April 12,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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First and foremost – choose the right keywords. Before switching on a campaign, think about the unique products or services your organisation offers that will encourage the potential visitor to click your advert. By identifying and leveraging your USP, you can easily rise above the competition by using keywords or phrases unique to your business. Always have a look at what you consider competition, see what keywords they are using (www.keywordspy.com offer free information on this). The danger however is bidding on generic keywords without using copy that will help you stand out.

Workbooks CRM will actually let you know what keywords the prospects used to first find your site, tracked all the way through the sales process to close. It will identify what combination of unique keywords attracts the most targeted traffic that is most likely to convert into a sale. For example, most tools at best will let you know what keywords are driving traffic to the ‘Contact Us’ form – but that information offers no insight if you then can’t track which Contact Us forms converted into sales.

However, a great campaign needs more than just Workbooks’ innovative reporting tools – we need to know how to best use these tools to continuously improve a campaign, and the common mistakes to avoid that organisations are likely to make when trying CPC advertising for the first time.

Here are 5 common CPC mistakes to avoid: 

1. Forgetting to identify Negative Keywords

   Negative keywords help filter out irrelevant traffic. When you enter your list of negative keywords into your CPC campaign, your advert will not show if that negative keyword is used alongside your bid keyword. Common negative keywords are ‘free’, ‘cheap’, ‘tutorial’ for example. Taking ‘Web Design’ as an example keyword, you want to show for that keyword, but why pay for someone looking for ‘Web Design Tutorial’. Constantly refining and adding to your negative keyword list means you’ll only end up paying for relevant traffic.

2. Putting everything into one group

   You are able to make multiple ‘groups’, so use this to categories customer types reflective to your various services. If you simply put all your keywords into one group, everyone sees the same advert, lands on the same page, and ultimately you will have a low-scoring advert that costs a fortune per click (Google will charge more the lower the percentage of click through). It takes time, but separating into AdGroups (as Google calls them) is the quickest way to drive and track specific traffic.

3. Only using a few adverts

   If you use only a handful of ads (some companies just have the one!), then you have no comparison to check how it’s doing. Google will rotate several adverts and over time, prioritise the advert that gets the most clicks. While this is good in practice and fixes 90% of the problem, Google has no visibility on what that user then did when they arrived on your site. One advert may send more traffic than another, but what if that traffic isn’t relevant and they click straight off, or the advert is attracting an audience from the wrong price bracket? Experimenting with advert copy, and reviewing their success in both Google Analytics and Workbooks is the only way to continuously fine-tune and optimise.

4. Starting off with a large budget

   More budget will mean more clicks, and if a marketing department’s KPI is to increase traffic, then why not just fix the problem with a large budget? The problem with this is you’d be wasting a lot of money; no matter how much time you spend setting up a campaign, it will never be 100% efficient first time. It’s frustrating when you know the customers are out there, but start small and increase budget with confidence.

   But the cost doesn’t stop there – the campaign may convert into lots of leads to follow up, each one taking a call, email, possibly even a meeting – the cost of sale will sky rocket. This is of course a great problem to have if they are all converting, but the chances of driving quality, targeted and qualified traffic from day one are fairly slim. Overtime, reporting features in Workbooks will show results as to what adverts led to the meetings that converted into sales, enabling you to stop wasting money and time on unqualified leads. Regular tinkering with an advert campaign using the valuable information Workbooks collects about the source for each lead, will soon drive down your cost per acquisition way below the competition who may just be relying on Google Analytics (which has no idea what leads actually convert if your website is used for lead generation). 

5. Getting discouraged too easily

   Too many people make a few botched attempts at using CPC, see no instant results and give up immediately. CPC will fail if you’re not doing it as well as your competitors, and giving up is giving your competitors and easy ride. Regardless of sector, getting your website in front of the right people is key - and those that ignore how to effectively market themselves in this internet age will quickly fall behind.  CPC takes a lot of time and patience to master, but get it right, and there’s no limit.

January 20,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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Are leads alone really the end game? what about the quality of sales opportunities? Or a campaign's overall return?

Adopting a fully integrated web analytics and CRM approach, is the only way organisations can truly understand Marketing ROI.

The overall objective here is to easily understand what’s working and what isn’t, so that marketers can better allocate marketing budget towards those keywords, channels and platforms that achieve a more realistic and useful Key Performance Indicator. 

• Is the number of web leads a good KPI to work from?
• Is the number of qualified opportunities and ultimately sales revenue a more helpful measurement?

Harmonious interaction between sales and marketing within an organisation is crucial, and bottom-line sales performance reflects how well sales and marketing work together, but this isn’t true of just departments, it’s true of information management too. 

The First Steps

At it’s most basic, what we need to do is append accurate marketing data to an opportunity or lead. For example ‘Website’ as a source in a CRM isn’t accurate enough if you have several channels contributing towards website traffic.

Most CRMs will have ‘web to lead’ functionality, whereby a web form can post information directly to your CRM solution, but that doesn’t wholly achieve what’s needed aswe’d always be reliant on the customer filling out the ‘how did you find us’ form, which let’s be honest, isn’t always going to happen, and doesn’t capture data to the level that’s of real use.

Full Web Data Integration

Achieving 100% accurate visibility on marketing ROI is easy when selling products online, as ‘Goals’ (purchases) can be tracked by Google’s analytical software. This is because Google can give you full visibility on what clicks, keywords, adverts, emails lead to a direct online Goal or conversion. 

Getting this same level of accuracy when the goal is lead capture rather than an immediate purchase isn’t so straight forward, as tracking the rest of the sales cycle through to a lead becoming a customer stretches far beyond Google’s visibility. Moreover, customers aren’t exactly going to let you know what keyword they entered, or have any idea how much they cost you in click spend.

Full Web Data Integration is the automatic collection of all campaign details associated with a lead and then having the tools to report to the penny the cost per lead, per sale. Imagine having the data within your CRM on what advert produces the best opportunities? Or what keywords produce the enquires that are most likely to convert to sale, rather than just settling with what keywords produce the most leads, qualified or otherwise.

This is all achievable with Workbooks CRM. Within Workbooks, you have the tools at your fingertips to examine and interrogate all advertising channels, including full visibility of any Google or Online Advertising spend per converted customer, not just per lead.

Say for example, your website collects 50 leads over the course of a month after a £2,000 advertising campaign. 10 of these leads convert to customers. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, and at £200 per sale, the return appears positive.

However, Workbooks will give you the visibility that perhaps 8 of those customers came from the visitor initially searching for your brand name in Google after a tradeshow, and only 2 of the converted leads came direct from the online advertising campaign, the other 40 leads generated from the advertising campaign didn’t convert – suddenly that £2k advertising budget isn’t looking like such a good investment. This level of valuable feedback isn’t possible with separate web analytic and CRM tools.

Without full marketing ROI visibility, that may have looked like £2k of web advertising equated to 50 leads and 10 sales, and the campaign would be run again. However, a complete view of the sales funnel shows the true and realistic cost of £1,000 per lead. Time to rethink the Marketing Campaign, perhaps those keywords are attracting the wrong type of traffic!

To learn more about how Workbooks can help you reduce operational costs and give full visibility on marketing spend, please get in touch or visit www.workbooks.com for more information.

December 03,2010 by jcheney • Leave a Comment 
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The combination of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Pay Per Click advertising has made online marketing one of the most effective ways for small and medium-sized business to build a brand and generate new sales leads.

Increasingly, online marketers use Google Analytics to track their performance. Google Analytics gives you great insight into your websites traffic volumes and the sources of that traffic, but it does not help you understand if that traffic converts into real business.

If you advertise using Google Adwords or the Bing equivalent, you are able to gain slightly better insight.  These tools allow you to track something called conversions.  Conversions are tracked by putting some specific web code on a ‘check-out’ page or on a ‘thank-you’ page once a lead capture form has been completed. If you actually sell your products online, then conversion tracking is very effective because you can track real sales.  However if you don’t sell online, then all a conversion tells you is that someone completed a form on your website. You still don’t know if it is a quality lead, or if the visitor ultimately becomes a new customer. By using Workbooks you can move beyond Google Analytics to answer key business questions, including:

• Which sources of online marketing deliver quality leads?
• Which online marketing activities result in sales?
• How much does it cost me to deliver quality leads to the business?
• How many sales do I make from a specific online campaign?
• How is my overall return on investment? (i.e. for every pound spent on a campaign, what value of new orders do I receive?)

Tracking sources of new leads

Let's start by looking at the typical lead capture process:

The diagram above illustrates the four main routes via which visitors can find your website:

• Organic search engine results (not Adwords advertising)
• Online advertising such as Google Adwords or banner adverts
• Referring sites - other websites that have links to your site
• Direct traffic, where the user enters your website address directly into their browser

Once the visitor has reached your site, then a typical ‘call to action’ is to ask them to complete an online form.  Often the visitor is encouraged to complete the form, through the offering of something in exchange, such as a free trial or access to a white paper.

First visit & last visit

It is worth remembering that a new visitor isn’t always going to complete a form on their first visit.  They may look around your site, before visiting a few minutes or days later.

In many cases the visitor will revisit the site using a different method.  For example they might discover your site for the first time via Adwords and remember your company name.  They may next visit several days later, having searched for your company name and arrived via search results.

Understanding this concept is important for measuring Marketing ROI.  For example, if you want to measure the return on your Google Adwords spend, you really need to be tracking how they first found your website.

Google Analytics & visit tracking

Google Analytics provides free tracking code which is placed on every page of your website.  This code is used to send visitor data back to the Google Analytics engine and drives the reports you find inside the Google Analytics  portal.  Part of that code creates a specific cookie in the visitors’ browser which stores information about how the visitor found your site.  The cookie is called ‘_utmz cookie’ and normally stores the following variables:

Google Analytics resets these values stored in the visitors’ browser each time they revisit the site via search, advertising, or referral.  If the visitor arrives directly, the _umtz cookie is not set. If you want to track first visit and last visit information, it is necessary to copy the values contained inside the _utmz cookie into a second cookie.  This can easily be achieved with some basic HTML code on your website. You can then use the values contained in the _utmz cookie to identify last visit, and the value stored in the second cookie to identify the initial visit.

Google Analytics & Workbooks CRM

By using the Web2lead functionality of Workbooks you can capture leads from a website and, at the same time, capture the values contained inside the tracking cookie. Web2lead functionality is something which is provided by the Workbooks CRM application and is available to all Workbooks customers.  It allows a web form to be created in Workbooks and hosted on your website.   It uses standard HTML form functionality and calls a specific action on the Workbooks site which allows you to post the form including various hidden fields. The action of posting a form creates a Sales Lead inside Workbooks which contains the displayed and hidden fields from the web form.  You can see a typical web2lead form here. If you look at the source code of that form you will see that, alongside capturing the ‘displayed’ fields it also interrogates the _utmz cookie to extract the visitor source information.  The information contained in the Google cookie is then passed into Workbooks and added into custom fields created on the Lead record. The form is also able to associate the lead to a specific campaign.  In this example the form links the lead to a marketing campaign based on the following logic: If the utmz SOURCE is ‘google’ and the umtz MEDIUM is ‘organic’ – The campaign is set to ‘SEO Marketing’ If the utmz SOURCE is ‘google’ and the umtz MEDIUM is ‘cpc’ – the campaign is set to ‘Google Adwords’ By associating leads with campaigns and in turn allocating budgets to campaigns it is possible to measure the cost of a lead, as well as track which campaigns deliver the most effective results. As the lead passes through its life cycle:

• Unqualified Lead > Opportunitity
• Opprtunity > Order
• Order > Invoice

It is possible to track the original website visitor information across the entire life cycle.  So at a very simple level you can track which web marketing activity generates real sales opportunities, all the way through to which ones deliver real business.

October 04,2010 by jcheney • Leave a Comment 
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In a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) business, a key performance indicator is the cost of customer acquisition - how much does it cost to acquire each new customer?

Here at Workbooks we track all sorts of metrics: cost of leads, conversion metrics and marketing ROI to name just a few.

Let me share some interesting numbers: At present it costs us £248 to generate a qualified lead and we convert 1 in 10 of these into a sale. An average sale for us generates £5k of revenue in year one, so at present it costs around 50% of the year one revenue to acquire a new customer.

This blog post isn’t about the economics of our business, rather I wanted to use the information to highlight how you can use Workbooks to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities.

Above is a dashboard (created in Workbooks) that I use to measure these metrics. I have hidden some fields but you'll get a pretty good view on what’s going on. Let me explain how we track this data.

The first stage of our sales process is to qualify a lead. Each month we get hundreds of leads into the business, these are mainly from people completing forms on our website (such as the free trial) or from other third-party websites that promote Workbooks.com. Some of these enquiries are people actively looking to purchase; many others are not prospective customers at all. Once we have spoken to the prospect and established their interest, they are either ‘qualified’ or ‘qualified-out’.

We use the Marketing Campaigns functionality of our product to track marketing expenditure on a monthly basis. So by writing a report which combines the total marketing costs and dividing that cost by the number of qualified leads generated, I can calculate a cost per qualified lead. In this case I have represented this as a dial chart.

In the top right chart you can see we track the cost of leads by campaign, monthly. This gives me some insight into which campaigns generate leads most cost effectively.

As you can see from my stats, our SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is improving, but our Google Adwords campaigns are far too expensive! We will continue to run google Adwords for a few more months, to see if we can improve the results!

On the bottom left you can see the Campaign ROI report. This report takes information from Invoices in Workbooks and compares it to the marketing expenditure. It totals all invoices which are attributed to a specific campaign and divides the total sales by the marketing spend. As you can see our referral program delivered the best return on investment.

The final chart in the bottom right takes the total number of won opportunities as a percentage of the total number of deals - either won, lost or qualified out. This gives me our pipeline conversion metrics.

As you can see not all our marketing is effective, but the good news is I can actually tell which marketing is working and which isn’t! And of course this enables me to modify and ultimately improve the effectiveness of our marketing!