Stand__Sure: Stop Wasting Money on Bad Leads

Stop Wasting Money on Bad Leads:

Integrating Marketing data into Backend Systems

Not all leads are good leads

The Problem: Some of the leads from paid media are negative return on investment (ROI)

Stop burning money on bad advertising!

The Cause: Placement Tool Reports only show the first conversion – the web-to-lead conversion

It is very common for a company to increase its lead volume and not improve sales.

From the placement tool reports, you do not know if a lead is a good lead or a bad lead.

The reports from media placement and bidding tools only indicate the quantity and cost associated with obtaining a lead – they do not have visibility further downstream.

In the absence of data, all leads are created equal – NOT all leads are good leads!

You need better data

Marketing → Website conversion
is not sufficient.

Marketing → Sale
is what you need.

What you need is a way to tie online marketing activity to future outcomes in order to know what is really working.

It may be the case that the ad that only sends a few leads and costs you 2x as much per lead to run results in more sales and yields a higher return on investment than your baseline advertising.

Traditional media optimization (spend → website conversion) would tell you to decrease your spend on this advertisement because of high CPA – the tools are unaware of downstream performance.

Solution: Two simple GTM tags to pull data into your backend systems

Although your placement tools cannot look downstream, your website can push data into your backend systems, allowing you to "look" upstream.

Below are two simple Google Tag Manager (GTM) tags that you can implement in minutes to begin solving the problem.

Step #1: Grab marketing data from the landing page URL

If the team handling your digital marketing placements has set things up properly, your landing page URLs will have utm_* parameters (e.g. https://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=marketing%20crm%20integration%20&utm_campaign=crm, where the terms in bold represent different well-understood tracking parameters and the terms to the right of the equals sign are the values that are recorded in Google Analytics and other tracking and analytics platforms).

If your marketing URLs do not contain parameters like these, please see the URL builder reference below.

The values of these parameters are well understood by Google Analytics and are used to track and report how users find your website. If you capture the same values into temporary, session-only cookies, when your website user fills out a form, you can pull the values from the cookies into the form.

Capturing these values will let you see what marketing leads to sales.

How to extract the utm_* parameters from a URL and put them into cookies

Create a new tag in Google Tag Manager
Click the "Custom HTML Tag" option
Enter the following code in the text area:
<script> (function (w) { var q = w.location.search, pairs, utms; q = q.substring(1); pairs = q.split("&"); utms = pairs.map(function(el) { var kv = el.split("="); if(kv[0].indexOf("utm") === 0) return kv; }); utms.forEach(function(kv) { if (kv) document.cookie = kv[0] + "=" + kv[1]; }); })(window); </script>
Select fire on "ALL PAGES"
Name and save the tag

Your completed tag should look similar to the one shown in Fig 1. below

UTM parameters to cookies GTM tag — Fig 1. UTM to Cookies GTM Tag

Step #2: Push the marketing parameters into your lead forms

Adding the data to your form

Create a new "Custom HTML Tag" as shown previously
Enter the following code
<script> (function (d) { var cookies = d.cookie.split(/\s*;\s*/g), utm; cookies = cookies.map(function(el) { var kv= el.split("="); return [(kv[0] || ""), (kv.length>1 ? (kv[1] || "") : "") ]; }); utm = cookies.filter(function(el) { return el[0].indexOf("utm")===0; }); utm.forEach(function(el){ var input = d.querySelector("[name=" + el[0] + "]"); if(input) input.value = el[1]; }); })(document); </script>
Select fire on "ALL PAGES"
Name and save the tag

Your completed tag should look similar to the one shown in Fig 2. below

UTM cookies to form GTM tag — Fig 2. Cookies to Form GTM Tag

NOTE: you or whoever configures your lead forms will need to add hidden inputs to your forms to accept these new pieces of data (e.g. <input type="hidden" name="utm_source" />). The name associated with each input must exactly match the name of the cookie (this includes capitalization – all utm_* parameter names and values in the URL should be lowercase: consistency on this point will prevent many headaches and extra work.

Previewing and Debugging

Once you have updated a form (or created a test form) on your site, you can test the tags.

Click the down button beside the "Publish" button
Click the "Preview" button
Debugging
- Open a page on your site
- Add some utm_* values to the URL (e.g. ?utm_source=testing – if there already is a question mark in the URL, do not add another one: replace the question mark with an ampersand character ("&") and append the utm pairs)
- Reload (you should see the first tag setting cookies here)
- Navigate to your test form and inspect the results (you should see the values from the cookies in your form fields).

In preview & debug mode, the following URL produces the result shown in Fig 4.: https://demos.stand--sure.com/utm-form-integration.html?utm_source=social&utm_medium=blog&utm_term=crm

Previewing and Debugging the GTM tags example — Fig 4. Preview & Debug GTM Tags Example

Next Steps

CRM

Develop reports that show the sales win rate for each type of advertising.
Start high level (source/medium) and then get more granular (campaign/keywords/creative) until you get useful and actionable insights.
Measure the qualification and win rates at the granularity from the previous step – use this in your lead scoring.

Marketing Automation

Use the insights gained above to identify groups that are less likely or may take longer to convert to sales.
Develop separate email and social marketing campaigns targeted at these prospects.
Use the sign-up page and the source/medium/campaign/... to send content to users that more closely matches their intention when they visited your site and signed up. Matching intent keeps the customer reading your content and increases your odds of winning a customer.

GTM

Add additional tags to push the values above into events.
Now that Google Analytics allows you to look at specific users in the User Explorer, valuable insights can be gained by pushing marketing data into the user session data that GA lets you see.
Add a tag to capture the Customer ID (the "cid" in Google Analytic parlance – it represents the user/device pair that is interacting with your site.
Push this value into your web sign-up forms so that you can go back and look at what a specific user did online.

Code Explanation

UTM to Cookies Tag

The first tag works as follows:

It grabs everything in the URL to the right of and including the first question mark. This is called the "search" or "query" string (e.g. ?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=marketing%20crm%20integration%20&utm_campaign=crm).
The leading question mark character is not useful to us and is, therefore, removed (e.g. utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=marketing%20crm%20integration%20&utm_campaign=crm).
The key-value pairs are separated by ampersand characters. The code splits the string along these characters.
It then splits the keys and values from each other, and if the key begins with "utm", it keeps the pair; otherwise, the pair is ignored.
Each "utm" pair is then assigned to a temporary, session-only cookie.

UTM cookies to Form Tag

The second tag works as follows:

Browser cookies are simple text and are delimited by semicolons. The code first splits the text into individual key=value pieces.
It then splits the individual pairs into keys and values and removes any leading/trailing whitespace.
For the cookies with names beginning with "utm", the code looks for HTML elements with the same name as the cookie (form inputs use a name="fieldName" to identify values when they are passed into backend systems) and sets the value of each input.

Google Tag Manager

If you are not using Google Tag Manager, you should be. Instructions for setup and installation are at https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6103696?hl=en

About Stand Sure

Stand Sure is a strategic marketing consultancy. We do not sell media or creative. Instead, we help you increase your revenue by making what you are already doing better.

01 July 2016

Stop Wasting Money on Bad Leads