One of the biggest hurdles business owners and marketers face in creating marketing campaigns is bias.  It is human nature, I suppose, that we believe our ideas and viewpoints are held by the majority of the public.  However, it is important to remove your bias from the discussion when developing an ad campaign.  Not all web surfers think alike or use the internet the same way to find information.  More importantly to consider and understand…not all people think like you when it comes to finding information online.

For small and medium size business owners, this seems like one of the hardest marketing lessons to accept.  It is understandable to expect a business owner, who built his or her business from the ground up, to have their pulse on what makes the business grow.  When it comes to internet marketing and paid search campaigns, many business owners simply apply the same logic that helped build their business to the web.  This is often a failing strategy, because of the bias inherent in the business owner’s thought process on what drives people to their website.  It is this bias and inexperience from most business owners that lead to poorly created and managed paid search campaigns.  Many of the fixes needed to restructure these campaigns are technical in design.  For example, the business owner wasn’t aware of the proper way to build out and structure the campaign, which is to be expected.  They have enough on their plates running their business, and probably never took the time to earn their Google AdWords Certification.  Getting a business owner to agree to technical and structural change is relatively easy when providing paid search consultation, it is exactly the type of help they need and want to hear.

Where it gets challenging for the marketing consultant, is educating the business owner on how to drive higher quality traffic, when the recommendations are in stark contrast to the preconceptions of the business owner.  I do not think many business owners like to hear their ideas on traffic generation are flawed.  As a marketing consultant, educating the business owner on how to look past their own bias by showing real-time statistics to support your recommendations is imperative.  Using Google Analytics (GA) is the most effective way to demonstrate the concept that not all searchers think alike and not all keywords are equal.  Website visitors and their engagement with the site determine success for any campaign.  As a business owner, learn to leverage that data to educate yourself and break down the walls of bias when creating and optimizing an online marketing campaign.  Don’t assume you can just build out keywords based on how you search the internet.  This will only limit your campaign’s effectiveness, because not all searchers think like you.

We speak with clients and prospects all of the time who are very focused on attaining a particular Cost Per Acquisition “CPA” goal with their search engine marketing campaigns. It’s clearly valuable to put energy into that kind of tracking effort and adjust campaigns accordingly, however I believe that the data can be easily misinterpreted if there is not a process in place to account for sales that occur later when the lead source may be a bit muddier. In other words, it’s essential to be able to properly attribute “leads” that become sales at a later date back to their original lead source, not just the last touch that they received.

With Google Analytics and most of the other tracking / analysis tools, it’s easy to accurately attribute sales on ecommerce websites. It gets trickier when the selling cycle is longer, particularly when companies have a process in place to continue to market to individuals who have visited their sites, but don’t immediately “convert”. Is the sale credited back to the original marketing effort, to a remarketing campaign or to the email campaigns that prospects have been consistently receiving for the past several months?

There is no exact answer to this question, nor is the answer the same in every circumstance. More often than not, the answer is that attribution should likely be shared across multiple sources (contributing factors). That being said, it’s important not to adopt a myopic view when it comes to assessing your lead sources and figuring out where to trim (or add) additional resources to campaigns.

Our friends at Google have recently launched a new sorting algorithm within Google Analytics. Now, when you sort a computed metric - like goal conversion rate, bounce rate or percentage of new visits – you can weight that sort by the number of data points.  This ranks the most interesting and actionable items higher in your sort.

Previously, if you wanted to see which keyword had the highest bounce rate, it would rank keywords with 100% bounce rates the highest, even if the keyword only had one visit. This did not lend much to analyze.

Now, however, with Weighted Sort you can see which keywords with substantial visits are giving you high bounce rates.

Weighted Sort clears up the clutter of large amounts of data and helps you make more effective decisions when dissecting campaigns. It can help you focus on what keywords or pages need to be improved to increase your campaign performance.