Display + Search

We return to the 2011 marketing plan for Carroll’s Florist.  Apologies for the delay, particularly to my cousin Chad, but snow, ice and a teething 14 month old got in the way.

Last time I said we’d be laying out the plan, but I want to really walk through the process of getting ready.  The next few posts will be a combination of how we are planning 2011 while also making sure that the pieces are in place to make our efforts a success.

First, let’s review what we‘ve done.  We did some test buying in late 2010 and the results were good enough to decide we wanted to do more of this.

A quick summary of 2010 buying:

• Facebook:  1.3MM impressions; 469 clicks; $377 spent; $0.28 eCPM; $0.80 CPC
• Google Adwords: 6,077 impressions; 38 clicks; $74 spent;  $12.17 eCPM;  $1.95 CPC

First, if you think these numbers are small, the population of Staten Island is approximately 0.1% of the US, so if you want to think of this as a national campaign, just act like the numbers are in thousands.

We spent a little less than $500 in about a month.  Unfortunately, we really couldn’t track success.  The Carroll’s Florist website doesn’t have a real goal event and most business comes in via phone or actually walking in the door.  That said, anecdotal “feeling” of the staff was that business had picked up slightly and we were able to track requests for information on the website and that seemed to increase.  But again, we just don’t know. What scared me was we spent nearly $500 (and remember that would be $500,000(!) if a national campaign) and we didn’t really know if it was working. We just thought it might be.  If this was a national brand, the CMO would be looking for a job right now. Just before Christmas I halted buying until we could fix this and make sure that we were spending money effectively.

So the first thing we need to fix is what is called Attribution – and this is the focus of this post.  For any marketer, proper attribution is one of, if not THE, most important thing to solve.  Attribution is the process of attributing results to marketing efforts.  Those results could be new customers, purchases, leads, whatever.  For example, yesterday I searched for “Canyons Discount Lift Tickets” and purchased a set of tickets after clicking on a paid search listing for go-utah.com.  The marketing manager at ski-utah.com would attribute my purchase to Paid Search. More specifically, she would attribute it to the search term “Canyons Discount Lift Tickets” which would flow into her models and drive her to increase her bid price on that term.

However, while my example was pretty easy, attribution often is not. What drove me to look for discount lift tickets? Why am I staying at the Canyons? Why am I skiing? Why am I going in February?  Depending on the marketer, all these questions need to be understood because many other efforts may have driven me to do that search and convert. If those efforts are not properly valued then the marketer may not dedicate the proper budget (or cease altogether). If those efforts actually do drive value and they decrease, the marketer will see a drop in her results and not know why that happened.  A death spiral ensues.

The point here is that attribution is critical for Carroll’s Florist.  While we may think that our ads have been driving some increase in business, how do we know?  We need to set up a process that allows us to capture this information so that we can analyze it.

We will do this by improving our web analytics, by implementing dedicated and unique phone numbers and by providing unique discounts or special offers to customers.

• Web Analytics – There are two major steps to any web analytics implementation. First, get it implemented properly on the site, and, second, set up a system for tracking what you do.  When we started this effort we actually had no web analytics so we had to fix that.  Carroll’s had implemented Google Places (great!!) but mistook this for Google Analytics (not great).  It took us about 15 minutes to fix this and our web analytics data began flowing through.  Now we need to make sure that the results of our marketing campaigns flow properly through to our analytics when customers come to the site (I call this campaign tracking).  This was not done in 2010 and we need to fix this before we launch any new campaigns.   TO DO: Fix campaign tracking
• Unique Phone Number(s) – A great deal of Carroll’s business comes in via phone. Before this effort started it was nearly impossible to communicate to the florist via the website (the site repeatedly encouraged phone calls).  While we made sure customers could get in touch with us via the site, we still need to recognize that a lot of people are going to want to call, and we need to be able to track that.  We’re going to implement unique phone numbers on the site.  There are companies who provide unique toll-free numbers that can be used for different purposes and allow the marketer to learn where the customer came from. We will obtain several numbers and place them in various points on the site so that we can track different efforts.
• Special Offers – advertisers have been providing special offers to customers who tell them where they came from  since at least the 1800s.  When the local deli gives you a discount for saying that you saw their ad in the Sunday Paper, they are tracking their marketing.  We need to figure out the same. I’ll be assigning Chad with the job of figuring out what he can offer customers for telling him where they came from.

That is my quick list of what we’re going to implement in the short term.  If you have any suggestions, comment below, and I’ll probably add them

Coming up soon we’ll lay out the marketing channels we plan to test, what campaigns we plan to run, and what we need to do to the website.  Among a lot of other stuff we need to get going.  Spring is around the corner and Weddings are the bread and butter for the Florist, so we need to be ready soon.