Ever wondered why that well planned (and expensive) online or offline campaign fizzled and you didn’t realize your return-on-investment? Well, maybe it wasn’t such a bust after all. But how could you know, either way? The answer is tracking. Well, it’s not all tracking, but it is setting yourself up for success so that the tracking you use can tell you whether or not you are reaching your goals. Here are four steps you can take to improve your campaign tracking, and your ROI.
Step 1: Define Campaign Conversion Events
Step 2: Set Up Campaign-Specific Landing Pages and Unique URLs
Step 3: Use Search to Capture Motivated Consumers
Step 4: Track and Mine the Right Data
Step 1: Define Campaign Conversion Events
The first thing you need to do is figure out what constitutes a conversion for you. Is it a purchase? Some sort of sign-up or registration? An email form completion? Many of our clients here at Catalyst are healthcare companies whose websites don’t have a shopping cart. Because there is nothing to buy explicitly, there has to be a call to action that is considered a conversion. The three-page view rule used to be a good place to start but these days we want to get a deeper look at the user to determine where she or he came from.
To determine an effective conversion, begin by thinking about what your offline campaign messaging is telling the user. For example, a TV ad on the Food Network for a statin drug might have compelling messaging describing cholesterol treatments of BrandX. At the end of the TV spot there is a URL that drives people to BrandX.com where they will hopefully navigate to the right part of the website. And do what?
Here’s where the conversion comes in. Is there an email capture for a printable coupon or a physician referral form… anything? What about a quiz or game that is not only beneficial to the user, but also captures email info, opt-in info and hopefully an answer to how they found their way here to the conversion page?
Step 2: Set Up Campaign-Specific Landing Pages and Unique URLs
The scenario above is common, but it contains one misstep that is equally as common: driving all traffic to the home page. By pushing the user to the homepage you are relying on the user’s ability to navigate your site to find the exact information he or she is looking for whether pushed there by a TV ad, or print material, or billboard - all of which may have disparate messaging and disparate conversion goals. That’s why the skillful use of unique URLs and custom landing pages are essential to monitoring ROI from offline.
Instead of sending the user to the brandx.com home page, you’ll need to set up a unique page that will let you know where that user came from. This is different from the convoluted user tracking that appends gobbledygook to the ends of URLs on the site. What we’re talking about here is much simpler.
For example (and let’s use our statin drug from above) for a TV ad you could use something as simple as www.brandx.com/tv or if there are multiple TV ads you can give them another identifier that distinguishes them but is still simple enough for the user to remember like: www.brandx.com/tv1 and www.brandx.com/tv2. Ok, so those aren’t very pretty URLs, but what about www.brandx.com/statins for the first ad and www.brandx.com/cholesterol for the next and so on?
Although this isn’t a landing page clinic, you should try to keep the “one click away from conversion” rule in mind when developing them. In cases where the user remembers the brand.com part of the custom URL but either forgets or misspells the identifier, you should customize your 404 error page (this is the standard “page not found” page on most sites) to include a search box, a site map and some callouts for any current campaigns so you can funnel the user to their appropriate target.
In the case where the user doesn’t remember any of the URL they will likely go to the web and start at their favorite search engine. That’s where search marketing comes in.
Step 3: Use Search to Capture Motivated Consumers
Hopefully you are already diligently optimizing your website and engaging in an integrated search campaign that provides synergy between your organic and paid search efforts. Search is the best way to capture any users that were compelled by your (or your competitor’s) messaging, but don’t remember (or weren’t told) what the brand name was. These are the folks that backfill the gaps and boost your ROI numbers.
You begin by making sure that your site is optimized for the appropriate key words so that you will rank organically in search engines like Google and Yahoo for searches on those terms. Also, and this is equally important, make sure that you are using paid search to gain sponsored listings on SERPs for those terms as well. You need to ensure that your in-house team, or more appropriately your SEM agency, is well apprised of your offline efforts so that they can keep that in mind when developing your campaign. So now you have everything covered…how do you track it?
Step 4: Track and Mine the Right Data
Successfully mining and understanding your web analytics software can mean the difference between thinking a campaign failed and knowing that it actually succeeded. Do you have tracking installed on your PPC campaigns? Can your analytics package tell the difference between a paid search referral and an organic search referral? (Hopefully you answered yes to both of these questions.) The point is that no matter if you spend $50K per month on an enterprise level analytics program or you’re using Google’s free analytics package, they all do the same thing and if you can’t mine the data they are worthless.
This isn’t a tutorial for how to mine server log data, but it is a primer on what you need to be doing with your data. Here are the top five things that your IT group or SEO agency should be tracking:
- Conversions — set up conversions and give that conversion a dollar value. Most people hate math, but dollars and cents seem to be understood by everyone.
- PPC tracking — make sure all your paid ads and creatives (even banners) are identifiable by your analytics program.
- Web referrals — keep track of where traffic is coming from. Who is linking to you can be very telling.
- Search referrals — see what terms are actually driving traffic. Long-tail is not a bad word. More targeted terms suggest a more targeted visitor. Also, you may find out that people are searching for you in a way you never even thought of.
- Traffic patterns — is your traffic seasonal? Is that due to subject matter or how often you update? Traffic patterns are a good way to figure out when you need to bolster your PPC or natural campaigns (or both).
The final note in this post is about working with your search team or vendor to make sure that they have all the data they need to make your campaign a success. In short, give them your traffic data. You may feel that traffic patterns are proprietary, but if your search team can’t see that data then you’ll never know if you are getting the desired ROI on the ad campaign or on your SEM efforts.
