Marketing - Setting a Goal

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Rodger Fleming
3 years ago
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2 marketing - Think Goal Conversions It s increasingly important to maximise the money you re spending on marketing activity, with budgets getting squeezed and bosses wanting to know what bang they re getting for their proverbial buck. The team at Pure360 don t just want to provide you with contract-free and feature-rich marketing software we want to give you answers to your marketing questions and help debunk the science of sending high converting campaigns. One thing our customers are focussed on is what to use as an effective measure of their campaigns success so Mr Marc Munier has answered some of their questions for you... Where should I start my campaign analysis? Click throughs? Firstly, you need to set clear goals. Sounds simple, but are you doing it? We re always surprised at how many people don t have clear goals for their marketing, some people are doing it because they feel that they should be or that the ROI looks great, but what is really key is understanding how marketing fits in to the wider marketing mix. So is it a lead generation tool? Brand awareness? Traffic generator? Customer retention? Customer service? List growth? The cop out answer is that it is all of these things. However if it genuinely is all of these things you can t achieve these within a single communication - so consider each goal of your marketing on its own and build a program of s to support them. For each of these programs look at how you would measure success, online goals are pretty simple but the ones that tend to deliver more long term value (client retention, brand awareness etc) are harder to attribute to marketing. Here are the popular ones: Lead Generation Ok so the easy one first, but even within this seemingly simple goal to measure there are difficulties. Let s say you are a B2B provider of some sort, you do an campaign driving people to your site to download a whitepaper, anyone who clicks through and downloads the paper will be tracked by your web analytics package and marketing provider. But what about the people who call up? They are (as any sales person will tell you) the best leads, but you are relying on sales people to ask the right questions (a constant and I m sure at your company). Even then which white paper are they responding to which campaign? It s almost impossible to capture that level of detail whilst relying on a human (yes sales people are human). Page 2 of 5 Pure360.com

The team at Pure360 don t just want to provide you with contract-free and feature-rich email marketing software we want to give you answers to your email marketing questions and help debunk the

3 A really neat solution is to serve different telephone numbers based on campaign codes by using Google Optimiser, pioneered this is a great way of getting ultimate in tracking for all your different lead sources. Telephone Number Lead Source campaign Google PPC Newsletter These numbers are almost free to secure so there really is no reason not to have one for each type of lead source. This way you are coding the capturing of the data sounds very complicated but actually very simple. Customer Retention You need a baseline before you can start tracking anything, there are hundreds of survey tools out there, we it really is a joy to use and it needs to be because otherwise doing surveys is rather dull. If you announce that you are going to do a customer survey you are bound to be inundated by all departments asking you to add in questions on their behalf. Before you start to consider which ones are in and out set yourself a question limit. I can t tell you what that number is, it s very much depending on how engaged your customers are with you which will be a factor of how important the product or service you provide is and how good you are at providing it... The one question that has to go in there is the Net Promoter Score. It was developed by Frederick F. Reichheld a Harvard Business School bigwig good overview on Wikipedia. As the name suggests it takes all the people who would recommend you and then takes away all the people who wouldn t, leaving you with your net promoters. And it s only one question. How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? Score of We ve recently implemented this and found some interesting facts, people who have raised a support case recently give a higher NPS, and those who haven t had any contact in the previous month give on the whole a lower NPS. So regular contact is essential in order to maintain that positive I want to recommend you vibe that we want to engender in our customers, and is simply the best way to do it. Which brings us back to our original topic, by tracking the NPS against respondents to your communications you can see the effect your campaigns are having on your recipients, what becomes apparent very quickly is that the non-responders are the ones you need to spend time on that s one for the next guide. Page 3 of 5 Pure360.com

4 Using Web Analytics packages Looking at the rest of our imagined goals they are much simpler to track, everything from form submissions to time on site can be tracked using web analytics packages. The choice for the vast majority of our customers is Google Analytics as it is for the wider market. There are alternatives which shouldn t be forgotten Coremetrics, Web Trends etc all provide a lot more in terms of analytics but come with some pretty hefty price tags. The key difference for a lot of marketers is that Google Analytics does not allow you to track individuals as all their data is aggregated to protect internet users privacy they don t want you to be able to identify each user. NB as it happens it is possible to do this with Google Analytics however doing so is a breach of their terms and conditions so not one to try. So for now we are going to assume you are a Google Analytics user. Google Analytics has a system of goals and these are what you need to focus on, if you don t know how to set them up please see below for a quick guide if you do skip forward to Putting it all together. Setting up a Goal Once you know what you want tracked: 1. Name the "goal" to clearly distinguish it from any others you may later add to your account 2. Add a funnel to your "goal", you don't want to lose any potential conversions due to a confusing purchasing process. This way you can identify the page with highest drop off rates and act on it. 3. Add a value to your "goal", only you'll be able to attribute the relevant value. Once this is applied you'll be able to measure ROI and other metrics. Adding to Google Analytics 1. Select the relevant website/brand in your Google Analytics account and click edit in the actions column 2. Select "add goal" in one of the four relevant goals section. 3. Once here you identify your goal by adding the name and its position. 4. URL destination is the most popular within goal destinations as the goal is attributed a unique URL and goals are recorded in Analytics every time this URL is activated. 5. Turning the goal on in this section will allow Analytics to start tracking this new goals information, and you're good to go. Page 4 of 5 Pure360.com

There are alternatives which shouldn t be forgotten Coremetrics, Web Trends etc all provide a lot more in terms of analytics but come with some pretty hefty price tags.

5 Pulling it all together OK so you are now so in control of your marketing goals you have goal posts behind your desk, now what? Well in order to get the most from the information you are capturing you need to integrate them with each other, ideally under one super duper marketing database, otherwise interrogation of data will usually end up with a headache. If that s a step too far simply appending your links with Google Analytics codes, or uploading your NPS into your ESP so that you can send s filtered on their responses to your last survey, will give you a shed load of added insight. Of course we have to say we make this super easy, just check out our latest 1 click Google Analytics integration. We hope that you ve found this Guide helpful we ve got loads more in the Resources section of our website so check it out. Or if you d like more info on marketing and our marketing software PureResponse, visit pure360.com Page 5 of 5 Pure360.com

Insights and ROI from your paid ads by using UTM tags to AdWords campaigns in WOW Analytics.

Insights and ROI from your paid ads by using UTM tags to AdWords campaigns in WOW Analytics. Insights and ROI from your paid ads You could spend thousands of pounds on you paid ads in Google AdWords, Bing