Pear Analytics

Let’s say you have a PPC campaign running with lots of variations in ads, ad groups, messaging, etc. You even have micro and macro conversion goals set up in your PPC campaign and assigned each of them a value. You’ve organized everything in to groups for testing, but you just aren’t completely sure which combination of test variables is working properly.

Here’s how to know which PPC ad group is working:

1. Determine what the value of your conversions are. This can be subjective, so use your judgment based on what the sale is worth.  If a sale is worth $100, maybe a form submission for a lead is worth $10. If you have an e-commerce site, than include the value of a sale, perhaps in net terms.  (We can determine what the max amount we should spend on a lead by looking at how to measure cost per acquisition.)

2. Compare your ad groups side by side, looking particularly at what the ad group cost, total conversions generated, and total conversion value.

3. Divide the total conversion value by the total amount spent on the ad group.  This tells you how much you earned in value for every dollar spent. In the example below, Campaign #1 earned $4.11 for every $1 spent on advertising, while Campaign #2 earned $6.81 for every $1 spent.

We call this the Value-to-Spend Ratio. It helps quickly evaluate your campaign if it has lots of ad groups.

If you have an example where your Value/Spend ratio is less than 1, that means you are earning less than you are spending, so you will need to decide if that ad group should continue or not.

Here are two ad groups shown side by side:

On the surface, Campaign # 1 looks like a better performer.  It had a higher click-through rate, more ad clicks, more conversions and $67 more conversion value.  Even the average CPC between the two campaigns are identical.  But Campaign #2 spent less than half the money to get only 21% less value.

A lot of people might assume Campaign #1 as the winner here, but we disagree because of the Value-to-Spend Ratio.  We like this measurement technique because it is agnostic of the various types of conversions and conversion values.

Try it, and let us know how you made out!

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No Comments »Tags: Google AdWords, pay per click, PPC, value-spend ratio

So often we are concerned with the “big conversion” on the website, like purchasing something, for example.  We call this a macro conversion – it’s your ultimate goal.  But what about other activities, maybe not as valuable, but still worth something.

We forget that marketing is basically broken down into these 3 pieces:

Everyone, including upper management, is zoning in on purchase.  But what about awareness?  Remember the circles of trust graphic?  It’s highly unlikely that many will purchase from you when they don’t know you.

My point:  create micro conversions in the Awareness and Consideration stages and measure them!

Things like entering a zip code, joining a mailing list, or subscribing to your RSS feed.  Now you have a chance to converse with some highly potential, future customers on a permission-based marketing system, versus a interruption marketing system.

Now, assign a value to these micro conversions.  A zip code might be worth $1 to you.  Asking for a zip code is great because it further refines what geo-tracking in Google Analytics can’t do.  Now you know what zip code your visitors are from, so it takes some of the guesswork out of your next direct mail piece.

Use this value to compare to the costs you’ve put into the activity, such as SEO, PPC or even web analytics.  Before long, you will be able to see which activity is driving the most value.

1 Comment »Tags: conversion tracking, conversions, pay per click, PPC, Web Analytics

Why does it seem like results-based or permission-based marketing is such a new phenomenon? The funny thing is that after you explain how the process works, while everyone in the room agrees with the direction, their first reaction is to still go back to the old way of doing things. But they can’t help it. They want to be strategic and results-oriented, but automatically revert back to mindless tactics because it’s what they think works. No one is willing to sacrifice a little gain to do some experimenting and measurement, to eventually get a much larger gain that you would have doing it the “old way.”

The fact is that testing multiple offers simultaneously, particularly online, is easy and cost-effective. If you ran 4 different offers (all things considered equal) to see which one had the better response rate, sure, 2 of them are going to have dismal results at the expense of a few leads – but – you take the 1 or 2 best performers and run those while continuing to tweak performance as you go, and before long, you will have exceeded your results from last year under the non-results approach.

But results-based marketing is alive and well at Pear Analytics. Not only do we get you on the path to performance, we also provide the tools necessary to get there.  Contact us to see how we can help.

No Comments »Tags: better marketing performance, marketing strategy, permission marketing, results marketing, Results-Based Marketing