Search Advisory

Stacy Williams, founder and president of Prominent Placement Inc, led a webinar for Online Marketing Connect’s Search Engine Marketing Focus Week in early May. This is the fifth post in a six-part series based on her webinar about the use of search engine marketing to pull B2B buyers through the sales funnel. To view the slides from Stacy’s presentation, click here.

One of the key benefits of all forms of online marketing is measurability. Every customer click and interaction can be recorded, and the resulting data can be sorted and analyzed in any number of combinations. Let’s explore some nuances of analytics in B2B marketing.

Analytics – Latent Conversions

B2B purchasing is notoriously slow. A previous post in this series mentioned that it also usually involves multiple people, from the employee who first feels the need to the company purchasing manager. This means that most B2B conversions are latent conversions; the buyer doesn’t convert on the first visit to your site, but after multiple visits over a prolonged period of time. Tracking all this can be complex.

Let’s say the buyer first finds your site through a broad search. He then sends an email about it to his boss, who clicks on a direct link in the email to view your site. With his boss’s approval, our buyer now runs a search on your company name to find the site again and make the purchase. Which of these digital touches gets the credit for this conversion?

This is called conversion attribution, and it can be tricky, making accurate tracking and analysis difficult. One way to make it easier is to set your site’s cookies to a long expiration date, of at least 6 months. This will enable the analytics system to recognize users that return to your site long after their initial visit, so you can connect the dots and gather information on their entire buying experience.

There are several tools on the horizon that will enhance conversion attribution. One of these is Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels, which will be offered through Google Analytics (it’s currently in limited beta testing). This will delve into conversion tracking data in great depth, allowing marketers to analyze how different traffic sources and channels relate to and support each other. The detail-oriented part of your brain will surely find plenty to scrutinize with this tool, so be on the lookout for it. To learn more about this upcoming feature, see slide 42 of Stacy’s presentation for screenshots and visit Google’s product page for more information.

Analytics – Phone Call Tracking

Another tricky aspect of conversion tracking is offline interactions. Consider this scenario: a searcher clicks on your paid ad and your landing page asks him to call your sales team. He does so, and eventually makes a purchase. How can we make sure that that phone call is accounted for and the sale is properly attributed to the paid ad?

There are a number of good call-tracking technology providers in the market. We use Marchex. Here’s how it works: the “real” phone number is taken off the site and replaced with a bit of JavaScript code that displays a “dummy” number. This dummy number changes based on how the visitor arrived at the website. Visitors who click a paid ad will see phone number A, visitors who click an organic search result will see number B, visitors who click a direct link will see number C, and so on. All these dummy numbers will automatically and quickly transfer to the main “real” number, so the caller experience is the same and they won’t know the difference. This allows marketers to tie phone calls to a specific online traffic source, which is very valuable in the pursuit of accurate analytics.

In our experience, this has made a tremendous impact. For some of our clients, a full two-thirds of search-generated leads were actually coming in via phone. This means that we were previously making decisions based only on one-third of the full dataset, and we were blind to the rest of it. More selfishly, it means that we were only getting credit for one-third of the results we were actually generating. Tracking phone calls is an easy and relatively inexpensive way to broaden the scope of your analytics and improve both the quantity and quality of information you have to make sound marketing decisions.

Please stay tuned for the rest of this series, and click on the series tag – B2B funnel – to read all the posts.