Purple Marketing Consulting (PMC) was hired by Weddle and Sons (WSI) Roofing to accomplish 2 major goals.
1. Develop systems and integrated tools that will allow WSI to better capture data to make decisions
2. Train the WSI staff to interpret and use the data collected to make decisions that would optimize website user experience, social media user experience, communication user experience, Google ads, and Facebook ads.
In this post, PMC will break down which systems were developed and briefly touch on questions to ask yourself when developing out your own systems. Following this section, we will dive into some of interpretation of data and how PMC makes strategic decisions based on the data.
It is important for reference to understand that prior to working with PMC, WSI already had social media, a website, google ads, and Facebook ads. After an initial audit of the existing systems, it was quickly realized that there was little strategy and cohesion between any of these tools. Facebook ads were one offs only developed to run for a week at a time. Google ads were untouched for months and only a single ad, ad set, and campaign were being used. The website had analytics being tracked, but no specific goals or user interaction were being tracked or monitored. Lastly, there were no communication automations in existence that would execute if a user made a specific action taking them down a specific funnel… no funnels were developed either. The first system that was improved was analytics. This improvement utilized google tag manager and google analytics.
Following a review with WSI, it was determined that there were key button clicks that showed strong user intent toward becoming a lead. Every single one of these buttons were added, labeled, and categorized in google tag manager for later use in analytics. An issue existed where when a lead was generated, WSI was using a iframe (3rd party website) to gather data from their customers. This made it difficult to track specific form data using our google tools; however, the 3rd party site did also have google tool integration. Rather than pooling the 3rd party site and the regular site together, we determined that creating a “success page” would be the best way to track every lead submission on one site; this page was built and tracking information was created to track user interaction. With these initial tools created, google analytics was then used to define specific goals based on these user interactions. Based on the average value of a lead, each of these goals were given the average value.
With these goals created, overtime, WSI was able to identify the pages on their website that had a strong pull toward a user becoming a lead versus that ones that did not. Additionally, WSI was able to see which sources and mediums were performing at bringing in leads. More on using this data later. Before actually utilizing this data, time needs to pass to get a good sample set of data and the other tools will take time to flesh out. The other tools being google ads, Facebook ads, and emails. Google ads were fleshed out first. With WSI having 7 different branches, a total of 35 different campaigns/ad sets/ ads were created targeting display, search, and re-marketing (search and display) placements. This differentiation of the branches allows for segregation of the data sets which can help to make location specific decisions later. The existing ad that had been running for months was used as a baseline to demonstrate for the client the impact that the new campaigns would have in comparison. Additionally, all of these campaigns for their specific placement type were made identically for each branch. This gives an additional reference for when enough data has been collected to make decisions which can be compared across all branches.
Over time, all of these campaigns will look very different in each location as they are optimized. An additional note with Google ads, conversions were built out using the google analytics goals created in the previous step. These were all given values. Google ads uses their pixel which sticks with a user and identifies if the google ads played a role in a conversion executing. This is very helpful as conversions and leads are very closely related and can give a great representation of the ROAS (return on ad spend) that WSI will be receiving. After analyzing previous Facebook campaigns that WSI had run, it was determined that the cost for a lead was very expensive. It was recommended by PMC that Facebook re-marketing campaigns be made and only very targeted Facebook campaigns on occasion be built out. Using the Facebook pixel, goals were defined, and users began being tracked using Facebook’s system. Re-marketing ads were made for every branch with 3 different targeting messages. After a couple of weeks, the ROAS of the Facebook ads were +1000% higher than any previous ads on either Facebook or Google. Note that this is a common strategy implemented, funnel a large amount of first-time website users to your site using Google as this is more affordable, and then re-market them on Facebook. Facebook ads inherently have more initial trust from consumers; re-marketing ads perform well here. The last item that was fleshed out was the automatic communications. Using Zapier and Mailgun, WSI was able to identify when a lead was captured, sold, or had gone cold and create custom chains of emails that would send to each group of customers. An initial set of communication was created and has tracking setup for future analyzing. A/B test can be powerful here in creating the best possible funnel paths of automatic communication. Using the same methods as the email campaigns, social media was fleshed out to determine what duration, keywords, content would be best to drive the user to whatever the goal of that channel is.
Most of the interpretation of data and optimization occur from following suggestions that the google and Facebook interfaces provide. For website optimization, A/B landing pages or varying what the landing page is can be an effective way to improve the performance of one’s site toward leading a user toward a goal/conversion/lead/sale. Another tool that is used heavily by PMC is google data studio. This is a powerful tool that allows the user to analyze google analytics, google ads, and any other source of data you can connect in one easy to use studio. Graphs, charts, and other metric demonstrative graphics can be generated here to show performance, correlation, contrast, compression, and other methods of displaying data. Using data studio, WSI asked PMC to propose a 12-month marketing budget. With the use of knowing the value generated/lead, the ROAS for each branch, the revenue goals of the business and the cyclical nature of the business after creating a waveform graph in data studio; PMC was able to confidently recommend an increase in ad spend of 1020% more than what was currently being spent. With the systems fleshed out, the goals being well defined and identified, and the data being readily available to WSI; their confidence in this recommendation is much stronger than one based solely on industry standards.
This was a very customized build out of systems for WSI. PMC has a team of experts that make this process painless and gives assurance in the quality and return on investment that you can expect. If you are interested in any of the solutions stated above, one of our team members would be happy to discuss your best path forward!
By Jordan Disberger
CEO, Purple Marketing Consulting