Live From SMX Seattle: What You Should Be Measuring – But Aren’t

Moderator:

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Akin Arikan, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Unica Corporation

Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance

Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ

Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group

Christine Churchill

63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches for various product categories occur offline.

Many companies push prospects to a phone call or other offline channels

Allows the marketers to use the power of voice to convert prospects. When they get the customer on the phone they can add the personal touch and can answer any questions they may have.
Appropriate for businesses requiring “high touch” or higher-end products
Works for B2B and companies with long complicated sales processes
Common for local companies that have tangible products

She showed an example from Omniture of On-line and Off-line analytics that can be measured.

Simple:

Make assumptions based on sales
Anedotal Data
In-store surveys

Immediate:

SWAG it from limited pilot tests

Unique phone numbers
Determine online-offline ratio
Offer coupons or special offers

Advanced:

Customer Tagging: tie the online cookie with the offline customer number or credit card data of offline purchases
Use of Unique phone numbers: Track where they are coming from
JavaScript provides different number based on referrer
Pay-Per-Call

Christine went on to summarize:

Normal online analytics don’t count offline conversions.

Offline conversions can be considerable, depending on your business. Offline conversion information is vital to making informed online marketing decisions.

Ryan Gibson

Ryan felt we need to go back to the basics with your paid search programs. You want to manage at least to the keyword level, or preferably the ad level.

You really want to look at the difference between brand and non-brand terms. Those branded terms may drive sales further down the sales cycle.

Typical Measurements:

A/S: Ad Spend to Sales
ROAS: Return on Ad Spend
ROI: Return on Investment
CPO/CPA: Cost per Order/Acquisition

He said to be careful with Click Through Rate because you are not sure what type of traffic you are driving to the site. It is not a very good metric.

He goes through the Life Time Value of a customer. Are they coming back and purchasing again?

What other actions are you finding from these consumers?

Email Sign Up? Request a catalog? Other downloads?

Rich Devine

Started off by introducing himself and promoted his book, Actionable Web Analytics.

He talks about the key to truly optimizing your PPC campaigns is looking at where people came from to get to a conversion. You want to understand the path that the customer took to lead to a conversion.

Building a Monetization Model