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Target it, track it slc-sem
- 1. Target it, Track it SLC| SEM Lee Gientke Managing Partner Webmix Marketing
- 3. The Heart of the System
- 4. The System
- 5. Sales & Leads Performance
- 6. A case study September Count of Count of Call to Sale Avg Order Cost per Return on Adv Adv. Spend Leads Sales % Total Rev Val Cost per Call Sale % of Rev Spend Google $8,650 144 58 40% $25,169.00 $433.95 $60.07 $149.14 34.40% 291% Service Magic $1,944 17 12 71% $3,258.00 $271.50 $114.35 $162.00 59.70% 168% November Count of Count of Call to Sale Avg Order Cost per Return on Adv Adv. Spend Leads Sales % Total Rev Val Cost per Call Sale % of Rev Spend $ $ $ $ Google $ 11,676.00 234 36 15% 14,719.00 408.86 49.90 324.33 79.33% 126% Service $ $ $ $ Magic $ 1,147.47 92 7 8% 1,968.00 281.14 12.47 163.92 58.31% 172%
- 7. Winning
Editor's Notes
- From a business perspective, the internet is awesome. Gone are the days of made up return on investment or campaigns where “branding” was the objective. In today’s world the businesses that win are the businesses that are accountable to the numbers. The smart CEO knows what numbers are important to him and he holds his vendors and staff responsible for their performance. The strength of the internet is that everything is trackable – every click, dollar, dime and visitor. As agencies, we can provide greater value to our clients by teaching them what numbers they should be looking at. We also know in today’s search environment, getting OR giving an accurate rankings report is next to impossible. As an agency, we’ve changed our focus from chasing keywords and rankings to traffic and revenue optimization. We’ve found that by doing that, we’ve reduced our customer churn dramatically and improved the relationship with our clients because we can correlate our activities with dollars in their pockets. By doing this, our account management conversation goes along the lines of “hey, we put XX thousands of dollars in your pocket. You are rich. How are you going to spend your money?” instead of “hey you are number one for pink fluffy bunnies in Florida.” Today, I want to share a couple case studies and some metrics as to what we are teaching our clients – all of which are small and medium size service companies – and how we keep the focus on revenue and traffic versus keywords. We’ve also made our clients’ marketing efforts more effective by byknowing where to look, what to track and what trends we need to analyze to make sure we are going in the right direction. The one thing to know is that measurement in business that it’s about change. Always be asking what direction are we going and does this match with my overall goals for my company. The bottom line is that internet marketing is coming full circle. As I see it, the days of the easy link or forum spam are long gone. And with that, I believe we will see more traditional marketing principles come into play. The first of which is clearly showing that you are making your clients more money than they are spending or developing ways to help them get there.
- The core of any company’s online marketing efforts is their own website. I am amazed today at the number of people who don’t have any sort of tracking software installed on their website and don’t take an active interest in their website despite it being the top source for their sales leads. I have a client who was spending thousands of dollars with a major marketing company. They felt something was weird because despite the expenditure, they didn’t seem to be getting the sales (they are great at asking their customers where they came from – more on this later) that would be appropriate with the spend. With a little research using the analytics software that was installed on their website (that they never looked at), we discovered that the marketing company never delivered any of the traffic they said they did. This was lucky for me as that company lost a client and I have a great client now. We are heavy users of Google Analytics – available at www.google.com/analytics. Its free software that you can easily install (or have installed) on your website that enables you to gauge a number of things such as the number of visitors that have come to your website, how they got there and how long they are spending there. As PCO’s the minimum things you need to be looking at on regular basis are: Number of unique visitors Traffic sources – where are people coming from? For most people this will be GoogleChange in unique visitors – make sure to compare month over month and year over year change. Personalized search has made demonstrating value really hard. No longer can your marketing team just point to a top ranking and say we are successful, look at us. These metrics will give you at least a basic baseline to keep your online marketing team accountable. Generally speaking, more traffic to your website equals more money for you.
- People will contact a local service business typically two ways: on the phone or via a lead capture form. The cool thing with the internet is that with some simple tools, we can tell how well we are doing. I wish we could afford an API and lots of automation but the reality is our marketing vendors are doing and how well our sales team is doing. For our clients, we are heavy users of phone tracking software that comes from a company called ifbyphone and lead capture software called gravity forms (though there are others that do this). If by phone is what I would describe as right priced, right featured call tracking software. It’s not as fancy as some of the call tracking systems out there today but for about $75 a month, it offers some powerful stuff. Let me share two stories with you. One is a client who complained about his rankings. He’d go to Google and see that he wasn’t number one. He came to us looking to leave because he wasn’t number one and he “FELT” that there wasn’t an ROI from what he was spending with us. With a little bit of investigation, we found that 35% of his calls were going to voicemail during the hours of 11am and 2pm because his sales staff was on lunch. In business, you need to answer the phone to make money. We knew that every call that came from that number cost him about $40. The bottom line was that he was able to change his staffing so that no calls went to voicemail. By tracking his calls, we are able to get credit and now know his average return on his spend with us is nearly 400%. A similar story is with another client who specializes in bed bugs. More than 85% of their leads come after 3pm. They really didn’t take this into consideration with their staffing as doesn’t everyone work 8 to 5? They now have a call center in place that at least contacts the lead and begins the process. The net result has been a double digit increase in lead conversion and a significant bump in revenue to the client. Another thing that IfByPhoneenables us to do is break out the different marketing methods we are using. It enables us to separate out how many calls we are getting from paid search, Google.com as organic traffic and even the limited number of yellow books our clients advertise in gets a number. The bottom line here is that we know what we are spending on each marketing method and how many calls we are getting from that method. Gravity forms enables us to download the forms from the website to obtain a count as well. Unfortunately, it only shows us how there from online sources (unless I’m using a unique landing page for a marketing method). We then add the leads we get from this form to the different online marketing channels. I know this doesn’t count offline marketing but that’s a fact of life. The metrics that we are tracking here are: cost per lead and the lead count. Add a trend on top of that and it gets interesting.
- Regardlessof what CRM you use to run your company, you need to track completed sales by source and how well those leads perform in relationship to what they cost. Many small businesses are a data nightmare. One client had 4 different source codes for the same lead. They described a Google lead as the followingGoogle Google Local Google Maps Google MapquestThey had 12 different source codes for an internet lead . Frequently the first thing we do with a client is review how they are tracking their sales and leads. If they are using a CRM with source codes, we’ll frequently refine and define the different codes. During this process, getting the sales staff to agree on these definitions is critically important. So often in a SMB environment, new source codes get created by different people as that’s how they describe them. Creating a common vocabulary and preventing source creep is critically important or you’ll end up with an undecipherable data mess. My average client is able to convert 40% of the leads they receive from their online marketing efforts into a completed sale. Figuring out how to improve these metrics can result in significant bottom line results.
- Here is a basic dashboard we produce for our clients at the end of every month to track their online marketing efforts. The biggest thing that we are looking at here is a trend. I wish there was a way for us to do this on a more realtime and automated basis but given the CRMs that most of my clients do, this is very difficult to do. As a result, we are looking at trends and patterns. One of the most glaring trends here is the drop in the call to sale percentage. We increased the number of leads produced but it would seem that there was a conversion issue with the leads. That blame could fall on us as the agency in that the traffic we’ve been sending is junk or that the sales people aren’t responding to the leads. Some areas we looked into in this instance are the call recordings and response times to leads. If the call recordings are showing disinterested customers, we’ll change some of our ads or the keywords we are bidding on. If response times on leads are slow, a sales person gets talked to.
- The bottom line is while we track a ton of things, it all boils down to trends and change. If you can show that you are driving value, you’ll earn a golden trophy and keep that client.