We use Google Analytics for everything. We track all of our inbound marketing, performance-based marketing and social media efforts. We’re lead focused, so we do our best to track how each source of traffic performs for us and through this, where we should be spending our time and energy. We use this to source PR opportunities, hone performance-based marketing campaigns, and now (I’ll explain) to do our display ad buys.
We’ve been running some basic display with Google Display Network for some time but wanted to notch up our test of display with a big site buy. So who the heck should we do a buy with? For companies like ours, there are numerous choices: the TechCrunches of the world, MediaPost publications, Forbes Small Business type pubs, vertical ad networks, etc. Rather than take a shotgun approach, we decided to look at our own data and pick some low-hanging fruit. Following a few of the steps we went through, you can do something similar for your own business.
Before you start: you must set up Goal tracking in analytics to make these decisions. If you don’t have this set up: do that first, bookmark this blog post, come back in a month and read the rest.
The fundamental question is which site has already aggregated your customer demographic for you. Clearly you want to do a buy on a site that is visited by your prospects. Start by running a simple Goal report in Google Analytics and segment by source. You’ll quickly see who is generating conversions for you. Next, take a look at two dimensions: the volume of conversions and the conversion rate. Both of these are important. If a source (let’s say TechCrunch) is generating tons of traffic but not conversions, this is not low-hanging fruit. If a source is generating incredible conversion rates but there is simply no volume, this is probably not low-hanging fruit either. I am going to guess you have a few sites in that report that are both acceptable volume and high conversion rate.
The beauty of this data is that it will tell you two things: who has your customers and what you should expect to spend per lead based on the conversion rate. Once you’ve built your spreadsheet (see below) all you have to do is make the right creative (banner ads) and execute the buy. On the whole, you should see similar conversion rates from your display buy to what you’re seeing on inbound conversions from content (e.g. an article on TechCrunch).
I built an example spreadsheet to show you the basic calculation. You can grab the first three columns right out of Google Analytics. The next two (CPM rate and estimate CTR) you can get from the various sites you might do ad buys on (they will tell you this information as part of their pitch to you). The rest you can derive. I don’t know what your acceptable CPA is so don’t take the numbers as gospel – I am just trying to highlight the method. What you should glean from this example is that the site ABC.com is actually the best starting bet for us (unless we don’t care about higher CPA) even though it wasn’t the higher visitor traffic.
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The beauty of this approach is that you can repeat it over and over again picking up new contenders for display buys as your inbound traffic changes over time. As a side note, you can integrate your PR strategy into this methodology as well. Directly targeting pubs or bloggers you haven’t reached yet (don’t see traffic from) then measure the direct correlation between visits from them and lead generation. If the numbers work (and the costs are in line) do an ad buy!
Long live metrics!
