Identifying the 30% of YOUR website visitors who WANT to buy from you!
Web Analytics and Google Adwords
Jonathan Calver, Managing Director, StrategyMix
So, what can Web Analytics do for you?
I will assume that you have a web site.
But I will not assume any of the following:
- That you can tell me how many unique individuals have visited your web site in the last hour
- That your marketing system will send an email alert to the appropriate sales executive if a well qualified prospect visits a high value web page, such as a pricing page
- That identified visitors can automatically be inserted into an multi-channel lead development campaign, combining both emails and telemarketing
- That you can calculate the ROI of your Google Adwords and Social Media campaigns based on “Lead Value”
- That you can tell me which pages on your web site I have visited and when
Why is Web Analytics becoming increasingly important?
Because the Internet and particularly the rise of search engines, such as Google, has changed the balance of power between Buyers and Sellers.
Buyers no longer need to contact your sales team to educate themselves on your products and services. Increasingly they start their research via Google, Portals, Blogs, etc. And then, once they have identified the main suppliers, they will visit your website where they expect to find some useful information.
In a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa
“80% of Purchasers believed that they found their vendors rather than that it was the vendors who found them”
Outbound marketing is also set to decline as response rates from email marketing fall further. This has already happened in the UK and USA where anti-spam legislation is relatively weak and the consequent email abuse has led to a reduction in overall response rates.
The Implications for Marketing
As a result, inbound marketing as a source of high quality leads is set to increase relative to outbound marketing. Web Analytics is used to track inbound marketing response and take appropriate actions in real-time, which is why it is set to play an increasingly vital role in your overall sales and marketing process.
The key implication for marketing is that this represents a “game change”. It is no longer about mass marketing to prospects, such as via bulk email blasting, but it is more about how you respond to the visitors who come to your website.
How Web Analytics works with StrategyMix
Essentially the process is quite simple.
We give you a small piece of javascript code, which you include in each web page that you would like to track. When someone visits your website the code will place a cookie on their computer. Each time that person visits one of your nominated web pages, the javascript code contacts one of our web servers to record the visit in your database.
What if they have cookies disabled?
If a person has cookies disabled then the process doesn’t work. However, we find that very few people actually disable their cookies.
How do we make cookies identifiable?
Once a cookie has been planted, you can track a unique visitor as they surf your web site.
So, you can say that Cookie Number 647 visited Page A, Page B and Page C. This type of information, however, is not very “useful” other than for the purpose of website analytics in that you may be able to deduce that a significant proportion of visitors who go to Page A, then go to Page B.
Maybe you can use this information to improve the design of your website, but it is not very exciting for your average sales person.
However, if your web visitor were to complete a registration form, perhaps to download one of your white papers, then suddenly Cookie Number 647 can be associated with the person who submitted the registration, maybe John Robertson, IT Director of Mega Bank. From this point we cannot only track John Robertson when he next visits our web site, BUT we can also “back fill” his previous visitor history based on our records for Cookie Number 647.
Helping Sales Interpret Digital Body Language
Tracking identified web visitors, like John Robertson, can provide Sales with useful insights.
To help illustrate this point let’s consider the following activity record which shows how Mary Jones, our Sales Person, has been attempting to contact John Robertson
Date / Time Activity
Jan 20 11:32 Mary Jones calls John Robertson and leaves a message
Jan 23 09:23 Mary Jones leaves another message for John
Jan 28 12:15 Mary Jones speaks to John’s secretary and again leaves a message
What do you think will happen next? If Mary is a typical salesperson, then she may conclude that John is “not interested” and that she is “wasting” her time and should give up.
However, if we overlay John’s web visitor history then a more complete picture of his behaviour and buying intentions emerges. The Activity Record might look like this:
Date / Time Activity
Jan 11 09:05 Cookie 647 visits our home page
Jan 19 09:34 Cookie 647 visits our product page
Jan 19 09:36 Cookie 647 visits our white paper section and downloads a white paper. Cookie 647 is associated with John Robertson. The system routes this lead to Sales.
Jan 20 11:32 Mary Jones calls John Robertson and leaves a message
Jan 23 09:23 Mary Jones leaves another message for John
Jan 23 11.10 John Robertson visits our case study page
Jan 24 10:15 Mary Jones speaks to John’s secretary and again leaves a message
Jan 24 11.10 John Robertson visits our pricing page
Jan 24 11.11 Mary receives an alert and decides to call John…..
Given this additional information, the picture for Mary now looks completely different. And as a consequence, we would expect Mary to continue following up this Lead.
Web Analytics and Sales Alerts
Within StrategyMix we have the concept of Smart Responses. A Smart Response is a series of actions that can be automatically triggered in response to a particular event, such as when John Robertson visits our pricing page, as he did on Jan 24.
One of the 7 Smart Responses that we can take is to send an email to alert Mary in real time that John is visiting our pricing page right NOW !
Mary can then call John straight away. Do you think she’ll get through this time? The answer, based on our experience is “Yes”. Furthermore, the conversation is likely to be of high quality because John is focused on our pricing right now and because Mary can orientate the discussion to what is of interest to John, ie: pricing.
Other Smart Responses:
In addition to sending our sales person an email alert we could also:
1. Send an email alert to a nominated user (perhaps a marketing manager)
2. Convert their lead status (perhaps to Shown Interest)
3. Add a list code to the prospect (so we can easily select them into reports or campaigns)
4. Send the prospect an email on a related topic
5. Insert the prospect into a telesales campaign
6. Insert the prospect into a multi-channel lead development campaign
Referrers – how to make them useful
A Referrer is the page that a user visited immediately before they came to your web site.
Referrers can be tracked and are useful because they tell us how people found our web site. This in turn will help us to optimize our SEO and online marketing investments.
You definitely want to keep an eye on your top referrers, as shown below:
The original referrer can also be linked to an identified visitor, so in our John Robertson example we can now reveal that his referrer on Jan 11th was Google.
We also have the full URL address of the referrer, which might have been:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=it+sales+sydney&meta=&aq=f&oq=
From this Referrer URL, we can deduce the search words that John used to find our web site, in this case: IT Sales Sydney
Calculating the ROI on Google Adwords
To find out how Google recommends that you calculate the ROI for Google Adwords, you can watch their two-part instructional You Tube video, which you will find by entering the following search words into Google: “Google Conversion ROI Video”.
Or you can read the following synopsis.
Keywords Page Impressions Click Rate Clicks Cost / Click
ABC 100 10% 10 $1.20
Total Cost No of Conversions Profit / Conversion Conversion Value ROI
$12 2 $20 $40 333%
The table above explains that you’ve generated 100 page impressions, your click through rate is 10% and you’ve had 10 clicks at an average cost of $1.20 per click, which means your total expenditure was $12.
Of the 10 clicks, 2 have “converted”, which means that these 2 individuals completed a registration form on your web site. You have assigned a nominal value to each conversion of $20, which means that your total return is $40 and your ROI is 333% (($40/$12)*100).
And so, based on the above calculation you should obviously increase your Adwords expenditure with Google !!
But wait, how do you know that the two conversions were worth $20 each?
At this point, a system like StrategyMix has an advantage over Google, because it has access to additional information which Google doesn’t. It knows the Lead Status of the two conversions.
Let’s assume that one of the conversions was John Robertson and that his lead status is now “May Purchase” and that the other conversion was a student that we have automatically qualified out.
So, we are left with just one conversion, that of John Robertson. What is the value of this conversion?
To answer this question accurately, it would be useful to know:
- Our conversion ratio from “May Purchase” to “Customer”.
- Our average sales price
- Our average profit margin
- Our gross profit margin before marketing and sales costs
Let’s assume that our conversion ratio is 10%, our average sale price is $10,000, our profit margin is 20% and our gross profit margin before marketing and sales costs is 30%.
In this scenario, we can allocate $1000 on marketing costs for each sale ((30% – 20%) * $10,000)) or $100 for each lead that has reached a status of “May Purchase”, because our conversion ratio from “May Purchase” to “Customer” is 10%.
So, on this basis, we can assign $100 to this lead value and our ROI is in fact, 833% (($100/$12)* 100).
but he says it’s OK to email him on david@acumen-dubai.com
