Paid Advertising

Contents

Summary

Advertising across different mediums is a great way to drive traffic to your website and digital assets. Marketers often focus a good portion of their budget on PPC campaigns to drive net new leads through form fills off the back of those expensive clicks.

While these clicks from your ads to your website and digital content are great to drive interest and traffic, there is a high drop-off rate once that click happens. PathFactory helps you to make the most of that click by allowing you to nurture at the point of acquisition, making every dollar work harder for you. It allows you to better understand the quality of the click rather than just the quantity and ultimately allows you to better understand the engagement of the lead you have just worked so hard to generate.

Using PathFactory to deliver the content behind your ad will positively impact your campaign by helping you:

Optimize on the costly click, giving you the opportunity to nurture at the point of acquisition
Drive leads through form fills leveraging PathFactory’s form strategy to turn anonymous visitors into known visitors
Understand which prospects are most engaged with the primary content asset as well as supplementary content
Evaluate what vendors are driving quality engagement vs. quantity

The following guide is for you if:

You run PPC campaigns
Your ads are hosted across a number of different mediums and you want to better understand the quality of the click

Goals:

Drive lead acquisition: Increase database growth and convert unknown traffic into known contacts
Evaluate leads: Evaluate leads based on their engagement to determine follow up and increase lower funnel conversion

Step 1: Planning and Preparation

Identify the ads to link out to a content track.
Set your success metrics
Some suggested metrics could be:
- % of leads have you generated with this content piece (clicks)
- % of quality clicks – those who spend time on your initial piece of content
- % of leads have binged on content (viewed more than one asset)
- % of leads met the Fast Moving Buyer (FMB) criteria (who are sales ready/ prioritized for sales)
- Sales team was more efficient based on higher quality of leads that they prioritized by engagement data (made more effective calls)
Benchmark KPIs
This might include:
- Base acquisition rate: How many new records are generated by this asset per month?
- Influenced MQLs: How many MQLs have been generated based on the asset(s) in the content track
  
  Use campaign attribution reporting if possible, alternatively you can use most recent lead source

Step 2: Build a Content Track

Building a content track around the asset you are advertising will allow you to nurture at the point of acquisition and make the most of that costly click by allowing your lead to binge on your content.

For a step by step guide on how to build a content track, see this article: Create a new content track

Ensure there is a form related to your content track to capture leads.
This could be before a visitor hits a content track—leveraging your existing landing page and form strategy—or you could try using PathFactory’s form strategy within the content track. Regardless of which strategy you implement, it’s important to pass the form submission data to PathFactory in order to identify the individual after their session. This is done by simply adding the PathFactory capture tag to either the thank you page or the submit event of your form.

For a step by step guide on how to add your MAP form to PathFactory, see this article: Using the forms library
To understand how to add the capture tag to track external form fills, see this article: Intro to capture tags

To easily understand where your traffic is coming from and to understand which ads are driving the best and most impactful traffic, it is recommended that you leverage query string parameters and values within your ad URLs. Query strings are common practice when it comes to PPC/Paid ad campaigns and allow you to uniquely identify source attributes as it relates to where the click originated.

Here is an example of a query string:

www.pathfactory.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=googleppc

The following components are the query string parameters: utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign.
This helps you define a specific element you want to capture, such as source or campaign name. The values that you see after each query string parameter are called query string values– these values are meant to help identify where and what drove the original click.
The combination of a query string parameter and query string value can help increase visibility into what sources are driving traffic and conversion.

PathFactory allows you to add hidden fields to your form to collect information from the URL’s query parameters. To achieve source attribution, you would be looking for a source parameter, for example: utm_source=XXX.

MAP specific articles can be found here:
Using Hidden Fields in Eloqua Forms
Using Hidden Fields in Marketo Forms
Using Hidden Fields in Pardot Forms

After you have finished your content track, copy the link and add the appropriate UTM parameters. Carrying on with this example, in this scenario you want to ensure you have your utm source equal to the location of the ad:
https://sample.companyname.com/not-a-real-link?utm_source=google

For a full article on how to use UTM parameters, see here:
How do I use UTM Parameters with my Content Tracks?

Step 4: Prepare your MAP

Bringing rich PathFactory engagement data back into your MAP is imperative to making a difference with your campaign. By this point, you should have your webhooks set up and enabled to send the relevant information to your MAP. If you are still missing this step, follow up with your CSM.

Related documentation can be found here:
Setting Up Webhooks

Step 5: Actioning the Data

Understanding PathFactory engagement data will allow you to segment leads who have clicked on one of your ads. For example, you may deem someone who spent a significant amount of time on the first asset ready for a more sophisticated nurture whereas someone who clicked and abandoned might go into a more welcome style nurture. Moreover, someone who engaged with more than one asset up to a certain threshold might already be fitting for sales.

In these scenarios, you will need to have the following webhook fields in your session webhooks sending over to your MAP:

experience name
number of assets viewed
content count time threshold met
engagement time

Fast Moving Buyer Alerts

A great way to let sales know someone is a hot lead, is a fast-moving buyer alert. Use the PathFactory data in your MAP to trigger email alerts from your MAP to relevant people in your organization. These email alerts communicate that a lead met an engagement threshold, and can also pass along other useful PathFactory data and lead details such as their name, phone number, and company.

For example, getting an email that one of your leads has passed your set engagement threshold is useful. Finding out in that same email which content pieces they actually consumed and for how long is even more useful and will enable you to have a more targeted conversation with that lead.

Step 6: Go Live

Simply add or replace the link of your ad to have it point to the appropriate asset in the content track that you have just created with the corresponding UTM parameters.

Note	Ensure you have fully tested the flow that the end user will go through to ensure the journey is working as expected, the data is flowing properly to your MAP, and the data is being actioned in the appropriate way once it arrives there.

Step 7: Evaluate/Measure

Ask yourself the following questions:

Did you achieve success based on the goals you set in step 1?
How many new leads have you generated with this ad?
What was the % of leads generated based on the goal of the campaign?
How many leads have binged on content (viewed more than one asset)?
How many leads met the FMB criteria (who are sales ready/prioritized for sales)?
Were the leads generated of better quality?
What is the primary source driving the highest number of leads (if you are sharing this on multiple platforms)?

Step 8: Optimize

Campaign Optimizations

Segment your leads based on engagement—those with lower engagement move into a top of funnel nurture program, those with more engagement move to a more aggressive nurture program or inside sales team. Ultimately, what is the next best action you can take with the leads who have engaged with your content?

Content Track Optimizations

Is there a significant drop off at a certain piece of content that is performing really well lower in the content track? Reorder your subsequent content to hold people’s attention longer or switch out content if it’s not performing as expected.

Source Evaluation

Understanding which paid sources/channels are filling your funnel is imperative when it comes to allocating your ad budget. Is there a source that is performing better than others in terms of lead quality, lead volume, cost per lead and/or binge rate that makes sense to invest more in? Is there a source that isn’t performing as well where you could reallocate spend budget?

Updated on April 13, 2023

Tagged: nurture

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