Optimise online marketing campaigns

Investigating the clues using A/B Testing

Organisations are increasingly spending more money on their online marketing campaigns. It is therefore essential to monitor and track these campaigns, and where possible optimise them in order to get the most out of them.

This article will introduce the notion of optimising your online marketing campaigns with the help of A/B testing to investigate which elements do and don't work.

Business goal

To maximise your desired outcomes by allocating a finite marketing budget optimally among campaign options.

Examples:

• Maximise number of qualified leads captured online
• Maximise online or offline revenue
• Maximise brand awareness

Background information and common terminology

An online marketing campaign can be defined as any marketing communication containing a web site URL that visitors may visit in order to respond to the campaign. Campaigns can be e-mails, banner ads, print ads, search engine ads and so forth. An impression is defined as an instance where a potential visitor views your ad. A clickthrough means that the visitor selected a link from the ad to your website. A conversion means that the visitor completed a desired action, such as becoming a lead or a customer.

Furthermore, a campaign, for example for a Spring promotion, could be launched in parallel through multiple campaign channels, e.g Yahoo and AOL. The channels can be of different channel types, such as banner ads, or paid textual listings. Within the campaign, different campaign segments may be addressed to different target audiences and/or may include different creative.

Most common challenges

• To measure not just clickthroughs from marketing campaigns, but conversions, especially if conversions occur during successive visits to the website (not in the initial visit in response to a campaign).
• To attribute offline conversions to online campaigns by joining customer data located in offline databases to the same customer’s online footprint located in web analytics databases (only a handful of web analytics tools can properly integrate offline data with online data. Affinium NetInsight is one of them).
• To methodically test campaign options before selecting the most promising candidate.

Required information sources

• A unique entry page URL for each campaign segment. Instead of hyper-linking from an e-mail newsletter to your home page, (http://www.mysite.com), make the link unique to the segment, (http://www.mysite.com/?campaign=123).
• Data that identifies which visits lead to conversions, whether they occur online or offline.
• Ideally, data that identifies the value of a conversion, e.g. obtaining a customer.
• Ideally, data that identifies the cost of the campaign.

Solutions for measuring your success with marketing campaigns

Frequently found in web analytics packages are Campaign Summaries, which measure clickthroughs attributable to each of your marketing campaigns, campaign channels, campaign segments, and channel types. You can often apply additional filters to the Campaign Summaries, e.g. for visits that included a view of the “Thank you for registering” page. A Campaign Summary filtered in such a way now measures the conversions of visitors to registrants attributable to each campaign. This can look similar to the graph displayed below.

Scenario Reports, such as the graph below, offer a solution for measuring conversions of campaign visitors even if the conversion occurred during successive visits to the web site, later in time than the initial campaign response. For example, the Scenario funnel below shows the visitors who clicked on a paid listing on Google, in the top slice. Each additional slice in the funnel tracks the number of visitors who eventually (even over multiple web site visits) continue to complete specific steps of a sign-up process, up to the completion of the form.

Investigating clues for optimising your market campaigns

Rather than relying on intuition as the basis for decision making, you can test alternative campaign designs with test audiences, before launching your mass campaign. This can be done using A/B testing, which is available in a few of the more advanced web analytics solutions, including Affinium NetInsight. When you conduct an A/B test create variations of campaigns and simply ad one additional URL parameter to the destination URL’s of your hyperlinks so that your web analytics solution can identify which campaign variation each visit should be attributed to.

For example:
http://mysite.com/?campaign=123&creative=A

Configure your web analytics package to track “creative” as a URL parameter. A crosstab summary will show the results of you’re A/B testing. Furthermore, investigating Content Group, Local Keyword, and Exit Page Summaries and filtering them to successful campaign visits, can help you to understand what these visitors may have been looking for that they did not find or did not like on your site.

Example Affinium NetInsight A/B testing report.
Please click image to enlarge.

Action items

• Increase spending on campaigns with high conversions or conversion rates and continue to measure outcomes.
• Review web site pages or processes causing high drop-offs. Experiment.

SCL Analytics

Properly managing your web data analysis and assimilating this information into your business requires time, focus and expertise.

At SCL we offer a complete web analytics solutions package. As well as supplying the software required to successfully deliver comprehensive reports and analysis, SCL also provide a professional consultation service designed to meet the individual needs of your business.

Our consultants have a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise in delivering web analytics and monitoring solutions. They will work closely with you, understanding your business goals and helping you to get the full benefit of the powerful solutions we provide. This will ultimately aid you in getting the most out of your website investment for your business.

How SCL Analytics can help

Affinium NetInsight (higher traffic volumes) and Unica NetTracker (lower traffic volumes) offer a powerful web analytics solution, enabling you to gather and investigate the information required to successfully optimise your online marketing campaigns.

Contact us to find out more about our web analytics solutions and how they can help you get more out of your online marketing investment.