“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker, Marketing Pioneer (1838-1922)
You are cordially invited…
Wanamaker perfectly illustrates how marketers have been blindly spending money on traditional media and creative for a hundred years. Making the most of that media spend was largely guesswork.
Almost a hundred years after John Wanamaker was venting his frustrations, along came the internet and a new channel was born. This new way of reaching consumers connected businesses to users in new, exciting ways, but it also heralded ‘Last Click Attribution’.
Last Click Attribution is the imbalance in reporting between traditional and digital media. For example, it’s quite tricky to confidently attribute a sale to a billboard or PR campaign, but a similar sale through a digital campaign can be clearly connected to a digital banner ad or similar. The billboard may have driven the interest in the first place, but the website will get all the glory. Digital campaigns are good, but they’re not that good.
C-suite decision makers (Chief Execs, CFOs, CTOs, etc.) build up an undeserved confidence and trust in digital channels because the reporting is so solid. Marketing Departments have been battling for a decade to drive efficiency and increase ROI across all channels, but it’s an uphill struggle because of the powers-that-be’s assurance that you can only really measure the online channels.
Fast-forward to the end of 2017 and something radical happened. A marketing marriage made in heaven; like John F. and Jackie, Victoria and Albert, Posh and Becks, Google has wooed and plans to wed the CRM giant Salesforce. A whole new world of customer-centric ROI awaits and we’re all invited to the celebrations.
Net Nuptials
On the 6th November 2017, Google Analytics and Salesforce announced that they will be joining forces to connect sales, marketing and advertising data together. This will give marketers (and the C-suite purse-string holders) a full view of what’s working across ads, websites, apps, emails, call centres, field sales teams and more, connecting sales, marketing and advertising data.
There are four integrations coming through the course of 2018;
- Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimisation and audience creation
- Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance
- Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS
- Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists
By integrating your customer data, you’ll see a customer’s path all the way from awareness through to conversion and retention; you’ll even see the customer lifetime value.
Wedding Presents
The benefits of the union are many, but here are a few that jump out:
- An email campaign to frequent shoppers to promote your autumn fashion line. In Marketing Cloud you’ll see information such as how many pages visited on your site, the clicks on product details to learn more, and how many people added items to their shopping cart and converted.
- A residential solar panel company looking for new customers. In Analytics 360, you can create an audience of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics. Also, create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as ‘closed’ in Sales Cloud; automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimise your bidding and drive more conversions.
- Create an audience in Analytics 360 of customers who bought a TV on your site and came back later to browse for home theatre accessories. Use that list in Salesforce to promote new speakers to them with a timely and relevant email.
- Explore the relationship between the traffic source for online leads (e.g. organic search vs. paid search vs. email) and the quality of those leads, as measured by how they progress through the sales pipeline.
- Product-specific data will make it possible to run remarketing campaigns that present cross-sell or upsell offers to customers based on products previously ordered.
- Data predicting the likelihood of lead conversion will let marketers create audience lists of prospects who have a high likelihood of purchasing. This can be used for remarketing (to move people along the sales funnel) or prospecting.
- Lifetime value data can be used as a diagnostic tool, to provide insight into which marketing channel brings in the highest value customers.
Honeymoon Benefits
It can take organisations months, working with a third party, to assemble data that matches ‘lead generation’ to ‘sales data’. Many organisations don’t even try. Those that do, often have a data analysts spending the majority of their week stitching data sets together. These integrations will remove those manual, timely and costly tasks.
- The lag from importing offline conversion data from 4-6 weeks will be reduced to near-instantaneous.
- Budgets will be enhanced. For example, if one source of site traffic consistently delivers leads that are higher quality than another source, budget can be shifted to drive more of the better traffic.
- Marketers can use the tools in AdWords and DoubleClick Search to optimise their bidding on search ads. This can be based on the goal of actual sales (offline conversions tracked in Salesforce) rather than just basic website leads. They can create an audience list in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick.
This really is a revolution in optimising spend, understanding customers and getting closer to measuring true ROI; John Wanamaker would be gobsmacked.
John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was an American merchant and religious, civic and political figure, considered by some to be an early proponent of advertising and a “pioneer in marketing”. In 1875, he opened “Wanamaker’s” in Philadelphia; one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States. The business grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of Macy’s.
