the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

My most challenging client:

For about 2.5 years I’ve worked with a B2B client in the technology market. Their product, for a non-network admin type like myself, was really abstract and difficult to comprehend. I understand what it is now, obviously, but during the first kick-off call I remember my eyes glazing over as they described their hardware, service, and benefits. Most of my responses we’re variations of the words:

Huh?
Oh.
Hmmm…
Interesting…
Sounds great..
Umm..

It took me 1 entire month to build their campaign.

1 month.

29 of those days were spent scratching at the deep dark depths of every keyword tool I could find. Begging for another keyword, synonym, anything at all that someone would search for that could possibly lead to a sale.

Splitting Hairs

On top of this, semantically this product could easily attract consumers and not network admins. This only compounded our issues. Remember the limitations of the content network years ago.

In short, the search network traffic was going to be minimal and we were going to be relying on the content network. I knew this from the start. Talk about a challenge..

The cherry on top? The sales cycle could be as long as 12 months. The kiss of internet marketing death.

Fast Forward

Anyhow, to make a long story longer - the client has received great industry praise for their service, have won numerous awards from their leading vertical pubs, and have had an IPO. Great for them.

All the while their little PPC campaign guy has been sitting in the corner generating leads and sending reports. Here’s where it gets interesting…

End to End B2B Tracking

From the very beginning we had to integrate with a high end, robust, but clunky 3rd party analytics tracking program. This required, much to my chagrin, a manually written custom tag on every keyword. The purpose of this tag was so the campaign, adgroup, keyword, and match type could be captured on site, passed through the lead form, and into their sales CRM backend. In short, every lead could be measured back to the PPC campaign by keyword.

Nice huh?

Well, every month for the last 2 years I’ve reported on everything I could, and have made steady progress on the cost per lead, even as we’ve expanded the campaign into 7 new countries.

All the while, no sales data, no matter how nicely I asked.

Out of the blue, about 2 months ago their new marketing analyst sent me some figures on lead to opportunity conversions. The numbers went something like this:

849 leads year to date. 21 opportunities. (No revenue numbers yet).

This came with the caveat that the revenue wasn’t yet attached to the report and we would be working on tying the 2 together. Still, I was enormously disappointed and was questioning all of the work I had done for them.

Finally, last month I received a follow-up email. What did they send me?

Data. Beautiful data.

Year to date:

1119 leads
91 verified opportunities
37 sales

$959,000 in revenue.

I can’t tell you our exact spend but it’s just a small fraction of this number. Much less than 10%. I’m happy again

What are the lessons for B2B PPC advertisers?

• Setup end to end tracking from the very beginning
• Be diligent in lead tracking with your CRM
• Don’t wait 2.5 years to examine revenue data from the campaign
• Be nice to your PPC analyst, he/she is probably making you a lot of money