According to industry analyst firm AMR International business-to-business (B2B) online advertising is just one of the areas that will start to climb out of the recession-driven trough it has been in. But while AMR’s B2B online marketing report reaffirms what others are saying about growing investments in various marketing channels, it, also, identifies a large descrepancy between how B2B marketers rate the effectiveness of paid search results. Apparently marketers who measure results rate the effectiveness of their online search ad campaigns higher than those who don’t.
Which got me to thinking: if marketers who don’t measure results think their ads don’t count, then why are they still buying search ads? More importantly, shouldn’t this raise red flags for SEO services vendors? I’d be beating a door to my clients with reports in hand to help validate the effectiveness of their campaigns.
You can read more on the report in the 4 March 2010 article called, “B2B Online Marketers Focus on Lead Gen,” on eMarketer.com. Here’s a copy of a chart from eMarketer’s site illustrating the broad differences between marketers who measure paid search results and those who don’t.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this…
Having done search ads both as a director of marketing for a software company and as a small business owner, I think the main thing I came away with was: Is it easy to do the analysis?
If I have to take the raw data and twist it around, then it’s a waste of my 80-hour-week time. If the analyzer the engine provides for me isn’t flexible enough to do it, then I still have to take the data and do my own excel analysis, then it’s a waste of my 80-hour-week time.
If, with a few clicks, I can customize to a high degree and save a report that gives me exactly what I want, when I want it (regardless of the actual data results), then, it’s worth it to me as a marketer, and I can justify it to my CEO without making my 80-hour-week an 85-hour-week.
I can’t believe B2B is still such a prevalent acronym. I remember when it was invented in 1999 and fueled a dot-com-boom. Overall, I think marketing (and probably more like senior management) needs – more than excellent statistical analysis of online advertising – a lesson in basic journalistic English. Adjectives are okay. Superlatives are not. Acronyms are of the devil.
Just my two cents.
Hi Cait. Thanks for your perspective. And I absolutely agree. If you can’t easily make sense of results, than why bother reading them. And that is partly my point: if an SEO vendor isn’t ‘translating’ accurately for his/her clients, then shouldn’t they turn off their ads? Isn’t it incumbent for the service provider to be on top of this? Google, of course, does all it can to make things confusing, I think, so it makes SEO/SEM vendors stay on their toes. And I respect how hard it may be to provide ‘readable’ data. But — isn’t that part of what you’re paying for? I’ve walked in these shoes and I, too, put the reports to the side because of the very issues you raise.
As for B2B…ah, that’s a term near and dear to my heart. I hope it never goes away
The results absolutely count. If traffic is coming into your site, and you can see your rank or ads in the search engines, then by all means, yes they are important.
As to one-click reporting that fully demonstrates the results? Without someone paying attention to the reports at an analytical level, high-level reports will most likely be all that can be delivered.
While it’s true that PPC can let you track almost everything, it can’t account for users who turn off javascript and disable cookies. So just from those people alone, the data will NEVER be 100% accurate. Then, take into account that the analytics software interpret the log files differently.
Webtrends processes the exact same log file differently from Google Analytics. Knowing this, the best way to know if something is working is to look for trends and patterns that match up over time.
Depending on how your site is constructed, you’d be amazed what people are willing to share – both good and bad. I don’t need a report telling me my site is bad based in my bounce rate.
Ultimately, it’s up to person charged with reviewing the reports to get out of it what they need. All the reporting in the world makes no difference is the people receiving them never look at them!
Interesting. If you’re doing paid search ads and you’re not measuring and analyzing your results, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here to say you’re incompetent. Everyone knows, and every book, webinar, ebook, and expert will affirm, that PPC is a test-adjust-improve-rinse-repeat process. With no real understanding of results data, the whole process is worthless. That is if the people in question are even attempting to follow it.
The chart strongly suggests that the people represented by the delta between 62% neutral and 27% neutral–that 35%–probably have no idea if/when their campaigns are working. They’re probably hands off. They’ve outsourced to a vendor who gives them razzle dazzle but not the beef, and they don’t demand it for some reason. There could be many different reasons, but they’re making the same mistake any marketer makes when they outsource a function, whether SEO or social media or PR, and don’t sweat the details right alongside the vendor. In the long run they’ll get suboptimal results.
I’m sorry but if you want to be in the game, you have no choice but to make the effort to keep score.
Sooooooo. In sum: Because RESULTS count, metrics SHOULD count but (a) they are often conflicting, (b) they’re hard to read or make sense of without a lot of effort, so look for trends, (c) — even if you don’t pay attention to the metrics or do anything with them, keep the faith because doing ’something’ in SEO is better than doing nothing… or so Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other search engines would like us to believe. (And, full disclosure, I probably have to concur.)
But, please, if you have more thoughts on this…would love to have you weigh in!
If a marketer can’t answer the question “What do I want more of?” AND is unable to measurably answer the question, then the marketer shouldn’t bother running the SEO campaign. It’s a recipe for making Google and SEO vendors rich. Marketers should demand meaningful analytics from their SEO vendors, and respectable ones like Elliance have summary and detailed performance dashboards.
We still find B2B, B2B2C, and B2C remain quite relevant because each requires unique persuasion architecture, conversion paradigms, demand generation strategies and web analytic models.
Marketers who run paid search campaigns (or organic, for that matter) seem to fall into two camps: marketers who are happy with the level of trackability that past types of traditional marketing offered (very little)…and marketers who want more.
I can understand the theory that doing “something” is better than doing nothing. The brand is at least getting some level of awareness that it wasn’t getting before. And, historically, such a small percentage of traditional marketing was trackable that some marketers have grown accustomed to assuming success or failure for particular campaigns without having the data to back it up.
However, it’s the marketers that recognize the measurable results that can come from search that are truly cashing in. The ROI that can be traced to key phrases, ad copy, landing pages, site copy revisions, etc. is just remarkable. Good firms know how to track it. And, you’re missing out if you’re not taking advantage.
For marketers dealing with “considered purchases” that involve long sales cycles (many b2b marketers), “measuring results” is easier said than done. Most likely, prospects saw multiple messages and promotions which means marketers must somehow attribute the “credit” for results across these multiple touches. Which is most important, the first touch? The last? All? Google is trying to help marketers get their heads around this with their new AdWords Search Funnel: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173376.
Andrew – thanks for weighing in and adding the link to the AdWords Search Funnel video. You’re right: trying to weight which marketing ‘activity’ tipped the balance is a delicate task. While it’s important to strive for such insight, one thing that’s always worried me is the over-weighting of one tactic over another, when it simply may be intersection of the maturation of the need and timing of the promotion that spurs the purchase. In such case, it might not make a difference what the tactic is, but that the tactic itself was simply ‘right-time.’ PS – Nice to hear from you. Hope all’s well and drying out in Mass.