Part of performance marketing is driving website traffic, but websites are largely responsible for converting users into paying customers. A webpage’s layout, functionality, and copy all contribute to how well it performs. This article explores how to convert traffic into leads so you can get the most out of your traffic-generating investments.

What is a marketing lead?

It is common for the definition of a “lead” to vary across marketing teams. For the purposes of this article, “leads” are real human beings who have expressed some level of interest in your product or service by giving you their contact information.

However, not all leads are created equal. Some are more likely to buy than others. 

In the 1950s, a social psychology professor at Harvard named Robert F. Bales created a method to measure the process of human interaction in small groups. This paved the way for modern market research. Findings from research using his methodology suggest three groups of buyers exist in any market at any point in time, based on their purchase intent:

• Satisfied with the status quo (56.5%)
• Dissatisfied with the status quo (40.5%)
• Actively on a buying journey (3%)

Marketers will first need to research their customers to understand how customers behave at each of these three stages. Then, use these insights to inform messaging, content and creative strategy for every stage of the marketing funnel. If you don’t already have an understanding of why your buyers buy from you, sometimes the best thing to do is the simplest: talk to your buyers. Recently, Katelyn Bourgoin was a guest on the Digital Marketing Troop podcast where she share the power of customer research:

How to convert traffic into leads

Once you have an understanding of why your buyers buy, you can solve for how buyers interact with your business online. Lead generation on digital channels usually requires an exchange of value. This valuable first-party data will become increasingly important to digital marketing strategies as advertising platforms comply with new data privacy laws. Download our free eBook to learn how to build and scale a first-party data strategy.

Website users are willing to give up personal information in exchange for something that delights them; discounts, how-to guides, exclusive events, etc. Here’s how to convert traffic into leads online in 5 steps:

1. Create a compelling offer
2. Launch a landing page
3. Drive traffic to your landing page
4. Test and measure results
5. Iterate based on the insights

Let’s break down each step below:

1. Create a compelling offer

If you want a user’s personal information like name and email, you need to offer something they care about. In B2C this could be an exclusive discount. In B2B this could be a comprehensive original research study. 

Here’s an example of a compelling offer in a business-to-consumer (B2C) company. Mattress Warehouse offers $25 for every friend you refer, and you can also get a 10% discount for subscribing to their email list. On a major purchase like a mattress, 10% can be a good amount of savings.

2. Launch a landing page

Here are the elements of an effective landing page:

• A main headline and a supporting headline. Heading structures help search engines like Google crawl and index your page, which helps to generate more organic search traffic.
• Images or video showing context of use. Some users are visual learners and need to see a product or service.
• The benefits of your offering. A common trap marketers make is focusing on the features of their product rather than the benefit to the end user. 
• A form that works. There’s nothing more frustrating to a marketer than learning a form is broken. Ensure your landing page is working properly before driving traffic.
• A call to action. What do you want users to do once they land on your page? Make sure it’s clear what action users should take.
• Social proof. This can be customer testimonials, ratings, and reviews. Seeing or hearing other buyers share their experience with your brand is a powerful motivator.

Long Home Products’ roofing services page is a good example of a B2C landing page. It has a compelling offer (no payments, no interest for 12 months), a form that follows you down the page, it shows the range of roofing products, and closes with their value proposition.

ChurnZero’s platform page is a good example for B2B. It’s designed in a way that has depth. Each of the market segments in the pie chart above would find value. Those interested can learn more with a video overview, case studies, features, integrations, and schedule a demo.

3. Drive traffic to the landing page

Your landing page needs traffic to convert into leads. The volume of traffic you need depends on your industry, digital marketing objectives, and your strategy. First, you must understand the channels your buyers are most likely to use. It could be Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, or a number of others. Then you need to operate each platform to get traffic that drives quality leads.

On most digital channels, you can take an organic or paid approach to driving traffic. Each needs a different kind of investment. Organic requires time, while paid requires money. Money is replenishable. Time is not. An organic SEO management strategy can help drive down acquisition costs over a long period of time, but a paid media strategy gives businesses the ability to scale leads quickly.

4. Test and measure results

You can drive thousands of users to your landing page. You may even convert some into leads and sales. But if you don’t test and measure results, you won’t be able to improve or evolve with the market. Here are a few metrics to monitor for continuous improvement:

• Click-through-rate (CTR) on calls-to-action. This measures the proportion of users who clicked on a call to action. It can be helpful when testing new messaging or graphics.
• Conversion rate of each landing page. This measures the proportion of users who converted into a lead. This can be compared to other landing pages to learn what performs best. 
• Number of new leads and sales from particular offers. This helps determine which offers are driving volume and/or quality leads.

5. Use insights to iterate the offer, landing page, and traffic drivers

Measuring data and looking at reports won’t do you any good if you don’t act on the insights. That’s why it’s critical to have a marketing team structure that enables feedback to influence tweaks and direction of your marketing campaigns.

For example, you may launch a series of landing pages. But one of them doesn’t load properly on mobile, causing an abnormal percent of users to bounce. This can be flagged in Google Analytics, triggering an audit and adjustments to load properly, increasing traffic and potential conversions. But this is only possible with the right system and team in place.

Why website traffic fails to convert

Now that we know the process of how to convert traffic into leads, let’s take a look at some common mistakes that cause users to leave your site.

• Lack of compelling offer or CTA. If your offer or call-to-action doesn’t resonate with the traffic you’re driving, users are unlikely to convert into a lead.
• Poor user experience. There are many factors that go into user expertise. For instance, when a user clicks on a link, but the site takes too long to load, users may become frustrated and click “back” to the page they came from. Or, if a web page has hard to read fonts, poor writing style, or obtrusive graphics, this can also dissuade users from taking the next step.
• Too much friction on the page. There could be a number of culprits, including too many form fields, calls-to-action below the fold, phone numbers that are hard to find, or even a button that blends in with the background or doesn’t look clickable. These may seem like small things, but they can absolutely impact conversion rates and performance.
• Too much or too little information. Depending on where your ideal prospect is in their buying journey, you want to give them the information they need to make a decision. Not too much, not too little. 
• Too many links off the page. When you give users too many links on a page, they may not know what direction to take, or they navigate too far away and you risk losing potential leads. Another common mistake is when the links on a landing page don’t align with the next steps you want your user to take.
• No social proof. Seeing testimonials and accounts from other people who have purchased your product or service can build trust in your buyers, and can increase the chances of traffic converting into leads.

How to convert blog traffic into leads

You don’t always have to have a dedicated landing page to convert traffic into leads. For many businesses, blog pages drive a majority of organic traffic. Marketing teams have an opportunity to use content marketing to capture email addresses and other personal information in a variety of ways. 

• Newsletter Signups. If buyers trust you enough to deliver good content (and not spam), many will opt-in to receive your email newsletter. 
• PDF Downloads. Users still download PDFs, especially if it’s something like an annual research report. This kind of content can be delivered in exchange for an email address using a form.
• Limited Time Offers. Put an expiration date on a special discount or offer to prompt blog visitors to take immediate action. This could be to request a demo, or a coupon code for a discount on their first purchase.
• Webinars. Users must provide their email address to register for and attend a webinar. Users who land on a blog page may be willing to register for (or watch a recording of) a webinar on a similar topic.
• Quizzes. This tactic can be used to funnel blog traffic to a series of questions used to qualify traffic and collect first-party data, like name and email.
• Popups. While many popups make for poor user experience, they are one way to convert blog traffic into leads.

Work with a new kind of agency

Marketing has always been about generating revenue. But the best way to do it is constantly changing. That’s why it’s so important to constantly test the conversion rates on your landing pages and adjust quickly. Our analytics solutions help you optimize your conversion rates, driving high-quality leads to your sales team. Contact us to get started today.

AdAge, Inc. Magazine and Washington Post have recognized Silverback Strategies as a top place to work. Our secret is simple. Healthy teams lead to happy clients and happy employees. Silverback’s focus on team health leads to honest, open and direct communication between staff and clients alike. This means we solve issues faster, set clear expectations, and deliver exceptional results.

In March 2022, Google announced plans to phase out its Universal Analytics reporting platform. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. This news should be enough for marketers to pause and examine their options. Let’s explore the difference between Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics, and how to set it up for a seamless transition.

Universal Analytics will be Deprecated in 2023

In October, 2020 Google unveiled their new website analytics reporting platform, Google Analytics 4. Since then, marketers have not had the ability to set up the legacy “Universal Analytics” for new web domains. Websites that previously had Universal Analytics were grandfathered in, and those webmasters enjoy the reports they’re familiar with. Only new websites technically need to set up Google Analytics 4.

Google’s announcement of their intent to deprecate Universal Analytics in 2023 gives marketers some closure. The announcement gave websites 15 months to prepare. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) Google Analytics 4 stores user data for up to 14 months. Marketers should add tracking codes to start collecting data, even if they’re unsure if they’ll use it.

Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics

The main difference between Google Analytics 4 vs Universal analytics is how the data is structured. But there are also other differences, too. Here are a few of the main ones:

• Compliance with data privacy regulations
• New views into the user journey
• Different way of storing data
• The use of data sampling in reports

Compliance with data privacy regulations

At the most basic level, Google Analytics 4 now complies with new data privacy regulations. They are categorized differently than Universal Analytics to better protect user identities. This is one of the biggest overhauls of the data model.

Rather than sharing specific actions like page views, Google Analytics 4 labels broad actions as “events” to anonymize data. Events can be anything from site visits to clicks. Some users may opt out of tracking. In this case, you can see conversions and attributions, but may not be able to identify or track specific users.

New views into the user journey

Google Analytics 4 gives marketers new insight into user journeys on a website. It allows marketers to view preceding and following events of users. This new feature opens up new doors to initiatives like customer journey mapping and conversion rate optimization.

Unlike Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 won’t provide you with as many pre-built templates. You’ll need to think ahead and build these frameworks. While it’s still possible to build them yourself, you need to have data collected to build them properly.

For instance, one report that has been incredibly useful for our clients is the “funnel” report. In this custom report, you can assign web pages to a specific stage of the marketing funnel.

I talk more about this report in this episode of our Digital Marketing Troop podcast:

Different way of storing data

The way data is stored is another key difference between Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics. The legacy platform defaulted to a specific time limit on data storage. But, you could override it if you wanted to keep it for longer. Google Analytics 4 removes the override function, meaning you only have 14 months of storage without exception. 

However, Google Analytics 4 now directly links to BigQuery. This means you no longer need to work with a third party to store data on your end. This makes external storage limits easier to manage. 

As a benefit, Google Analytics 4 ties each event to the user now, rather than by events within sessions. This makes it much easier to identify actions attributed to a user. For contrast, Universal Analytics might not correctly tie actions to sessions. With this new user-focused data structure, it is much easier to handle privacy requests to remove someone’s data. This is especially important if your business is subject to CCPA or GDPR.

The use of data sampling in reports

If you have large amounts of traffic and decide to get fancy combining metrics, you may be subject to sampling. Sampling is the process of analyzing a statistically significant subset of data. It represents your total website traffic within a margin of error. It detects similarities with your larger dataset to select a balanced sample. In Google Analytics 4, several reports are always un-sampled, while a few reports will be sampled.

How to set up Google Analytics 4

The key for setting up Google Analytics 4 is to not abandon your legacy reporting in Universal Analytics. The transition won’t happen until July, 2023. Universal Analytics can fill in data gaps while you acclimate to the new platform.

First, there is a Google Analytics 4 Setup Assistant within the platform’s administration tools. For those with gtag.js, once you select the appropriate property, the setup assistant will do the heavy lifting for you. Here’s where you can find that setup wizard:

If you use a website plugin, Google Tag Manager (GTM) or an analytics.js snippet, you’ll need to go about placing the Google Analytics 4 HTML yourself. 

Luckily, GTM already has pre-built tags if you are looking for a relatively painless way to upgrade your tracking.

What are Google Analytics 4 goals?

Like Universal Analytics, marketers can set “goals” in Google Analytics 4 to measure user actions. When aligned with digital marketing objectives, goals can be a powerful reporting tool. These goals need to be set up in the platform to be measured properly. There are four main types of goals in Google Analytics 4:

• Destination — when a user visits a specific page on your site
• Duration — how long a user stays on your site before leaving
• Pages per session — the number of pages each user visits before leaving
• Events — specific user interactions on your website like form conversions, clicks on outbound links, button clicks, and PDF downloads.

In Google Analytics 4, you can simply check or uncheck an event to count as a goal. This is a key difference compared to Universal Analytics. You can turn goals off and on to adjust as your site changes. For example, you may be testing an offer and find it’s not worth continuing. This feature would enable you to turn off that event as a goal. This helps you focus on the events that matter to your marketing operation.

Better data means better decisions

Setting up Google Analytics 4 is a small shift toward more accurate web analytics. It’s also a key building block of a first-party data strategy. Using data effectively can help marketing leaders gain confidence and make better investments.

Silverback Strategies offers digital marketing analytics services, including Google Analytics 4 setup and reports. These analytics services are typically in conjunction with other digital marketing solutions like paid media, search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing. Contact us to learn more.

Content marketers want to know which blog posts catch users’ attention, push prospects down the sales funnel or convince leads to become customers. This is essential to measuring blog ROI.

We want to figure out how much a blog contributes to a company’s revenue. Are we actually helping the bottom line? This level of marketing attribution is critical to solving major marketing pain points.

Knowing what makes the magic happen helps content marketers improve our skills and be more efficient with our blogging budgets.

Easy enough, right?

Well…no.

Calculating blog ROI isn’t straightforward or simple.

It would be great if marketing teams could easily tie every behavior by individual users directly to digital marketing objectives. Every content marketing agency in the industry would rejoice! 

Unfortunately, complete data sets with that granular level of detail are not always available.

User privacy, limits to analytics and murky data sets mean you can’t always track which behaviors led to a specific customer transaction as accurately as you like, even if you’ve implemented a first-party data strategy.

Service-based businesses — plumbers, electricians, designers, etc. — have it even tougher. Measuring blog ROI depends much more on your revenue tracking platform outside of Google Analytics. These businesses typically have a longer sales process, and Google does not collect that information. It’s hard to marry the data between the revenue tracking platform and Google Analytics because you can’t easily go back and combine the two.

However, this does not mean we should throw our blog budgets down the drain with no hope of seeing a measurable return.

Measuring Blog ROI

Let’s be clear: blog ROI isn’t always measured by direct, attributable revenue generation. Many marketers lean on shares, time on page, bounce rate, engagements on social and other top-funnel metrics to determine whether or not their content is resonating.

Read More: A Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy for Lead Generation

You don’t always want to get bogged down on the monetary value. There are so many other aspects that blogs can bring to the table.

But the fact remains: at some point, a client, or a boss, or someone who can directly impact your career, will ask you that hard question — what are we getting for all those blogs you’re writing? 

Yes, you want to pay attention to your blog’s growth. And while attribution modeling can help you understand which individual posts drive conversions, that’s often not enough information to show if those conversions are actually leading to customer spend.

To do that, you’ll need a more in-depth method of figuring out how to estimate the revenue and ROI for a blog. That’s what we’re here to do. 

But before we start the math…

A Few Blog ROI Notes to Keep in Mind

We can’t read minds (yet). We can only look at data — and Google Analytics looks at users in sessions. By default, the platform attributes conversions to the channel that received the last click before the conversion. This often ignores the importance a blog can play in earlier stages and even throughout the sales funnel.

And, as our friends at Google point out, that means you’re missing out on a lot of value because the way users interact with the digital environment has changed so radically.

“As marketers, we were taught to master the funnel — a linear customer journey from awareness to consideration to purchase,” Google’s President of the Americas Allan Thygesen wrote in a September 2018 post entitled Beyond the Traditional Marketing Funnel — A New Formula For Growth on the Think With Google blog. “And using mass media, the key levers to drive growth were reach and frequency. We used demographics to approximate user intent and inform our targeting and creative…

“But this model no longer applies to today’s customer journeys,” he continues. “In the last six months, Google looked at thousands of users’ clickstream data from a third-party opt-in panel. We found that no two journeys are exactly alike, and in fact, most journeys don’t resemble a funnel at all. They look like pyramids, diamonds, hourglasses, and more. Digital technology and mobile devices have put people in control. We all now expect an immediate answer in the moments we want to know, go, do, and buy.”

There’s no perfect method for measuring blog ROI. But by creating an estimate, we can get a general sense of a blog’s revenue creation efficiency.

That alone can provide valuable information to content marketers as they work to improve their efforts.

Here We Go: The Blog ROI Math

Depending on what a business offers, how Google Analytics is set up and what the sales process is like, some of this may need to be shifted to fit your business’ exact situation. Regardless, everyone will need to come prepared with these numbers and factors before they get started:

• An average transaction amount
• What goals are in Google Analytics
• The percentage of people that converted who became customers
• The blog staffer’s yearly/hourly salary or agency fees for whoever runs the blog
• How long the blog staffer spends managing and writing the blog
• SEO and paid media spend

It’s good to break down revenue per goal to get the most accurate revenue estimate as possible. Using just the overall revenue may end up giving some conversions more or less credit than they deserve.

Step 1: Establish goal conversion values

Not everyone who converts turns into a customer. To estimate the ROI for a blog, you’ll need to know, on average, what a single conversion on your site is worth.

Meaning: if a person converts, what is the company expected to earn?

Find this value by taking the average transaction amount and multiplying it by the percentage of people that converted who became customers.

This value is used in the next part of the equation, but as a side note, it can be plugged into Google Analytics to make measuring blog ROI easier.

For more information about calculating goal conversion values and goals in general for Google Analytics, check out Google’s help page about goals.

Step 2: Calculate the blog’s average estimated revenue per goal.

Have the conversion values for all of the goals figured out? Good. It’s time to estimate the average revenue that your blog creates.

This revenue represents the dollar value for goals completed on blog pages AND when a blog page was part of the conversion path that ended in goal completion.

To do this:

Take the number of goal completions from your blog URL (found in Google Analytics under Behavior → Landing Pages → Advanced Filter: landing page containing “blog” with the time frame set for the time that you’re looking at) and multiply that figure by the goal conversion value.

Then, add the number of assisted conversions from your blog URL (found in Google Analytics under Conversions → Multi-Channel Funnels → Assisted Conversions → Secondary dimensions: Landing Page URL → Advanced Filter: Landing Page URL containing “blog” with the time frame set for the time that you’re looking at) and again multiply that by the conversion value.

Complete this process for each goal.

Step 3: Estimate the blog’s average revenue

This part is easy! Add up all of the blog conversion revenue numbers to get the average estimated revenue the blog helped create during the time frame you selected. This is a simple, yet important step to measuring blog ROI.

Step 4: Identify the right investment

(Ed. note – This is not a perfect formula for figuring out actual investment; rather, it’s a pretty simple estimate that gets close to what that digital investment would be. Want to do more math and work in the company’s overhead and other nitty-gritty details? Go for it. Otherwise, use this one. If an agency manages your blog, use their fee as the investment figure for the blog.)

To get the blog investment, start by figuring out the blog writer’s hourly fee. Divide the blog writer’s salary by the hours he or she works in a year (usually just over 2,000 for a full-time employee, according to Advanton).

Once you have that number, multiply the hourly wage by the number of hours spent working on the blog (which includes writing, maintaining, boosting and optimizing for SEO).

Add that number to the blog’s monthly hosting fees and any money spent to boost your blog post on social media. This will give you the estimated investment in your blog for that month.

Step 5: Calculate blog ROI

Congratulations! You now have the blog’s estimated revenue and investment.

All that’s left to do now is figure out the ROI percentage.

To do this, follow the basic ROI formula: revenue minus investment, divided by investment. For your blog ROI, it’ll look like this.

A few things to remember before you get too excited or disappointed:

• This number is based on single sessions for the selected time frame. As a result, numbers may overlap.
• Some of the conversions or traffic may be counted twice. Your investment calculation may be off. 
• Consider this formula “impressionistic.” You’ll get a pretty good idea of the value you’re providing (or if you’re losing revenue), but it’s not necessarily accurate down to the nearest cent.

I (Generally) Know My Blog ROI. Now what?

So, we’ve estimated our blog’s revenue and blog ROI. Great. Fantastic. This information is helpful when we internalize it and act on it.

Picking up on trends between blog content and goal completions can help tailor editorial strategies going forward. But there’s much more to do than simply following data trends if we want to improve and maximize ROI for a blog.

At the end of the day, the blog comes down to publishing good content. But if it’s about proving ROI, blogs need spin to get people to convert. Include calls to action and conversion points or put in a way to navigate to conversion points.

To have a financially successful blog, we need to include those calls to action and conversion points on the page itself in order to really drive conversions and revenue. Just putting up a post and hoping people click around our site can only do so much for us in the end. We need to help our visitors find the things we want them to find.

Plus, a blog doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs help to be as useful to your business as it can be.

How to Build Blog ROI in 3 Simple Steps

From here, we recommend following these three tips for maximizing ROI on organic blog posts:

1. Create interesting, well-written content that actually answers real audience questions or solves real audience problems.
2. Optimize your keywords for organic search. If you’re not optimizing your content, no one’s going to find it. 
3. Include compelling creative that’s also optimized for search. Great creative will help you get noticed in social media and has real SEO value, too.

Silverback Strategies Helps Max Out Your Marketing Dollars. 

Having a combined analytics, content, SEO and paid media strategy utilizes the full power of your content to increase traffic, drive more conversions and boost your bottom line.

Silverback Strategies helps break down silos and supercharge your performance marketing programs. Contact us today to learn more.

You’re a marketing leader. Maybe you’re juggling teams of specialists focused on semi-siloed marketing programs. Or perhaps you’re the bandwidth-strapped ‘jack of all trades’ marketer operating as a department of one. Either way, you work hard to bring revenue to your business and help your company grow. But communicating the impact of those efforts is unfortunately neither easy, nor clear.

Sound familiar? We get it. 

Marketing teams consistently struggle to fully and accurately demonstrate the impact of their efforts on company revenue. In the era of digital marketing, availability of data is no issue — in fact there’s often too much! But deciding what to present and how to present data in a way that will resonate with your executive team is where the real challenge lies. 

What brought that customer your way? Was it a LinkedIn post, a white paper, or a Google ad? It was probably all of those. According to Gartner, B2B companies have an average of 24 interactions with a potential customer from inquiry to conversion – and that’s just starting from the inquiry. How do you account for – and give credit to – all the smaller interactions that occur before a customer reaches out?

Imagine you are a Marketing Director in an ecommerce business and you don’t have visibility into how awareness-level marketing activities impact your sales funnel and bottom line. 

A few years ago, we had an ecommerce client running a brand awareness campaign on Facebook before the platform rolled out their robust product campaign features. The exposure they had from this campaign helped to fuel other, successful paid search campaigns closer to the point of purchase. 

However, they did not realize how much of an impact this top-of-the-funnel campaign had on sales because their tracking was not yet set up properly. Counter to our advice, this client shut off the Facebook campaign which dried up their lead flow. In one fell swoop, they obliterated their marketing funnel because they didn’t have the data to show how that awareness campaign drove business outcomes.

You don’t have to meet the same fate.

What is Marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI is a way to measure how much your marketing contributes to your company’s profits. You can calculate marketing ROI by subtracting marketing costs from sales growth, divided by the marketing spend. 

Marketing ROI  = ((Gross Revenue – Marketing Spend) / Marketing Spend)

While it’s tempting to use net revenue as part of your calculation, focus on using gross revenue because there are too many other cost variables (like rent, salaries, etc.) that contribute to net revenue.

Knowing your marketing ROI will bring you clarity in your actions and the confidence to make smart decisions about your marketing spend.

Connect Marketing Data to the Rest of the Business

If you want to unlock true insights into how your marketing affects your company’s revenue and what you can do to drive even more sales, you have to tie your data to the data of other areas of your business. This connection is the technical foundation of your marketing ROI, so it’s important to know what data should be connected, and how it should be leveraged to make investment decisions

Sales and operations are the two key areas you should focus on. To read more detail on connecting marketing data to the rest of your business, download our free how-to guide.

Integration that Moved the Needle

Long Roofing benefited from integrating their marketing data with both sales and operations, creating a targeted content and digital strategy that generated not just click-throughs and conversions, but resulted in a marketing platform that can be optimized based on the performance of sales and call center teams. The data integration and campaigns were so cohesive that the company was able to throttle back their efforts when leads overwhelmed their call center. The tight integration of all their platforms allows them to adjust the levers of their marketing ROI as needed. Read the full case story here.

Measure Marketing ROI on the Right Scale

Accuracy is important in calculating marketing ROI. Once you use the right data – connected with other key areas of your business – to measure it, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how marketing affects revenue. 

A healthy view comes from synthesizing short-term and long-term return – a relationship that will vary based on the goals of your business and your market maturity.

If you’re selling a commodity product or service, short-term marketing ROI data might drive more of your decisions as you harvest a mature or declining market. Focus on attribution of techniques, tactics and channels. Short-term return calculations work well to measure performance of specific campaigns.

With a product or service that requires more buyer education (and thus more touches), you’ll want to weigh your calculations more toward long-term marketing ROI. Focus on the impact of branding and messaging, as long-term calculations measure brand performance over longer time horizons.

Your Data is Only as Good as What You Do with It

You can talk click-throughs and views all day, but your revenue depends on you being able to not just track but measure and assign real value to your metrics. You have the data. It’s time to bring it together and act – so you can get the results your leadership demands. 

Knowing your marketing ROI will help you hold tight to your marketing budget and help others in your business see the impact you and your team bring to the table.

How Silverback Strategies Can Help

Silverback Strategies gives marketing leaders the confidence and clarity to accelerate campaign performance and prove revenue impact so they can do more of what works and lose what doesn’t.

We offer an integrated team of experts and practitioners across Analytics, Content, Creative, Paid Media, Research and SEO to customize unique campaigns and revenue attribution models. Here are two examples of how Silverback can help you measure marketing ROI:

1. Infrastructure for marketing data integration — Our expert Analytics team examines your current Web Analytics Tracking and CRM connectivity. Armed with these insights, we provide guidance to augment your data collection & quality standards. This will give you confidence in knowing accurate marketing data is connected to the rest of your business.
2. Centralized marketing dashboards & executive data reviews — Using the latest innovations in data visualization, our teams create customized reports and dashboards tailored to what matters most to you and your C-suite. We then review the latest insights with you and your C-suite so that you can quickly act on defining trends for your business.

Our dedicated account managers work side-by-side with you to maximize your marketing efforts, coordinate across resources, and get value out of every dollar you spend. 

Ready to go? Request a consultation today.

Google Analytics 4 is here. The search engine giant released the newest update to its web analytics tool on Oct. 14, 2020 with the goal of keeping pace “with major shifts in consumer behavior and privacy-driven changes to longtime industry standards,” Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s Vice President for Measurement, Analytics, and Buying Platforms wrote in a post on the company blog.

This Google Analytics update didn’t exactly come out of the blue. Google Analytics 4 sprouted from a beta the company was already running, so the changes that come with it are familiar to experts. In this article, we’ll explore how you can plan a smooth transition to Google Analytics 4 for your company both in the short and long term.

This update will impact every user

Google Analytics is by far the most-used website analytics platform out there. BuiltWith, which tracks software usage on websites around the world, estimates over 29 million websites use Google Analytics as their website analytics provider. So an update to the platform is a development any marketing professional needs to properly examine.

“Every Google Analytics user will be impacted by this move,” says Louis Belpaire, Chief Operating Officer at Silverback Strategies, “which is about providing marketers with easier workflows, a smoother UI, better privacy management tools, more customer centric reports and a deeper integration with Google Ads.”

An important note: your Google Analytics account won’t have changed automatically. The previous iteration, Universal Analytics, will still load up when you log into your account. But if you set up a new property in Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4 will now be the default option.

The new platform will change the way marketers analyze data

Google Analytics 4 is an expansion of App + Web, a beta the company introduced last year. Silverback implemented the App + Web beta for a few of our clients, so our analytics team has some takeaways after recording data in the beta as well as in Universal Analytics. Here are the big changes you’ll want to be aware of.

“This property is completely different from the GA we now know,” says Daniel Rim, Analytics Account Manager at Silverback Strategies. “The data is collected, stored, and filtered differently. Reports and segmentation have also gotten a huge remake. We’ll definitely have to shift into a new era of analyzing our data to account for the new data model.”

It is designed to adapt to a future without cookies

Two laws in particular, the California Consumer Privacy Act and the General Data Protection Regulation, have forced companies to take further steps to protect the private information of consumers. Google is phasing out third-party cookies, which allow a company to track website visitors after they leave that company’s website, by 2022. Google Analytics 4 is clearly aimed at making sure the phasing out of cookies doesn’t kill your business.

“Because the technology landscape continues to evolve, the new Analytics is designed to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers,” Srinivasan writes. “It uses a flexible approach to measurement, and in the future, will include modeling to fill in the gaps where the data may be incomplete. This means that you can rely on Google Analytics to help you measure your marketing results and meet customer needs now as you navigate the recovery and as you face uncertainty in the future.”

So what does that look like in practice?

Read more: 5 Ways B2B Brands Can Stand Out in a Suddenly Crowded Digital Landscape

Customer-centric measurements move away from sessions and towards events

“The new Analytics gives you customer-centric measurement, instead of measurement fragmented by device or by platform,” Srinivasan writes on Google’s blog. “It uses multiple identity spaces, including marketer-provided User IDs and unique Google signals from users opted into ads personalization, to give you a more complete view of how your customers interact with your business.”

Preparing for the move to a cookie-less internet means changing the way we measure what consumers do on our clients’ websites. That starts with moving on from sessions as a go-to metric. 

“We are shifting into a new data model: Event-Driven instead of Session-Based,” Rim says. ”One of the main issues with sessions is that it doesn’t fully capture all of the micro-interactions and doesn’t represent what users are actually doing on websites.”

An event is any user interaction with your site that you collect data about. This could include simple things like a click, page scroll or site search. It could also include bigger actions like someone making a purchase, adding to their cart, signing up for a newsletter or downloading a white paper.

“By moving into Event-Driven, it puts the focus more on the user and measures how they are engaging with your website or app,” Rim says. “Google has tied all of the standard events (clicks, page scroll, site search, and downloads) back to the user instead of the session. We can start saying “Users engaged with these particular events,” instead of “This session had a page view and completed some event.”

Increased machine learning means more insights and predictions

In the future, Google hopes increased machine learning can help account for gaps in data that will come up as cookies are phased out.

“For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure,” Srinivasan writes in the Google announcement. “We’re continuing to add new predictive metrics, like the potential revenue you could earn from a particular group of customers. This allows you to create audiences to reach higher value customers and run analyses to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others, so you can take action to improve your results.”

Machine learning insights were already a part of Universal Analytics, but GA4 beefs them up a bit. Google’s walkthrough of the new analytics user interface showcases how and where you can find these new insights.

Marketers should set up Google Analytics 4 sooner rather than later

Google won’t make anyone overhaul the way they use analytics overnight. Which is good, because you’ll have to take some steps to prepare to transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.

“The main downside of not migrating to Google Analytics 4 is that we’d be setting ourselves up for failure in the future,” Rim says. “Google hasn’t provided any information about migration timelines, but based on how Google phased out Classic Analytics and transitioned into Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 will also take a new stance and soon replace the current Analytics.”

Read more: How to Measure Your Blog’s Return on Investment

So how do you make sure you’re ready for the transition?

You can’t just import all your data from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. The new edition is a new data schema, so your Universal Analytics data doesn’t come with you when you upgrade. Instead, it’ll be a good idea to start tracking data in Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 for a while before Google Analytics 4 becomes the standard.

You can record that data now, and Google offers advice on how to set up parallel tracking whether you use Google Tag Manager or gtag.js. Tracking in both versions of Google Analytics will allow you to explore and experiment without messing up your current workflow.

Rim says the next steps he’ll take at Silverback include adapting to the new styles of reports and metrics, setting up additional tracking and experimenting with the new audience features that you can use for paid media and SEO. 

While many businesses offer a product or service where a click-and-convert buying cycle is the norm, it’s not so simple for others. B2B or B2G providers, for example, may require weeks or months of lead nurturing after the initial touchpoint is made. 

Typically, those products and services with longer buying cycles also carry higher values, thus increasing the advertiser’s need to accurately close the loop and attribute them to their originating source.

Let’s take a closer look at offline conversion tracking and learn how your company can close the loop.

What is Offline Conversion Tracking?

Offline conversion tracking is the measurement and attribution of post-lead events, typically occurring outside of the website environment, for optimization and informed decision-making. This is often difficult to do because it requires collaboration between media buyers, web developers, CRM administrators, and legal teams. However, offline conversion tracking is important because it offers the ad platforms a measure of lead quality and real-world results. A lead that results in a sale or new business is more valuable than a lead that does not.

Kinds of Conversions that Happen Offline

The types of conversions that happen offline look different for every business, but the idea is to share the status of the lead with the source platform. This way, it can learn how to drive even more high-quality leads. 

For one of our clients, we track leads from all our ad platforms so that we can understand where to best spend ad dollars to maintain their profit target while maximizing lead volume. For another client, our audience research uncovered that people may research a brand’s products online but buy them in-store. This kind of customer behavior helps us translate online marketing efforts into real-world results.

How to Track Offline Conversions

Here, we share some tips on tools you and your team can use to “close the loop” with your offline conversions.

Google Ads

Google Ads offline conversion tracking helps you “close the loop,” as well as understand how online ads are driving offline conversions, by allowing you to track conversions when leads make it further down the sales funnel. You’ll be able to see how specific campaigns and ad groups affect sales. To set up offline conversion tracking, businesses can upload data from their CRM or point-of-sale system into Google Ads, which will match the data with Google’s click and conversion data to attribute sales to specific campaigns and ad groups.

There is also an option to do offline conversion tracking without GCLID with Google. It leverages Enhanced Conversion tracking (providing Google with the PII of the person who is submitting your form, then later telling Google when that person has progressed in your CRM funnel to the next qualification stage or a sale). 

Pro tip: A great way to keep lead-stored info associated with a Google Ads click is by capturing the GCLID as a “hidden field” in the lead form. This stores the GCLID with the customer’s given information within the CRM. 

While this typically requires some light development work, the added leads and customer insights are typically well worth the extra effort. Google even provides a general framework for this implementation to get you started.

Meta Ads Manager

Similar to Google Ads, Meta allows advertisers to upload data through an “offline event set” via the Business Manager.

Instead of relying on a unique click ID, as Google Ads does, Meta asks advertisers to upload hashed data containing unique information about the event or action to which you are trying to attribute a campaign. This includes a timestamp for the event, an event name, and a unique ID associated with each event.

Facebook also has a rolled-up solution called Conversions API. The FB pixel can receive data from both the website and from a ‘server’ (offline events being sent to FB via API from a CRM directly or from middleware like Zapier).

Integrated CRMs

Recent platform developments have centered around API integrations with the top CRMs (such as Salesforce, Marketo, Zappier, and OneCommand) to further the ease of attribution without all the manual leg work.

Typically, an authentication via the ad platform, followed by the CRM itself, will successfully sync the two and automatically pass desired actions for attribution at the campaign, keyword, and ad levels.  

Strategies to Drive In-Store Purchases

Regarding offline conversions, here are some strategies for maximizing digital integration that leads to in-store purchases. 

Short-Term Strategies

Optimize campaigns toward store visits, such as with location targeting and location-specific messaging. You can also promote in-store incentives like giveaways. Utilize live, in-store events to drive customers to your brick-and-mortar stores.

Long-Term Strategies

Set up broader experiments (with control sets) to measure incremental lifts in KPIs (such as in-store transactions or revenue) after an adjustment to strategy or budget. Analyze your data and get to know what drives your customers to make in-store purchases after online research.

Is Your Brand Effectively Tracking Offline Conversions?

Silverback offers conversion rate optimization services that can help your business maximize offline conversions. To find out more, email us at Info@silverbackstrategies.com or fill out our online contact form.

*This post is part of a recurring series regarding mobile apps and the tools available to digital marketers to drive more installs and understand in app customer behavior.

Mobile apps can play a crucial role in a business’ success. A great App improves overall customer experience and can result in faster and more frequent conversions from users.  For this reason, along with the significant growth in mobile traffic, it is becoming more important to begin reporting on app download stats along your other campaign metrics. With Facebook, Google and Bing coming up with new ad formats for app promotion it can get tricky to attribute app installs to the right marketing channels.  Here are three ways, with benefits and draw backs to help track those client app downloads from easiest to hardest.

Using a Tag Management system on your website

The simplest way to get an estimate of how many downloads are originating from paid visits to your website is to track clicks going to the App Stores. It can be achieved by passing a custom event to your Analytics platform each time a customer clicks on an App Store link. If you are using Google Analytics, once the event is firing properly, you can create a specific App Store Click Goal and monitor its progression in a customized report.

The obvious draw back to this method is that you do not know whether or not the user downloaded the app after clicking on the App Store link, and you are merely collecting data for an estimate. The benefit to this approach is that it requires no developer access to the application or access to the App Stores themselves. This method is a great way to start internal conversations about app download attribution and the necessity to implement more accurate app download tracking.

Using the Google Play Store and Apple’s iOS App Analytics report

Another and more complex way to get a clearer picture of your app install data is to link a Google Play Store account to a Google Analytics mobile app property. Linking these two accounts will provide access to a report named the “Google Play Referral Report” which passes Android install data from the Google Play store to the GA property. This report shows which campaigns are driving the most app installs. While this is all great information, the Play Store Referral Report does not include iOS app install data.

To attribute iOS downloads to specific campaigns, you can tag App Store links across your site and ad campaigns using iTunes Connect’s App Analytics campaign URLs. These Campaign URLs contain tracking parameters and will pass the campaign source to the App Analytics dashboard. With this information available in the Apple dashboard, you can now combine your Play store and iOS data to get a more accurate picture of how your marketing efforts are driving app installs.

This setup is slightly more complex and requires admin access across Google Analytics, the Google Play Store, and iTunes Connect.  It also requires the technical work of tagging URLs and replacing them in the proper campaigns. The benefit of this approach is that you will be tracking App installs directly from the respective stores, but again are only seeing data at the campaign level.

Implementing the Adwords SDK within your Apps

 Placing Adwords’ SDK within your Android or iOS app is the best solution when trying to attribute app installs to specific ads or keywords. The benefit of the Adwords SDK (Software Development Kit) is that it is lightweight and can pass a lot of insightful data to Google Adwords. The steps for implementation are outlined on the Google developer site. The SDK allows for the source off the download to be tied back to a very specific ad unit or keyword in Google Adwords. The drawback to this approach is that it requires development resources and admin access to the app which can be time consuming and expensive.

 
Those are three possible methods to track app installs. The three of these solutions not only flow in-terms of difficulty but can also be a great way to start the app tracking conversation when defining a mobile app tagging strategy and when estimating the amount of development resources that will be required.