Do you work at a company where if you added up all of the revenue that the different marketing and communications teams took credit for that the number would look vastly different then what the finance department says? In other words, do you take the time to actually attribute the correct percentage of sales to the correct outreach method?
According to the panel for the Channel Surfing: Tracking Profit and ROI Across Channels at SES today, only 13% of companies actually measure online advertising attribution. When you start to dive into attribution you start to see that it is not for the faint of heart. At one point a panel member pointed out that many of the methods they were discussing were only being done by companies that were spending over $50k a month on advertising. But what can you do in terms of measuring attribution if you are a small business?
If you can answer these 3 questions with a ‘yes’ you will be miles ahead of the majority of your competition in terms of understanding your business and increasing your ROI on your ad spend.
- Which of your keywords brought in your highest value customers?
- Can I track my customers across all of my systems, including analytics, mail, ad servers, etc?
- Am I looking beyond the last click to give credit where credit is due?
Granted, those are questions that the vast number of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) will not have the time or inclination to answer yes to. So, if you can’t possibly fathom doing all three of the above, then let me recommend that you focus only on number 1: keywords. As a matter of fact, let’s be so bold as to coin a new acronym and say that you should focus on your HRK (High Return Keywords). Which of your keywords produced your highest value customers? You can measure that via the initial sale only, but I would argue that you should consider extending the timing of it and seeing if you can draw meaningful conclusions for repeat sales as well.
It seems daunting, I know, but you can do it. Take a few hours, dig into your ad reporting, figure out how to tie it to your customer database (if you have not already), and then see what keywords your best customers were coming from. It might be a few hours of work or a few weeks (and you might need some help) but having access to the right data that allows you to adjust your bidding strategy on your HRK could mean more sales to rockstar customers.
Thanks for reading,
Phil Greenwood