It is often said that the first thing you need when getting started with Salesforce.com marketing is a web-to-lead form. Why is it your first step as a marketing professional?
Web-to-lead is an out of the box functionality where you can create a registration form that inputs the contacts who fill out the form directly into salesforce as leads.
On this form you can capture as many fields as you like and also setup an auto response email that goes out after someone registers on the form.
Forms are used for many different marketing campaigns (example: Webinar registration, Software download, event sign up) which is why its is important to associate each web-to-lead with a separate campaign.
Before you get started with creating a web-to-lead form you need to have the following in place:
- Create a lead assignment rule to determine who the leads should be assigned to.
- Create any custom field you would like to capture on the form.
- Create public email templates you can use for auto response.
- Create a campaign and customize the member status values if needed.
- Get the Campaign ID from the url. Example: https://na2.salesforce.com/70140000000I8TH The part after the / is your campaign ID.
Creating the Web-to-lead and attaching the campaign:
Step1:
Go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | Leads | Web-to-Lead.
Step 2:
Select the fields you would like to capture on your form.
Make sure to include “Campaign and “Campaign Member Status”
Step 3:
Click on Generate button to get the HTML code of the form. The HTML will show you the list of your available campaigns and their IDs. Select the one you want out of that list.
Step 4:
Add the following code to the HTML form
<input type=”HIDDEN” name=”Campaign_ID” value=”70140000000I8TH
“></select><br>
<input type=”HIDDEN” name=”member_status” value=”responded”>
Adding this code to the HTML form will ensure that every lead that fills out the form will be attached to the campaign you assigned and the member status default you designated.
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We all know how hard it is to track the source of every lead that comes into our CRM system. In most CRM systems you can track the source of incoming leads registering on your landing pages by customizing the URL of the registration page and capturing the campaign ID. If you are generating leads on the web using the Salesforce.com Web-to-Lead form or the Salesforce API, you can easily pass the campaign ID as a hidden value in the form so that every lead that is created from that form will have the campaign attached automatically.
(If you need more information on how to push site registrations leads into Salesforce, check out my post on campaign and web-to-lead)
If a different campaign ID is used for each marketing program (e.g: email campaign, webinar, whitepaper promo) it’s easy to track ROI for each campaign, as the lead goes from prospect to closed deal. BUT what happens when leads are referred to your site directly from outside sources that were not part of your online programs? For example: Analyst review, Blogs, Tech articles etc… In those cases you have no control over the URL that the lead is registering on, and the campaign id is the default common one you use on your website. For these leads, the campaign attached in the CRM will indicate that they registered on the website, but no information is given on how they got to your site in the first place. Marketing managers need this information to analyse the impact of the press and analyst relations as well as evaluate the performance of their Search Engine Optimization efforts which include Link Building and other tactics.
There are excellent web analytic tools like Omniture or marketing automation Software like Eloqua that capture this information and integrate with Salesforce.com, but they can be very costly and hard to implement if you are a small company with limited technical resources. On the other hand, Google’s web analytics tool is free and provides all lot of the information that most marketers need to review their SEO or PR performance, but unfortunately it doesn’t integrate with Salesforce.com or any other CRM systems. There are a few requests in the Salesforce.com Idea Exchange site that ask for this integration but I haven’t seen or heard about any efforts from Salesforce.com to get this done.
There is however another work around for companies using Adwords; the free integration with Salesforce actually records not only the paid traffic but also the organic traffic and the referring sites. If you’re intrested in this integration read this informative Salesforce blog as well as my next Blog post: How Salesforce.com for Google Adwords Can Impact your Paid Search Performance
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Since Salesforce.com rolled out their Adwords integration in 2007, many marketing users rushed to install the free package not knowing what the effect of this integration will have on their Adwords account. If you’re using the Optimize Ad Rotation method to run your ads in Google (i.e: Optimize: Show better performing ads more often) you MUST read on to see how this can impact you.
As it turns out, as soon as you switch on the integration, Salesfore immediately modifies ALL your Adwords destination urls by adding extra tracking parameters similar to: _kk={Keyword}&_kt=3379166f-49a0-431d-a20c-7805d06fa958. These tracking parameters are necessary because they allow Salesforce to record the keyword, search term, ad group etc.. that the lead used to find your site and register.
However, in Adwords when you modify an ad in any way, Google considers it as a completely new ad and erases the history you’ve collected and resets your ad to zero. If you have many ads running and selected to Optimize the Ad Rotation then Google should be showing ads with better click thru rate (CTR) more often than others. As time goes by, your better performing ads will get higher position because the CTR positively affects the Quality Score of the Ad. So resetting all the ads by changing the url will feel as if you just launched Adwords for the first time and Google has no history of your Ad performance. Salesforce warns that it takes a day for the account to get back to normal but for large Adwords accounts, only a few hours of running the wrong ads might be costly.
The only solution i found to solve part of this problem is the following:
- Run a historical Ad Performance, export it to .csv
- Highlight the worse performing ads who were getting low % serving and low CTR
- Go through your Ad Groups and pause the low performing ads.
This is not an ideal solution but at least you don’t lose impressions, clicks and in turn conversions. Also, you don’t have to wait for Google to rotate all your ads to rediscover which are the better performing ones.
Please comment on this blog if you found a better solution.
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Before i start this post i would like to list the three requirements that you will need to have in your Adwords set up in order to optimize your content match:
1) You must have created separate campaigns for content only. This will ensure that your campaign performance is not affected by the low click thru rate that is generally seen with content.
2) You have set up the conversion tracking using either Adwords or the Analytics Goals set up.
3) You should be using the new Adwords Interface
Now that we have the above set up and the campaign running for a while (at least one week) we can begin optimizing our Adword content campaign with the goal of lowering cost per conversion and increasing the #of conversions.
We begin by clicking on the Network tab in our content campaign and selecting to show details next to the Automatic Placements as seen below:
Side note: In this example I am using both Managed and Automatic placement. The reason i did that is because i needed my ads to show on additional sites that were not automatically matching my keywords and displaying my ads. This way i force my ads to display on certain sites even though the keywords don’t particularly match.
Now back to our automatic placement optimization:
We can see, in the table that shows up, the conversion details for each site our ads are displaying, as well as the Ad Group keyword that triggered the ad to display. Our first task is to look for the sites that have the highest cost per conversion and exclude these sites. We can achieve this by clicking on the header “Cost/Conv (many-per-click)” and sorting the data from high to low as seen in the image below. I then choose to exclude all the sites that have over $100 cost per conversion. This will free up some funds that I can allocate to other ad groups and get more conversions for lower cost:
Next step, I need to find the sites that are receiving clicks but no conversion. I then sort by “Conv. (many-per-click)” instead and display the data in ascending format. I can exclude the sites that have received a significant number of clicks but zero conv. and choose to keep the ones with less clicks and wait for more significant data.
Content match should always be monitored and optimized because your ads are dynamically displaying on new sites based on content match.
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Measuring the progress of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a necessary on going task that includes thorough evaluation of the keywords driving traffic to the site and their corresponding conversion. It’s not enough to look at your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) for the keywords you’re trying to target if these keywords are not driving enough traffic or not converting well on the site.
So the questions you really want to ask are:
- Am I getting more traffic from my targeted SEO keywords?
- Are those new visitors finding the site interesting and engaging? i.e: Low bounce rate, high average page views.
- Are those visitors converting on my website?
You can answer all these questions by following these simple steps:
Using Google Analytics’ “Traffic Sources” section select the “Keywords” option in the left side menu, then Click on the “non-paid” option on top of the table. Make sure you select a time range that goes far back to see the progress prior to starting your SEO project.
This will display all the organic traffic to the site and shows important metrics like bounce rate and conversion.
This is great BUT if you’ve been in business for a while you’ll notice that the majority of your keywords include your company name. Its great to know that people are searching for your company and finding it on the web but what about the people that don’t know you?
To narrow down your results and only look at keywords that dont include your company name, use the exclude option:
- At the bottom of the Keyword page you’ll find a search box “Find Keyword”. Select Excluding and enter your company name
You should now be seeing all the organic keyword visits over time from visitors who most probably never heard of you before.
Your next step would be to check if the traffic is relevant and that you made the right choice in selecting the keywords to optimize for.
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