Closed Loop Marketing for Pay Per Click Lead Generation

Editor's Notes

• #2: So how do you improve your lead quality? You have to MacGyver it. I say MacGyver it because it’s not a perfect clean system. It can get dirty because it’s unique every time and you have to use what you have with each different client or situation. There was this one time where I literally in a clients office, working on their CRM with their sales team trying to figure out some issues when a countdown TIMER suddenly appeared and I kid you not the CRM was going to explode…luckily I found a paperclip…. Just kidding.
• #3: Good to follow Tim and Soren. Two people I highly respect. My name is Luke Alley and I am director of PPC at Avalaunch Media. I’ll be speaking on Closed Loop Marketing and how you can optimize beyond just cost per lead. First, I’d like to get a feel for the audience. How many of you work in-house? How many are on the agency side? How many have felt in the end like a business consultant? How many have asked about CRMs? How many have asked about how the leads are being followed up with? How many have ventured into the “how is the sales team following up on leads” realm? There are a lot of us dealing with this and it something I’ve been working on with my clients and it’s why I’m here today; to share what we’ve done to improve lead quality.
• #4: Seriously though, businesses don’t want leads… business want quality leads. Who here has heard this from a client, “we’re getting leads but they are just not quality… we need more quality leads.” I’m sure we all have. Finding those quality leads is the hard part though.
• #5: John Wanamaker said “half the money I spend in advertising is wasted; the problem is I don’t know which half”… that saying can be extended to PPC.
• #6: Half the money I spend in PPC is wasted on LOW QUALITY leads… the problem is I don’t know which half. See what I did there? I MacGyvered that quote… thus the duct tape.  So why do we have this problem in what is arguably the most data rich marketing channel that exists? We have so much data at our hands yet we’re still missing pieces. There are six parts to it…
• #7: First, When we talk in terms of leads, we typically talk about cost per lead. The problem with CPL is that it does not take into consideration the quality of those leads. Second, ad platforms are built for CPL. While you can enable a column for value for ecommerce, you cannot for leads. Even 3rd party tools are not built for this. We use NinjaCat for our reporting and we can’t tie CRM data into there. Third, it’s also difficult to tie leads back to keywords and requires extensive tagging. Fourth, optimizing data can be difficult because it requires working with the CRM and sales team. And lastly, call quality can be difficult to measure and call follow ups often get lost. So these are the problems, so what is the solution?
• #8: The solution that we’ve found is working on what I call CPX Bidding.
• #9: CPX bidding is cost per x bidding… x being the status of a lead beyond just a lead. Some examples of that are cost per application sent, or cost per qualified lead, or cost per demo, or cost per enrolled student. CPX bidding is looking at your lead-gen efforts and basing it off a quality measure. What I’m suggesting is looking at PPC lead-gen completely different than how we’re currently looking at as an industry. By changing that one simple KPI measure you can improve your lead-gen results significantly. Now, in order to track CPX you have to have Closed Loop Marketing setup.
• #10: So let’s talk about closed loop marketing. What it is? Has anyone heard of Closed Loop Marketing? You’ll see two paths on this graph; one that the visitor follows and the other that the marketer setups. The visitors finds and clicks an ad, is taken to your website where they browse, they fill out a form or make a call, they work with the sales team then become a customer. Closed Loop Marketing tracks that entire process allowing you to tie sales data back into your campaign. It starts by tying campaign data to the visitor; keyword, adgroup, campaign are the basic info but you can tie much more. That data is passed along with the lead. The lead enters the CRM and moves through the sales pipeline. And last the data is tied back to the campaign where you can analyze and optimize the campaign. By using this process with your paid search campaigns you can make much more insightful decisions on the data. So what CPX goal do you choose?
• #11: So what CPX goal should you chose to optimize off? Revenue or even LTV seems like the right answer every time, however it’s not. As you can see by the arrow on the left the quality of a lead improves as it moves further down the pipeline. In some accounts you can optimize purely off revenue per lead because you have significant revenue data on all keywords. If you can that’s the ideal situation. However in many accounts you will only have a small percentage of keywords that actually bring in revenue, or your sales cycle could be several weeks long and data becomes outdated. In those cases you can end up hurting your account if you only optimize off keywords that bring in revenue. Why? Because the recency of data and the number of data points you have to work off could be few, and you may make incorrect decisions. The sweet spot will be different in every account, but you should chose a status where you have the highest quality while still having enough recent data points to work off. We’ve worked off the number of the highest quality status that has at least 40 data points in the last 28 days. So are other marketers using CPX bidding or closed loop marketing?
• #12: I polled 20 people in the industry that had on average between 6-8 years experience doing PPC. I asked them a series of questions regarding lead quality issues. One of the questions was is lead quality important to clients? Unsurprisingly the majority said yes. 85%. I then asked them if they felt like they had an adequate system for tracking and optimizing the quality of leads.
• #13: Shockingly 70% of them said no! Think about that! 7 of 10 experienced marketers said they did not have a good solution. Naturally, I asked them what their system was for tracking the quality of leads.
• #14: Check out how the majority track leads. 50% simply rely on client feedback while only 25% actually use a clients CRM. In short, many marketers do not have a good solution for tracking and optimizing the quality of leads.
• #15: Especially relying on client feedback is like asking customers where you find you. You know those little cards you fill out when you go into a business? They are unreliable
• #16: Based on this we can see that tracking your CPX goals using Closed Loop Marketing is a huge competitive advantage! There are many systems for setting up and tracking CLM. I’m going to show you the way that you can do it for almost free.
• #17: So let’s break down each of the four steps in the CLM process:
• #18: First, tying campaign data to the visitor. You can simply do this using URL parameters, also known as query strings. There are a few pieces to setting it up including the URL separator, the elements which identify campaign, adgroup, and keyword… and then the element separator. Once you combine all this you get this…
• #19: All this data then is then connected to the visitor as they land on your site.
• #20: The data is then tied to a lead through hidden fields on the form. This is a screenshot of Gravity Forms, which we use at Avalaunch. By enabling hidden fields it will pull the elements from the URL and pass them into the hidden fields so when a form is submitted that information is included. Now this explains how to do this for form fills, how about for phone calls?
• #21: Well first, what phone provider should you use? I asked this question and there wasn’t a clear winner. Call Rail came in at the top, and that’s who we use, but there were several close behind. I haven’t heard of many call providers that don’t allow keyword tracking for phone calls however you do need to make sure to pass the keyword in your URL like this…
• #22: In April of last year Google stripped search query data from automatically being passed so in order for call tracking providers to have any keyword info you have to include this now.
• #23: If you don’t have a team to listen and grade every call coming in or use a call tracking provider that offers some sort of grading, you can pass calls into Analytics based on the duration of the call. While not perfect this will at least give you a better measure of quality of the calls.
• #24: Those calls then appear in Analytics as goals, which you can then import into Adwords.
• #25: After you’ve generated those leads with campaign data tied to them they then enter a clients CRM and the sales team works them. There are hundreds of CRMs out there but these are the most common. We typically ask the client to either give us access to their CRM or setup an automatic export of leads on a weekly or monthly basis. Once you receive that information then the fun begins and you can analyze!
• #26: This is just example data but this is where the rubber hits the road! By having information on campaigns or keywords that generation the highest quality leads you no longer just make decisions off CPL, a metric that does not take into consideration any quality factors.
• #27: Now what I explained up to this point is the manual process for CLM. Where the magic happens is when this all can be automated. I won’t go extensively into it but the entire CLM process can be automated by allowing the CRM to talk to the marketing side. We’ve set this up using Marin Software where there is a daily upload of updated lead information and where we’ve setup bidding rules based on a carefully chosen CPX goal. It’s time consuming and expensive but it’s a much better way to optimize the data.
• #28: So to close, and to illustrate the point of CLM I’ll share so real data from a client. In this chat you can see performance at the campaign level based on CPL. At face value we would make decisions on what to do with the different campaigns based off the data. But what happens when you look at this based on a CPX goal? In this case it’s cost per application sent.
• #29: The numbers tell a completely different story. Specifically campaign 1, which wasn’t the worst campaign based on CPL is much worse when based on a quality metric. Cost per application sent is twice as high as the next closest campaign. Once we saw this we treated that campaign completely different. The same goes for keywords.
• #30: You can see the top 20 keywords based on cost/conv. clicks. But what do they look like when we look at the CPX goal?
• #31: Again, certain keywords tell a completely different story.
• #32: In the end by setting up a closed loop marketing system and choosing metrics based off a CPX goal you’ll be able to much more easily defuse lead quality issues and make your campaigns better than the competition. Thank you!