As wedding vendors and wedding marketers, the goals we set
for a given marketing channel or specific campaign will inherently frame its
success or failure. Applying the wrong metrics might have us optimizing
in the wrong direction, and reducing the impact of our marketing dollars.
I hope this post illuminates the
pitfalls of using a seemingly meaty progress metric like the mighty conversion
to solely determine where you invest. We'll take a look at campaign
investments in paid search and display advertising over a defined time period,
and then trace the path of conversions down the funnel to demonstrate that
it’s not the total number of leads or the cost of those leads that count — but
how much business those leads create, and the implied ROI of those campaigns?
But this is only part of the
picture. We need to dig deeper to understand where and how value is
really being driven.
One of the most effective ways
to access this larger audience is through highly targeted display advertising.
The beauty of targeted display is that it can be deployed as a lead generator,
but it is also the vehicle best-equipped for influencing brides at any stage
of the marketing funnel. With display you can reach more brides at scale, driving them into the top of your marketing funnel. But the
impact doesn’t stop there—display continuously helps to educate and build trust
with brides not yet ready to engage with sales—which then sets up the rest of
your marketing mix to do their jobs even better.
Think of it as your
display advertising campaigns tossing alley-oops all day long, to set up slam
dunk conversions for your wedding website and
email and search marketing.
Given that display is actually
lifting all boats in your marketing mix, it’s not enough to evaluate the leads
that a display campaign delivers. To accurately frame the full value of an
investments in display, we need to understand how many brides were directly
driven by display (i.e., “post-click conversions”; a user clicks on an ad and
converts during the same session), as well as how many brides benefited from a
“display alley-oop” (i.e., “post-impression conversions”; a bride views an ad,
doesn’t click on the ad, but returns to a website later and converts).
To accurately frame the value
of display, you would want to apply tracking metrics that comprehend display’s
1-2 punch. Essentially, how many brides did display advertising directly drive
(post-click conversion) and how much action did display advertising create across the rest of
your mix (post-impression conversions). One way to start measuring
post-impression conversions is to create a control group (users that are not
exposed to the ad) and a test group (users exposed to the
ad).
By doing this, your post-campaign assessment might look
something like this (fictitious numbers used for this example)
What’s happened here? If you
just measured display post-click conversions in Test Group B, you might
conclude that your investment in display earned you 25 leads (and whatever
those leads translate into in terms of downstream pipeline and revenue).
But, by getting a handle on the lift created across your other programs, the
picture changes quite a bit. Your display investment actually netted 25
incremental search conversions (and whatever those search leads translate into
in terms of downstream pipeline and revenue), and 25 incremental email
conversions (and whatever those email leads translate into in terms of
downstream pipeline and revenue).
Here’s another way of looking at
the conversions that display drove in the example above:
After all, there were only a few players that make the highlight reel in a basketball game. But, if you look a little closer, you’ll see someone else in the corner setting up the alley-oop.
For more information about wedding marketing, visit www.bridalmarketinggroup.com and fan us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bridalmarketing .
