Improving Google Ad campaign effectiveness with Context

As the marketer responsible for lead generation in our B to B organization, I work closely with our Sales VPs to keep the dynamic sales team happy with enough quality leads (easy right?). This past year we launched numerous initiatives that generated an impressive growth in the number of leads for our team , more than doubling. But, I really struggled with understanding the effectiveness of our Google Online Ads in North America.

Now, Google does a great job of making you feel good about your spend, no matter how poorly you are doing! It seemed like all I really needed to do was to increase my budget for better results.

Well, in all fairness, sure it is true there are some simple things that really help your Google Quality score. For example, make sure your keyword phrases match your Ad text, and that they both match your landing page text. If you make sure you keep that relevance and matching very high between all three, your Quality score will go up with Google. You can see that displayed in the Ad Dashboard, and the higher the quality and closer to 10, the better. And, the higher the Quality the less Google charges you for the same Ad click.

But, what about the challenge of understanding more about your campaign effectiveness? Which campaigns are resulting in more leads, subscribers, people contacting your sales team, visiting your stores or ending up with something in their check-out cart?

You are spending dollars every day, and in today's online world, we should know what is working and what isn't. It's easy to get lost in 'reletive effectiveness' of Ads, but what really matters is Ads that deliver ROI, in however you measure that for your organization.

Google does supply their Analytics package where you can set up Goals and align them (somewhat clumsily) with your Ads. So it is possible, with enough time, to align your Goals in Google Analytics with your Ad properties.

But what I couldn't learn from the Google Analytics was more context on who was visiting, where else on the site they went, and what organization they came from.

I also wanted to be able to tie together repeat visits from the same vistor, becasue often the conversions where later on in sebsequent visits. I didn't want to miss understanding which valuable first campaign they came in on.

We installed Sitecore's own Online Marketing Suite (OMS) this Spring, and we gained a number of valuable insights into our campaigns previoously missing.

For example, we found that certain online properties where we are advertising were really more valuable than we thought, and others a disaster in real ROI. One publication had a lower click through rate, yet we could see their visitors spent much more time on the site, were from organizations of great interest to our sales teams, downloaded more content and eventually would register to get our premium content. I couldn't get this intel before.

With the OMS, global cookies are retained so visits weeks or months apart are automatically tied together. That let us understand campaigns that were really working, and delivering visitors who returned later on to learn more and join.
We eliminated the costly campaigns that just had a lot of clicks but not the right target audience and actions.

What the OMS delivers me is context. Visitor context. And that makes a huge difference. We realigned our Ad dollars and felt the pleasure of seeing our campaign ROI rise appreciably.

Found- the Missing Middle Class of leads

I recently penned a piece about discovering visitors that quite frankly I had been missing on our own website. Yes, sad as it is to admit, visitors who were interesting in learning and doing more with my company were being (unwittingly) ignored. But isn't that a typical marketers life? Learning what an idiot you've been yesterday and getting better every day? Seems to me that if you can try to find your mistakes before the competition and everyone else does, you are OK! Of course throwing in a few good new ideas now and again sure helps.

Anyway, I was trying to decide how to describe these 'missed leads' and decided to call them the Missing Middle Class. Of course the reference here is to what we often see, that there is a concern that we're getting more super rich people and more poor people and fewer inbetween. Now this isn't an economics blog, nor a political blog, just a business marketing blog emphasing all things online. So why choose the Missing Middle Class? Well, because they are really important. They form the backbone of every successful economic system in history (nor an historical blog...), and in fact every emerging and exciting economy (including China and India) all are trying to build this very group, viewing it as critical to success.

And they are critical for your website. So to learn more about how I view these leads and how we then successfully identified and reached out to them, you may want to check out my article in Online Strategies Magazine.