Let’s Fix your Conversion Process and Web Site Output
We are pleased to announce the availability of high level marketing infrastructure & operational support services. Our operations chief Becky brings over 20 years of proven talents with optimizing the digital end user experience to drive sales. She was a co-founder at ARS, one of the first and largest subscription content eCommerce site portfolios & affiliate networks online.
Becky and the Buoyancy Digital team will strategize and build optimized digital marketing infrastructure that blends content with user intelligence, personalization and automation to develop & nurture relationships via digital communication channels until they become profitable.
This offering is agnostic of how the client is sourcing their digital visitors, as well as their specific eCommerce business models & product/service offerings, markets served, etc. For tangible deliverables, they break down into these buckets:
This includes assessment of current website setup and associated technology & service provider integrations, with a comparison to company goals.
Proposed integrations & changes to sites, systems or landing pages for clients will allow for major client gains in the following areas: improved data and actionable intelligence gathering; greater use of personalization in all client digital touchpoints; expanded use of marketing automation tools, systems and strategy; implementation and/or deployment of conversational interfaces are also included as necessary, to help brands better develop one-to-one relationships with all website & social media page visitors, regardless of which marketing channel drove the user, and thus improve the lifetime value of your customer relationships.
Proposal and implementation of CTA (call to action) supporting mechanisms: dependent on campaign objectives (lead collection, point of sale, click to call, etc.). It includes bespoke marketing tech stack to measure and optimize campaigns.
Automated relationship nurturing to move users closer to finding value worth paying for whatever you are selling.
Funnel steps and transitions are guided by company sales process, strategies, and goals.
Talk to us. We’ve built, managed and/or improved upon site performance for clients across the Internet since it’s commercial inception in the 1990’s. We are no-bull, get into the weeds operators with over 60 years experience in the field. We can recommend, implement, optimize and report on the success of conversion and customer engagement solutions tailored to your specific brand situation and driven by data & experience.
For more information, contact us online or write Becky via convmar@bdllc.org
The wide array of SEM and overall search marketing options from Google are mission critical to the marketing plans of companies & organizations throughout the global economy.
Staying current with paid search best practices & techniques as well as AdWords policies & feature updates through certification is part of our commitment to bringing our best game to every client project.
As a committed digital marketing and SEM service provider, Buoyancy Digital is pleased to re-certify its' standing as an AdWords certified Google Partner, with a specialization in mobile SEM.
#SEM is not optional for marketing.
Buoyancy Digital is proud to become a Google partner with certifications for the management of #AdWords & #mobileadvertising
The Attribution Question
Like many of you, I look at traffic and conversion reports every day for various ad campaigns from different digital traffic sources for various advertised offers.
Accordingly, the ads placed, whether SEM/paid search, display, social, or otherwise get optimized both manually and systematically on a regular basis to extract the best possible results.
There are typically target CPA or ROAS goals baked into every campaign purchased, with pixels, tracking URL’s, cookies and various other technical methodologies to generate reports showing tangible results which validate success or show where improvements can be made….or both.
Simple enough, right? Attribution for digital media buys in your bag of marketing tricks (aka layers of the funnel) comes down to assigning credit where credit is due, in terms of which impressions, clicks and resulting actions such as sales conversions were generated by which ad/source/campaign/ad creative used/audience/platform/media vendor, and even by which person or agency handles that conversion generating media buy for you.
But, I have to say it, this notion of attribution and some of the existing standard practices related to measurement, is a very subjective piece of the science of cost accountable digital media. Especially now, in an era where attribution judgments (did the campaign work? Was it profitable?) are being made by media buyers with ad sources driving view throughs, a measured event viewing of ads, such as display & video ads, but which did not yield a click/conversion immediately, yet did so within a defined window of time afterwards).
Here is a (very common) scenario and thus my beef with how the digital media industry standards for this can be biased: a user who visited your eCommerce site on Monday but does not convert, then sees (views) one of your retargeted display ads on a major news site on Tuesday, creating the view through which can be attributed to the retargeting campaign, yet does not click through and visit your eCommerce site or take any other actions at that moment. The same user ultimately comes back to your site and converts to sale on Thursday (always a beautiful thing if profitable), two days later. Many retargeting colleagues have said that this view through on Tuesday from the retargeting campaign should get the attribution credit for the sale.
But…between that Tuesday view through and a purchase completed on Thursday by that user, was that user exposed to any other media/campaigns related to your site, brand or product, whether the additional media or ads were earned, owned or paid for? Perhaps the user eyeballed some information elsewhere in the vastness of the Web and Social networking about your brand, your product lines, specific products, etc? Maybe you got unexpected and positive news coverage on Wednesday that impacted the user’s viewpoint?
Further, how about the cloud or CDN network enhancements that kicked in in this scenario Tuesday night or Wednesday, which made the UX on your site on Thursday faster, better or otherwise more enjoyable for your user to complete the purchase.
Did one of your brilliant design artisans adjust the shade of blue in the background on the product page that this user saw, between visit 2 and visit 3 to the site?
Perhaps your merchandisers tweaked the category and PDP (product) pages a bit to reflect more product information than had been previously known, or added a product bundle for purchase which made our user want to convert even more on their Thursday visit.
Why do these variables matter for trying to cost account the success of a given digital ad buy or campaign? Plain and simple. If we are to be truly transparent and even holistic in approach to understanding true cost of a customer acquisition from digital media campaigns, then we need to get real in terms of factoring in the wide range of other elements, changes, nuances or events which impacted that user’s behavior, aka customer/consumer journey.
I believe strongly that digital media attribution standards should allow for shared credit, perhaps via a points system or some other method that a great mathematician can help devise. Not just shared credit among the 3-5 digital media sources and ads potentially seen by the user before they converted to sale, but also shared credit for site or vendor-internal changes made during the user’s view through window after their first ad exposure on Monday which may not always get accounted for, unless they were part of an intentional A/B test.
Even the subtlest events which could impact the user from Monday’s visit to your site turning into a conversion on Thursday deserve credit for their part in the process of making a sale happen; adopting at least some elements of this view can allow all of us involved in the digital media and eCommerce ecosystem to have ultimate transparency with factoring how much it really cost to generate the conversion as well as deeper understanding of what actually caused the conversion to happen.
Rant completed. Have a great weekend!
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So it's true. We all proclaim to embrace the universality of shopping for anything online, but as humans, we have reserved the right to simply 'not go there' for certain types of shopping needs.
For many, that no-go for online shopping threshold can be clothing (if I can't try it on before I buy, it will be a PITA process of returns and trying to make off the rack clothing fit a non-standard body); for others, it is perishable food products (why should I buy this cake, produce or other specialty grocery item from 2000 miles away that will need dry ice shipping and may arrive squashed from rough handling? Personally, I have overcome the objections of others as well as my own reservations & have succumbed over time to enjoy the price, availability and variety options available, when buying most things online, including clothing and perishable food items.
Even as a 20 year digital media and eCommerce professional, plus being a passionate internet super user, I too had a no-go zone for shopping online - buying prescription eyeglasses. In retrospect, I am not sure why I had such a hangup. Over the past 20 years, working in front of digital screens and small font text data has taken at least part of my optical capabilities, requiring that I wear glasses, for over 10 years now.
Add to that the reality of the retail brick & mortar experience for most people when it's time to get your peepers checked and buy updated prescription glasses. Frankly, it's not always that much fun. It takes many hours on a day that you may prefer to be spending quality time with family or friends. The selection of frames may be limited, depending on where you live, for demographic reasons controlled by the optical retailers. Lastly, the optical shopping experience can feel like the car buying process - as related to the deep and wide range of up-sells and options that both optical retail professionals and automotive sales professionals bring to bear during the manual 'check out' process. (Did you know you were going to need 4 different 'coating types' for your lenses?) Thus, despite almost two decades of internet shopping awareness & comfort, plus a dislike for the offline experience of shopping for eyeglasses, I did not 'go there' until last month.
Behold, a savior from the worlds of consumer eye wear and planet internet shopping, requiring consumers to have an open mind! In August, I already had a fresh updated prescription for glasses that needed to be filled from seeing the local optometrist. The optical retail stores I had local access to did not have anything I liked that was reasonably priced for frames. A friend from my professional life finally said, get over your hang ups and trot over to Glasses.com - find what you like, enjoy the shopping process and get on with your life.
Despite being an innate skeptic, I dove in, as it couldn't be worse than my retail experiences over the years. The complete user experience of working with the merchant from start to finish and after the sale, from ease of use with the web site, the styles available for purchase, their mobile app on iPad to"try on" and then a couple of painless customer service interactions via email and phone with sharp support staff, made this buying experience my best ever for eyeglasses overall and one of the best for online shopping in general.
This is not a shameless plug for one digital merchant who treated me well. The takeaway is more about a wake up call to challenge consumer comfort zones as online merchants overall, and then delivering the finest multi-touch user experience possible. Customers who had their views converted on an entire range of online shopping behavior that walk away from your (web) shop happy, will not only be prone to repeat purchases with the merchant who won them over, but also with merchants overall in the previously ignored online shopping category. Get it right and evolve a generation or two of consumers to buy more online that they actually want/need, where and when it makes sense, even in those prior no-go digital shopping categories.