The ability to track online behavior is one of the best technological advancement that ever happened to the marketing community. But, with the influx of new information the challenge is to keep it beneficial and actionable.
This is especially true in B2B marketing. Conversions come in different forms and attribution can get complicated. Hence, when it comes to conversion tracking, a competent line of action is an absolute must.
Below is a rundown of B2B conversion tracking mistakes to avoid…unless screwing up data is your idea of fun.
Not Making Conversion Tracking a Priority
This may be the case for many B2B businesses. Nothing could be worse than putting conversion tracking in the back seat of the priority list. Thoughts like — “As long as the traffic is OK we’re fine” or “No tracking is needed as long as we get leads” — are too common. But it’s one of the reasons why many businesses are struggling in the first place.
Conversion tracking helps marketers to test what works better in a specific scenario. It leads to reasonable decisions and marketing campaigns with high ROI. Spending too much money on under-performing strategies should be a thing of the past. Conversion tracking shows you how to spend your money in the most efficient way.
Not Being Able To Differentiate Between Conversions And Leads
In B2B marketing, the tricky part is that there can be many conversion points in a customer’s journey. You might expect three conversions are required to generate a sale – from an unknown visitor to a lead, from a lead to an opportunity, and from an opportunity to a customer. Notice that making a lead out of an anonymous visitor is a conversion. But a conversion can mean so many things. That’s where the confusion comes in. A conversion is not the same as a lead. But making leads out of unknown visitors is a part of holistic conversion.
Tracking conversions using Google Analytics could range from a click on a page to time spent on a page. In B2B marketing, it may be more complicated. It may be about filling a form or providing contact information. Most likely, each of these includes multiple clicks.
Confusion With UTM Parameters
UTM parameters can help to discern how people got to your website. When someone converts you want to know the medium, channel, or campaign that won this user. That is the essence of B2B conversion tracking. And UTM parameters hold this kind of valuable information.
But there may be thousands of campaigns and advertisements. So you may prefer one unique UTM parameter for each of those. Just imagine how difficult it may get to keep track of tens of thousands of unique UTM parameters. To avoid such confusion, organize all your UTM parameters using a consistent naming rule. It will help you simplify and understand where all your conversions are coming from. This is the goal of B2B conversion tracking, isn’t it?
Ridiculous Goal Tracking
B2B conversion tracking is important to marketers, who don’t count just ANY conversions. In basketball, for example, statistics can mean different things. For example: 20 points and 10 rebounds look sexy on the outside. But when the player scores at a time when the outcome is ALREADY settled, those stats mean NOTHING. Zero.
But can a B2B marketer really track a useless conversion? Definitely. For example, one company records conversions of about 10,000 per month. This is a reasonably high number. How did they reach it? Perhaps, they have included useless goals like spending a couple of seconds on a page. Does that sound like a real goal to you? Probably not. These are not conversions because they don’t add meaningful value to the business.
What are some of the metrics that a B2B marketer need to track? Social, blog and E-mail subscriptions are some of these. You can also track content views as a conversion. It is a reliable indicator of how you engage with the audience. At the deeper stages of the funnel, you may track downloaded content, event registrations, filled forms, or live chat sessions.
Not Using Multi-Touch Attribution Models
Big amounts of data can be a real problem for B2B marketers. It may lead to misinterpretations, which in turn leads to other problems. Mis-attribution of conversions can be one of such problems. It happens when you use many channels to market own product/service without first defining the customer journey and the important conversion checkpoints that are meaningful to your business.
Having different marketing channels in action may lead to problems. These problems are double-counting the conversions, single and last-touch attributions. None of these three are good for B2B conversion tracking, and here’s why.
Suppose a visitor clicks on a Facebook ad one day. Then, she clicks on AdWords another day. This visitor converts. One of three things can happen, depending on the attribution model you use.
First, you can count both Facebook and AdWords as a conversion. Hence, you count one single conversion as two (Ouch!). Second, a single-touch attribution model counts a conversion to the first channel — Facebook. It does not reflect the true value of the channels working in harmony. In reality, a visitor converts after seeing TWO different ads on TWO different channels. Third, in last-touch attribution approach AdWords gets all the credit and Facebook does not.
All these three problems are solved by a multi-touch attribution model (MTA). It gives credit to both channels instead of double-counting or over/undervaluing a marketing channel. The idea is simple – enter both channels in your database (e.g. Facebook -Adwords, or Social media – Paid search).
Do you recognize your business in any of the following scenarios? Have you faced problems like that? Let’s discuss in the comments below!
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