Ever wonder whether some of your PPC responses happen offline (usually by phone), rather than via the usual click-through …perhaps days after the ad was viewed?
We here at eMagine were curious about this in our own Web marketing, so we did a little study. We were astonished to discover that more than 60% of our ad responses came by call-in, not click-through. Put another way: the true ROI of our PPC campaign was more than twice as strong as we had thought up until then. On digging around a bit, we learned that research by comScore indicates that 63 percent of searchers advance or complete their purchase offline following their search activity.
We’re not sure what fraction of our clients – or B2Bs at large – is similarly undervaluing their PPC marketing, but we’ll bet it’s fairly substantial. Perhaps you know who you are …or, more’s the pity, perhaps you don’t. Either way, there’s good news for all of you.
Call, and you shall be tracked
Several vendors now offer technology that enables you to capture offline (i.e., phone) responses to your online ads. They include…
ClickPath – an award-winning ad tracking solution that tracks all conversions generated from your online advertising – including phone calls – and ties them back to the exact keyword or ad source. At the heart of ClickPath is Dynamic Number Insertion technology that links call data to the originating keywords. It assigns a unique toll-free number to every ad campaign you want to track, and places a simple code on your website which will follow respondents throughout their navigation of your site. When visitors call the toll-free number, ClickPath captures that call data and matches it to the ad source, keywords, and referring domain.
Mongoose Metrics – a phone call tracking service that allows you to measure offline phone call tracking from within any web analytics package that supports on-page tagging. You simply request the phone number(s) for your campaign from Mongoose and associate them with a hidden web page that the service will visit when the phone number is called. It supports customized URL parameters to allow for further tagging phone call activity according to medium, campaign, keywords and more.
You need this capability …now
Unless you’re already doing it, you need to be tracking call-ins as well as click-throughs. Aside from the ROI issue, there are other distortions from looking only at click traffic:
- You’re probably not getting an accurate picture of the differential value of various ad creatives, or the real value of certain keywords/phrases. To think you are is to simply assume that callers follow exactly the same distribution as clickers, and that’s a bit of a stretch.
- You may be missing an opportunity to steer your traffic toward calling vs. clicking, where the more time-consuming act of calling – plus its interactivity – surely indicates a greater level of interest than an anonymous click.
You’ll probably have little difficulty choosing one of the available call tracking solutions and putting it to work, and your Web marketing consultants can surely help with any rough spots. Once you get it done, you may well kick yourself for all that time you went without this data.
November 20th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
My team manages Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns for a number of B2B clients, and of course we’re always gratified when new ones choose to outsource their programs to us.
A few clients, however, seem to operate as though there was some mystical connection between outsourcing and hand-washing (as in the Pontius Pilate story): so that once they let go, they feel they never need to worry about this subject ever again. And as long as the monthly results look OK, we may actually never hear from them again.
What is the danger in this? It’s simple: as smart and trustworthy as we believe we are, we don’t claim to be omniscient; and in particular, there’s no way we’ll ever understand your business as well as you do. And even though the numbers look good, there’s at least some chance they could be improved by some better business understanding.
I was reminded of this issue on reading Todd Miechiels’ blog post, The Danger of Blindly Trusting your B2B Pay-Per-Click Campaign to the “Experts”. As Todd points out, even though we consultants have a wider and deeper understanding of how the search engines work and how the pay-per-click landscape is evolving, we generally can never
have an in-depth understanding of every industry. No discovery form or data-gathering process in the world can catch all the subtleties and nuances of a particular company.
So while we experts are doing the fancy stuff like ad testing, landing page optimization, bid adjusting and keyword expansion, it’s just possible that some glaring oversight may be costing the client money or lost opportunity. It could be a particular search phrase that’s active, but is simply not at all on target for your market. Or it could be a sentence in your ad copy concerning a product feature or benefit that’s not really accurate.
Fighting the disconnect…
Todd suggests asking your outsource provider for a few simple reports:
- One listing all of your ad creatives. Then simply scan through it to make sure they are accurate for your brand or your product/service. Don’t worry about whether the ad copy seems like the best ever; if your vendor has been doing their job, they’ve split-tested many different variations to get to this one.
- Another showing all of your search phrases along with the money that’s been spent on each phrase, and the conversion rate and/or time on your site. Try to spot any lines indicating that you’re spending money on phrases that either aren’t converting, or visitors are bailing from your site within a few seconds.
The moral here is that the right model is more of a partnership: the consulting firm contributes their technical knowledge and Web marketing know-how, while the client brings their deep understanding of the nuances of their business and industry. And both parties exercise a level of vigilance to eliminate those deadwood phrases that are consuming budget but generating little or no return.
Outsourcing your PPC program can save you boatloads of time and generally produce better results; but it will always work best when you stay engaged with your provider.
November 6th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
Perhaps in the present economy you’re a bit reluctant to spring for a website re-do. Hey, your site’s not that bad just yet …but then, you’re also not totally happy with its performance, either.
We’ve blogged before about the option of simply freshening your site’s design (aka “skins”), and about plugging holes in a site that leaks leads …both improvements that can be made in times of tight budgets. In a similar vein, we recently came across some timeless advice in Lisa Wehr’s article, “15 ways to get your website in gear”, drawn from a white paper done late last year by her firm, Oneupweb.com, and declared a “Best of 2008 So Far (September) – Website Design” by Tom Pick on his WebMarketCentral blog.
No, we won’t go through all 15 ways here (that’s why we give you the link); but we’ve picked out several that we think are most critical (more…)
October 23rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve blogged in the past about the importance of classifying leads into some sort of A//B/C scheme and nurturing the ones in the research phase, vs. simply shipping all the leads over to Sales; and of being able to identify the occasional hot ones so as to get those to Sales a.s.a.p. But how does a B2B marketer do this in practice, really?
The answer is lead scoring, which many marketers say they do. Unfortunately, too many resort to shortcuts with it, such as… (more…)
October 16th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
It seems like once a week – at least – a client asks me, “Should we be doing SEO …or PPC??” So it was nice to come across a piece by Julie Batten for ClickZ, “Coordinating Organic, Paid Search Efforts” …with its title giving a pretty strong hint that the answer isn’t going to be one or the other.
Some of this persistently perceived dichotomy probably stems from the illusion that SEO is somehow “free”, which then begs the query: “why should I pay for a ranking when I can get one for free?” Of course, the last time that was even somewhat true was back when all you had to do was throw some keywords in your meta data and you scored a great position. But that was back when Larry and Sergey were still undergraduates …certainly before “google” became a verb. These days, it requires quite a bit more effort and dedication to secure and maintain strong organic search rankings.
As background to debunking the forced choice of our mythical client’s question, Julie presents a nifty summary of (more…)
October 9th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
Got to thinking the other day about how strange it is that marketers still talk in terms of generating demand (as though they actually have some control over it). In fact, many of them will tell you that that task is very high on their priority list.
And for most of history, they were right: B2B marketing was pretty much a one-way flow. Sellers had all the information, and they released it when and as they saw fit… in the form of targeted “messages” about specs, features, prices, motivation to buy.
What changed all that, of course, was (more…)
October 2nd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
All too often, we run into clients who tell us (or simply act as though) search-engine ranking is the most important goal of their online marketing. Truth be told, in many cases it’s not really the goal of the marketing exec nominally in charge of the effort, but that of someone one or two pay grades above his/hers.
So we were glad to come across Todd Miechiels’ piece for Rain Today, Your Search Engine Ranking Doesn’t Matter (as Much as You May Think), in which he contends that the pursuit of rankings is really indicative of a newly-discovered but not-so-rare disease called Ranking Obsession Syndrome. People with this syndrome come from big and small companies alike; even the wisest of business leaders can fall victim. Sadly, it causes otherwise savvy business people to obsess over their organic search rankings, when in practice they have little or no control over day-to-day results. It’s a lot like a non-professional long-term investor checking the stock market indices 8 times a day.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t become alarmed if… (more…)
September 25th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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