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DIGITAL MARKETING 101 : KPIs
KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Now that we feel more comfortable with traditional advertising options for your marketing goals let's get a bit more aggressive with our sales tactics. Of-course you can always count a traditional advertising for brand awareness on channels like print, radio, film, broadcast television and cable however, those options can be less than transparent in their campaign metrics and do not provide real-time methods of measuring and adjusting your campaigns to improve sales.
If you wish to continue to focus on brand awareness I understand its perceived value however my research and your own experience will validate that the wireless internet of everything has taken over and so we will focus on 21st century Digital Marketing tools moving forward.
Did you know that this year more Americans will surf the internet from the cellphone than from their desktops at home. By the end of the decade there will be more cellphones than humans and the trend is to enable them all with broadband speeds, global position systems, cameras and electronic wallets. If your mouth is not salivating at this prospect right now perhaps it will by the end of this section.
77% of all business have a website and they are reaching out to their consumers online during any of the phases of strategic planning, tactical development, implementation and monitoring using display networks, advertising agencies, affiliate programs, email campaigns, social media, mobile advertising and search engine marketing.
There are a few key performance indicators that will help you and your inter-departmental team better understand how to monitor each of these and reach your milestones more confidently.
Let's list some of these marketing goals and their associated key performance indicators...
If you wish to continue to focus on brand awareness I understand its perceived value however my research and your own experience will validate that the wireless internet of everything has taken over and so we will focus on 21st century Digital Marketing tools moving forward.
Did you know that this year more Americans will surf the internet from the cellphone than from their desktops at home. By the end of the decade there will be more cellphones than humans and the trend is to enable them all with broadband speeds, global position systems, cameras and electronic wallets. If your mouth is not salivating at this prospect right now perhaps it will by the end of this section.
77% of all business have a website and they are reaching out to their consumers online during any of the phases of strategic planning, tactical development, implementation and monitoring using display networks, advertising agencies, affiliate programs, email campaigns, social media, mobile advertising and search engine marketing.
There are a few key performance indicators that will help you and your inter-departmental team better understand how to monitor each of these and reach your milestones more confidently.
Let's list some of these marketing goals and their associated key performance indicators...
R E A C H
* Impressions served
* # of Visits
* # of New Visits
* % of Returning Visitors
* % of New Visitors
* Visitor Demographics
R E S P O N S E
* Search Engine used
* Referring Domain
* Search Key phrase used
* Search Keyword used
* # of Responses
* # of Unique Responders
A C Q U I S I T I O N
* Page Stick/Landing
* Page Slip/Bounce Rate
* AVG # of Visits per Visitor
* AVG # of Pages per Visit
* AVG Time 2 Purchase
RETENTION
* Page Frequency
* AVG Frequency
* Return Action
* Action Value
Lifetime Value
C O S T T O R E V E N U E T R A C K I N G V A R I A B L E S
CPM
Cost Per Mile
CPC
Cost Per Click
CPA
Cost Per Acquisition
CPA
Cost Per Action
DIGITAL MARKETING 101 : SEO
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
While performing SEO on your website can help you expand your reach, solicit response and acquire new customers the results can take 3-6 months to be fully realized but only last 1 to 2 years depending on how competitive your industry is.
Remember that by 2020 40% of all purchases will be online and more than 90% will be searching the web for product info or a better price even while at the store purchasing from. Since more than 50% of web users never click on PAID ads, it is important that you optimize your website for search engines. Take into account that more than 60% of web searching and 40% of all digital advertising is performed on Google so your product or service needs to be on display there first and foremost. You will work on Bing, Yahoo and the others later.
So, how does SEO help you? It answers the questions for each and every possible consumer type you want to target so that when they type a SEARCH QUERY looking for something that you have, provide or sell YOUR INFORMATION shows up before YOUR COMPETITORS info catches their attention. This area is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page and studies have shown that consumers usually click on the top 3 links and have an attention span of about 10 seconds once your LANDING PAGE is displayed before they decide to continue deeper with you or go back to a competitor link. It should take you less than a week to optimize your website but depending on how many pages you have it might take longer to update and re-submit your sitemaps.xml, robots.txt files for spiders, web crawlers and robots to re-index.
But how do you figure out this new content to include? It's called "self analysis" or keyword search for your on-page content and off-page popularity on the web. By finding out what keywords and key phrases are begin used by your customers to talk about you or look for your products. Researching your competition in the same manner can help you understand what separates you from the competition.
Once you find these short and long-tail combinations you can decide which have a higher probability of getting your company to the top of the search results page and insert them into your file names and HTML code to ensure proper densities and proximity. Use them in your meta-tags, heading tags (H1-H5), cascading style sheets inside external files or internal code. Update internal and external anchor links, file names, titles, descriptions and alt tags for all of your audio, video and image assets as well as the internal html code on your web pages. Basically your entire website should be written strategically to reflect how customers look for you and not how you see yourself.
Sounds easy enough right? Don't fret it... in the "Tools of the Trade" we will see many applications that can facilitate this process and remember that whenever your business process changes you will need to consider re-optimizing again. :-) SEO is not a ONE TIME fix but a constant choice.
Remember that by 2020 40% of all purchases will be online and more than 90% will be searching the web for product info or a better price even while at the store purchasing from. Since more than 50% of web users never click on PAID ads, it is important that you optimize your website for search engines. Take into account that more than 60% of web searching and 40% of all digital advertising is performed on Google so your product or service needs to be on display there first and foremost. You will work on Bing, Yahoo and the others later.
So, how does SEO help you? It answers the questions for each and every possible consumer type you want to target so that when they type a SEARCH QUERY looking for something that you have, provide or sell YOUR INFORMATION shows up before YOUR COMPETITORS info catches their attention. This area is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page and studies have shown that consumers usually click on the top 3 links and have an attention span of about 10 seconds once your LANDING PAGE is displayed before they decide to continue deeper with you or go back to a competitor link. It should take you less than a week to optimize your website but depending on how many pages you have it might take longer to update and re-submit your sitemaps.xml, robots.txt files for spiders, web crawlers and robots to re-index.
But how do you figure out this new content to include? It's called "self analysis" or keyword search for your on-page content and off-page popularity on the web. By finding out what keywords and key phrases are begin used by your customers to talk about you or look for your products. Researching your competition in the same manner can help you understand what separates you from the competition.
Once you find these short and long-tail combinations you can decide which have a higher probability of getting your company to the top of the search results page and insert them into your file names and HTML code to ensure proper densities and proximity. Use them in your meta-tags, heading tags (H1-H5), cascading style sheets inside external files or internal code. Update internal and external anchor links, file names, titles, descriptions and alt tags for all of your audio, video and image assets as well as the internal html code on your web pages. Basically your entire website should be written strategically to reflect how customers look for you and not how you see yourself.
Sounds easy enough right? Don't fret it... in the "Tools of the Trade" we will see many applications that can facilitate this process and remember that whenever your business process changes you will need to consider re-optimizing again. :-) SEO is not a ONE TIME fix but a constant choice.
DIGITAL MARKETING 101 : PPC
PAY PER CLICK
PPC has two main players currently but Online Classifieds and Directories are slowly making their move on sites like Craigslist and eBay billing 3 billion usd a year or 6% of sector. Let's focus on the 20-30 billion usd that will be spent yearly in Display and Search ads during the next decade.
The Display Networks have been around since the onset of the web with companies like DoubleClick ( now Google ) while consumers spend less and less time on vertical websites when researching purchases ( as little as 5% versus 95% on search engines ) it is interesting to note that both Display and Search share almost the same % from the total digital spend at ~40% . The Display ecosystem holds many players between Advertiser and Publisher/Audience including advertising agencies like WPP Omnicom, IPG and Publicis; Ad networks like Google, Yahoo and InterClick; Ad Exchanges like DoubleClick and AdBrite and Search Engine platforms like Bing, Ask and Baidu.
There are of-course many others in the supply chain like Demand Aggregators, Yield Optimizers, Shopping Feeds and DSPs. These players have either Licensing business models or a % of media spend. They use CPM or Cost Per Mile to determine pricing as is the case with Demand Side Platforms that aggregate demand and increase performance allowing advertisers to bid on a per single impression basis rather than per 1K, similar to SEM below.
The Search Marketing model takes the lion's share of attention since it is much more easily accessible to small business owners and does not have a strict requirement in equipment, process or even knowledge. It is sold on an auction basis to the highest bidder and has been very popular with small to medium sized companies looking to sell online as it does not even require a shopping cart. Google for example uses a simple formula to determine the ads rank based on the following variables :
The Display Networks have been around since the onset of the web with companies like DoubleClick ( now Google ) while consumers spend less and less time on vertical websites when researching purchases ( as little as 5% versus 95% on search engines ) it is interesting to note that both Display and Search share almost the same % from the total digital spend at ~40% . The Display ecosystem holds many players between Advertiser and Publisher/Audience including advertising agencies like WPP Omnicom, IPG and Publicis; Ad networks like Google, Yahoo and InterClick; Ad Exchanges like DoubleClick and AdBrite and Search Engine platforms like Bing, Ask and Baidu.
There are of-course many others in the supply chain like Demand Aggregators, Yield Optimizers, Shopping Feeds and DSPs. These players have either Licensing business models or a % of media spend. They use CPM or Cost Per Mile to determine pricing as is the case with Demand Side Platforms that aggregate demand and increase performance allowing advertisers to bid on a per single impression basis rather than per 1K, similar to SEM below.
The Search Marketing model takes the lion's share of attention since it is much more easily accessible to small business owners and does not have a strict requirement in equipment, process or even knowledge. It is sold on an auction basis to the highest bidder and has been very popular with small to medium sized companies looking to sell online as it does not even require a shopping cart. Google for example uses a simple formula to determine the ads rank based on the following variables :
CPC x CTR x QS = SERP
Let's translate the formula Cost Per Click refers to the highest bidder getting the highest rank on the results page. Click Through Rate is the success rate of your ads and how often it is clicked because of compelling text relevance to the searched query. Last but not least is the Quality Score which compares your ad text with your landing page to ensure that they are relevant to each other. So... If you play by the rules you will be placed as close to the top of the Search Result Page in relation to what other bidders for that search query are willing to pay.
So research your customer personas, buying funnel actions, test your ad copy and landing pages understand your lines of business, ads, ad groups and keywords, keyphrases and negative keywords. Manage your bids ( implicit, explicit, manual or auto ramp to maintain your page rank with broad or exact match types to phrase. Exact matches increase relevance in crucial bidding wars but remember that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have their own management dashboards, search algorithms and developer APIs so get ready for some fun.
Google accounts for 2/3 of all ads with Yahoo, Bing and the other display networks taking the remaining 33% but Pay Per Click advertising is not exclusive to the Search Engines although they do take a large portion of the total spent on ads you can certainly purchase advertising directly on high traffic verticals like AOL, CNN and others or even contract with an Ad agency that can handle all of the complexities for you.
Last but not least is of-course the mobile advertising and social media worlds are emerging platforms that promise contextual Geographic, Demographic and Psychographic real-time segmentation of your target audience with Biometrics just around the corner it is no wonder that the internet of everything also means everyone.
Because of the many constant changes and innovations in the consumer electronics spectrum and digital marketing advertising models it is recommended that you review your strategy 4-6 times per 18 month period to avoid critical inflection points.
Remember that PPC is not everything. You still need a product or service in demand, a price that is competitive and a value proposition that is compelling.
DIGITAL MARKETING 101: PPP
PAY PER PERFORMANCE
PPP programs are extensions of the sales force. Referral and Affiliate middleman between Merchant and Consumer with independent Networks to audit performance in the case of affiliates.
The difference between the two programs is that under a referral the lead is generated out of good will and honest love for your product from the referrer. These referrers come from the merchants active customer base and they love the product or service so much that they want to refer friends and family. Yes, they are rewarded for that sale but that is not their primary motivation.
The difference between the two programs is that under a referral the lead is generated out of good will and honest love for your product from the referrer. These referrers come from the merchants active customer base and they love the product or service so much that they want to refer friends and family. Yes, they are rewarded for that sale but that is not their primary motivation.
MERCHANT(Brand) REFERRER(Current Customer) CONSUMER(New Customer)
Affiliates on the other hand work only as hard as your commissions ( unless cookie stuffing ) Think of these affiliates as independent contractors that increase the brand awareness, lead generation and ultimately revenue streams for free. These companies and entrepreneurs are selling the merchant's products and services using content sites, syndicated, comparison, coupon or promotional sites, bloggers and even virtual game currencies and niche directories with little risk to the merchant who only pays them if there's an actual sale made from their efforts. Sweet!!!
MERCHANT(Brand) NETWORK(Auditor) + PUBLISHER(Affiliate) CONSUMER(New Customer)
Now don't get me wrong there are still risks associated with these relationships, specially to the brand name, better business bureau standing and sales but for the most part if monitoring is in place understanding the publishers good and bad activities should be easy and the learning experience alone is worth the risk, never mind the increased traffic and sales potential.
A major risk known as "Cookie Stuffing" occurs when the publisher benefits from a merchant's customer during the check-out process on the shopping cart if the customer decides to search for "discount codes" or coupons. When they open a new browser window, google "Discount Code" + the merchant's name and click on the links displayed, the landing pages launched set first party cookie values with the publisher's info. When the user returns to complete the sale already started, the publisher can take credit for the sale. The publishers are not entirely guilty since they are also using SEO, PPC and DISPLAY advertising to promote the merchants products but this and many other issues fuel distrust in the relationships between merchants and affiliates.
For this reason many merchants and affiliates simply choose to use an outside management company known as a network to be the middleman. CommissionJunction.com is one of the most successful even if they charge a flat fee of $500 a month or take 20-30% of affiliate payments from the merchants account because they resolve these conflicts. ( typically 4-20% of sale )
So how do you get started on these digital marketing options? Next month I will explain both the analysis steps and the tools of the trade before you move on to the industry research portion and the sample industry highlighted in the second half of this publication.
A major risk known as "Cookie Stuffing" occurs when the publisher benefits from a merchant's customer during the check-out process on the shopping cart if the customer decides to search for "discount codes" or coupons. When they open a new browser window, google "Discount Code" + the merchant's name and click on the links displayed, the landing pages launched set first party cookie values with the publisher's info. When the user returns to complete the sale already started, the publisher can take credit for the sale. The publishers are not entirely guilty since they are also using SEO, PPC and DISPLAY advertising to promote the merchants products but this and many other issues fuel distrust in the relationships between merchants and affiliates.
For this reason many merchants and affiliates simply choose to use an outside management company known as a network to be the middleman. CommissionJunction.com is one of the most successful even if they charge a flat fee of $500 a month or take 20-30% of affiliate payments from the merchants account because they resolve these conflicts. ( typically 4-20% of sale )
So how do you get started on these digital marketing options? Next month I will explain both the analysis steps and the tools of the trade before you move on to the industry research portion and the sample industry highlighted in the second half of this publication.
