Losing Leads and Sales With Bad Search Marketing Decisions

There are so many tools that help marketers with their search marketing but marketers have to know how to use the analytics in order to focus on the right things to generate leads and sales.

So often I find that marketers are only looking at conversion rates of how specific phrases or banners perform and are ignoring other valuable information. While conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

I came across an interesting article by B2B Internet marketing consultant Todd Miechiels, and I liked what he had to say about those B2B marketers that make bad decisions based on “solid analytics data.”

Marketers need to look at more than the quantity of conversions. Quality is just as important. If you look solely at what phrases convert a higher percentage of whitepaper downloads, for example, you could be missing the fact that another phrase brought in 2 or 3 of your top prospects, which in the long run, could be better for your company.

Todd goes on to say: “If you are spending thousands of dollars per month on search marketing and not capturing visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that don't), you are shutting down phrases and scaling back campaigns by using only half the truth. Equally as dangerous, you are likely routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear to perform better but in reality are merely clogging the marketing database and sales pipeline.”

According to Todd, there are three things you should remember:

• Make sure you're capturing and reporting on visiting organizations referred by specific search phrases.
• Factor in the number of legitimate organizations you've captured when assessing the effectiveness of your search terms and campaigns.
• Don't fall into the trap of optimizing campaigns based solely on quantitative conversion data.

 Don’t clog the pipeline. Take Todd's advice and take the broader view.

Here's some related posts:

Web analytics for b2b lead gen
Tracking ROI for web generated leads