As an advertiser, it’s imperative to thoroughly analyze the journey of your customers as they move through the buying cycle. In order to optimize your digital marketing strategy, you must understand how to keep in step with your customer’s needs—what piques (and holds) your customers’ interest? What can you do to adjust your marketing strategy in order to validate successful campaigns and identify ones with low ROI?

Tracking primary and secondary conversion events gives you the opportunity to understand the behavior of your customers as they move through the buying cycle. When used in tandem with attribution and incremental lift, you can better dedicate your marketing spend only to efforts that work well for your brand.

First and Foremost—what are
primary and secondary conversion events?

A primary conversion event refers to your brand’s main marketing goal —aka the primary action you want your site visitors to complete. This could be something like completing a purchase, filling out a contact form, or requesting a demo.

Secondary conversion events, or engagement events refer to actions that, despite not being the end goal of your digital marketing strategy, imply a user is moving through the buying cycle. A secondary conversion event might be something like downloading a white paper or signing up for an email newsletter.

For example: a primary conversion event that an e-commerce retailer might track would be when a customer completes a purchase. A secondary conversion event for this same e-commerce company might be that the same site visitor signs up to receive an email newsletter . Signing up for a newsletter might not be the main action an advertiser wants a site visitor to complete, but if visitors who sign up for email newsletters have a higher probability of completing a purchase, then it is a secondary conversion event that is worth measuring and trying to optimize.  

Is it really that simple?

Yes and no. The above is a simplistic theoretical example of primary and secondary conversion events, but applying the practice to your marketing strategy in reality is more challenging–it requires time and resources to uncover what works. Let’s dive a little deeper into how primary and secondary conversions can optimize a digital marketing campaign strategy.

Secondary conversion events can be active or passive. For example: downloading a white paper from a site would qualify as an active secondary conversion event, while being on a site for an average of five minutes would qualify as a passive secondary conversion event. Remaining on a site does not require a site visitor to complete a particular action, but it is still something that can be tracked in order to gain insight.

For example: let’s say that a B2B company (let’s call them Company X) would like to test the idea of running webinars in order to see whether they are a worthwhile marketing effort. In order to do this, Company X creates both primary and secondary conversion events–in this case let’s say the primary conversion event is when a site visitor requests a demo from Company X, and the secondary conversion event is when a site visitor attends a webinar. Company X will then link these conversion events together by comparing the correlation of how many customers viewed a webinar before requesting a demo.

By linking these conversion events together, Company X is looking for two things in particular: first, how many more people who attended the webinar (the secondary conversion event) requested a demo (the primary conversion event). Company X then will compare this number to the number of people who didn’t see the webinar but became customers anyway, thereby calculating the incremental lift between those two user groups. If the number of users that became customers from the group that attended the webinar is higher than those that became customers from the group that did not attend the webinar, then it’s clear that webinars are a worthwhile marketing effort.

The second thing Company X is looking for is whether the cost of producing the webinar is more expensive than the revenue generated by customers who attended the webinar. If the cost is higher than the revenue, then clearly webinars are not a worthwhile marketing effort for Company X to pursue.

How to measure primary and secondary conversion events

In our blog post about frequency and recency capping, we discussed the importance of identifying your customer’s unique purchase journey before establishing frequency and recency caps. Having a clear understanding of this purchase journey is key to successfully avoiding ad fatigue and oversaturation.

Conversion tracking–like frequency and recency–is directly related to the purchase journey of your customer, as it gives insight into the ways that you are successfully reaching your customers—and the ways you’re not.

There are many ways to measure the success of your ad campaigns, and conversion tracking is only one piece of the puzzle. Metrics like attribution and incrementality go hand in hand with conversion tracking, and it’s important to track all three in order to get an accurate idea about the success of your marketing spend.

Attribution and incrementality complement each other–both give advertisers the opportunity to test the success of their marketing efforts using information gained from primary and secondary conversion tracking. Attribution examines the customer journey in depth in order to more accurately determine what part of an advertising campaign can be held responsible for getting a site visitor to complete a primary conversion. Incrementality allows you to calculate the incremental lift between those who completed a secondary conversion and then became customers vs. those who became customers without completing a secondary conversion. You then can determine whether your secondary conversion is actually driving more people to become customers.

Determining attribution using primary and secondary conversion tracking and subsequently calculating incremental lift is the most thorough way to track the success of your digital marketing campaign strategy.

How to identify secondary conversion metrics.

Let’s say that Company X has determined that webinars are a worthwhile marketing effort for their business.

Seeing what kind of customers attend webinars is the next step Company X would take as a secondary marketing effort, after already determining that people who attend webinars are more likely to request  a demo. In other words, Company X has determined that there is a positive correlation between attending a webinar as a secondary conversion event and the primary conversion event of requesting a demo.

It is a frequent practice for marketers to use insights gleaned from tracking primary conversion events and engagement events to understand applied business intelligence. Using this information can help you build an intelligent digital advertising strategy that takes your business intelligence and applies it to your customer journey.

Advertisers who have taken the time to analyze their customer journey often have a pretty good idea what their customers need in order to make an informed purchase decision, but this knowledge can always be supplemented as the customer’s buying cycle evolves. Working in the programmatic advertising space helps advertisers test those needs through an automated advertising campaign that can accurately track consumer behaviors and associate them with converted customers.. The marketing initiatives that significantly influence consumer behaviors can then be considered secondary conversion metrics.

Conversion Events and Audience Segmentation

A key aspect to consider is audience segmentation. Audience segmentation refers to the process of dividing users into subgroups based on criteria such as demographics, site behavior, or interests. Once you have identified whether a secondary conversion is driving primary conversions, you can then use audience segmentation in order to identify the specific audience you would like to target with this particular secondary conversion effort.

For example, after Company X has determined that webinars are a valuable marketing effort, they can then study the demographics of the people who tend to attend webinars before requesting a demo. By understanding their webinar audience in this way, Company X can improve the design of their webinars in order to more accurately target the audience who is most likely to view them.

Using secondary conversion events to segment your audience based on their likelihood to complete these conversion events gives you valuable intelligence. For instance, you can separate users into groups with higher purchase value, or create user groups who are more likely to convert without engagement events. After strategically separating your audience into segments, you can better target them with the ads that will most likely cause them to complete a purchase. In addition, you can track the effect on users’ conversions when they’re placed into certain groups.

As long as you keep the importance of audience-specific targeting in mind from the beginning when identifying your secondary conversions, audience segmentation will occur almost naturally as you implement your marketing strategy.

TL;DR

Primary and secondary conversion tracking can be used at any stage of your digital marketing campaign strategy–whether you are simply trying to test whether a marketing effort provides a positive ROI or if you are testing different levels of audience segmentation in order to better target already receptive audiences to more efficiently send them through the purchase funnel.

As a best practice, it is a good idea to place multiple secondary conversion pixels at once in order to test more than one metric. Placing multiple secondary conversion pixels allows advertisers to test the relevance of how different conversion events perform against each other. In other words, you can test multiple marketing efforts (such as webinars vs. white paper downloads) against each other in order to see which are more effective at driving users to complete your primary conversion.

You can also create multiple conversion events and target them to different audience segments in order to test against each other. This works best after you have already used secondary conversion tracking to test your different marketing efforts against each other. For example in Company X’s case: different audience segments might be impacted differently by webinars vs white papers, therefore Company X can use conversion tracking to more effectively design these materials and target the most appropriate audience with each one.

The post Conversion Tracking- Engagement Events & Your Retargeting Strategy appeared first on Retargeter.

On October 18th, the ReTargeter team volunteered with the nonprofit organization Alameda Point Collaborative to help prepare their grounds for their annual harvest festival event. APC is a supportive housing community and nonprofit that provides over 500 residents of the Bay Area with easy access to life and job skills training, as well as substance abuse and mental health counseling. ReTargeter was thrilled to work with this wonderful organization on their urban farm!

Alameda Point Collaborative’s urban farm produces thousands of pounds of sustainably grown produce each year and all proceeds from this community supported agriculture program are put back into APC’s many programs and activities for its resident community.

In preparation for their Harvest Festival, the ReTargeter team helped with composting, laying down wood chips, and decorating signage. It was strenuous but rewarding labor –we hope to come back and work with them soon!

To learn more about APC and how you can contribute: visit their website

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An example of reviewing your marketing capabilities using the McKinsey 7S framework The McKinsey 7S model is a useful framework for reviewing an organization’s marketing capabilities from different viewpoints. Developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman during their tenure at …..

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In 2018, Facebook enacted some algorithm changes that negatively impacted a brand’s ability to reach its audience organically.

HubSpot’s Latin America & Iberia Marketing team were no exception to this.

Despite having half a million Spanish-speaking fans on our Facebook page, we realized we were barely able to reach one percent of them — which is pretty shocking, if you think about it.

That meant, despite years of work building up our Facebook audience on the platform, that we weren’t even able to communicate with our fans when we had something interesting to say.

Unless, of course, we paid.

But, from our perspective, paying to talk to people who already know about HubSpot, and presumably already like us, didn’t sound the right thing to do. It also didn’t seem to align with our goal of creating sustainable, genuine connections with our audience.

After months of suffering a down-trend on our Facebook numbers, and finding out about an increasing number of Facebook updates, we reached a turning point when we realized we needed to change our social strategy — and, more fundamentally, the way we thought about Facebook.

Here, we’re going to explain the six fundamental changes we made to our Spanish-speaking Facebook strategy to increase our organic reach over two and a half times.

How To Increase Organic Reach Despite Facebook’s Algorithm Changes

1. Think of Facebook as a publishing platform.

Traffic was one of the main metrics we used to measure our Facebook performance in the past. As many brands do, we saw Facebook as a portal to our website — a channel to obtain traffic.

In fact, Facebook has traditionally be one of the most important sources of traffic for many businesses … so it would be foolish not to tap into it, right?

Unfortunately, that was the case for the old Facebook. In the last couple of years, however, Facebook has carried out many updates for the same underlying goal — to keep users on Facebook longer, and increase engagement on the platform itself. As a consequence, external links are not held in very high regard.

Now, brands that only use Facebook as an amplifying channel for their websites, or blog, are going to suffer the most from the algorithm changes.

We were part of that group.

Once we realized our old strategy wouldn’t work on the new Facebook, we knew we needed a mindset change — something many brands are likely unwilling to do.

To succeed on Facebook, we began thinking of Facebook as a publishing channel. This fundamentally meant creating quality content to be consumed directly on Facebook — no links.

Okay, I know what you are thinking now: What happens with my traffic then? How do I convert all those people?

This is what scares most people — you don’t. You grow your brand awareness, and grow your reach. People may not be on your website, but they are still seeing your content and your brand, so when they are ready to buy or need something from you, they will remember you. You will be top of mind.

And magic will happen.

2. Play by Facebook rules (engagement, engagement, engagement).

Facebook’s algorithm favors certain types of content. And those algorithm-favored pieces of content are put in front of more people — and, as a result, get more engagement.

Of course, those favored content types are constantly evolving at Facebook, as the company continues to try to improve the engagement of its users. So it’s critical you remain flexible and willing to experiment with content types as you enact your own Facebook strategy.

For us, videos have been our best bet over the past year, and have worked wonders for us — once we recognized the power of video, we moved from less than 10% video content to 50% video content, which consistently gets higher reach than any other type of content.

3. Break up with paid boosting.

Along with the change to our organic strategy, we also changed the way we approach boosting posts on Facebook.

We came to the conclusion that boosting is not a sustainable strategy to get people’s attention on Facebook. We slowed down our spending to focus on organic-only, and to understand which type of posts work for us — and which didn’t.

Once we started to see improvements in our organic reach and were happy with our overall strategy, we started investing again on boosting posts but, unlike in the past, we now only boost high-performing posts to generate extra engagement and reach, not clicks.

This approach reinforces our overall strategy and allows us to spread our net wider when it comes to brand awareness.

Additionally, it’s important to note we keep our paid social strategy completely separate from our organic strategy, since those teams have varying tasks and goals.

4. Change the way you measure success.

A year ago, we used number of likes as our main growth indicator for social — now, we see that number is meaningless.

Measuring the number of likes a post gets is no longer a good metric to determine the success of your Facebook strategy. There is no point in having 500K fans if your posts are being seen only by 5K. I’d rather have 100K fans, and have most of them see my posts regularly — wouldn’t you?

As a consequence, we came to the conclusion that we should move away from likes, and instead adopt a reach metric to measure our performance.

Of course, total reach can be easily manipulated by playing with frequency — but a metric like Average Reach per Post is something we felt could help us most accurately measure our performance, and how many people are exposed to our brand regularly.

5. Keep it organized.

Giving some structure to your social posting might sound like a basic tip, but it really gave us the consistency and focus we needed for Facebook.

We implemented a detailed social calendar and divided the posts by categories, allowing us to be more effective when creating content. It also enabled us to work better as a team. For instance, we allocate some weekly slots to areas of the business we want to surface, such as the Flywheel or Academy, and created social content with that in mind.

This structure also helps us to better analyze which posts perform best, and adapt our social calendar on an ongoing basis.

6. Consider alternatives.

Not everything works as planned. We have tested some ideas that have failed — alternatively, good-performing ideas have lost momentum.

#MartesEnVivo, a weekly Facebook Live broadcasting series, was our Tom Brady for months. Every week, it would be our top-performing post, driving up engagement and reach numbers.

But nothing lasts forever. When introducing more and more video content as part of our social content, we noticed that #MartesEnVivo was losing momentum, and the performance was not good enough for all the effort we were putting into it.

However, the content we shared in #MartesEnVivo was unquestionably valuable for our users, so we recently decided to spin the series and relaunch it on YouTube with a different name and different format.

The plan with this is to take advantage of YouTube search nature to make the lifespan of these videos longer — and, also, to free up some precious slots on Facebook for ephemeral videos that perform better there.

This will happen to you as well, so it’s always a good idea to keep in mind that Facebook is not the only social network that businesses can use.

There is always a channel for good content.

Our Results

The results have been surprising, even for us. We knew this was the right approach, but we never anticipated such a big improvement in our metrics in only five months.

Ultimately, we saw an average 185% increase in organic reach per post. We also saw a significant increase in all the metrics related to video-viewing on Facebook.

Over the next year, we are going to strive to push these numbers even further by continuing with this strategy, and trying new formats that can give us an extra push.

Facebook Stories, for instance, is receiving a lot of attention from the Facebook community — so it’s definitely something on our radar.

Ultimately, Facebook’s algorithm changes can be scary and frustrating for your company, but it can also serve as a major opportunity for new growth. By changing your Facebook strategy to respond to Facebook’s changes, you just might find new avenues to reach, and impact, an even larger audience.

I recently came across an amazing post that I urge everyone to read about the current state of social media.

Burn It Down, Start From Scratch And Build a Social Media Strategy That Works

Here is just an excerpt – this is towards the end of the long post.  Please, please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Then read it again. Then print it and pass it around. And then change everything you’re doing.

DOING SOCIAL MEDIA RIGHT

Most companies are doing social wrong and have done it wrong from the beginning. The key to success is to stop most of what today passes for social media strategy and rebuild social plans from the ground up:

• First, create and measure a new definition of WOM. An individual who recommends your brand based on their actual customer experience is gold; a customer who clicks the “heart” button on a pretty photo posted by your brand isn’t even tin (and a like that is bought is a stain on the soul of your brand). Now is the time to recognize that not all consumer interactions are equal and to succeed, brands must generate the WOM that matters–not the activities that are easy to manipulate and tabulate but the ones that are difficult and meaningful. Discard the fake WOM strategies created with brand-to-consumer content broadcasted in social channels and focus on the real WOM forged peer-to-peer with customer stories, recommendations and advocacy. Fake WOM gets people to click “like” on something the brand posted; real WOM gets people to tell others why they should trust, try and buy your product or service.

• Toss out your social media scorecard immediately. The first step to refocus social activities on what matters is to change what is measured. Stop rewarding employees or agencies for generating engagement that fails to deliver business benefit and start measuring what matters–changes in customer loyalty or consideration, positive and authentic Word of Mouth, inbound traffic that converts, quality lead acquisition and customer satisfaction.

• Reconsider what department should lead your social media efforts. Once you have reconsidered the metrics that matter, the next question is who within the organization is best equipped and staffed to deliver on those metrics. If organic social media is not proving an effective marketing channel, should your marketing team be responsible for content creation and managing social media calendars? If one-to-one engagement and responsiveness are the new goals, which department is best staffed to provide what the brand needs and consumers expect in social media? These are vital questions, because whichever department funds and manages social media will expect the outcomes and use the metrics about which they most care. A recent report from Econsultancy makes the case: Among Financial Service firms, just 38% see social media as a channel for retention; the majority sees it geared for acquisition and cross-sell. That means most of these firms are using social media to chase marketing strategies to drive sales (an approach we now know will fail) while the minority have social media strategies designed to improve customer satisfaction, reputation, loyalty and retention–goals generally not associated with Marketing but with Public Relations and Customer Care departments.

• Objectively assess the return your brand generates with content marketing in social channels, and stop what is not working. If you are not today validating positive return on marketing content posted to social channels, you certainly will not do so in the future as organic reach crumbles to nothing. Marketers continue to act as if content marketing is destined to work and they have simply failed yet to find the right content marketing strategy. Data tells us otherwise; customers and prospects inundated with marketing messages, distrustful of brand content and protected behind social paywalls and adblocking software are not interested in or available to your content marketing output. Content is essential and has a place in Marketing strategies, but now is the time to rebalance the investment the brand is making to match the return it receives and can expect.

Read the rest. You won’t regret it.

The post Burn your social media strategy appeared first on Social Fish.

Michael Maven looks at new hardware changes made by Apple, and the lesson you can learn from it.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to test Perfect Audience’s Site Tracking Tag and you’re a Chrome user, here’s a free new tool.

The Perfect Audience Tag Verifier is great for any Perfect Audience advertiser but especially those running dynamic product campaigns – this will make sure Perfect Audience is receiving the information it needs to run your ads accurately and smoothly.

What’s New

 

Our previous method required using Javascript console commands and only tested if the tag was firing or not. We upgraded and with one click this new Chrome extension checks for:

• Our Site Tracking Tag to ensure it is loading properly
• Audiences
• Conversion Goals
  • Order ID for a conversion
  • Revenue Value for each conversion
• Product ID for Dynamic Ads

 

When to Use The Extension

 

• You’re new to Perfect Audience         
• You were running regular web ads but now want to run dynamic campaigns
• You built a new landing page
• Debuting a new product
• Built a new website entirely, or added a new client at your agency
• Just want to double-check the tag

 

Pick it up today here and get the full instructions here.  Email [email protected] if you have any questions.  New to Perfect Audience?  Grab your free trial here.

Happy retargeting!

The post Test Your Perfect Audience Site Tracking Tag with This Extension appeared first on Perfect Audience Retargeting Blog.

How do you go viral without social media? Lost was created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, was produced by Bad Robot Productions, and was filmed almost entirely on location in Hawaii. The show was produced by ABC …..

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