Unfortunately, our industry has done a really bad job of educating the masses about the unique and VERY different issues facing a company that markets a product or service with a long sales cycle. At our agency, we have a nice mix of clients in a variety of industries which are classified into three unique segments in order to leverage historic best practices, and determine which optimization methodology to apply.
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Business to Business vs. Business to Consumer
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Lead Generation vs. Ecommerce
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High Consideration Products/Services vs. Average Consideration
Most search marketers have done a great job of developing unique best practices for #1 and #2. There are even trade publications, workshops, technologies and vendors that have segmented themselves in this manner, When it comes to #3, I have seen very little support to the High Consideration Products/Services segment.
Let’s take a look at one of the unique issues facing marketers enduring a long sales cycle – tracking, especially the impact on the key metric, conversion rate:
Products or services that require extensive research, normally associated with complex or high ticket purchases require a unique approach to search marketing. For example, most lead generation campaigns will have a conversion cycle (click to lead) of less than 1 hour. Therefore, when measuring the changes that are being made to the media on a daily basis, conversion rate is a good metric.
Let’s say you use Google Analytics to track your search marketing.
|
Date
|
Clicks
|
Leads
|
Conversion Rate
|
|
1-1-2008
|
100
|
10
|
10%
|
|
1-2-2008
|
150
|
15
|
10%
|
|
1-3-2008
|
200
|
20
|
10%
|
|
1-4-2008
|
300
|
22
|
7%
|
|
1-5-2008
|
350
|
24
|
7%
|
|
1-6-2008
|
350
|
24
|
7%
|
|
1-7-2008
|
400
|
28
|
7%
|
|
1-8-2008
|
450
|
30
|
7%
|
Looking back, it is pretty obvious the changes that went into effect on 1/4/2008 drove additional traffic that did not convert art the same rate. It is simple to evaluate cause and effect. Determine what changed on the 1/4/2008 and you now are able to quantify its effect.
However, what if this company was selling high end art work (average order value of $1,200) with an average sales cycle from click to purchase of 13 days? (It’s highly likely we have some clients that have an average latency or sales cycle of 18+ days.) How would you interpret this data? To be honest, you better not! If the average latency is 18 days, then you don’t care about the daily relationship between clicks and sales even though that is the metric Google Analytics will report as a key indicator of media effectiveness.
The real metric you care about is: Clicks from day “x” / Sales from clicks that occurred on day “x” (Day "x" needs to be outside of your average latency range)
Unfortunately Google Analytics does NOT provide this metric, making it impossible to do any truly granular optimization using conversion rate as a key indicator of success. However, inside the Google AD Words account, they actually will post the sale to the day the click actually occurred. This is much better, right? A little bit, but there is still a major problem… Sales with a high latency have a tendency to get clicks on many media placements (banners, keywords etc…) prior to the sale. Google Ad Words will post the sale to the most recent click and not provide any credit to the original click.
Do you use Omniture, Click Tracks, Web Trends, Google, Yahoo, MSN? Do you know their tracking methodology? Does it align with your long sales cycle? Make sure you get this squared away. As online marketers, we base so many of our decisions on data.
Here are key bid management rules that will be seriously affected in an adverse way if you do not take care of this issue:
- Day Parting (increasing bids throughout the day based on conversion rate)
- Day of Week Bidding
- Conversion Rate by Creative
We could conduct a deep dive into this issue and wrestle with many other tracking issues faced by marketers with high consideration products. The reality is there are many non tracking issues, like creative, landing pages, frequencies effect on conversions, retargeting etc. If you at least take care of tracking, you will have a much stronger foundation to work from.