My friend Alan Weinkrantz shoots a quick video to capture some of the things Pear Analytics is up to. In this video, I talk about the importance of measurement to achieve better marketing performance, in addition to some of the tools we are building to help clients track real-time results.
My friend Alan Weinkrantz shoots a quick video to capture some of the things Pear Analytics is up to. In this video, I talk about the importance of measurement to achieve better marketing performance, in addition to some of the tools we are building to help clients track real-time results.
We just finished putting together a comprehensive online ad campaign using Google AdWords for a hospital in Chicago. We needed to create four campaigns centered around “heart attacks”, “heart disease” and other cardiovascular related topics. The set up work was kind of exhaustive as we scrubbed the keywords for searchability, effectiveness, competition, and average cost per click. We also set up a strategy for each landing page, remembering some of the rules about good landing page design. Then we needed to determine what we were going to track in the campaign in order to compute the real return on investment, or ROI. If you use AdWords’ Conversion Optimizer, it will kind of give you an ROI, but in terms of the ad spend, cost of acquisition, conversion values and some other things. However, the ROI extends beyond the campaign since there is activity that drives leads to the client that AdWords can’t track (that I am aware of); in our case with the hospital, consultations scheduled, consultations completed and ultimately, procedures. Well each of these has value that must be calculated as part of your ROI on the campaign. Quite simply, we can define ROI in the following manner:
where the total benefits are all of the conversions and their associated values along the way, and the total costs are what the campaign cost with click expenditures, web design, development, tracking, analysis, account service and more. In the end, we set up 8 different conversions that were cross-utilized in the other ad groups and landing pages, so when you add it all up, there were over 25 points of conversion – all having value to the client.
So we can easily see here under the “Conversion Tracking” menu that so far, only after a day of running the campaign, we have 54 conversions on Zip Code Entry. Well, we have several ads that drive you to a landing page that ask for a zip code before you can use the risk assessment tool, so if I click on each conversion, I get the following:
and now I can see that the Zip Code Entry was most successful on the Cardiac Risk Assessment Calculator conventional ad, run 1 (I talk more about how to set up AdWords campaigns for maximum efficiency and results in another post). Overall, I’m getting an 84.38% conversion rate on this particular metric, which is very good. This says that most people are OK with giving you a zip code in order to use something of perceived value, or to get to the next step in the process. So, during the campaign we will add up all of our conversions, multiply them by their respective values, and divide by campaign cost. This method will show your client much more value of what the campaign is extracting, rather than just looking at click through rates (CTR’s) and ad conversion rates.
How do you calculate ROI for online ad campaigns?
I’m starting to learn more about how to use Twitter’s advanced search portal, and I have to say, this is impressive. With the influx of social media, blogs, discussion forums, vlogging, and so much more, companies are wondering what the effect social conversation has on their brands. Well, now we can have a peek into what people are saying about brands in terms of quality, service, reliability and more. According to TechCrunch, there are well over 1 million users of Twitter as of March 2008 (which I’m sure has grown substantially since then…new estimates are >3 million), so as more people begin to use Twitter, the better the search data could become. Here is an example of the advanced search page on Twitter:
What impressed me the most was not the ability to search for exact words or phrases, or even by geolocation, but the attitude of the comment. So the search algorithm looks for those silly expressions, or emoticons we always use when IM’ing, like 
or 
or even a question mark at the end of the search term or phrase. You get to find out some really interesting things! Try it for yourself.
When you are spending money on pay-per-click advertising, or even search engine optimization, it’s nice to see people converting, or the act of getting the visitor to do what you want. After all, you are paying for the traffic, so wouldn’t it be prudent of you to give them what they are ultimately looking for? What if you went into the Dollar Store and everything was $3? You would be very disappointed, right? You would turn around and walk right out!
So let’s use an example. Let’s say I am interested in getting back in the gym, so I do a search on Google and find this::
Awesome! I totally need to get back into shape, so I am digging this 50% off enrollment, especially when enrollment is probably $150 or more.
So after you click on the link above, it takes you to the following landing page:
Wait a minute….where’s the stuff about the 50% off enrollment? I don’t see it….do I have to sign up first? Do I have to call, or give a promo code? Now the potential customer has a bunch of questions, and so they are likely to “bounce” from this page given too many unknowns. Not surprisingly, this happens all too frequently.
But let’s say I do stay on the page. What is it they want me to do? Better yet, if I am Spectrum Clubs, what do I want you to do? I would like you to probably a) fill out a form; b) call me; or c) stop into one of our clubs. Tracking wise, the easiest thing to track would be the form submission, then the phone number, and lastly, the visit to the club. Let’s say I’m looking for a form to fill out so someone can contact me later.
The problem is that this page has 8 different things for me to click on – but only 1 of them will take me to the form. So, after I’ve paid $2 to get you here, I’m going to challenge you to a game of Roulette? There is a 1 in 8 chance now for the visitor to even click on the right button, and even less of a chance to get them to fill out the form and submit it. This reduces conversion, and increased cost per acquisition.
So, let’s look at a few pointers for good landing page design which is sure to increase your conversion rates:
Happy landing page designing! Monitor and test often.
Today I got an email forwarded to me from one of my colleagues addressed to the CEO of one of our clients. The email is from Brian Conness, and account executive at Network Solutions. Clearly a sales pitch, in his email he explains to our client that “I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but over 40,000 times per month people search on Google for “cell phone san antonio.” (I’ve attached a pdf of Google’s keyword search to show you.) If someone does this search, [your company] doesn’t come up at all.” He goes on to say “40,000 is too big of a game for you to not even be a player.” It is also fair to mention that little did Conness know that the client is currently undergoing a major online transformation, complete with SEO/SEM/SMO strategies, so while he is correct about the client not being readily found for several keywords and phrases in their markets, we are going to be rapidly changing that. Here is a shot of the file he sends using the Keyword tool within the AdWords system:
Google Keywod Tool Screenshot
Quickly, I assess the fact that this is a tool for paid searches, and doesn’t accurately represent the organic search traffic, which was indicated in the email. Secondly, the match type is set to broad match, which means any combination of “cell phone san antonio” could have made up his 40,000 number. If you actually set it to exact match, the results are much different, as seen below:
Google Keyword Tool Screenshot 2
Wow! We went from 40,000 searches a day to somewhere between 73 and “not enough data” – across the entire US, which is not representative of the client’s market. Good thing the tool gives us some much better suggestions to go after below the unfavorable results we got above. Also, it’s not a bad idea to see if any of these are similar search volumes on the organic side as well.
The point is that it’s always good to know what kind of data you are getting from prospective vendors, where it came from, and what it means. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate for Mr. Conness to send an email to the client measuring the commercial buying intent, or probability to purchase, for a host of keywords or phrases, and how Pocket could be bidding on those words while their competitors are not. Maybe then the CEO would have been more interested.
