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Get More Customers

By Ryan Carson @ryancarson

08 December 2010 | Category: Marketing

I've learned some very valuable lessons on web app marketing that I'd like to share with you all. I'll be writing a series of articles and in this first post, I'll be covering how to create and track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

These lessons have been learned while marketing Think Vitamin Membership, our new on-demand video training site for Web Designers and Developers. We're humbled and excited to announce we just signed up our 1,000 monthly paying Member, after only six months. Thanks to everyone who has signed up!

Campaigns

The first thing you need to do is build ‘Campaigns’ into your app’s back end.

Here are the database tables you’ll need …

Campaigns

1. ID
2. Name
3. Description or notes
4. Start date (not required)
5. End date (not required)
6. Amount spent

Campaign Visits

1. Campaign ID
2. Date
3. Time

Campaign Signups

1. Campaign ID
2. Customer ID
3. Date
4. Time

Here is a screengrab of a campaign after it’s been running for awhile …

Once you create a Campaign, you should get a simple ID back from the system, for example: 112. You can then tack this ID on to any URL from your site like this:

http://yoursite.com/?cid=112
http://yoursite.com/prices?cid=112

When someone hits your site using that link, here’s what happens …

1. A cookie is created for them. This cookie will link them to this campaign if they sign up as a customer.
2. A record is created in the  Campaign Visit table, if it’s a new unique visit.

If they sign up, then the system checks to see if they have a Campaign cookie. If so, then it creates a record in the Campaign Signup table.

When you view the campaign report (see image above) then it also queries the Customer table to display the customer’s ID, name, email, current plan and LTV or Life Time Value.

LTV is simply a sum of all the money the customer has paid you since they signed up. This is vital as it allows you to see whether or not you’ve made a profit on the amount you spent on the campaign.

As you can see above, this campaign is the ‘Membership’ link in the Think Vitamin navigation. We don’t have to pay for that link, so the ‘Total Spend’ is $0.

Tracking the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Now that you’re recording Campaign data, here are the important stats for each campaign …

1. Profitability – The total Life Time Value of the campaign should exceed the amount of money you spent on the campaign. It’s also important to pay attention to when you hit profitability on a campaign. If it takes more than three months, then something might be wrong.
2. Conversion rate – Calculated like this: Campaign Signups / Campaign Visits. Obviously the higher the number here, the better.
3. Visits – The number of unique visits
4. Bounce – We currently get this from Google Analytics as it’s a complex thing to measure and we didn’t want to spend the time building it in.

A Real-Life Example

We’ve learned something very interesting: A lot more people (and I mean a LOT MORE) click on the ‘Membership’ link in the nav, than on the advertisement in the right sidebar. (We track this by using two different campaigns).

Here are the results from Nov 23rd 2010 – Dec 7th 2010:

Sidebar advertisement

• 1.42% conversion
• 6 signups
• 422 visits
• 0.37% click-through from Think Vitamin
• 39.57% bounce
• 3.02 pages/visit

‘Membership’ link in top navigation

• 2.33% conversion (64.08% increase)
• 30 signups (400% increase)
• 1,288 visits (205.21% increase)
• 1.14% click-through from Think Vitamin (208.11% increase)
• 25.00% bounce (36.82% decrease)
• 3.23 pages/visit (6.95% increase)

As you can see, the ‘Membership’ link in the site’s top nav is massively more effective then the sidebar advert.

I believe this is because people are much more trusting of a native link in the nav, then an advert. Even if the advertisement is from the same company that runs the site.

Next, we’re going to use Optimizely.com to test the performance of a couple different sidebar ads to make sure it’s not just this specific ad that’s under performing.

Graphing the data

In my next article, I’ll walk you through how to use advanced Google Analytics methods to visually chart the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can build this charting into your web app admin, but that takes extra time and effort. Google Analytics does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, which means you can launch more quickly.

Here’s a taster …

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