How To Use Offline Data To Get Online Wins

As an online marketer, do you focus most of your energy and effort on achieving a low cost-per-lead? What if that lead fails to convert into a paying customer?

If that happens, you’ve still spent money, yet you’ve gained nothing.

Sure, things looked promising—you had a great cost-per-lead after all—but when push comes to shove, a lead doesn’t make your business any money. For that, you need to optimize for offline sales.

Fortunately, your customer relationship management (CRM) or lead management platform captures a ton of data that you can use to improve the quality of your leads and your online return on investment (ROI).

But, if you aren’t using the data in your CRM, your campaigns will never reach their potential.

Intrigued? Well, in a recent webinar, Brittani Hunsaker, Director of PPC at Disruptive Advertising, covered how to capture offline sales data, key data segments to capture and examine and how to use the information in your CRM to make critical marketing decisions.

While this Quick Class focuses on data captured by Salesforce, have no fear! Most any CRM or lead management system captures this data.

Capturing the Data

You can capture offline sales data automatically in Google AdWords or Analytics through an integration with your CRM or lead generation system.

If this option is outside of your developer’s skill set, you can accomplish the same thing by using direct, regular imports from your CRM into Google AdWords or Analytics.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to look at your data in AdWords or Analytics, you can capture the offline data manually, too, by regularly producing lead status reports in your CRM or lead management system. You’ll use these reports to examine the various data fields or segments.

What You Should Be Looking At

While you can examine any number of data segments for trends that you can use to improve lead quality and ROI, here are 8 segments to start with.

Ultimately, you want to use these segments—either on their own or combined—to figure out how to minimize your cost per sale.

1. Source and Medium

Your Lead Source field helps you identify the advertiser, site, publication or other source like Google or a billboard that’s sending traffic to your site and therefore is responsible for your lead.

If you are using Google Analytics, you can also see the medium your leads used (such as a banner or email newsletter) to reach your site.

Both the source and medium are directly available from your Google Analytics parameters—they’re there for the taking—or they may be assigned in your CRM.

In either case, by understanding the origins of your leads, you can determine which sources or mediums are converting leads to sales and allocate budget accordingly for higher return investment.

2. Campaign Name

Campaign name is a unique identifier (name, slogan or promotional code) you should use to separate specific campaigns.

For example, if you structured your campaign names by specific product, service, network or market, you could look at which campaign names produce the best types of leads and sales and give them more budget to maximize their results.

3. Keyword Term

In paid search advertising, keyword term identifies the keyword in a user’s search that triggered the display of your text-based advertisement.

With display advertising, keyword identifies the best-matching keyword that caused your banner, rich media or other form of advertising to display.

Keyword match type lets you delve a little deeper, by showing whether the user entered an exact keyword match, a phrase match, a broad match or some other match type variant that triggered your advertisement.

Segmenting your leads by keyword term and keyword match type allows you to identify the keywords that drive your highest quality leads and whether they are coming from broad match, phrase match, exact match, or other keyword match types.

With this information, you can find out what keywords are profitable and which ones are losing money and then perform keyword optimization to improve performance.

4. Quality Indicator/Lead Status

Unfortunately, while most CRM or lead management systems have the capability to track lead quality and status, few companies make use of this valuable segmenting option.

For example, you can have a lead or an opportunity in Salesforce, where a lead is not as high-quality as an opportunity. If your organization doesn’t use this capability, it will have to build it in as a practice.

For most CRMs or lead generation systems, you may need a rating system or lead status system in reports, but doing so will give your sales team a great way to easily communicate the quality of their leads.

5. Landing Page

Tracking landing page performance in your CRM allows you to drill down to the direct landing page URL a user was on when they converted. This segment is particularly useful for identifying the best performing page variation in A/B testing.

6. User Location

Another underused CRM segmenting option is user location. User location tells you the geographic location a user was in when they clicked or converted.

You can go as deep or shallow as you like with your geographic analysis to identify new geographic targets, maximize the top performing regions or identify and eliminate regions of high-spend and low conversion.

7. Device

Segmenting by device can be a great way to identify which device(s) you should be optimizing for.

If most of your sales come through desktop leads, bid more for desktop. On the other hand, if most of your sales are coming through mobile conversions, you may want to work on your mobile optimization.

8. Placement/Referring URL

Your placement or referring URL field tells you which site a user was on before they came to your site. This segment is especially useful for retargeting or display ads and is great for helping identify sites to remove from your display targeting when they’re bringing in poor quality leads.

Other Segments to Try

That’s just a short list of the top segments you might consider using. If you exhaust those and want to examine still more segments, then try these:

• Product/Service
• Ad Content
• Experiment ID
• Network
• Ad Position
• Lead Type
• Creative
• Ad Group
• Device Model

Try using these segments to gain insight that help you increase your ROI. I’d love to hear what kinds of data you used and your results. Please feel free to share any advice you have for getting to this data from your specific CRM or lead management system.

By the way, if you’d like Brittani to do some analysis on your offline or online data and give you some specific recommendations, let me know here or in the comments!