Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [245]
Small changes and differences like this are evidence of a form that has been tested in numerous iterations and tweaked in order to convert the most numbers of visitors. Each small element of the landing page plays a part in gaining a response from the visitor, and the Salesforce.com page does an excellent job of reaching the right audience with the right message.
Friday: Measure the Right Thing
One of the more aggravating things I hear when discussing PPC campaigns with advertisers is the emphasis on clicks. It isn’t difficult to find advertisers who know their click-through rate but not their conversion rates. This leads to my last point on PPC advertising, which is to make sure you measure the right thing—profitability.
Clicks and CTR will not create a profitable campaign. Sales and leads are the things that create direct revenue for a company, and they must be the central focus of any PPC campaign. This is why every PPC campaign is incomplete when CTR is the final measurement of success. CTR is not a direct reflection of revenue, only of your spend. It is the same with the number of visitors—clicks and visitors cost money. Do you know how much you made as a result?
This creates work. Tracking revenue and tracking profitability is not easy, and it is not built into most analytics programs. This is something that requires careful tracking, coding, tagging, and analysis in order to accomplish. Now, for ecommerce websites that are pure ecommerce players, this is a bit easier than for everyone else. However, it is still surprising how many are not tracking sales based on PPC campaigns and ad groups.
Even in lead generation websites, in order to properly track ad groups and effectiveness, there has to be a defining value of a goal. To track profitability or the cost of acquisition, the value of the goal needs to be defined. You can’t track lead generation success without first defining the value of each lead.
This brings us back to a principle discussed in Chapter 3—knowing the value of a lead. Recall that chapter’s story of my college telemarketing job. Although I despised the work and made only $6.50 an hour, an employee who loved the job mentioned to me that he made $3.50 for each phone call. The disparity was all because he understood the value of a lead. He explained that out of 50 calls he could average making 2 sales. If he averaged that production throughout the week, he would be receive a bonus. If he averaged that kind of production for the month, he would receive another bonus; if he averaged that for the quarter, he would get both a bonus and a reward. When all the bonuses, rewards, and incentives were counted, his income averaged out to $3.50 a phone call. Now he understood the value of a lead!
Unless you understand your own sales cycle and what it takes to convert a lead to a sale or a registrant to a subscriber, then you will not know the value of a lead. Smart companies know the values of leads and the differences of value based on acquisition. What is the value of a trade show lead? What is the value of a direct mail lead or a cold-call lead? When the lead can be tracked in value based on acquisition, then the entire marketing cycle can be based on measurement and effectiveness, which then affects the marketing spend of those companies; they spend smarter because they understand and know the value of a lead.
Of course, this depends on strict tracking guidelines. Lead generation companies need to tie their leads into their sales tracking system in order to find and judge lead values based on acquisition. Companies that rely on sending web visitors to a