It’s no secret that online advertising campaigns play a critical role in fueling the sales cycle for many B2B and B2C businesses.
With so many online marketing channels, where does each tactic fit into the sales funnel?
Let’s just talk about the most popular of online marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Popular because it sits at the bottom of the sales funnel, and mostly when prospects are ready to convert to a lead (conversion) to a sale (acquisition).
Tracking Success Metrics
SEM campaigns drive website traffic, generate leads for your business in effort to increase sales. So it’s important to measure the success of your campaigns. This will help you determine the effectiveness of your Search campaign, and whether you are investing your money in the right online channel.
Implementing conversion tracking will allow you to see which keywords, text ads, ad groups and campaigns are driving the most valuable activity for your business.
So, how do you measure success?
Conversion tracking is actually fairly easy to implement. It begins with creating a conversion action in your Google Ads account. Conversion actions can be anything from a form fill, to a purchase, an event registration, or email sign up – just choose a metric that is important to your business.
Once you have your goal actions setup, a conversion tag is added to your website on the pages you are trying to track. When a prospective customer completes the action, a conversion will be recorded in your Google Ads Account.
Now this is great data for your Campaign Manager to work with, but what about the sales, and how do you know what leads are quality and what ones produce revenue for you. This is the area where the majority of business owners or managers want to know because outside of the great tracking and data SEM agencies can measure I’m sure you must ask yourself; how much am I getting back from what I’m putting in?
Teamwork, Communication & The Manual Approach
Unless you have an online shop where the price of the sale is ‘the price’, it is hard to track your sales coming through when your products and services may vary in price. It has to be a manual process and can only be implemented and worked on by the business.
If you are a one-man band, perhaps in the trades industry for example, you probably answer all your phone calls or read and respond to all emails (these are what we see if your Search campaign tracked as ‘conversions’). If this is your situation you will need to ask the lead on the phone, did you find me on Google?
And write down their answer, create an excel spreadsheet and track this month on month along with if it’s a sale, and how much did it bring into to your business? Was it the type of customer you want?
Also what is important when communicating with your allocated Digital Account Manager who is normally the person who discusses your campaign results and reports, the date & time measurement of the leads is a big help to them. This way, they can work with you to marry up the conversion tracked to the sale or ROI for your business.
Now if you are a bigger business you may have staff, someone who answers the phone. Based on your own staffing capacity, the roles your staff are in, and how you manage leads coming into the business, it is up to you to create a measurement process and roll out a fool proof way for your staff to follow and report back to you.
Then as mentioned above, pull out your measured data and work with your Digital Account Manager on this. You never know, the Search campaign can actually be working really well but perhaps the data you have collected shows that your website isn’t converting or your sales team may need more training on closing deals. Who knows! But unless you start tracking your ROI you will never know what is working and what is not, and be able to make informed decisions on the amount of marketing budget you are spending.
All good things come in three’s they say, however I must say this one doesn’t excite us geeks too much, but it must be mentioned non the less. Responsive display ads for viewing on multiple devices is becoming easier for us Agencies in the creation and implementation process. Google will assist us with making the Ads responsive.