Leveraging our first-party data to optimise Direct Performance through Experimentation and reporting
Digital Transformation is using digital technologies and processes to modernize business adaptability, efficiency and performance. An agile approach to Digital Transformation is widely seen by marketing managers as a key to delivering ahead of competitors and keeping a business relevant in the digital space. To get the most out of digital transformation efforts a company must be able to allow its data to drive key decision-making processes, enable optimised digital experiences, and be able to communicate real-time feedback of a customer’s journey to key decision makers as well as enable data-driven marketing practices. Being able to pinpoint what moves the needle in an organisation’s marketing campaigns is the best way to understand what is working and where a company can further invest efforts into successful marketing strategies.
The lead-to-sale journey for a customer can be diverse and have many different friction points. Most services companies have comparable sales journey formats, and you can utilise data directly from any Customer Relationship Management software. Prospa has a very robust sales pipeline running through its Salesforce CRM and though the process is not at its most efficient it still has many markers and determining moments that can be used to help define conversion events for Marketing Enrichment. Each stage of the sales pipeline from initial lead generation to an application settlement can be used by a PPC marketing platform via integration or API enablement. This has become a necessity in data-driven marketing teams, and companies that do not incorporate this level of detail in their feedback loop to their marketing platform lose out on bidding efficiency and cost savings.
When given an opportunity to collaborate with our digital marketing team, I learned about the untapped potential for growth and advancement in data-driven marketing processes. With a new PPC hire about to join the digital marketing team, they would need the assistance of a member of our data team to ensure a data integration would be created between the Google Ads platform and our own data warehouses. As a digital analytics specialist and analyst, I was granted three story points per sprint to work on this task. I would use this scarce time wisely to prioritise tasks I knew would bring instantaneous results and help the new PPC hire optimise Google Ads to the absolute best of his abilities.
During a Google’s account manager check-in, I brought up how we currently track conversions and how we optimise with that conversion data. I was blown away when it was revealed that data-team or Go-To-Market teams would provide manual exports which were uploaded to Google Ads using the database upload tool. This conversion was not segmented or divided by conversion action; it was just a blanket “Workable Leads” upload (which was incorrect in terms of the company definition of workable lead). The Head of Direct Marketing explained that he knew this was not optimal and there was so much more that could be done. Having previously set up CRM to Ads platform integrations in previous roles I already knew exactly what to do and spoke to our Google Account partner about setting up integrations for real-time conversions being fed back through Salesforce and/or direct API requests. I also used this as an opportunity to bring up a strategy I’ve used in previous marketing roles known as “Weighted Conversions” where we add $ dollar values to each conversion action so that all actions in a set equal $1 to represent a complete 100%. The percentage of that dollar assigned to each individual conversion action is the “weighted” amount and is used in the Google Ads algorithm to help optimisation to understand customer behaviours that can’t lead to a settled lead.
After completing an audit of our conversion setup in the Google Ads platform I made the point that exporting and importing leads this way would not enable live optimisation or conversion weighting based on different conversion actions. This led to the scoping of live data integration into Google Ads via either API or direct integration with Salesforce. After developing and launching both conversion integration projects, we chose to implement the SF direct integration into the Google Ads platform due to convenience and simpler maintenance. Collaborating with our PPC team members we created conversion events that would help break up and dictate a truly workable lead/ settlement and categorised them with the best weighting based on the action’s importance in the ‘Prospa Sales Pipeline’.
