your ads, keywords, etc.
• Mobile isn’t the future. It’s now. Don’t wait to embrace mobile. Companies like eBay that rely largely on online commerce recognize this and are quickly developing solutions to serve today’s tech-savvy mobile consumer.

Feel free to share any additional insights from the show or else comment on the ideas I’ve mentioned.

1. The automotive industry is not a one size fits all industry – this was the way it was approached in the past

 

2. 1 in 7 searches are mobile

 

3. Social tools are becoming most effective in the post sale dealer/brand locality

 

4. 37% of buyers use social as a part of the decision making process

 

5. Twitter is like wearing a Speedo….if you don’t like it, don’t look at it

 

6. 27% of people use FB as a part of the buying process. This number is more than all sales from Toyota and Ford combined

 

7. 91% of car buyers want to see service reviews before purchasing a car

 

8. Successful companies know how to give customers a “Beyond the Moment” experience

 

9. A negative purchase experience in the past would result in the exposure to 7-10 people, now it is 700-1,000

 

10. When researching a vehicle, prospects look at the top three resources:  independent sites, search engines, and dealer websites. You have no control over independent sites.  You have limited control over search engines. You have complete control over your dealer websites

The underlying theme throughout these quotes and the conference itself was understanding your customer. With the increasing popularity of social media, the rapid growth of mobile devices and the wealth of information available on the web, consumers have wider access to information to make them smarter about the buying process. DrivingSales clearly understands the importance of leveraging customer data to help move them through the automotive buying process today.

If you were at the show and want to share your takeaways please leave a comment.