Digital marketing has evolved tremendously in the last few years with various channels including social media, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and email marketing emerging as some of the strongest and most widely adopted online avenues for generating a decent ROI. All of these channels have improved in their ability to reach specific audiences through demographic profiles, geo-targeting, analyzing consumer history and more. From a marketing perspective, however, it is the ability to track the effectiveness of these digital conduits in terms of desired outcomes (conversions) that really counts.
The capacity to test the effectiveness of various campaign components, from initial click to online or in-store sale, is crucial in determining what will actually work, and which direction your marketing efforts should gravitate towards. Here’s how some of the major channels are making modern day marketing more science than art in their ability to track purchases and other conversions.
Social Media Marketing
Facebook has become the dominant player in social media, boasting a user base of approximately 1.3 billion. Now that Facebook has us all hooked on their platform, they’ve really begun to monetize their channel.
Only a few years ago, brands that worked hard to build up a significant following, using organic content that captivated user interest, were able to promote their wares to their fan base for free, and perhaps eh, hem… over did it a bit. For a brand to effectively pitch to their fan base on Facebook these days, they’ve got to advertise:
Over the past several months, Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Pages. A recent study found that companies’ posts dropped from reaching 12% of their followers in October to just 6% by February [2014]. Time Magazine: The Free-Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook
Now that brands are spending real dollars on Facebook ads (to the tune of $7 billion in 2013) they need to know what they’re getting for their investment, that is their ROI for Facebook adspend. Source Metrics has known this for sometime, inspiring us to develop a social media analytics platform that tracks return on Facebook adspend for both online and in-store conversions, deploying targeted ads and specific offers.
Since 2012, Facebook has been working on it’s own methods of tracking conversions, online and in-store, from it’s advertising platform. Facebook’s technology differs from ours in that it relies on data brokers like Acxiom and Datalogix to confirm in-store conversions. This technology is likely to evolve rapidly as Google is now pursuing similar relationships with data brokers, but there is an inherent danger in relying on this method of conversion tracking: the evolution of personal privacy protection.
Facebook’s latest blunder with its messenger app being able to virtually take over your phone and make it call people and do things on auto-pilot has raised ire over privacy concerns. Other big internet players like Google, which has been under scrutiny for targeting ads based on medical data scanned in Gmail and Yahoo, which let a gazillion user names and passwords escape into cyberspace last year, are also feeling the heat for privacy concerns.
Pay Per Click Advertising (Search Engine Marketing)
PPC is dominated by Google, which achieved advertising revenue in 2013 in excess of $50 billion, fuelling Google to surpass Apple as the world’s most valuable brand this year:
The ubiquitous search engine company now commands the most valuable brand in the world according to BrandZ. The value of the Google brand rose 40 percent in 2014 to nearly $159 billion. Nasdaq.com
Google has measuring the cost per conversion through Adwords down to a science for purchases made online; however, when it comes to sales made in-store, they are a bit behind, but not for long.
This spring, Google launched a pilot project to measure in-store conversions from Adwords, partnering with some big brands such as Micheal’s. Google is likely to catch up to Facebook in this area, given their vast experience in online conversion tracking, but yet again, Google is relying on information from data brokers, who’ve been under increasing pressure from The US Congress to make their practices of collecting private financial data on millions of consumers more transparent.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is another strong digital marketing channel that can have amazing results and, thanks to tools like Google Analytics, can be tracked back to a purchase quite effectively for ecommerce sales. Organic search, fuelled by SEO, stacks up close to PPC in terms revenue generated. A recent study by MarketLive looked at more than 200 websites for the first half of 2013 and concluded that organic search was in the ballpark of paid search in term of conversion rates and average order size (Search Engine Watch).
Today, SEO is primarily driven by a combination of quality content, incorporating keywords your target market is likely to use in a search for your product or services, with links back to your site from other reputable and relevant websites.
Email Marketing
With the proliferation of instant messaging on mobile and the growth of Facebook, email is no longer the all-inclusive-darling of communication it was only a few years ago, when blackberry ruled. Yet, most of us still have an email account that we check fairly frequently, making laser-targeted email marketing a viable channel, with as much as 63% of leading CMO’s using email marketing as a primary digital channel (Deloitte, 2014 “CMO Report: Bridging The Digital Divide).
Large corporations have their own in-house methods for tracking the effectiveness of email campaigns and conversion rates. Various email-marketing tools, such as Constant Contact and Mail Chimp, have emerged to allow smaller companies and start-ups to track open rates, click rates and which can be coupled with Google Analytics for tracking conversion rates.
Email as channel, is also under the privacy microscope. In July, the government of Canada activated new anti-spam legislation, requiring express permission from recipients before sending out mass emails.
How You Count Conversions is Important
Tracking conversions, online and in-store is essential is today’s digitally influenced marketplace. There are a variety of marketing channels that can be used to effectively reach your target audience, most of which have developed some means of tracking a sale, from initial digital-touch-point to desired customer outcome. Yet there are different and evolving methodologies for doing so.
At Source Metrics, we’ve developed the technology to track conversions both online and in-store using methods that are transparent and actually involve a fair degree of customer buy-in. If you would like to find out more about how our technology works, visit our site and let us know… we’d be happy to hear from you!
