SEM : Track and Tack
Six steps to improve B-to-B lead quality from paid search campaigns
October 2009 By Janet Driscoll Miller
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• Leads from paid search—By understanding the quantity of leads from paid search, you can determine how many true conversions you’re receiving from your campaigns. While conversion tracking in the search engines is good, it’s often not foolproof, sometimes overcounting conversions. Understanding the true number of leads you received from paid search helps you understand your true conversion rate and cost per conversion.
• Opportunities from paid search—Not all leads are qualified and become sales opportunities. So the next evaluation step is to understand the number of opportunities (or qualified leads) coming from paid search. Additionally, review the keywords that drove the most opportunities—these are your star keywords. When making paid search account changes, consider ways to ensure that these words receive a higher percentage of the media budget.
• Deals won/deals lost from paid search—Of course, true ROI doesn’t come from leads but rather from closed sales. So to measure paid search ROI, you need to review the opportunities you won as well as the opportunities you lost. Which keywords drove the highest quantity of sales and the greatest revenue? Which keywords appear most in the lost opportunities?
Like with the opportunities, consider restructuring the account to ensure that the keywords that appeared most in the deals won receive a greater share of the budget than other underperforming account keywords. Also, if you begin to see a monthly trend where certain keywords continue to appear exclusively or primarily in opportunities lost, consider removing these keywords from your account. This will help shift more of the media budget to better-performing keywords versus allocating some portion of your resources to underperforming keywords and phrases.
• Lifetime value from paid search—Many B-to-B marketers have limited paid search budgets and often are faced with tough decisions about how to prioritize these dollars. A lifetime value report can provide valuable insight and direction when making budgeting decisions.
When I was working for an online survey company a few years ago, I ran a report on lifetime value for paid search and looked at which search engines produced the highest lifetime value customers. In other words, which search engines generated the most repeat customers? The results were unexpected. I found that while Google produced the highest quantity of new customers each year, MSN customers had the highest lifetime value. Essentially, customers from MSN tended to be more loyal than those from Google, signaling that I should, at minimum, keep running both the Google and MSN paid search programs.
6. Compile data, and adjust paid search campaigns accordingly.
Armed with the data from these reports, added with the information from each search engine (such as impressions, clickthrough rate, etc.), you can begin to make better informed decisions about your B-to-B paid search campaigns. I use the table (shown below) and chart this information month over month.
This chart allows you to collect both key performance indicators as well as ROI measurements—giving you a full, clear picture about which paid search keywords or campaigns are fulfilling your company’s paid search goals. Additionally, by using this chart for other marketing activities, you can better compare the true value of each tactic.
Once the chart is complete each month, return to your paid search campaigns to make necessary adjustments:
- Problem: Low clickthrough rate (CTR)—If the clickthrough rate is very low, consider testing new search ad copy to better entice clicks.
- Problem: Low conversion rate—If the conversion rate is low, it means that you’re receiving clicks. But once prospects arrive at your landing page, they are not signing up. This typically signals a problem with the landing page. Is your message/offer consistent with the search ad copy?
- Problem: Low opportunity rate—If the conversion rate is high but the opportunity rate is low, this may signal that your offers or keywords are not targeted enough to your audience. Consider removing keywords that are not converting to opportunities, especially if you have not maximized impression share for top-performing keywords.
By following a few tracking and analysis best practices, you’ll have the performance insights necessary to help fine-tune your paid search investments, contributing to better lead quality.
Janet Driscoll Miller is the president and CEO of Search Mojo, a search engine marketing agency focused on B-to-B lead generation. You can read more from Miller at Search Mojo’s blog, Search Marketing Sage, at http://blog.search-mojo.com. Follow her on Twitter at @janetdmiller or @SearchMojo, or contact her at (800) 939-5938.
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