Archive for April, 2010

Fast Tracking

by Carey Copeling on April 23, 2010 in Other with No comments

Recently, I completed a gated form project for a client that protected three ‘kits’ of assets. The design and functionality were similar to that of most form landing pages I’ve personally project managed – except for one exception. They had a fair amount of targeted banner ads and plugs on various sites belonging to resellers, partners and other stakeholders of the particular product and the benefit of promoting it. A new marketing director had just joined their team and his first task was to quickly find a way to measure and assign these inbound leads from the very start of their clickstream.

Through the use of query string parameters (easily set up in Eloqua) a reseller, for example, could link a specific URL to the banner on their site, and when clicked, it identified to our client that this potential lead had come from them. This isn’t rocket science by any means, but depending on your business model, this scalable, simple and cost effective solution may provide you some basic attribution tracking if you are investing even a small amount (or just starting out) on branded placement on sites other than your own.

Initially, we created five query string parameters and added a sixth later on. Each one represented a type of campaign, lead source, and information about the reseller. A shortened example of what we developed would be this:

http://www.couch-associates.com/product_gated_forms.php?campaign=GatedFormBlitz&source=Banner&source_info=240×60&reseller_id=AJH567

The above URL would pass the following parameter values:
Campaign Name: Gated Form Blitz
Campaign Source: Banner
Source Info: 240×60
Reseller ID: AJH567

This told the marketing team which campaign had generated this lead – they had clicked on a banner, identifiable by the dimensions and the site from which the lead was generated was also captured. With this information, you can run visitor reporting in Eloqua to evaluate these known and unknown visitors to your site. Query string values are considered profile data in Eloqua and as such are tied to the visitor profile. If the visitor has been targeted correctly and they show interest, they may submit a form to acquire more information. At this point, you can now take the profile data and save it to the contact record. You will most likely need to enlist the help of a developer to provide with you some code to do this because you will need to get (grab) the parameter values from the URL and store them to a hidden form field.

Once the data is stored in the hidden fields, you can use an update rule to write the form data to any contact field, such as Lead Source – Most Recent (or Lead Source – Original if no value already exists) or other campaign fields. In our example, the client created all 6 fields to store this – but they had a good reason. Depending from which campaign a particular lead had responded, a different lead score was applied, and often, a score high enough to become marketing qualified and sent over to their CRM for sales to start the conversion process. In addition to the impact on lead score, certain parameter values that came across with the lead triggered different lead assignment/routing decisions, ensuring that specific leads were routed correctly to the sales representative best suited to engage.
What was originally applied to three gated assets is currently being implemented across another 30, and each high value asset download that generates from online advertising placement can be tied back to a unique and specific source. In the short term, this type of tracking will help you measure (and verify) the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts whether it be from Google Adwords, or in the case of our client, working with your third-party stakeholders to generate those valuable leads.

Part II: Coming Soon – Creating a form for resellers/partners that will allow them to generate their own referring URLs automatically.

Google Analytics

by Barry Taylor on April 15, 2010 in Other with No comments


One of the most essential things necessary to create successful websites, landing pages, or marketing campaigns is to be able to measure your own success. There are many different ways to extract this information from your projects, but one of the most simple, reliable, and powerful solutions to do this is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has come a long way since its initial release in 2005. Many marketers, webmasters, and companies now rely on this free platform for all their analytical needs. The reason all these people continue to use Google Analytics is its vast amount of reporting and integration features that Google constantly keeps innovating and releasing.

Google Analytics also allows integration with Google Adwords, which is currently one of the largest and most successful online advertising platforms available to date.  Syncing Google Analytics with Google Adwords allows for you to get accurate information of traffic and income generated from your Google Ads. This allows you to collect trend information on which ads are doing better during which time/days of the weeks, empowering you to fine tune your ad budgets to maximize your Google Adwords profits. 

Another reason why Google Analytics has been able to thrive is its simplicity of implementing it on website. General set ups require a simple step by step setup which entails posting a block of code that has your account id generally in your pages footer above the </body> tag. The block of code necessary to track your code won’t interfere with any other tracking your site has, and won’t bog your site down.

Example of a code required for simple tracking purposes.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : http://www.);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Google Analytics then automatically creates daily/weekly/monthly reports based on your traffic that can provide you with the insight you need to better manage your sites. Some of the useful features include reports showing what percent of your visitors use a certain browser, or how many of your visitors are from a specific state or province, and even what resolution they’re using to view your site. Information like this can be used to better cater your sites to your target audience allowing you to make the correct decisions in your marketing campaign design process. 

One of Google Analytic’s newer features that is still in beta and began in October 2009 is Google Analytics Intelligence. Intelligence monitors your sites traffic and automatically alerts you to any significant changes in your traffic. The created alerts also indicate when and where the change happened. Alerts are setup to monitor your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and are all automatically compiled into Google Analytics Dashboard styled reports. Intelligence also allows you to make your own custom triggers that creates alerts, and can also automatically email you allowing you to see any significant changes on your mobile devices.

Google Analytics can also be integrated into your ecommerce sites to help track which products are selling, where the traffic that is buying is coming from, and how it’s getting there. This is very useful to help you design your ads to increase revenue of products that aren’t selling as well as you would like. This also helps you identify which sales processes are more effective I.E. does the 2 pages stream sell more then the 4 page stream? Identifying which sites are referring the most traffic to you is also important to determine which sites you need to invest more advertising in to maximize your ad income.

There are still a large amount of features and abilities of Google Analytics that I have not covered, but the best way to figure out which features are most valuable to you is by trying Google Analytics yourself.

Welcome Aboard!

by Carey Copeling on April 6, 2010 in Other with No comments

In the past few weeks, several of our clients have requested some help with a nurturing campaign. Not an uncommon request for our consultants here, but in my case, after reviewing the end goals and expected results, it became apparent that it was not so much a traditional nurturing campaign, but more of an on-boarding or AWP (automated welcoming program). Essentially, these clients wanted a way to welcome and introduce net-new contacts to their brand, products, services and resources using emails and hypersites.

One particular client had developed an idea wherein they wanted to leverage Eloqua’s Program Builder, Email and PURL-based Hypersites to direct all new contacts in the database to a personalized resource portal that featured their top 5 whitepaper/resources, their sales rep’s information (lead owner) and some personalized messaging based on their industry or vertical. Not to say that other organizations aren’t applying this type of program to their net new leads, but it dawned on me that the majority of nurturing efforts occur after lead scoring, and a few weeks of traditional communication efforts have not made them MQLs. This particular program engaged the lead within 24 hours of becoming an Eloqua contact and provided a tremendous amount of value right away to the prospective lead.

The determination of whether or not a lead qualified was fairly simple: Was the Date Created within the last 24 hours, or did the lead have a SFDC Lead Status of “Prospect, No Opportunity” and was Modified by CRM within the last 24 hours, and had that particular contact not run through the program previously? If all of those answers were true, then the feeder would fire and they would begin their path. An email was sent the following business day welcoming them to the company, and quickly let them know that there were some key, and more importantly free, resources available to them that they are encouraged to view on a personalized Hypersite page. When any of the assets were viewed/downloaded, a closed SFDC activity was written to their record, notifying the lead owner that the lead’s interest was mounting and that they were now far more educated about the client’s products and services than they were a mere 24 hours ago. On the Hypersite page itself, the lead owner’s information was clearly present, which gave an additional personalized touch to the resource page, and essentially put a name (and a face) to the connection between them and the next step in the relationship.

Now, we know that the first email isn’t always going to peak the interest of a particular contact, and as Steve Woods posted in his blog last week, evaluating which contacts clicked through and visited the hypersite and those that did not is the key to nurturing these welcoming messages. Putting a decision rule after the email send will allow you to ‘bucket’ those that did not action the first email, and allows you to change your messaging to this group and try them again at a later date. Steve referenced 4 days, but again, that is up to the client. With this particular example, the second email went out 3 weeks later, and a 3rd email went out 4 weeks later after evaluating visitors vs. non-visitors.

This is a very valuable tool/method for treating new contacts/leads in a way that will educate, empower and engage them quickly and effectively while passing on value immediately. If you have access to Program Builder and Hypersites this is a must have, and truly will help you gain that all-important first touch that you leads and contacts are probably really going to want.