METRICS THAT MATTER: A Guide to Measuring the Impact of Display Advertising in B2B
The State of the B2B Buying Process From online targeting to marketing automation to the constantly evolving world of social media, there’s no shortage of tactics and approaches to help today’s B2B marketers. And while the marketing discipline has never been more exciting— it’s also never been more challenging. Along with the growth of B2B-specific technologies and related strategies come prospects who are increasingly savvy— and particular—about the ways they choose to seek out solutions and services for their businesses. Most B2B prospects do not pick up the phone or fill out online forms to contact vendors directly. Instead, they’re doing their own online research, seeking out reviews from their own social networks, and ultimately not engaging with an actual salesperson until 90% of the B2B purchase process is already over.1
According to Forrester Research, a B2B buyer’s journey is often ninety percent over before sales is contacted.
And if this wasn’t enough, according to a recent survey done by Crain’s BtoB Magazine 2 :
• 81% of B2B marketers say at least 2 people are typically responsible for the buying decision
• 43% say their B2B buying processes have increased in length • 36% of marketers admit that their current marketing mix is not meeting the demands of the sales pipeline With longer buying processes, maxed out marketing channels, and the need for more precise online targeting than ever, what’s a B2B marketer to do?
1 Lori Wizdo, “Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide the Buyer’s Journey,” Lori Wizdo’s Blog, October 4, 2012, http://blogs.forrester.com/lori_wizdo/12-10-04-buyer_behavior_helps_b2b_marketers_guide_the_buyers_journey. 2 “Priming the Pipeline: Driving Awareness, Conversions & Sales,” Crain’s B2B Magazine, 2013.
Forty-three percent of marketers surveyed by BtoB Magazine said their B2B buying processes have lengthened in the past three years.
Display Advertising - A Perfect Fit for B2B With B2B marketing, there is no “one size fits all” approach. Depending on the challenges being faced by marketers in a given time period, some may want to gain more awareness for their brand in a certain market. At other times, lead generation and nurturing may be their main focal points to drive more sales. The beauty of display advertising is that it is uniquely capable to meet this entire range of B2B marketing challenges. Undoubtedly, channels such as email marketing and search marketing have made their mark as B2B marketing staples, but both of these tactics only reach a limited amount of people. For example, you can only email the prospects for which you have contact information; with search, you’re only engaging with those who are actively looking for a solution to their business problem at this very moment. With display advertising, you can reach those in your target audience who may not have even realized they need your product or service yet. At the same time, you can use a different set of ad creative to nurture those that are in your buying cycle and already engaged. Finally, you can use display advertising to “close the deal” with a conversion—whether that conversion goal is a whitepaper download, a free trial signup, or a demo request. Display advertising is a B2B marketer’s best friend throughout the entire buying cycle or marketing funnel—an idea we’ll dive into deeper a little later in this whitepaper.
Measuring Digital Marketing Success in B2B Long ago, marketing was often considered to be a cost center in the B2B organization.
Today, nothing could be farther from the truth—the majority of B2B marketers are now data-driven and able to use supporting technologies to measure their success in highly tangible ways. They can also prove marketing’s value as a solid contributor to revenue and the bottom line. Yet despite these massive leaps, many B2B marketers still struggle with comprehensive program measurement and value attribution; in fact only 42% of marketers said they attribute success across the entire marketing funnel. For this reason, there is a tendency to over-invest in lower-funnel programs that are easiest to track and measure, since they are closest to the sale conversion. As such, there is the strong tendency in B2B marketing to apply metrics related to lead generation (leads, cost per lead, etc.) to almost any sort of online marketing campaign. However, using leads as the universal language for metrics can be problematic, especially when the marketing objective is to increase brand awareness or drive engagement.
The Internet and the Evolution of Advertising Metrics Let’s go back to the “early” days of traditional advertising. Before the Internet, television, print, and radio advertising ruled. Because massive spend was required to even move the needle, advertising was also limited to the big brands and budgets that could afford it. As for metrics, reach (the total number of people or households exposed to an advertising message at least once within a certain period) and frequency (the number of times people are exposed to an advertising message) were used to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Fast forward to today, and the world of advertising is both affordable and accessible to all sizes of businesses. The Web has made online advertising both highly targeted and efficient, and unlike before, companies only need dollars—not thousands of dollars— to take advantage of this online marketing channel. Thanks to the efficiencies of the Web, small organizations can now compete for the same ad inventory as large companies.
Metrics such as reach and frequency are still important, but the online world has also given way to a variety of other ways to measure success, depending on where marketers are looking to make an impact on their marketing funnel.
Display Advertising and the Full-Funnel Marketing Approach The notion of the “marketing funnel” provides a framework for B2B marketers to both understand the various stages
TOP FUNNEL IMPACT
a B2B prospect goes through (awareness, education,
(Brand Awareness)
evaluation, purchase, etc.) and how they need to design programs to keep their brands, messages, and content in front of their target audiences at every stage. In today’s age of advanced marketing technologies and rapidly evolving best practices and strategies, marketers
MID FUNNEL IMPACT
(Content Engagement & Education)
are in a strong position to cost-effectively reach their target audiences at every stage of the funnel. But, they must avoid the pitfall of under-investing in any one stage of the funnel (e.g. neglecting top-funnel goals such as
BOTTOM FUNNEL IMPACT
(Lead Generation & Sales Conversions)
branding and awareness can put downstream goals such as conversions at risk). The savviest online marketers are employing a diverse set of marketing programs that impact the entire funnel. Full-funnel marketing is about understanding the key objectives you need to hit at each stage of the funnel, pinning down the right metrics to measure progress against those objectives, and then deploying the right programs to achieve them. While B2B marketers are constantly employing a mix of programs to achieve a wide variety of goals, display advertising is unique in its ability to impact all stages as a powerful, full-funnel marketing channel. For B2B marketers, the key to measuring a program starts with:
• Specifically defining the role a program or channel is intended to play in the marketing mix. For example, your corporate website should be used to increase engagement with your brand, not generate initial brand awareness—display advertising is better suited for this.
• Aligning metrics to each program based on its unique role and the goals it aims to achieve. For instance, if you launch a display advertising campaign in order to increase awareness of your products or brand among your target audiences, clicks and click-through rate (CTR) don’t make sense as success metrics—but brand recall or lift in targeted website traffic do.
A Closer Look at Full-Funnel Display Advertising So what does full-funnel marketing look like exactly when we focus specifically on display advertising? Here’s a breakdown of just a few of the different tactics and metrics that are relevant to particular parts of the funnel.
TOP-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING TACTICS The top funnel is where you focus to increase awareness and recall of your company and products, and to drive more of the right traffic to your Website, corporate blog,
TOP FUNNEL IMPACT (Brand Awareness)
or landing pages. Top-funnel campaigns convey what your company does, why your products are unique, and why customers should care about your company. Here are some effective top-funnel display tactics:
MIDmarketers FUNNEL IMPACT can • Broad business demographic targeting. For the top funnel, (Content Engagement & Education) deploy a range of display advertising techniques including broad business demographic targeting (e.g. targeting all business professionals). Starting out broadly also enables you to cast the widest net for potential prospects and optimize to top-performing segments as time goes on.
BOTTOM FUNNEL IMPACT
(Lead Generation & Sales Conversions)
• Company targeting. Company targeting enables marketers to run display
campaigns against a specific target account list. This can be a useful tactic for reaching multiple people within a single company that may be involved in the buying process. However, to ensure the greatest success, company targeting should be used in conjunction with business demographic targeting so that you’re reaching the right people—not just the right accounts.
• Video Targeting. Video targeting is a great way to reach the broader audiences you are targeting early on in the purchase process. More and more B2B marketers are investing in video, as it’s an appealing and digestible format for content. In fact, in a recent survey done by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, 58% of the B2B marketers surveyed said they found video to be an effective tactic.3 3 “B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.
TOP-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING METRICS Top-funnel measurement can be tricky, which is why many marketers take the easy way out and simply attribute success to the strength of the last marketing campaign that touched a deal before it closed. For example, if they have deployed a display advertising program to fill or accelerate prospects through the funnel, and paidsearch or SEO programs to convert prospects lower in the funnel, they may jump to the conclusion that search is driving all the new business, which may lead them to increase their incremental spend on search alone. Here’s the conundrum. If all credit is given to search, and spending on search is subsequently increased, the shortage of budget in display is likely to adversely impact the next quarter’s search results. Simply put, the lower-funnel activity will plateau if you don’t invest in the upper funnel. We’ll discuss how to best approach attribution later on in the guide. Beyond proper attribution, there are several good-fit tangible metrics that you can track to get a handle on the impact of your upper-funnel display advertising tactics. If you’re reaching more of your target audience higher up in the funnel, you should see a lift in:
• Brand recall. You can run an online brand study that compares increase in awareness among a control group (i.e., people who didn’t see your display ad) to an exposed group (i.e., people who saw your display ad).
• Branded search. You should see an increase in the number of people searching for your company or products in their search engine of choice.
• Targeted traffic to your website. Your website analytics tools should show an increase in the volume of targeted traffic to your Website.
• Form conversions. You should see an increase in the number of the right people who are engaging with your website content and submitting
TOP FUNNEL IMPACT forms (e.g., contact forms, white paper downloads, or free trial signups). (Brand Awareness)
MID-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING TACTICS The middle of the funnel is all about the important nurturing work that needs to be done to more deeply orient, educate, and influence a prospects after they
MID FUNNEL IMPACT
(Content Engagement & Education)
are aware of your brand, but before they are necessarily ready to engage with a sales rep—or before they are even
BOTTOM FUNNEL IMPACT
(Lead Generation & Sales Conversions)
ready to share their personal information (e.g., via a Web form). In B2B, heightened engagement generally translates to prospects engaging with your content. When it comes to mid-funnel display advertising, more focused business demographic targeting and social advertising are effective tactics for getting prospects to engage more with your brand and your content. Because B2B prospects are active on social networks, social advertising can be a great way to tap the value of your initial branding display campaigns, ensuring that you are keeping your lower funnel filled and growing. Here’s a closer look at these mid-funnel tactics:
• Business Demographic Targeting (e.g. Job Function, Seniority): Mid-funnel display strategies include business demographic-targeted campaigns where you put your ads in front of specific audiences you are looking to target by their role and seniority in an organization, wherever they travel across the Web.
• LinkedIn Ads: Given the inherent nature of its business-focused network, LinkedIn makes it easy for marketers to target its audience by key business demographics including industry, job function, and title. You can also target users according to discussion groups they belong to, such as “Digital Media” or “IT Professionals.”
• Facebook Exchange: Facebook offers B2B marketers tremendous opportunities to reach precise business audiences through the Facebook Exchange (FBX), a real-time bidding system in which marketers can leverage third-party data to reach their target audiences when they are on Facebook, and retarget them with highly relevant ads. By partnering with advertising platforms that enable access to third-party data on business professionals, Facebook Exchange gives marketers the ability to specifically target users according to job function, industry, and other business demographic data.
MID-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING METRICS Mid-funnel display metrics are all about gauging content engagement from those exposed to your display advertising—whether it’s downloads, page views, or leads. Here are a few of the most prevalent metrics for mid-funnel programs:
• New Visitors: Display advertising can result in new visitors to your website. • Cost per New Visitor: To optimize the cost of acquiring a new prospect, divide your total campaign cost by the number of new visitors introduced by display advertising.
• Page view lift: As your branding efforts begin to drive more people to your Website, mid-funnel display advertising takes the baton. If executed effectively, your target prospects should be spending more time engaging on your Website.
• Web form lift %: The middle of the funnel is where all that investment in developing quality downloadable content (i.e., white papers and case studies) begins to pay off. You can use website form lift as a key metric to gauge the success of mid-funnel programs.
• Search lift: As people begin to recall and connect more to your brand, you’re likely to see a lift in search metrics against both branded and keyword search terms.
• Leads: As your target audience gets drawn into your content, they will be more willing to share their personal info (fill out your Web forms) to get at it. Look for more leads from your effective mid-funnel programs.
TOP FUNNEL IMPACT
(Brandvelocity Awareness) Remember, the goal of mid-funnel display advertising is to increase the
by which prospects move through the funnel. Using display advertising to nurture and further your prospects’ engagement with your brand will prime the pump for lower-funnel tactics such as search and email marketing to get their jobs done, and accelerate conversations in the field.
MID FUNNEL IMPACT
(Content Engagement & Education)
BOTTOM-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING TACTICS With the awareness-building and nurturing work you have done higher up in the funnel, you should now have a healthy, growing pool of target prospects that are ready to share information, check out your free trial, and
BOTTOM FUNNEL IMPACT
(Lead Generation & Sales Conversions)
possibly engage with your sales team. Bottom-funnel display advertising strategies including retargeting and keyword targeting, which can both help move these prospects from consideration to conversion:
• Website retargeting. Through website retargeting, you can retarget display ads to people that visit your website, blog, or landing pages that you set up in your marketing automation system.
• CRM retargeting. You’ve already invested significant marketing dollars in capturing leads and contacts in your internal database. CRM retargeting enables you to target ads to these valuable prospects, giving you a powerful new way to reach them beyond their inbox.
• Keyword targeting. Keyword targeting allows you to combine search with display to reach audiences with display ads after they’ve performed a search using specific key terms. Using this tactic, you can catch your target audiences while they’re thinking about relevant topics to make a timely impression.
BOTTOM-FUNNEL DISPLAY ADVERTISING METRICS Here are a few of the most prevalent metrics for bottom-funnel display advertising programs:
• Leads (total, cost per lead): Based on the trust you have built higher in the funnel and the content that prospects consume lower in the funnel, your target audience is now primed to share their personal info with you by filling out your Web forms.
• Overall website form conversion lift percentage: You should see a continued spike in Web form conversions as you deploy your bottom-funnel display tactics. In particular, measure lift in your “Contact Form” conversion rates to gauge success.
• Opportunity contribution: Since lower-funnel display advertising touches prospects close to the point of conversion, you can readily tie and attribute their influence to opportunities that make it into your sales pipeline.
• Revenue contribution: Similar to pipeline contribution, you can also tie lowerfunnel programs more easily to revenue contribution, as you track opportunities to closed business.
Display Advertising Metrics in Action | Case Study Zuora, a SaaS company that offers solutions for decision makers in sales, marketing, and finance alike, uses display advertising to make a full-funnel impact: increasing brand awareness; driving targeted audiences to the Zuora website; and building sales pipeline. Here’s a snapshot of the results they achieved:
• 21% lift in brand recall • 182% increase in page views • More than 1,000 conversions from precisely targeted business audiences
Attribution and Display Advertising In a Crain’s BtoB survey, more than one-third (36 percent) of respondents reported their biggest online marketing challenge is accurately measuring and attributing online conversions to the correct marketing channels. And less than half (42 percent) of marketers say they attribute success across the entire marketing funnel.4
WHY DO MANY B2B MARKETERS FIND ATTRIBUTION SO DIFFICULT? Most B2B prospects interact with a brand through multiple marketing touchpoints (display, email, search, etc.) before making a purchase. However, as we touched upon earlier, many B2B marketers are accustomed to taking a “last touch” approach when it comes to marketing attribution, essentially giving ALL the credit to the program that was last to touch a lead before it became an opportunity. In the example below, you’ll see a sample marketing touch sequence that depicts a typical buying process in which the prospect was introduced to a product via a display ad, continued to engage through the paid search channel, and was last touched by an email before making the actual purchase. Despite the contributions of multiple channels, all credit is given to email and the work done by display and search is ignored. This approach overstates the value of lower-funnel contributions, and undervalues the programs that created awareness and nurtured higher in the funnel.
INTRODUCE Display Impression
INFLUENCE
CLOSE
SEM
In this marketing touch sequence, all credit is given to email, which is an ineffective way to measure the value of your marketing programs.
123 123 Total Total Conversion Conversion Actions Actions
As you can see, relying on a single source of attribution for a lead or opportunity can be misleading, as more often than not, prospects are touched by more than one marketing channel in their journey toward a purchase. As we’ve been discussing throughout this guide, display is a unique marketing channel in that its impact can be felt over time and seen across the entire marketing mix. As such, it is particularly
4 “Priming the Pipeline: Driving Awareness, Conversions & Sales,” Crain’s BtoB Magazine, 2013.
important to avoid using the click or click-through rate as an indicator of success. Instead, set up an attribution model that gives credit to more than the last touch that occurs.
Basic Attribution Modeling—Simple Value Attribution Gets You 80% of the Benefit While there are various attribution models available that vary in complexity, even the simplest attribution model can drastically improve the accuracy of your marketing ROI measurements. If you’re just getting started with attribution modeling, start with even attribution (shown below). In this model, credit is evenly distributed among all the channels involved. While fairly basic, this model will provide you with a more accurate depiction of which channels are driving the most value for your marketing dollar.
INTRODUCE
INFLUENCE
CLOSE
Display Impression
SEM
41 41 Actions Actions
41 41 Actions Actions
41 41 Actions Actions
123 Total Conversion Actions
By using even attribution, marketers can move beyond the “last touch” and achieve greater accuracy in their ROI metrics.
Remember, if you’re doing a good job at the top of the funnel, then you’ll have more of the right prospects in your sights to educate, and a greater percentage of that “nurture pool” will in turn be ready to take the next step when you touch them with your bottom-funnel programs.
Conclusion The marketing funnel is alive and well, and can offer B2B marketers a great framework for developing a diverse set of marketing programs that will ensure they reach their target audience early, often, and throughout the buying process. But remember— it’s less important to dabble in every single marketing tactic available to you, and more important to make sure that for the tactics you do choose to employ, you’re using the success metrics that align best with the goals you’ve set for yourself and your company. »
Glossary of Display Advertising Metrics »»Brand Awareness Impact: Total number of new people that would be aware of your brand.
»»Brand Recall: Percentage increase in your target audience’s familiarity with your brand and understanding of its value.
»»Branded Search Lift: Percentage increase in the number of website visitors who search specifically for your brand name in search engines.
»»Clicks: Total number of times display ads are clicked in a certain time period. »»Click-through Rate (CTR): A percentage, calculated by dividing total clicks by total number of impressions delivered, multiplied by 100.
»»Conversion Lift: Lift in total number of conversions through the corporate website, landing pages, etc.
»»Conversion Rate: Percentage of visitors that complete a specified action (e.g. filling out a contact form).
»»Cost per Action: Total campaign cost divided by the number of completed actions or conversions.
»»Cost per Click: Total campaign cost divided by total number of clicks. »»Cost per Lead: Total campaign cost divided by total leads converted. »»Cost per New Visitor: Total campaign cost divided by new visitors introduced by display advertising.
»»Cost per Page View: Total campaign cost divided by display advertising-driven page views.
»»Cost per Visit: Total marketing cost divided by total number of visits; total display advertising campaign cost divided by campaign-driven visits.
»»Impression: The serving of one display ad online. »»Impressions Delivered against Target Audience: Total number of display ads served (or displayed) to a defined target audience.
»»Leads: Individuals that a company views as potential customers. »»Lead Quality: An indicator of how likely a lead is to become a customer. »»Lift in Page Views per Visit: Increase in the amount of Web content consumed by visitors on each unique visit.
»»New Visitors: Visitors who have not previously visited your website. »»Opportunity Contribution: In display advertising, the direct effect of advertising on the creation of new business opportunities.
»»Page Views/Visits: Total number of pages viewed in a defined time period. »»Revenue Contribution: In display advertising, advertising’s direct contribution to new revenue generated.
»»Share of Voice: A brand’s exposure to a specific audience relative to other advertisers who are bidding on the same audience.
»»Targeted Reach: Total number of unique individuals in a specific target audience that you have access to via display advertising.
»»Target Audience Time on Site Lift: Increase in time spent on the website by specific target audiences.
»»Target Audience Website Traffic Lift: Increase in website traffic from specific target audiences.
»»Total Visits: Total number of website visits from both new and returning visitors. »»Website Content Engagement Lift: A lift in website activity which can be shown by an increase in several metrics including Target Audience Time on Site Lift, Page Views/Visits, Conversion Lift, and more.
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