A Digital Palace full of Sitecore Solutions Seekers at Dreamcore Europe

Dreamcore, Sitecore's Developer and Partner conference is held on a worldwide basis. 2010 is the inaugural year, and the first event in Boston was over-the-top exciting and successful- but now moves to a Digital Palace promising new heights.

Having two Dreamcore' events one month apart across the Atlantic from each other (or should I say on opposite sides of that crazy Volcano),is totally hectic. It's the overlay of major events on top of a hair-on-fire global expansion pace that makes you look somewhere for another gear to shift into.

But there is a bright side advantage. We get to incorporate new ideas and feedback from the first right away into the second Dreamcore Europe event, happening this week in Copenhagen.

We've added an interesting customer presentation, featuring the very popular English soccer club Manchester City and their partner Aqueduct, providing the story behind fostering the fan passion and fueling the on-field success.

The popular Technical track review of three challenging implementations takes on some wonderful local color. The UK's Conservative Party, just recently elected into power features an exciting online success story with their Sitecore website with True Clarity. Then Austrian Airplines and Sitecore partner ecomplexx describe their site deployed for an amazing 56 countries and 22 languages. Partner Eduserve will dish out a number of tips on optimizing SEO with Google while still managing rapidfire changes in your Sitecore architecture.

Then building a bridge across the Atlantic, Partners Pentia and HedgeHog Development are co-presenting on Team Development and best practices- melding their many strong experiences from both Europe and North America.

Sitecore had numerous presenters who drew rave reviews and they are back, such as wild John West, who smoked the stage with his 10 (actually many more) things you didn't know you could do with Sitecore. He has inspired Sitecore bloggers as far away as Australia who are raising the bar to 25 or 50 hidden tips now, a true sign of talent and passion on the web for Sitecore solutions.

There is more content oriented towards business cases for the Online Marketing Suite, along with several talented solution architects with fresh insights into data retrieval techniques, ways to add customized features with Sitecore and more. See the full online agenda here.

With an at-capacity crowd coming from 11 countries around the world, and a Sitecore Community which values transparency and sharing and a passion for innovation, the classical Palace we are meeting in will be rocking amd morphed into a Digital Palace of Web Art and Science!

Sitecore is watching Google- turning the tables.

Google is everywhere , right? With so many free convenient services, and all they want to do is watch ....over your shoulder and maybe offer ads...Your searches, Gmail, Google Docs, Wave, your mobile, Chrome browser and more.

Well, who is watching Google? Well in our case at Sitecore, our Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is- and it just saved us some money and time!

We use Google ads, Bing and Yahoo Ads, and a lot of display ads as well. We have these campaigns feed into our OMS, because beyond the click performance we have visibility into visitor goals success on our website and context of the visitors' experience. We also integrate our email campaigns, PR campaigns, really anything online that ends up on our website.

A few days ago Ted, our Online marketing Ad specialist, noticed that suddenly our conversions were way down on our Google Ads. The OMS showed that it wasn't consistent across all our many campaigns, specifically the traffic from our Google Adwords wasn't engaged with our website at all, they were bouncing right away without accomplishing any goals.

Google was showing lotsa clicks, the meter was running but the wheels weren't turning on our website!

Ted then went into our AdWords campaigns and noticed some strange things about our ads and account.

Suddenly we were selling iPhone accessories! Instead of offering only our software, we had iPhone Ads popping up everywhere and linking back to our site. No wonder our OMS pointed out our conversions were lousy- other than the fact that our Web CMS allows your website to look great from an iPhone, we have no interesting iPhone accessory info on our site! So these visitors bounced.


Turns out we were hacked, or else Google accidentally merged our account with another company's AdWords account, with a name that is very close to our Sitecore name- literally the same with two letters transposed. Suddenly our ad total budget tripled, we had a new group of ads appear, and campaigns got scrambled.

Ted quickly got in touch with Google via their chat system and escalated the problem. We had to suspend our campaign, change our credit card info, and update our passwords. Of course all the crazy charges were refunded, although we lost the productivity from 3 days of online Google Ads.

The good news is by having our OMS system watching Google's system we caught this quickly, and kept the expense from being even higher. That was not our original intent, frankly. We use the OMS to integrate our multi-channel campaign results, since we do so much more than just AdWords. But, as it turned out, the OMS helped protect us as well as see the fuller online picture than presented by Google!

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.