We have asked many clients the question: “Is your online marketing getting you clients?” and we usually get the answer, “yes”.
The question we only sometimes get a “yes” answer to is:
- “Is your online marketing providing a positive ROI”
This is an interesting question because in these days of PPC price inflation and with many keywords in many industries easily above $50 a click the cost of acquisition is exploding. The only way to positive ROI is to factor in “lifetime value” of a customer. In other words we need to look beyond the first transaction to achieve positive ROI. This make tracking the lead source through the lifetime of the customer a very important analysis and programs for customer retention absolutely vital.
What we almost never get a “yes” to is the question:
- “Do you know specifically which keywords, ad groups, or campaigns are giving you the best customers and the best ROI”
The reason this question is such an important one is that within your campaigns, certain ad groups and specific keywords are going to be the ones that have a higher ROI than the other ones even though we tend to set our bids based just on bid competition. With the right information, we would bod higher for some keywords and less (or drop entirely) for others. The problem is that this information isn’t easily available. We need to be able to calculate the lifetime return for an individual client and correlate the google analytics data to it.
These are questions that a recent client had that initiated an interesting project in making sure we could properly attribute what campaign/ad group/keyword brought a customer in, measure and track customer retention year over year. To do this, we had to figure out a way of capturing the analytic data (not just utm data) and passing it to the CRM (SalesForce in this case) at Lead creation and store it with the the Account and Opportunity info. We also were able to track what pages the prospect took before they filled in the contact form and location data. For call-ins, the integration didn’t include as much data but it was still worthwhile.
If you would like more information on how we did this, call for a free consultation.