Closing the Loop on Paid Search

Guest post from Elle Woulfe, Senior Marketing Programs Manager at Eloqua. Elle is one of the people responsible for our own internal use of Eloqua to optimize our marketing, and in this post, she looks at how we approach our investments in paid search marketing.


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Paid search ranks high on the list of marketing tactics for most B2B companies, but many marketers lack the ability to close the loop on search generated inquiries. Tying clicks to revenue in order to understand the business impact of SEM allows you to optimize spend and improve ROI.

Like most technology companies, Eloqua depends on both paid and natural search to find those buyers in the early stages of researching marketing automation vendors. We use a disciplined system of testing and optimization throughout our search program to produce the best results. But knowing which keywords generated the most inquires isn’t enough. We rely on Eloqua to track SEM leads from first click to close, generating a complete view of the revenue impact and the ROI of our search program.

For paid search, we treat each landing page and its associated keywords, as a campaign. When a visitor searches Google for a term related to marketing automation, like “lead scoring,” and clicks on one of our paid search terms, they land on an Eloqua landing page with a relevant offer for that term. When a user completes the form on the search landing page they are associated with that campaign in Eloqua. Now we can easily track the impact that search has on our sales funnel, but before that happens - our standard lead management process kicks in.

Clean Data Makes Happy Marketers

Eloqua’s automated data cleansing, lead scoring and routing processes are initiated once a prospect submits a form. In order to use our data for segmentation and targeting, lead scoring and analysis, we need an accurate dataset. When a contact enters our database it first goes through the contact washing machine. In this process, contact data is normalized and appended and the contact is associated to an account where possible. The contact is then scored based on fit and behavior and finally, this new data is synced to our CRM system, updating the relevant fields to give sales an accurate picture of prospect activity.

The contact’s most recent search term, as well as any other activities the prospect has taken is displayed in the CRM system so sales as a real-time view into prospect activity and interest.

How We Close the Loop

• A contact is associated to a search campaign when they complete the form. Now, as they engage with other Eloqua assets or campaigns, those interactions are associated to the contact as well, providing a complete picture of all the marketing activities that influence them.

• Eloqua campaign reporting automatically pulls opportunity, lead rank and revenue information associated to the contact and captured in our CRM back into Eloqua so we have a single view of search marketing success metrics and the impact of search influenced leads on the sales funnel.

• If a deal closes with the account our search lead is associated to, the search campaign is tracked as having influenced the prospect. The total deal size is automatically divided by all the campaigns that touched all the contacts associated to the account and the search campaign gets its cut. If multiple people at the account were influenced by search campaigns, all of those touch points are counted as influencing campaigns and get their fair share.

• In the event that our search campaign was the last touch point before a sales opportunity was opened with the account – the search campaign becomes the lead source directly attributed to that deal.

Picking the Winners

By setting up campaigns for each search landing page, we can easily see how each page is performing in terms of the number of inquires generated and follow the trail to see the impact on revenue. With the data pulled in from CRM, we can also see what stage of the funnel each lead is at and can quantify the impact each landing page (and associated keywords) have had on revenue generated. This holistic approach to tracking our search marketing performance makes it easy to pick the winners of our search campaign and calculate the return on our investment in paid search.

Marketing Analysis and the Lead Funnel

In thinking about B2B marketing analysis from the perspective of a top-down view of a balance sheet and income statement of lead metrics means that we need to look at the stages of the buying funnel a bit more objectively. A balance sheet view would give us a current (or past) point in time view of what leads are at what stage, and an income statement view would give us an indication of the transitions in stage that took place within the time period.

The first step is to define the stages of your buying process more explicitly. This can be as simple as the Sirius Decisions model of Inquiries and Marketing Qualified Leads, or it can be a unique mapping of the buying process stages of your business. The number of stages in your buying funnel will depend on your business and how your buyers buy.

With the stages defined, however, you can then begin to model them as part of your marketing analysis. Within Eloqua, this means defining the lead stages/ranks. In Campaigns, under "Inquiries & Leads", select "Lead Ranking Systems". You can define a lead ranking system to model your buyers buying process as you need.

Each leve you define has an order, a name, and a text value. The text value is what is written to the underlying contact or prospect when a lead is defined as being in this stage.

To indicate that a contact or a prospect is a lead at a certain stage of the buying process, you must build a lead ranking rule. Under Data Tools, build a lead ranking rule for each stage in your buying process.

With that in place, you can use a lead ranking rule whenever you want to define that a lead is at a particular stage. The text value for the lead rank/stage is written into the contact record, so existing processes that may be dependant on seeing data in the contact record are unimpacted.

The lead ranking rules can be run anywhere it might make sense; on groups that have been uploaded, such as lists from events or tradeshows, in form processing steps to indicate that anyone submitting a certain form is at a certain stage of the buying process, or within program builder.

Running a lead ranking rule from within program builder is done in a similar manner to how leads were ranked as being a certain stage using data update rules. Except that when done within a lead ranking system, the lead rank is stored historically, and forms a basis for all of your marketing funnel analysis.

With your lead funnel data flowing through as formal lead ranks, you will be able to easily represent it in funnel reports in the campaign analysis area. More importantly, when it is tracked in this way, a historical record of the lead rank for each person is kept. This allows you to view how each person's lead rank has changed over time, and begin to understand how your marketing campaigns have facilitated moving buyers through the lead funnel.

(*Please note that the capabilities described here are currently available only with Eloqua Team edition)

Marketing Dashboards and Time Ranges - A Quick Tip

I use custom dashboards a lot in Eloqua, usually in order to track ther performance of anything I'm interested in over an extended period of time. The performance of the Eloqua Artisan and Digital Body Language blogs are good examples of that - I check in on their performance using a custom dashboard at least a few times per week. We also track in great detail what the sources of traffic are for our online properties in another custom dashboard.



When building and using custom dashboards, one setting that is worth being aware of, and thinking about, is the time range settings. This is the definition of exactly what period of time is included in the dashboard. With Eloqua, you have a rich set of options that you can use to define exactly what timeframe you have in mind.



You can configure this for the standard dashboards in your system in one central place, under Setup->Management->Systems Management->Dashboard Settings, or you can configure the settings for each report in a custom dashboard by selecting Edit under the Actions menu on the report's upper right side.



Each of these will give you a set of time range options. For a dashboard, it's almost certain you will be using a relative range (the period of time up until now) rather than a fixed range (a specific set of days) as you generally want the dashboard to change over time and be up to the current moment.



However, that's where the nuances come in. If you are looking at a daily chart for the last 3 weeks, for example, exactly how you specify that will guide how your data appears for the periods around the start and end of the time period.



For example, if we looked at it literally, we could say that the last three weeks was equal to the last 3x7x24 hours. However, the data for the day at the start (three weeks ago) and the day at the end (today) would be skewed based on the time of day we looked at. If I looked at that data at 6pm, the starting day would only have 6 hours of data in it and the ending day (today) would only have 18 hours of data in it (up until 6pm). In many cases, this literal option is not the best result.



The "Last Full X days/weeks/months" options provide a way around this, by only including full days. There is also an option to "include today" with these if you do want to show the 18 hours of data up until the current moment in the day today, without skewing the data on the start day.



Similarly, a variety of options allow you to report on specific precisions at the week or month level (such as weekdays only, for example), if that is relevant to your marketing analysis.


What is important is that you think carefully about exactly what period of time is of interest to you and then select that option for your dashboards. The options will be available to you to do what you need.

Closed Loop Reporting with Salesforce.com Campaigns

If you use a CRM system such as Salesforce.com, you can easily use Eloqua to map inquiries to campaigns, and from there understand the return on investment that the individual campaign produced. This gives you a quick and very useful approach to closed loop reporting in your marketing campaigns.

This works well in less complex buying cycles where a single campaign can reasonably be tied to a single purchase event. In those cases, tying the inquiries from a form or a landing page to a campaign in CRM, and using that tie to understang campaign effectiveness is all you need to do. In more complex buying cycles where you want to understand the influence of multiple campaigns over multiple months, you'll want to use Eloqua's campaign analytics module.

For the simpler case, however, it's easy to get started. I'll show an example with Salesforce.com campaigns, but this can just as easily be done using Oracle's Siebel on Demand product or Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

First, we'll add the key fields for the campaign to the form. They do not have to appear in the HTML of the form for the web visitor, but by adding them to Eloqua, we can then associate that form with the right campaign in Salesforce.com. Add a field for each of SFDC Campaign ID, SFDC Campaign Name, and SFDC Campaign Status.

With each field, edit the field properties by clicking on the field, and populate the values you require for each of the three fields. The campaign ID, for example can easily be discovered in Salesforce.com in the address bar of your browser when you have selected the campaign you are interested in associating leads with.

With that in place, you can then add the campaign information to the contact's record, so you can see at a glance what the last marketing campaign was that they were associcated with. This information is valuable to have associated with them for various analysis and reporting purposes, but we'll just use it for now to associate their record in Salesforce.com with the appropriate campaign.

To update the contact record, simply add the three fields we have been workding with to your update contact step as optional parameters. This will add the campaign information to the contact record within Eloqua.

With the information added to the contact record within Eloqua, and assuming that your CRM integration with Salesforce.com is set up normally, the only remaining step is to add this contact to your CRM update program.

Add a form processing step to add the contact to a step in program builder, and select the System program for running the CRM update. Unless you have configured this program from the default, this will automatically pick up the values of those fields in the contact record, and make the necessary associations with the campaigns in Salesforce.com.

As you know, your business, and your CRM system configuration, guides you towards many potential ways to define how and when contacts and leads are associated with your Campaigns. Rather than be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach, by opening up how forms are linked with campaign data, how that is written into the contact record, and then how that contact is mapped to the CRM system, you should find that the resulting structure best maps to your business needs.

With the mapping in place, you can now see very quickly and easily which campaigns are performing, which are creating opportunities, which are driving revenue, and which have the highest overall performance in terms of marketing ROI.