Live From SMX Seattle: Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?

News, SEM

Live From SMX Seattle: Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of ClearSaleing

Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services at Apogee Search

John Tawadros, COO of iProspect

Lauren Vaccarello, Director of SEM and Analytics at FXCM

 

John Tawadros talked about being able to track all touch points for the lifetime of a consumer.

  • TV, radio, search, website, banner ad, billboard
  • Unique urls

He posed the question how much information is too much?

Alissa Ruehl was up next talking about tracking past the lead.

What does your company really want to get out of your marketing goals?

What are you currently using to measure your success?

  • Leads, click, page views

Do you integrate your paid search with CRM?

  • Pull paid search information into your CRM system
  • Report on sales (instead of just leads)

Alissa gave a 6 step process on how to accomplish all of this:

Step 1: Create Custom Fields in your CRM system for the information you want to capture

  • Keyword, Search Engine, Ad Group, Campaign, Ad ID, Content/Search, Referring URL

Step 2: Update Tracking URL’s

  • If you are already capturing this information in your analytics system, you can use the same variables
  • If you are not already capturing this information in your analytics system, add these variables to your keyword URL in a query string.

Step 3: Set Cookies

  • Have your website set a cookie that captures these variables from the landing page query string and referring URL

Step 4: Add Hidden Fields

  • Add fields for each of these variables to all of your forms
  • These fields should pull values from the cookie, rather than user input

Step 5: Test and Report

  • Test all forms to make sure the process is working
  • You should see leads coming through with paid search tracking information, as well as basic contact information from the form
  • Set up these forms in your CRM system to list sales with the new fields displayed as additional columns.  

Step 6: Compare Data

  • Compare this data to your paid search spend, just as you would do with a lead.

Few Caveats

  • Pay attention to statistical significance
  • Take your sales cycle length into account
  • Look at “junk” leads as well as sales
  • Consider an intermediate step of looking at cost per opportunity

Adam Goldberg:

Adam started off his presentation with a basketball analogy of John Stocken and Karl Malone. With John Stocken in the game, Karl Malone had more points, but when John Stocken was taken out Karl’s points went down significantly.

The reason is because John wasn’t in the game to give Karl the assist. Same rules apply with online marketing. PPC advertising may work well, but its hasn’t reached its full potential because of no other online marketing programs working in parallel with PPC. You should have multiple touch points for a consumer.

He went through the stages of the customer buying cycle:

Problem Recognition àInformation Search àEvaluation of Alternatives àPurchase Decisions àPurchase

Phone Call Tracking

Advertising Dollar à Consumer Visits Web Site à Consumer Places Phone Call to Company à Consumer Places Order Via Phone à Phone Rep Requests Customer Link ID à Phone Rep Enters Order Into System With Customer ID à Periodic Extraction

Related blog posts from this session:

Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead? By David Wallace

Closing The Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead? By Virginia Nussey



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