Friday, January 13, 2012

Where Are My Peeps!

Does this look familiar? It's incredibly unfamiliar to me, but today I had to introduce myself to the goose egg. Yes, this is a drawing of a goose egg and out of my whole career it's the first time that I got one of these on my Adwords conversions. 0 today. Nada! It definitely takes a big blow to the ego since I can't recall any previous days like this.

I spent close to 2 hours diagnosing the issue like House would do. Let's check the list.

  • Impressions were in the hundreds of thousands so the ads are showing. 
  • Budget is still below the daily limits so we're ok there.
  • Ad positions weren't completely buried on the 2nd or 3rd pages so the average positions were decent.
  • Click activity was super low....Aha! The House moment.
So why would click activity be so low? Now that I'm at my sixth day at the new gig, I should've had some pretty good ads and landing pages. I read the ads again. They really stank. It had all the usual buzzwords but nothing that would make my peeps (IT Ops people) even blink. Add that to the fact that there's a 3 day weekend around the corner and my company is still in stealth mode so there's very little information out there and I get a goose egg. I guess if a tree falls in the forest and we're all in the city, no one gives a sh*t.

Next week I have to turn that goose egg into a hatchling.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Me, Myself & Marketo


And so it begins...again. A new year and new job and a new instance of Marketo.  On one hand it's exciting to bring a marketing automation suite into a stealth mode company and have a chance to start from scratch. There's nothing in place. On the other hand, it looks so empty at first. Beginning at the beginning again so I have create all those precious little nuggets of activities that have made life so much easier.

Here's a plan for getting up and running quickly. It's quick and dirty and you can build on the rest.

  • Day 1: Marketo sent the login details and credentials. Add the muchkin code, connect SFDC, initialize the database schema sync, add the cname.
  • Day 2: Build the landing page template. You don't have to wait for the standard pack Marketo installs. Look at the blank template and modify the css to fit your brand. (Do NOT cut and paste code from an existing landing page from your website and use it as a template. The Marketo editor will not work if you do that. The key pieces to modify are the (denoted with mkt) header, content, column, footer. This is what the wysywig editor looks for in order for the properties to show up correctly.)  
  • Day 3: Create the first smart list for bad data filtering. Get on a kick-off call with the customer success manager.
  • Day 4: Create all Adwords landing pages and run ads there.
  • Day 5: Check out all your sync and conversions to see if lead details are coming in correctly. 

Up and running in 5 days. Of course if you're motivated this just needs to take a few hours.

If there's any advice, the most important place to start is to define your lead capture forms and pages. Success is highly dependent on your getting your lead capture forms correctly. It is after all the primary place where names get entered into the system. 

Begin by determining the absolute minimum number of form fields you need in order to make some routing decision about the lead. It is generally accepted knowledge that that longer forms deter users from filling it out. Over time, you can try different lengths for various assets to get a sense of the trade-offs. At this point, replicate what is there.