Optimizing Mobile Marketing Conversions

Transcription

1 Phone Conversion Optimization Optimizing Mobile Marketing Conversions White Paper Part III of a Three-Part Mobile Marketing Series

2 By Bradley E. Reynolds, chief executive officer of Mongoose Metrics Introduction We have discussed in previous papers (Mobile Marketing for Business Part I and Mobile Marketing Macro Trends Part 2) the general trends driving mobile device proliferation and the specific marketing opportunities available in first and second generation mobile marketing. The medium is ripe for savvy marketers to engage with customers, but an important piece of the puzzle has not been addressed until now. This paper answers the questions: 1. How can you analyze and attribute a single person-to-person engagement to a specific mobile marketing effort? 2. How do you create instant feedback loops for this information so that you can react as your market and engagements change? 3. How can you integrate this actionable data into your existing business process? Table of Contents Methods of Mobile Interaction Search Driven Mobile Web How to Validate Mobile Marketing Strategies Integration: Web Analytics + Call Analytics Integration: Web Analytics + Call Analytics + CRM Integration: Bid Management Conclusion: Your Daily Decision-Making Process 2

3 Methods of Mobile Interaction Search-Driven Mobile Web One of the primary methods of mobile interaction with users is through mobile search as it generates traffic to mobile-tailored websites. As stated in the previous papers in this series, there are inherent limitations to the interactivity you can expect with the limited user interfaces (UI) currently available on mobile devices. Search engines such as Google or built-in browser toolbars are simple enough to translate well to the micro-screen environment, but navigating search results gets more complicated and will often result in a quick interaction to retrieve data for an external purpose such as finding an address or making a phone call. Users are not sitting on the mobile web for a long time; they are looking for quick and actionable data to service some external need (for example, finding a restaurant or looking up a fact on Wikipedia). As such, the time spent viewing the search results page or on the actual returned site will be minimal and therefore cause some external action most likely, a phone call. Because users are interacting with the mobile web, many technologies used to analyze desktop screen web browsing translate well to mobile browsing. The difference is that mobile browsing habits vary significantly when compared to desktop browsing habits because of the difficulty of visualization and navigation. The simplest technology to assess the value of mobile web engagements is software from a web analytics vendor. This software requires a small piece of tracking code installed on the marketing site. This tracking code compiles details about the person interacting with the marketing effort including page histories, time on site, keyword flow, critical paths and a variety of additional browser-based information. This type of tracking requires the mobile browser to parse and execute JavaScript correctly which many of the current mobile browsers do. Examples of web analytics software vendors include Google Analytics (free), Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, and Unica. By installing web analytics software on sites intended for mobile users, marketers can begin to visualize how people arrive at the site, what they are doing on the site, and what types of results have happened (shopping cart was filled but no order, order was placed, customer abandoned site after viewing one page, etc). Over a period of time, marketers will gain a 3

4 greater understanding about how to optimize desired outcomes and use new data sets to validate content experiments. Web analytics provide an excellent way to model online conversions (where the entire browse-to-sale path is completed online). An example of an online conversion is buying a book at Amazon: You search through Google, click on the Amazon link, put the book in the cart, and pay through electronic mechanisms. All of the research and validation, browsing, shopping and buying happens without the need to talk to a human. Properly configured web analytics will work for this application regardless of whether the purchaser is sitting at a desktop or a mobile device. Pattern differences in conversions will likely be attributed to the different mode of engagement and interaction prevalent on mobile devices. In a mobile application, web analytics alone cannot tell the whole story. Because the mobile web is difficult to navigate and quickly scan, immediate actions are a more likely outcome. Phone calls (whether in click-to-call or directly dialing a number on a mobile web page) are becoming the primary method consumers use to interact with mobile websites to retrieve detailed information. In the restaurant example, a user puts a name into Google, navigates to a restaurant site or directory and subsequently calls the published phone number. This is a short duration, highly transactional process. The specific value proposition is: How long will it take me to get the information I need via a phone call versus navigating on the mobile web? If the value proposition is highly imbalanced toward quickness from a phone call, mobile web will drive phone calls. Consequently, when a mobile application s intent is to drive phone calls, marketers need to understand how to marry their web analytics with phone analytics to give a true picture of customer engagement. With call tracking technology, marketers can connect a web session interaction with a phone call session (including all call-related information). This is extremely important when the phone call results in a sale or a conversion because you want to trace that sale back to your marketing efforts. Without a linkage between a phone call and web analytics, it is impossible to definitively say which tweak or effort resulted in the phone call. Because phone calls are so simple to launch from a mobile device, the value proposition for information-retrieval or order-placement is highly skewed towards phone calls and away from web form submissions. If you do not understand and attribute phone conversions correctly to online marketing efforts, you likely are missing 50 to 80 percent of your mobile marketing web conversions. 4

5 How to Validate your Mobile Marketing Strategies Integration: Web Analytics + Call Analytics The rubber hits the road when you can develop a holistic picture of your online and offline conversions and properly attribute those conversions to their cause. The easiest way to do this is to pair web analytics, such as the Google Analytics screenshots captured below, to your call analytics information. Mongoose Metrics, in 2007, was the first call tracking provider to integrate its data into Google Analytics, and since then we have cleared the path for integrations into many of the other leading web analytics vendors including Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Unica. Google, like other web analytics vendors, uses a concept of source, campaign and keyword as drilldown levels for its analytics data. Mongoose, when integrated with Google Analytics, uploads this information into a specific source level. In the example above, Mongoose uses the source/medium combination of PhoneSPC (our product)/phone-organic (the type of search traffic) to identify this traffic source as coming from organic methods. 5

6 We can further drill down to the campaign level of Mongoose Metrics SPC product for additional models. Campaign could easily be used for a specific client or to discriminate between multiple campaigns for the same client. Data can also be exported at any layer of these drilldowns. The most valuable report is the one which shows you which keyword drove your phone calls. You can use this report with the calendar setting to view your phone conversion performance for any range of time. Additionally, you can view detailed session-related data within the Mongoose system to understand full details on a per-person basis. Marketers generally use an integrated analytics package to understand patterns and trends and then drill down into the details when something is not following the accepted pattern. 6

7 Combining Mongoose data with web analytics data gives marketers one place to view the full conversion picture for both offline and online conversions. It is imperative with mobile web interactions to view both types of conversions. Very small adjustments in content can result in large conversion changes because of the limited UI size. Integration: Web Analytics + Call Analytics + CRM Additionally, call tracking and web analytics data can be integrated into a CRM system such as Salesforce or Microsoft CRM so that salespeople are provided with additional intelligence about the customer looking to interact with the company. Ideally, the sales representative can use this investigative information to help build a question plan. Integration: Bid Management: If the goal of your marketing campaign is to better optimize keyword ad spend, it is ideal to integrate with a bid management vendor such as Acquisio, Kenshoo or Marin Software. These vendors take conversion data from Mongoose Metrics and Google Adwords and automatically adjust your keyword purchases based on the actual conversion performance of your efforts. Because mobile marketing is highly phone-oriented, not accounting for the phone conversion leaves you with incomplete information which may result in erroneous marketing decisions. Your Daily Decision-Making Process If you are spending money and time engaging customers via mobile devices, you need to understand how those customers are interacting with you and how you can improve their interactions. The only way to do this in a scalable fashion is to combine an analysis of their engagements with fluid actions which fit your business processes. While it is a laudable initiative to implement web analytics and call analytics, the real effort lies in taking that data and converting it into a decisive action. Mongoose Metrics can assist you in understanding your conversion flow, building models and reports to visualize that funnel, and help you create decisive and quick actions as you adjust to the mobile landscape. Contact us at Mongoose Metrics at or visit us online at to set up a meeting. 7