“Information
is only as powerful as what you do with it,” said Avinash Kaushik,
digital marketing evangelist at Google. In his keynote at SES New York
2012, he talked about how marketers can achieve business goal
optimization with marketing budgets by being smart about analytics that
measure the success of various multichannel campaigns.
Three-quarters of marketers struggle to gauge the effectiveness of their SEO
and social marketing campaigns, Kaushik offered five tips for measuring
multichannel marketing success and investing in the right content for
search, social, email and other campaigns.
1. Focus on measuring holistic success
If
internet marketers are doing a good job of creating integrated web
marketing campaigns, consumers have multiple touch points for any brand.
And yet, the average website sees a 2 percent conversion rate from combined web marketing efforts. But Kaushik told SES New York attendees that the economic value of web and content marketing offers businesses is bigger than 2 percent.
Marketers
need to consider the “assist value” of their various marketing
initiatives. First and last touch points in single visits that result in
conversions aren’t sufficient attribution models. Indeed, Brafton
recently reported more than 70 percent of marketers undervalue SEO
in terms of driving web conversions by focusing on direct brand visits.
He said, “Even if organic phrases don’t seem to convert, the generic to
brand search behavior is proven to be huge!” Think big picture. Kaushik
also discussed the need for brands to remember that they shouldn’t rely
too much on any one channel (not even his company, Google).
2. Be “less wrong over time” in your marketing portfolio
To
effectively understand how to “optimize for economic value – not just
conversions,” companies have to perform sophisticated analysis of their
campaigns. “It’s easy to say, ‘Display ads offer no conversions,’ but
ask, ‘do they provide brand exposure for ultimate conversions?’” he
recommended.
Kaushik said that marketers often have to think about
long-term (versus short term) value. Maybe paid search is generating
more last clicks to conversions, but another channel in the marketing
mix might be producing leads with stronger economic value over time. To
know where the right – and wrong – marketing investments are in a
portfolio, Kaushik advised marketers to run tests and be mindful of the
broader internet landscape. (He also provided a site – Zqi.me/vizd3 –
that can help companies make visuals to help them understand their
Google Analytics data.)
He thought of this as a two-step process:
A. Apply optimal attribution
Time decay model: Explore which channels might offer upfront traffic but not sustainable interaction?
Personalized model: Build company-specific own models to go beyond first- and last-click studies.
B. Understand that influence evolves.
Be ready to shift investment focus: Analytics should be regularly checked as important channels can shift over time.
3. Rethink social
Marketers
often get caught up in playing the numbers game at social: How many
Likes? How many Retweets? Volume is good, but quality is better.
Investment in social marketing can’t be faith-based: It must be rooted
in an understanding of the economic value.
Kaushik advised
marketers to strive to understand the intention of shares as well as the
real value of social traffic. He encouraged marketers to explore the
social referrals under “Standard Reporting” in Google Analytics to see
social actions.
“Examine what content gets engagement. How can we create more content like that?” he said.
Ultimately,
marketers who want to optimize their marketing efforts for conversions
need to understand three things about their social outreach:
A. So what? What is the economic value of a social visit?
B. Where?
Where are people sharing and where is the key social traffic coming
from? Which shared content is driving or assisting conversions?
C. Why? What content did people love – why did they share? Create more.
The web is becoming a more social space, but it might offer more top-of-funnel value, and analyzing it must adapt accordingly.
4. Stop guessing: Control experiments
“Don’t become a data puker – be smart about how you look at web analytics,” Kaushik said.
While
he was quick to explain that every company will need to be running
unique tests to ensure they are considering their specific campaigns and
business goals, he offered three steps to follow when running analytics
experiments:
A. Scientific method
B. Structure experiments
C. Statistical analysis
5. Have insane focus.
At
the end of the day, marketers should never lose sight of the bottom
line with marketing. It’s all about “price and cost margins, as well as
share and size volumes,” he said. Marketers who remember this will avoid
wasting marketing dollars and be able to put conversion optimization at
the core of marketing initiatives.
Kaushik’s tips should come in
handy for a number of marketers who are trying to streamline their site
and campaign analysis for more results-driven marketing strategies in
2012. As Brafton has reported, marketers who are “happy” with their web
conversions perform 40 percent more site tests than those who are “unhappy.”
source: http://www.brafton.com/news/googles-five-steps-to-internet-marketing-con...
