Under pressure to send a steady stream of leads to your sales team, how do you decide where to allocate your marketing investment? How do you know which sites, PPC ads or lists give you the best ROI? Is your website performing well? And when it comes time to lobby for an increase to your budget, how do you justify asking for more money? Do you know campaign and program ROI, the cost-per-lead or cost-per-acquisition?
With campaign tracking and analytics, you’ll answer all these questions, and be able to show your boss that you’ve made a steady improvement in marketing ROI and made direct contributions to the sales process. Yes, you’ll even be able to document that marketing expenditures helped increase revenue. For campaign tracking it’s necessary to use a mix of tools provided by Google, Salesforce.com, Emediate and many others. A company with experience generating proprietary analytics that drill deeper into website, media buying and online campaign processes is the other half of the equation. They should go beyond click-through, impressions, traffic and conversions to learn lead quality, predictable behavior and geographical location.
Most importantly, you’ll be able to compare campaign ROI to find out what works best, not just for cost-per-lead but cost-per-acquisition. You’ll also be able to provide data to make internal strategic decisions as you’ll know what offers or product/services bundling prompted response within specific target audiences. Great creative on a hot site may work for a week or two, and then it will need to be refreshed. Or today’s hot site may be dead in a month. In the end, data without intelligent interpretation and the ability to act isn’t worth much
