If you’re not sure where to begin with developing strong marketing data, our Director of Client Operations, Elizabeth Crinejo, will walk you through the first steps.

From the session “Drowning in Data, but Thirsty for Insight?” given by Elizabeth Crinejo and Melissa Mines at ConnectToConvert, August 21, 2017.

Transcript

Also, this end section is just little things you should be doing. So, it’s kind of like a potpourri or a mishmash of different ideas. So, one of the things that I know is, whenever I’ve talked to clients or potential clients that aren’t— that don’t have a clean data world or have a no-data world, the first things I tell them to do is put your Google Analytics code on your page. Set up all the relevant goals.

It doesn’t take very long. You can put one person to that task, and most of you are probably beyond this but just in case, everything that you’re spending money on should also give you a way to track it. So, if it’s AdWords or Bing or Yahoo or LinkedIn or Facebook, you have some way to track it, and make sure you have those codes on your page, and you’re doing it properly.

Then set up performance goals. So, for each of those channels where you’re spending money, it may start out as just a thought like, “Okay, I want in general get this type of return or in general I want to get this kind of cost per acquisition.” See how you fare against that.

The other thing I wanted to point out is, so really technology is going to be one of our biggest partners in this world of data. So, you want to make sure you’re using the technologies you have on hand. You may not think, “Oh, I can’t go get like an AI vendor, someone who can really bring some programmatic thinking to my game.” But if you’re just marketing in AdWords alone, there are tools that are already in the tool that do this already for you.
These are tools that use Google’s smart analytic processing power to cross so many metrics simultaneously when someone puts in a search and hits go. This tool will automatically say, “Should your ad be there? Should it not be there? Should you automatically bid more because the likelihood that they’re gonna turn into a lead is higher?”
So, I made this pretty actionable. Each of those are hot linked. I know you’ll be able to get these downloads, but there’s also some information about each of them specifically. So going through each of these, and I won’t go through each of these. I don’t know how many of you—how many of you advertise in AdWords? Okay, so it’s a good number of you. How many of you already are working with any of these tools? Okay good. So, a few of you are and a few of you aren’t.

These Google Adwords resources are listed in the video; click the links for Google’s pages on them

Okay, for those of you who aren’t, I hope it actually can be something that’s easy to implement. It’s already there. No budgets need to be improved. You might need to allocate, but this is all stuff you need to test. In our agency we’ve had some of these do really well for clients and then do really not well for some other clients. So, use the process that we outlined to help you test and iterate on this.

So, here, again, I’ve shared—basically, one cheat sheet is here for each of these products. So, take a look at them, and there’s also links to either—I put pretty much the most useful resource that I came across, either a video or AdWords help that took you all the way through to implementation, but these are all tools that help you find audiences in some cases or help you show better if the likelihood, based on its algorithmic process, in that millisecond after someone hits go on a search says that it’s much more likely that they’re going to click on your ad than another. So, it’s worth a 30-percent bump in your bid. That’s what these tools do.

There’s also great tools that allow you to upload your email lists so that you allow their algorithm to learn from your people. Either you can market them, so maybe it can be a world of nurturing a lead or maybe it’s having them come back with different types of remarketing efforts that maybe you have other product or services you’d like to show to them or you want to go out there and find people just like them. Google will use those email addresses to—they’ll watch them for a little while, see how they behave up there in the internet, and then they’ll go find people that seem to behave similarly.

These are all guesses based on a machine not a person. So, act accordingly, but don’t avoid the fact that sometimes there are going to be lots of machines who will think faster than we can, so you definitely want to make them your friends.