Sunday, June 25, 2017

5 Online Marketing Integrations Successful Businesses Use

Article ImageWith online spend set to become the preferred method of shopping, it's unsurprising that recent statistics indicate the average digital marketing spend for businesses will reach $118 billion (£91.4 billion) by 2021.

However, investing this amount into various marketing campaigns can lead to uncertainty; especially if businesses cannot accurately measure their return on investment. Want to ensure you're generating profits from your marketing spend? Here are five online marketing integrations your business must start using.

Google Analytics Track Conversions

Typically, websites will include a variety of actions visitors can complete to interact with the business, such as phone calls, form submissions, downloads (PDFs) and purchases; these are all individually counted as conversions -- completed actions you have defined as valuable to your business. If you have multiple conversion paths available, how can you track the success of your online business and determine your overall conversion rate?

"Goal tracking" in Google Analytics measures how successfully your site completes target objectives. It analyzes the amount of completed activities (conversions) that are contributing to your goals and therefore the success of your business. Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. You can set up goals in Google Analytics by going to Conversions > Goals > Overview.

The website in the example above has set up four goals -- book visit form completions, brochure downloads, phone calls, and open event form completions. By setting up goal tracking they have discovered the conversion rate for phone calls is extremely high, defining it as a favourite path for customers. Now the importance of phone calls has been identified, this business can invest more into their customer service, whether it's through increased phone support or advanced staff training to meet demands, guarantee customer satisfaction and ultimately - generate profits.

Comparatively, brochure downloads seem to be slowly decreasing, the accessibility/positioning of these on the website might need changing or the content in the brochures might need improving.

Calcuate Highest Traffic Sources

If you're investing in several digital marketing strategies, whether it's organic search, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media channels or email campaigns, understanding exactly how your customers are finding you is essential for determining which efforts are working and which need to be optimised. Google Analytics allows you to monitor the performances of different marketing channels to evaluate everything from brand awareness through direct traffic and organic search to keyword targeting.

For example, this website (see above) has received traffic from the following channels: direct, organic search, paid search, display, email, referral and social media. As direct traffic - a user typing the domain name into their browser or using a bookmark to directly access your site, has generated the most traffic, this indicates their brand awareness is widely recognised amongst returning visitors, for new direct traffic users only amounted to 27%. If this business wanted to generate new leads, they could look into optimising their organic search positions for non-branded keywords for this channel generated the highest new users (43%).

Google Search Console Low Hanging Fruit Keywords

When deciding on your target keywords it is easy to assume that focusing your SEO efforts on the very popular keywords related to your business will generate the best improvements to your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as: rankings, CTR (click through rate), and organic traffic. Although this might be an effective long-term strategy, the benefits won't be immediate, especially if they have high search volume and are extremely competitive. So the challenge then is, how can you obtain quick fix results whilst working on your rankings for long-term keywords?

Targeting low-hanging fruit keywords -- keywords that are already positioned in the "sweet spot" (i.e. position 5-15) in a SERP (search engine results page), is one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to demonstrate results for your KPIs with minimal effort. However, recognizing the importance of these keywords isn't enough -- you need to determine which keywords are missing out on these "sweet spots" but which offer the most potential.

This firm of solicitors has used Google Search Console (see above) to monitor which search queries are driving traffic, clicks and generating impressions - how many times a listing has appeared in the search results - to their site. This tool will also provide data on the keywords you are currently ranking under and your position.

Once the data was exported into Excel and filtered by monthly impressions, many of their positions were identified as "hanging" at the bottom of the first SERP for high-impression keywords. For example, the keyword "constructive dismissal" has 18,253 monthly impressions and a monthly search volume of 18,100 -- that's a considerable amount of potential traffic and engagement for being in first, second and even third position.

However, being in position 10 for "constructive dismissal" has caused the business to receive only 93 clicks, resulting in a 0.51% CTR, meaning a considerable number of those impressions have been ignored. Considering this business is based in Birmingham, missing out on the 'sweet spots' for location-based keywords is dramatically affecting their local SEO - being in 9th positon for 'solicitors in Birmingham' which generates 1,369 impressions has resulted in a mere 9 links and a 0.66% CTR.

By targeting keywords they are already ranking in positions 5-15 for in the SERP: this business could quickly start to generate clicks, traffic and sales through these quick wins.

Double Click Faster Reporting

Double Click Search (DS) is a search management platform that allows businesses to manage large marketing campaigns across multiple engines and media channels in one integrated system. Double Click makes it simple to change bid strategies through formula columns, labels and rules: reports are updated every fifteen minutes and can include net profits. Spend can be imported excluding media costs to calculate total profits and executive reports can be set up for each level of detail required. Also, the reports can either provide a snapshot of the accounts or include more detail if needed, for example data can be imported from external variables. Below is an example of a basic executive report:

Call Tracking

Considering we're living in a digital age, it is easy to assume the majority of business marketers monitor performance solely through digital analytics (tracking goals such as page views, purchases, and form submission). However, this doesn't mean the telephone has been abandoned as a method to generate business. In fact, 75% of consumers consider a phone call to be the quickest way to receive a response.

Call tracking is the process of determining which channels, campaigns or individual ads are generating phone call conversions for your business, making it possible to monitor the date and time of a call and create detailed reports on the return on investment (ROI) for your individual marketing channels. Without call tracking, confusion could arise over the performance of your marketing campaigns and the steps necessary to improve them.

Landing Page Performance

When using PPC advertising, determining your exact conversion rate and landing page performance is essential for calculating your ROI from this marketing tactic. The majority of landing pages provide users with a phone number or a contact form submission -- without call tracking, PPC advertisers can only calculate landing page success through form fills. Unfortunately, this will result in an inaccurate conversion rate that's substantially smaller than anticipated.

By introducing call tracking, from suppliers such as Mediahawk, businesses can discover which landing pages are generating high volumes of phone calls to provide a more detailed understanding of landing page performance. Remember - overviewing your landing page analysis should be approached from different angle, answer the following questions on which landing pages are:

  • Delivering the most calls
  • Producing the highest quality calls
  • Generating the best call conversion rate (conversions/call volume = conversion rate) to measure ROI accurately and determine which landing pages require further optimisation.
  • Where They Went After a Call

    Sadly, consumers aren't guaranteed to convert into a sale when making a phone call. According to AdRoll, a mere 2% of shoppers actually convert on their first visit to an online store, meaning brands need to become active in trying to re-engage with prospects where possible.

    Syncing call data with your retargeting campaigns and lists allows you to re-engage with your audience more effectively, for your messaging and marketing strategy is based on their online and offline engagement history. If you've generated calls that haven't turned into sales you can target these unconverted consumers with retargeting ads by syncing your call data with your marketing campaigns. Callers tend to be highly engaged, quality prospects making them perfect for retargeting. This also eliminates the risk of retargeting someone with a discount offer who already converted over the phone.

    Optimizely A/B Split Testing

    Acting as an experimentation platform, Optimizely enables businesses to deliver continuous experimentation and personalisation across websites, mobile apps and other connected devices.

    A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of an app or webpage against each other to determine which performs better; this provides better determination of a given conversion goal. For instance, a B2B technology company may want to improve their sales lead quality and volume from campaign landing pages. In order to achieve this, they could implement A/B testing changes to the visual imagery, headline, form fields, calls to action and overall layout of the page.

    Testing variables individually helps pinpoint which changes had an effect on their visitors' behaviour and which ones did not. Over time, the successful changes from experiments can be combined to demonstrate the measurable improvement of the new experience over the old one.


    Source: 5 Online Marketing Integrations Successful Businesses Use

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