Salesforce Marketing Blog
Salesforce Marketing Blog - Reports and Dashboards
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Batting Averages and Clickthrough Rates
Apr 5, 2007
John Gartner is obviously a fan of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,
as am I. Moneyball is a book by Michael M. Lewis released in 2003
about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, and
his team's approach to running the organization. One of the central
tenants of Moneyball, is that in the game of baseball, real statistical
analysis has shown that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and that avoiding an out is more important than getting a hit. In his article, Do Your Metrics Measure Up,
John analogizes a batting average in baseball, to a clickthrough ratio
for marketers. This begs the question, which metrics are most
important to your marketing organization? The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we all live an work. This has never been more true for marketers. As marketing dollars and advertising spend has shifted from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway, marketers can measure almost every aspect of the performance of their marketing programs in real-time. One of the potential effects of this, aside from Google's repeated quarterly revenue home runs, is a potentially overwhelming amount of statistical information associated with your various marketing programs. If you get lost in a sea of stats, and lose track of what is important, it is very easy to miss your targets, which in the b2b world is likely along the lines of pipeline, revenue, and profitability.
John's article certainly shares our mindset. While clickthrough rates, quality scores, and conversion rates are key metrics to track closely, if you live in the b2b world, be careful not to get so bogged down in the myriad of metrics that you lose sight of your original goals:
Driving new leads, pipeline, revenue, and profitability for your organization.
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Marketing in the Google Era, Part 1
Feb 28, 2007Thank you for the overwhelming attendance and feedback from yesterdays Marketing in the Google Era webinar. Here you will find the details from yesterdays presentation.
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe Breeze Presenter, Streaming)
Also, many of you have asked us for the 7 techniques reviewed in the webinar, the bookmark set and blogroll that was listed at the end of the presentation.
Bookmark Set: http://del.icio.us/kswensrud
Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kswensrudSpread the word:
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Measure Marketing Effectiveness with Pipe-to-Spend Ratios
Feb 26, 2007It’s a basic question most marketers ask themselves and I'm sure many struggle with the right answer…How should we be measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns?
In addition to direct ROI, we also look at a pipe-to-spend ratio for each campaign we run. This allows us to see for every marketing dollar we spend how many dollars of pipeline are we generating in return. Using a basic calculated field, all of our marketing managers can easily see how their campaigns stack up against the rest.
The result is a report like the one below that benchmarks all of your campaigns against each other.
Now your marketing managers can see which of their programs are effective (in real time!) and management can make educated decisions based on hard data rather than gut feel.
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The Era of Trackable Media
Feb 16, 2007Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.
Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.
Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.
They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that:
Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet the largest trackable advertising system ever invented, the Web. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.
The era of trackable media is here...Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.
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The Web is a Marketing Platform
Feb 11, 2007The Web is a marketers paradise. A community of connected individuals talking, reading, publishing, collaborating, syndicating, discovering, and sharing information around the world and around the clock. A community where every individual participates by contritbuting content, tags, links, descriptions, comments, bookmarks, and opinions.
So when we came across this video on You Tube last week, we figured there was no better way to kick off the new Salesforce Marketing blog:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
The video is itself informative, describing the changes that are at the very heart of the web and the internet marketing revolution. Even more interesting is the manner in which this information is disseminated. The format is video, published for free on You Tube. Over the course of 10 days, the community has viewed the video 806,077 times, posted 2749 comments, and republished the video or the link on countless other websites and blogs (such as this one) that resyndicate the content via RSS.
To take it a step further, search engines crawl the web and index its content and links. As of the date of this post, the video ranks #4 out of 164,000,000 search results for the term "web 2.0 video" ...and it all happened in a matter of days
It really makes you think. If your prospects and your customers are online, how are you reaching them? How are you disseminating your message and interacting with your community?
The Salesforce Marketing blog is designed to help marketers answer this question and discover new ways to take advantage of the web as a marketing platform. Stay tuned.
- The Salesforce Marketing Team
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