Want to Improve Your Advertising? Align Your Measurement Strategy With the Right KPIs

The ability to measure nearly every facet of marketing campaigns and websites is nothing new. Solutions have existed for several years now and are continuously receiving updates, improvements, and new features that allow for even more in-depth analysis of customer and visitor trends. Tools like Google Analytics even allow for tracking of everything from your business's website, to social media interactions, to your television ads (just to scratch the surface). With such a powerful (and free) tool available, there is really no excuse NOT to have insight into your initiatives!

With such a robust arsenal available to today's marketers, however, it can become quite tempting to report on every available piece of data. While much of this data is indeed important, only a small selection of them does a good job of gauging the impact of marketing and advertising effectiveness.

So your organization chose an analytical tool to measure its campaigns and website: What should your measurement be focused on? Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)!

KPIs and You

KPIs are metrics and insights that are used to measure the success of a website or campaign. These KPIs typically demonstrate the success of your website at accomplishing the tasks it was designed for. Check out the visual below for a nice little example:

In order to identify KPIs for measurement, you must first determine the purpose of your organization's website or campaign. In the case of the above visual, the website exists to generate brand awareness, increase leads, and increase sales. Once you've identified these high-level goals, you must then look at what your analytical tool can measure and align the right metrics to the appropriate goals. For example, the amount of new visitors and direct traffic to the website are great indicators into its ability to generate brand awareness. Keep in mind that these KPIs shouldn't always be limited to a single tool! In some cases, they may even require insights into foot traffic (i.e. increases in foot traffic to a branch or ATM).

Want to impress the decision-makers even more? Use those KPIs to demonstrate Return on Investment! The people with the power to allocate budgets and make decisions often glaze over when presented with standard metrics. While they will definitely be impressed with the KPIs you've come up with, showing them ROI on the marketing budget will knock the ball out of the park. This requires that you have visibility into profit margins for a given initiative. If that isn't readily available to you, you might want to find out how to get it!

Conclusion

It is imperative that KPIs are identified with any measurement strategy, as they greatly benefit all facets of your business. They can help individuals in your team identify opportunities for increased efficiencies. Campaign performance can be easily determined by the marketing department, which would then allow for improvements. Your entire business benefits from a solidified base in measurement and improvements, and KPIs can be great building blocks for that foundation.

Picture This—An Infographic’s Role in Content Marketing

What are Infographics?

In short, an infographic is any visual representation of information. These large, creative images (see below for an example) can be found in a variety of places around the web, like on blogs, through some social networks like Pinterest, and on bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. For the purposes of Internet Marketing, an infographic is normally used to present a large amount or complicated data in an appealing and engaging way. And that’s the key to your business getting the most out of this kind of content—engagement with your target audience. The assumption always seems to be that web users are impatient—they won’t bother with a site if it doesn’t load after a few seconds, and they won’t take the time to read every word on a text-rich web page. To market in this environment, where users want information in (faster than) an instant, visual content like infographics just might be a way to slow people down and get your message across effectively.

How can I use Infographics for Marketing?

Just like any other visual-based piece of content, the marketing value of infographics lies in their portability, opportunities for sharing via social networks, and linking back to your business’s web site.

Portability: Once designed and completed, an infographic can be easily uploaded to an aggregator, repurposed in a presentation, highlighted in an email promotion, or discussed in an article, blog post, press release, or social media post.

Sharing: Your business’s online presence, reach, and credibility can all receive a substantial boost when users share your visual content. Because of their relatively small size and wide range of applications, infographics make for an inexpensive chance for your business’s content to “go viral.”

Backlinking: Just because any text content within an infographic can’t be crawled or indexed by a search engine doesn’t mean that these images don’t have distinct SEO advantages. Anyone that shares and/or publishes an infographic somewhere else typically links back to your business’s website; this link bait results in greater traffic and a higher search ranking.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see the benefits that can come not only from infographics, but from the integration of any visual content into your business’s digital marketing plan. The key is that the content has to be well designed. The best images are appealing and easy to understand, as well as informative and engaging. They can show your business’s expertise on a particular subject as well as increase your reach and web traffic. Finally, infographics are easily repurposed, shared by users, and serve as effective link bait for SEO purposes. For a business owner, it seems a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words.

PPC Advertising Battle: AdWords Vs adCenter

Everyone knows that Google is king of search. But when it comes to Paid Search Advertising (PPC), is going with the Google always the best option? Although Bing and Yahoo combined do not compare to Google's daily search volume, their paid advertising via Microsoft adCenter might be a cheaper alternative that could generate a higher ROI for you.

Round 1 of the PPC Advertising Battle: Stats & Metrics 

From my experience, there seems to be less competition and therefore cheaper prices (CPC) on adCenter. Below is a snapshot look into a client's account on adCenter.

As you can see, they had an almost 2% CTR, an Average Position within the top 2-3 spots, a CPC below $1.00, and a CPA under $20.00. Now let's compare those performance metrics to the same time period on Google AdWords.

 Stats are taken for the same Date Range from Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.

As expected, Google AdWords brought in more traffic, and therefore more conversions (7 more to be exact). However, each Click cost $0.71 ($0.07 more) and each Conversion cost $26.26 (almost $10 more.)

Round 2 of the PPC Advertising Battle: ROI

If, for example, we assume the value of each conversion is $50 each, which PPC Account has a better ROI? Microsoft adCenter is showing a Cost of $583.10 (CPA $16.66 x 35 Conversions) with a returning Value of $1750 (35 Conversions x $50 value per Conversion). That results in an ROI of $1166.90 ($1750 Value - $583.10 Cost).

Keeping the same assumption of a $50 value per Conversion, Google AdWords earned a returning value of $2100 (42 Conversions x $50 Value), but had a cost of $1102.92 (Cost/Conv. $26.26 x 42 Conversions). With that said, the ROI for Google AdWords was $997.08 ($2100 Value - $1102.92 Cost.)

In this particular case, although Google AdWords earned a 90.4% ROI ($997.08), it was trumped by Microsoft adCenter, which earned an incredible 199.9% ROI ($1166.90).

Google AdWords Vs Microsoft Adverting Battle Re-cap

Microsoft adCenter did well in Round 1 with maintaining a good CTR (almost 2%) and generating 35 Conversions. However, Google was able to out muscle Microsoft, with more than double the CTR (above 4%) as well as an additional 7 Conversions (42 in total.)

In Round 2, Microsoft adCenter came out swinging with it lower CPC and CPA (or Cost/Conversion). After multiplying the incremental costs out, it turned out to be too much for Google. Microsoft adCenter was able to pull out the victory with a very impressive ROI of over $1,000.

If you run similar or identical campaigns on both Google AdWords & Microsoft adCenter, let us know which is performing better. Does your paid search advertising battle end the same way this one did with Microsoft earning the higher ROI?

A/B Testing (Split Testing) to Convert More Online Customers

What is A/B testing (split testing)?

A/B testing, or split testing, is a marketing testing method by which one baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response or conversion rates. An example would be to test two different subject lines of an email campaign. A/B testing has been implemented for direct mail and within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails, landing pages, or even entire websites to improve performance. You can also extend A/B testing to PPC advertising copy, alternative keywords, or PPC keyword match types.

How can my business or marketing department apply A/B testing?

You should always be testing ways to improve the sales process to reduce your cost per acquisition and to improve your customers’ experiences. I would recommend that you start with the “low hanging fruit” that could have the greatest impact on revenue or the customer experience. For example, an A/B test could be a simple as testing the color of the calls-to-action to improve the click-through-rate.

A/B testing can be applied to marketing tactics to improve sales or lead generation at a lower cost. In general, it’s easier to implement A/B testing with digital advertising because of the ability to make changes quickly and optimize the process. The findings from digital advertising can also be carried over to traditional advertising.

A/B Testing Best Practices

If you’re new to A/B/ split testing, here are a few best practices:

Define your goals. Clearly state what you hope to accomplish.

Determine how you plan to accomplish your goals. Keep it Simple!

What are you testing & why?

What is the variation you are testing (color, position, ad copy, etc.)?

Define the control and your variation for testing.

What are your expected results & reasoning?

Measure & Analyze the results through the sales or conversion process.

How do you apply A/B Testing to Internet Marketing Strategy?

You can leverage A/B testing based on geography, psychographics, customer lifecycles, etc. You want to develop realistic goals based on your target audiences. At first, I would recommend being targeted with your approach and limiting the test to a single market. It’s important to identify the greatest impact on the conversion process or sales process by modifying the internet marketing strategy slightly. Be sure to focus on all the results from the beginning of the process to completion and to communicate the results. Think about the effect the testing will have on saving time, money, and creating efficiencies.

Conclusion

If you haven’t started A/B testing, you’re wasting time, money, and missing opportunities. As marketers, we should always be testing to maximize performance and to reduce costs. Testing goes beyond just a subject line or ad copy. It requires focus, consistency, and planning. In addition, you must think about usability, branding, layouts, the purchase process, etc. There are numerous tools such as Web Optimizer, Visual Website Optimizer, or Test &Target to get started.

Looking For Better Insights On Members? Get The Big Picture!

In past blogs, I have discussed how web analytics can help gain the support of the decision makers and even laid out some great ways to measure traditional marketing with Google Analytics. But how do you get to the point of being able to show the decision makers the right insights in the first place? Today's blog is focused on some of the most common problems we've come across with banks and credit unions that stand between them and gaining greater insights into member behaviors and trends. More importantly, it sets out to show how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns via analytics and open minds.

The Problem

Institutions often seem to lack visibility into the "big picture". When I say "big picture", I am referring to the complete analytical scene: The website, your institution's social media assets, marketing campaigns (both online AND offline), affiliate sites, and of course conversions (leads & sales) and Return on Investment. There is little-to-no connection between their assets. Why is this?

This fragmented view seems to be caused by several things from internal politics to fears on data collection and security. What banks and credit unions often fail to realize is that tools like Google Analytics do not collect personally identifiable information! Monitoring beyond the main credit union/bank website is often viewed as a risk, when in reality the real risk is in the lack of visibility into the performance of marketing initiatives.

Are you from a bank or credit union that isn't afraid to get the tools in place to uncover some insightful gems? Want to see how to tie everything together? Read on!

Getting the Pieces in Place

The key to putting this analytical puzzle together is to first establish links between the data points. This means that policies and procedures need to be created for every "fragment" of your institution's initiatives:

1. Cross-Domain Tracking - It's imperative to remove any gaps in the clickstream of your website. Credit Unions and banks often use 3rd party loan application platforms. Luckily, web analytics solutions like Google Analytics feature advanced Cross-Domain tracking functionality to ensure the data is preserved all the way from the time the consumer lands on the site to the point that they submit an application.
2. URL Tagging - URLs being used for Pay Per Click & banner ads or being posted to your social media assets should be tagged for easier identification within web analytics tools.
3. Vanity Numbers & URLs - Vanity URLs and phone numbers set up for call tracking can help bridge the gap between web analytics and traditional marketing.
4. Event Tracking - Event Tracking can be used to identify when visitors to your website complete a desired action (like downloading an informational PDF or paper application).

Conclusion

A seamless view of marketing initiatives not obstructed by the glaring gaps and disconnects in data is every financial marketer's dream. Luckily a holistic view can be achieved through a combination of tagging, scripting, and good ol' ingenuity. Connecting the dots using analytical tools can yield opportunities to optimize both traditional and digital campaigns and ultimately increase new memberships and loan & credit applications.