Why don’t we just call it “Customer Engagement and Conversion?”

I’ve spent some more time looking at the Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) 2009 Annual Survey released Monday – particularly at the marketing concepts that were grouped under the umbrella “Marketing Basics.” Here they are in order as ranked by respondents:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer retention
• Marketing ROI
• Brand loyalty
• Segmentation
• Quality

Marketing ROI is the one mentioned in my previous blog that has a direct correlation with the measurable value of search marketing as a medium (and the one in the group that jumped the most over 2008 results).

Now, looking at the grouping as a whole, I think I also need to expand and expound on the impact of search across all these basics.

Regarding customer satisfaction and retention, I was reminded of a presentation by Peter Blackshaw, Executive Vice-President of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of the book Satisfied Customers Tell 3 Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000. The title pretty much says it all about the growing power of consumer-generated media and the importance of proactively managing your brand’s reputation across social media and other digital outposts. And, in case you weren’t aware, DBE added social media marketing and management to our search umbrella several years ago.

You could say that social media also covers brand loyalty and quality to an extent but I’ll go further because of the proven impact on brand awareness and positive perceptions created from high rankings on search engine results pages. As reported in our December newsletter, several studies have shown the combined power of top natural positions gained from search engine optimization and paid search advertising listings.

Now as for segmentation, all forms of search marketing naturally segment/personalize results based on keyword phrases chosen by the searcher. In this sense, the searcher is already prequalified and predisposed to your brand based on its relevance to his/her search. What other medium offers segmentation that gets you so close to customer action?

So rather than looking at these concepts as Marketing Basics, look at them as “Customer Engagement and Conversion” concepts or, better yet, as “Search Marketing” concepts.

Who Gets the Credit?

The path from click to conversion can be a winding one. Not every click-through from the search results leads directly to a conversion. Visitors come back to your site several times before making a purchase or may complete the transaction via a phone call or in-store visit. Where does the process begin? Who gets the credit? Let’s look at a few scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your potential customer found your site through your organic search results on Google or another search engine. After checking your site out, he or she bookmarked it, came back at a later date through the bookmark, and made a transaction in your site. Will the organic search result be credited for the conversion, or will this appear as direct traffic?

Scenario 2: While searching for the product or service that you provide, your potential customer found your site through your paid search campaign. This person checked out your site, went to compare against a competitor, then decided to revisit your site a day later. This time he forgot your site address, so searched for your company’s name, clicked on your organic search listing, and bought your product. Would your paid search campaign or the organic search result be given credit for this conversion?

Scenario 3: Same as scenario 2, but this time he found you through the organic search results first, and later come to your site through the paid search results and completes the transaction. Which one – organic or paid search results, will get the credit?

By default, the referrer information gets updated to reflect the latest referral information when a visitor returns to your site, and your analytics program gives credit for a conversion to the last referrer a visitor used. This is the case except when the last referrer is direct- that is, the visitor uses their bookmarks or types your URL directly into their browser’s address bar.

So for scenario 1, your organic search results are credited for the conversion. For scenario 2, your organic search result is given the credit, since this is the last referrer. For scenario 3, your paid search result is given the credit.

What can you do if you want to give credit to the original referrer? For example, in scenario 2, it is actually the paid search result that introduced your site to your prospect and made him to convert, but the organic listing is the one getting the credit. Shouldn’t your paid search be given credit for the conversion? How will you be able to measure the effectiveness of your various campaigns if you do SEO (optimize your site to appear in your organic result), SEA (paid search campaigns), and/or Social media campaigns?

Well, if you use Google Analytics to track your site’s results, you can achieve this with some advanced coding and setup. You just need to modify the Google Analytics tracking code in your site, and then apply an advanced filter in your Google Analytics setup.

Your Google Analytics consultant or your webmaster should be able to help with this advanced coding setup.

With the code, you need to simply check if the visitor is a first time visitor by looking for the presence of _utma cookie in the visitor’s computer. (This is always set for a visitor and its presence indicates a returning visitor.) If the visitor is a new visitor, then grab the referral information, and store the referral information as a visitor label by calling __setVar(). With this code, you are saving the first referrer information before it gets updated at the subsequent visits. Then, use the advanced filter in your Google Analytics setup to overwrite the referral info to include both the referral info (current referrer) and the visitor label you saved (first referrer).

With this setup, you will be able to track the very first referrer that drove your prospect to your site, and will be able to measure the effectiveness of your various campaigns accurately. This will help you gauge the true value of your search marketing programs and ensure that you get the greatest ROI.

MENG 2009 Annual Survey Confirms Trends Shifting to Search Marketing Concepts

The Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) just released its Second Annual Survey on Top Marketing Trends. The survey respondents were 89% senior level executives (vp and up) evenly split between B2B and B2C marketing arenas. And here is what they said were the Top 5 Main Trends heading into 2009:

As it did last year, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in solidly as the Number 2 marketing trend with a statistically significant increase over 2008. The Viral/WOM grouping (consisting of Word of Mouth, Viral Marketing and Blogging) jumped into the Top 5 from Number 8 last year with its own significant increase. While these both have obvious connections with the search marketing concepts we advocate here at DBE, a closer look at the other top trends shows how search concepts continue to become integrated with marketing thinking.

For example, the Marketing Basics grouping includes Marketing ROI which had the third biggest individual concept increase from 2008 with a jump of 12 points. (The first two concepts with bigger jumps were Credit Availability and Housing Markets.) Of course, the metrics of search make it one of the most measurable media in terms of Marketing ROI.

The Personalization grouping has a number of terms that we include in our search marketing umbrella – Competitive Intelligence, Data Mining, Lead Generation, and E-commerce. Plus the Innovative Branding group includes Leading through Analytics so I could make the case that aspects of search marketing can be found in all five of the leading marketing trends for 2009.

Oh, and by the way, mentions of New Media also increased in the 2009 study moving it to Number 8 behind Green Marketing and Multicultural/Ethnic Issues. New Media includes Mobile Communications, Electronic Media, SNS (Social Networking Sites), Web 2.0, CGM (Consumer Generated Media) and Long Tail – all search-related terms, too.

Oddly enough, the MENG survey also reports that the Top 5 buzzwords marketers are “most tired of hearing” are (in order) Web 2.0, Social Networking, Social Media, Blog and Viral Marketing. Even the MENG release on the study finds this anachronistic as many of these same marketers previously said they don’t yet know enough about these new media.

My thought is that if senior executives are tired of hearing about these trends now, they better buy some ear plugs because the buzz around these and all search marketing concepts is only going to continue to rise in 2009.