Cleaning Up with SOAP

I'm seeing more websites these days utilize the Marketo SOAP API's on forms than the standard form/landing page combo and it's a good sign. For the marketers out there, there are a few ways that leads can get added into Marketo and much more clean in terms of how it's done as well as having full control of the design of the web pages.

1. Standard. Use the standard form and landing page pair by creating a form and adding it to a landing page. This works well if you don't have too many form variations since you build the form as a single object with all the fields you want and then drag and drop into a landing page. However, it doesn't work as well if you want to use one form but with just some additional fields. Also, it's a bit tricky to get the right form styles to pass a good designer's eye.
2. Web to Lead. Use a form similar to the Salesforce web to lead form by creating a form and cutting and pasting the code onto your own non-Marketo landing page. You get to control the look and feel but have it go directly into Marketo.
3. API - There's the Munchkin API and SOAP API. Munchkin uses the same javascript cookie that tracks leads to insert them. However, for some of the more nifty things, the documentation says to go with the SOAP API. 

Again, for marketers, I would pass along the documentation and samples for the SOAP API to your web developer. They eat this stuff for breakfast and the PHP and JAVA samples should give enough info to go on. Key takeaway is that there is much more flexibility to control what you can do with the lead information. You have full control of the design elements, but added benefit of being able to look up lead records, append/upsert information to the record as necessary. 

Personally, I've used it (with lots of help) on separate occasions with great success. One for an account management function where a user can manage his/her profile as well as sign in credentials to get access to files, support (on a different system), and website materials without having to resubmit this information. The other is to signup for a demo environment (hosted on our servers) and using the API to pass along the lead information to Marketo. 

https://www.sumologic.com/demo/index.html

On the Marketo side, all you have to do is create a trigger for the API and a value such as lead source that you are using to differentiate the call. 

"Use the Source"

Of all lead fields, the lead source value gets the most amount of attention. As marketers we are trained to look to the lead source as the source of truth for ROI. However, this often gets overly complicated and at times philosophical. After all, leads are often associated to several campaigns prior to conversion and depending on who was involved in the campaigns, each party is looking to claim the credit for the converting source.

  

Depending on the final analysis, telling the full story isn't always so clear. I remember a marketing manager vehemently defending that most leads that converted were because of demos since converted leads had campaigns with the word demo showed up most often. Hmm...we do know that interested buyers tend to go to a demo as the last step before they are converted into an opportunity. Does that mean we should spend all our money on demos and that this is the source of all leads?

So here are my SFDC lead source values. Although it's only single source attribution, what I do give credit for is the originating source or the click from the place prior to the person being cookies on my site. Perhaps we will never truly know the origin of any source, however, it's a good start because it's the first time I've cookied this user. Even if this person leaves the site and comes back at a later point, the original referrer source does not change. For the form conversion, I use the campaign name. I've also tried multiple source fields (lead and web source), but the campaign seems to do the job for now.

If you are using SFGA (Salesforce for Google Adwords) there are a few lead sources that come with the package. The SFGA application will assign a majority of these values by cookie'ing the user on the initial visit to your website. It does a very good job in assigning the lead sources and you'll see these activities entered by the "License Manager" user. The only caveat is that it doesn't work in all cases. For instance, if you decide to send an email and use "Campaign" as a lead source, SFGA will look at referrer and select "Website Referral" as the source since the source was from your email blast source. This also happens for trade show lists. 

In Marketo, I add a rule to Change Data Value for the lead source in the flow preceded by a 5 minute wait step. This ensures license manager will give it the source, then the flow rule will come in after and change it vs. having it the other way around. 

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.

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.

The Big (Adwords) Questions in Life

I recently spent time with our sales folks in our UK office. (I have to digress just for a second and say that traveling business class for the first time was buck!) There were a lot of presentations about lead intelligence, the status of our conversion rates, etc. However, the most intriguing questions to them were pretty much the same ones our sales folks in the US asked.

1. Why doesn't our ads show up in Google when I do a search?
2. If I do a search in the UK, do the results show up the same as if I searched in the States?

If you're on the hook for Adwords, you probably hear these two questions raised all the time. It should be one that is easily answered, but let's give it some more color.

For question #1, the most common symptom is that you run out of budget. Each campaign is set to a daily budget. Within the campaign are ad groups which contain one or more ads (the results you see), and ad groups are associated to keywords that trigger the ad to show. Structurally:

Campaign Name
   Ad Group 1
       Ad 1
          Keywords for Ad 1
       Ad 2
          Keywords for Ad 2

To diagnose, look into the Settings for the Campaign and see what the daily budget amount is set to. Also, check to see if the ads are running at all times meaning a 24 hour period. If so, it might be best to cut down on the times where your ad is not performing well to maximize the most efficient use of budget and conversions. We call this day-parting. It's also important to see if the ads are set to run evenly or accelerated. Accelerated would run through impressions and clicks fairly quickly as well and blow the budget.

Within the campaign look for keywords that are sucking you dry...i.e lots of expensive clicks but low conversions. See if it makes sense to find ways to cut down on spend for these to save on the budget as a whole.

For question #2, the short answer is it depends. It depends on whether or not the country in question is targeted for the campaign. We call this geo-targeting. It's helpful to check the Google Preview Tool to run both the search term on the domain in question.

 

Compete.com With the Best

Imagine this very common scenario. You have spent hours pouring over your analytics data slicing and dicing the images, trend lines, segments, referrals, etc. A few questions about what page visits mean or how unique visitors are trending and if things are growing in the right direction. Then this question comes up which you might not have thought about and usually from someone in a higher pay grade.


How do these metrics compare to our competitors?

Of course, it's an obviously simple question, but not one that is easy to answer. You don't have access to your competitor's analytics information, only yours. I'm glad to see that there are tools that try to answer some of the competitor questions. I just signed up with compete.com and paid for the pro version hoping it'll give more than just directional data. There are others such as comscore and hitwise. Compete seems to have the easiest UI to use.

In the sample screenshot of Facebook against LinkedIn you can see some overall trends and stats over a 2 year period. If I drill down deeper, there are some better details for optimized keywords that bring traffic to the site, etc. It seems to be very useful in benchmarking some trends against competition, but again just directional data. I would look at the percentage more than the actual numbers. Some of the segmentation data in terms of the age, income, gender data is just ok.

The biggest shocker is that the data under reports statistics so it won't match any of the web analytics data. Their unique visitor count is based on a very "sophisticated" measurement on a sample of the US internet population. Tracking is not cookie based but by audience sampling and reminds me of the Nielson ratings. (Yes, US internet users.)

Broad Match Modifier Makes Adwords Easier

I've been running AdWords campaigns for a few years and when the concept of using broad match modifier and this chart was rolled out globally, I almost cried.  I remember the sense of pure joy with an adrenaline rush only geeks who love this stuff can get.

For the first time in a long time, all of this finally made sense. This scheme makes it possible to reduce thousands of keywords within ad groups into a few without sacrificing quality score. It gives the best possible variations of usage without wasting money on broad terms that tend not to lead to quality conversions.

When interviewing firms or Adwords consultants, I always ask how they plan to structure campaigns and ad groups. The answers reveal a lot.

First, if anyone is asked to be paid on a percentage of the budget managed, then you automatically lose. Those goals are opposites. You want to spend less but get more. They want to spend more to get more.

Second, it never made any sense to take a campaign and add tens of ad groups within the campaign. After all, you only get to set the budget at the campaign level. So, if you have 10 dollars for a campaign and 5 ad groups, you can allocate a certain amount per ad group. If someone suggest building out more ad groups within the campaign, you just broke up the spend into more ad groups and having to spend for all the keywords. Now, you'll have to add more money for the campaign, and ding, ding...they make their money on the size of the account.

Use the modified broad match. It'll be your best friend and allow you to manage many more campaigns without splitting all your dollars across the plethora of keyword match options. Since it is available globally, I've used this successfully across all geographies.

AdWords Broad Match Keyword Targeting