Harsha Potapragada

Outline:

• Introduction
• What is B2B Marketing Attribution and how is it different from B2C Marketing Attribution? 
• 7 Challenges with B2B marketing attribution

1. Tracking The Website Activity And Identifying Users Using Form Submissions, 
2. Identifying Accounts On The Website Even For Anonymous Users Using A Reverse IP Solution. 
3. Stitching Website Data With Map And Crm Data Using Email Ids (Specifically Unifying CRM Data Across Objects - Lead, Contact, Campaign Member, Activities Into A Single Timeline)
4.  Tracking And Defining Offline Touchpoints At The Same Level As Digital Marketing Touchpoints
5. Long Sales Cycles Implying Need To Track This Data Over Many Months And Years
6. Sales Marketing Alignment - Bringing In Sales Data
7.   Ability To Do All Of This At An Account Level                                                                         

• Takeaway

The B2B customer journey includes multiple people and touchpoints in the decision-making process.

On average, 6 to 10 people are involved in the B2B buying process. And for 33% of B2B organizations, the sales cycle is extended beyond six months. 

Overwhelming, isn't it?

In a B2B business, there are multiple stakeholders at different stages in the buying journey. And it is essential to have content that appeals to them. Hence it becomes hard to build content pieces that provide educational value. 

However, it is not an excuse that hinders your growth. In this blog, we will discuss the seven main challenges with B2B attribution and how factors can help overcome them. 

How Is B2B Marketing Attribution Different From B2C Marketing Attribution? 

71% of Marketers believe optimizing the customer journey across multiple channels and interactions is crucial. This optimization can improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth. 

However, 50% of B2B marketers report limitations with their current analytics solutions. These reports are not providing them with adequate visibility into what channels or campaigns work best. 

The following are two reasons why traditional marketing analytics solutions fail to achieve this. 

1. Multiple stakeholders are involved in decision-making, and the buying journey is non-linear. It makes it difficult to predict the impact of marketing-driven interactions.
2. Sales cycles are longer and involve multiple online & offline touchpoints for educating and influencing the buyer's decision. 

Let's understand this with an example. 

A customer journey for a B2C brand that is selling chocolates will look like this: 

Clicks on an Instagram ad → go to the website→ to make a purchase. (Yes, that's it!) 

On the other hand, a B2B customer's journey will look something like this.

Visit website→Read product reviews→Attend a webinar→Engage with a sales representative→Make a purchase decision. [For example's purpose only]

Now, from the customer journey, it is clear that it has both online and offline touchpoints. A more detailed depiction of a customer journey in the B2b business is added below for your reference. 

Furthermore, users now tend to browse anonymously, making it harder to piece together the accurate buying journey. Website Visitor identification capabilities can help throw light on these otherwise untrackable touchpoints. 

Challenges With B2B Attribution

Here are the seven challenges faced by the marketing teams with B2B attribution and how to overcome them. 

1. Tracking Website Activity And Identifying Users 

• How many people visit my website, and who are they? 
• Which page are they landing on?
• Which content is driving maximum engagement? 
• Which traffic sources - campaigns, referrals are driving high-quality traffic to the website? 

These are some of the questions that cross the mind of a B2B marketer. Websites are the sales epicenters for B2B marketers. Why? Because all the lead generation and conversions happen via the website. 

At every stage of the buying journey, your prospects are consuming your content and comparing it with your competitors. They want to understand whether you can solve their problems faster and better. 

So, it is vital for you to track and identify the website visitors to prepare customer-centric marketing strategies. However, tracking a user's journey from the first interaction to conversion across months is a technically complex task. It includes

• Managing cookies,
• Tracking traffic sources via utm parameters, referral parameters, or click ids,
• And stitching that with the respective ad platforms.

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Factors.ai is an analytics solution purpose-built for B2B marketers. It has an inbuilt capability to track a user's journey from the first interaction to conversion and beyond. 

The solution is configurable, wherein marketers can set up their utm definitions and channel configurations. It also comes with the following

• Ability to track utm parameters and click ids.
• Native integrations with the main ad platforms, providing a cost-to-revenue view seamlessly.

2. Website Visitor Identification

The key to driving effective marketing is targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time.

And data is what you need to convert the hot lead! The more you know about your prospect, the more you can personalize their experience.

However, collecting user data is challenging for the B2B segment. According to a report by 6sense, only 3% of B2B website visitors will fill out any form. And the rest, 97% of them, will be labeled as anonymous traffic. 

But it would be misleading to say that 97% of anonymous users did not influence the decision-making process of the known 3% of users. 

Let's unpack this with an example now. 

For instance, six people from the same company visited your website, but only 1 filled out the demo form. Therefore, attributing all the marketing efforts to that single identified person and his touchpoints will be wrong.

All the users from that account and the campaigns/content they interacted with should be considered when building an attribution model.

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Collecting user data is crucial. But you can do that only with their consent, which means your anonymous visitors stay hidden. Therefore, you need a solution that tracks the data on the website, even for anonymous users. 

Factors.ai has an OEM partnership with 6sense to provide the best-in-class visitor identification to its customers. Thus, stitching together the entire account journey across all users. 

They use a reverse IP solution and get data on an account level rather than at an individual level. It further enables you to understand the companies the users are from and know more about your anonymous users.

3. Putting The User Data In One Place 

B2B Marketers today leverage multiple channels to promote content downloads, webinar registrations, and demo requests. It helps them engage buyers as per their preferences. 

However, with many campaigns, ads, and other marketing activities happening simultaneously, it becomes challenging for marketers to measure the influence of each of these efforts on pipeline and revenue. In many cases, the customer journey is siloed across multiple tools. For example, the Marketing Automation Platform captures the website activity, while CRM captures the post-sales hand-off events.

Most Marketing Automation Platforms also are not sophisticated to capture traffic sources accurately. Furthermore, CRMs keep the user data fragmented across multiple objects such as Leads, Contacts, Campaign Members, and Activities.

Hence, it isn't feasible to stitch together the user journey across all these tools at an account level. Therefore, to make result-oriented marketing strategies, you need to unify this data - both at a user level and then at an account level. 

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Factors.ai has out-of-the-box integrations with Marketing Automation and CRM platforms. And it can stitch all data with the website activity based on the user's email ID.

Also, Factors pulls in all the engagement data across both Hubspot and Salesforce across individual objects. 

For example, in Hubspot, Factors can pull in the Contact, Engagement, Form Submission, and Add to List activities. Within Salesforce, Factors unifies data across Lead, Contact, Campaign Member, and Activity objects.

It makes it easy for the decision-makers to get a 360-degree unified view of customer activities and behavior in one platform.

4. Tracking And Defining Offline Touchpoints At The Same Level As Digital Marketing Touchpoints

Both online and offline touchpoints are equally involved in the lead acquisition process. Hence, B2B marketers need to track them in a single timeline. 

Online touchpoints are easier to track through the well-established digital marketing ecosystem. However, offline touchpoints like events, workshops, meetings, and direct mail are difficult to keep track of. 

Therefore you need a solution that allows you to keep track of both touchpoints simultaneously and build an exhaustive account timeline. 

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Factors automatically track offline touchpoints, which are recorded in the MAP or the CRM. 

Further, Factors allows you to configure and define your offline touchpoints with a simple UI. It enables Marketers to map all their touchpoints at a user and account level for making data-driven decisions.

5. Long Sales Cycles Implying the Need To Track This Data Over Many Months And Years

Longer sales cycles are one of the unfortunate realities of the B2B buying journey. Due to the multiple stakeholders involved and shifting priorities, most buyers take much longer to make a purchase decision. On average, a customer conducts nearly twelve searches before interacting with a brand. 

With this and the complexity involved in the decision-making process, it becomes challenging to accelerate the sales cycle. As a result, the customers could take weeks, months, or even years to close the deal size. 

Therefore B2B organizations would need a solution that can manage voluminous data running into many years of interactions with their prospects. 

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Factors.ai allows you to keep a record of all the interactions across all the platforms, like websites and campaigns, within one platform. In addition, you can seamlessly store data for an extended period (no limits) and reflect back on it at any point to decide what really helped.  

6. Sales Marketing Alignment - Bringing In Sales Data

An alignment between marketing and sales can maximize the ROI of a business. But this alignment between the teams is often absent in B2B businesses. Each team believes their efforts were the reason for closing a deal, which could be one reason for this. 

Emphasizing that each team is part of a larger go-to-market function is one way to make them work together.

Once you form a synchronization between them, it will allow the marketing heads to get a unified overview of the data across both marketing and sales touchpoints. 

Furthermore, each team can review and analyze the attribution data to see which of their strategies are working and which are not. 

How Can Factors.ai Help? 

Factors.ai pulls in all your sales interactions from the CRM and treats them at par with marketing touchpoints. And it also provides a clear and consistent view of the customer journey. On top of the unified data foundation, both teams can get answers to questions such as; 

• How many touchpoints did it take to convert a deal? 
• How many of these were sales vs. marketing touchpoints?
• Were marketing efforts able to drive engagement with the right stakeholders in these accounts?
• When is the right time for sales teams to intervene to convert an account?

7. Ability To Do All Of This At An Account (company) Level

The most significant pain point of B2B marketers is the involvement of multiple stakeholders in decision-making. 

The person who made the purchase is not usually the one who initiated the process of buying the product. Instead, multiple people across different departments (technical support, finance, marketing) must have come across the different stages of the buying journey. 

The traditional methodology would want you to attribute all the credits to the person who bought the product. It makes sense because he is bringing in the revenue. 

However, tracking customer journeys at an account (company) level rather than at an individual-level is what your attribution strategy requires. 

How Can Factors.ai Help?

Factors.ai will give insights at a granular level by breaking down the customer journey at the account level. It will simplify and visualize the customer journey by giving you an optimized overview of every touchpoint that drives the velocity of conversions & pipeline. 

Do B2B Marketing Attribution The Right Way! 

To keep up with the competitive marketplace, you need a differentiated analytics tool that helps you connect the dots from initial interaction to conversion. 

While B2B Attribution is technically and organizationally a complex problem, overcoming these challenges is critical to ensure your efforts are well directed. Hence tools like Factors.ai can tremendously simplify the B2B attribution process and elevate your ROI. To get your B2B marketing attribution game on point and cost-effective, sign up now for a free demo today. 

Here's a handy beginner's guide on the basics of A/B testing that covers what A/B testing is, why it's important, how to perform a robust test, and more! This should be a great introduction for those looking to dive into the world of optimisation.

‍What Is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing is a strategy that, simply put, allows you to compare two versions of something and find out which version performs better. 

Marketers use this technique to compare two or more versions of their websites, adverts, emails, pop-ups, or landing pages against each other to see which version is most effective. In A/B testing, A refers to ‘control’ or the original version and B refers to ‘variation’ or the new version. A/B tests can provide both qualitative and quantitative insights for the marketer. It usually falls under the larger umbrella of Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO.

To illustrate an example, you might test two different Google Ads to see which one drives more purchases or you might want to test two versions of a CTA button on a webpage to see which version leads to more webinar sign-ups. The version that drives more visitors to take the desired action (click on the ad, sign up for the webinar, etc) is the winner.

Why Does it Matter?

A/B testing is a great way to field-test ideas before finalising implementation. A/B testing helps you track impact of the changes on key metrics like conversion rates, drop off rates, etc. Thereby providing key insights on how effective the changes are going to be. Secondly, leaders don’t want to make decisions unless there is strong evidence for them, particularly when they have to incur costs. A/B testing helps databack ideas and decide where and how to invest the marketing budget. It is a great tool for creating effective marketing strategies. 

Where do marketers use A/B testing?

Almost any style or content element that is a customer-facing item can be evaluated using A/B testing. 

Some common examples include:

• Website design and layout
• Email campaigns and personalised emails
• Social media marketing strategies
• Paid Adverts
• Newsletters
  

In each category, A/B tests can be conducted on multiple elements. For example, if you want to test your website design, you can test the colour scheme, layout, headings and subheadings, pricing page, special offers, CTA button designs, etc, amongst many other elements.

While the metrics for conversion are unique to each website, A/B tests can be used to collect data and understand user behaviour, user actions, the pain points, reception to new features, satisfaction with existing features, etc. The metrics however depend on the industry and type. For example, the metrics for B2B (new leads or deals won) will be different from their B2C and D2C counterparts (cart abandonment rate, total purchases, etc). 

The Primary Types of A/B tests:

1. Split URL testing:

The simplest in concept — in split URL testing, two versions of a webpage url are compared with each other using webpage traffic to see which performs better on key metrics. It is the primary testing method for most organisations vying for website optimisation. However, this is not the best method to compare between two changes. It is mostly used to compare the original version with the new version that has some changes. More importantly, you can’t learn more about how different changes or elements interact with each or what combinations perform best.

2. Multivariate testing (MVT):

Multivariate testing allows the experimenter to compare multiple variables in the same test. This helps further what split URLs can do by overcoming their main limitation. Here, you can compare various combinations of the elements whose impact you’re trying to test. Good multivariate tests can combine all possible permutations to find which combination produces the best results. However, a large traffic is needed to be able to divide the traffic to face all the permutations of the webpage that is created by the traffic.

3. Multi-page testing:

Multi-page, as the name suggests, implements the changes being studied over multiple pages instead of a single page as is seen with simple split A/B tests. This helps understand how the changes impact the visitors in terms of how they interact with the different pages that they encounter on the website. This also helps maintain consistency when a visitor is met with a new variation that is being tested. 

How to perform an A/B test

The A/B testing process can be summarised as follows...

1. Data Collection:

In the first stage, the marketers or experimenters collect data from their analytics softwares to look out for numbers like high and low traffic areas, pages with high and low conversion rates, and or drop-off rates. This helps understand how the webpage is currently performing.

2. Decide what features you want to test:

Here marketers decide what features on the website or webpage they want to track and identify the goals. In other words, the determining the key conversion metrics that they want to improve for those features.

3. Formulate hypothesis:

Here, one starts generating A/B testing ideas and formulating a hypothesis for why the changes will perform better in terms of impact on the metrics being tracked.

4. Create variations:

After the hypothesis has been created, giving direction and clarity to the marketer’s goals, create variations that will be tested against the current version. This is where the marketer will choose the method of testing as well as the A/B tool used for testing. 

5. Run test:

After everything is in place, the only thing left to do is to run the test. Most A/B testers suggest around two weeks of testing on average. However, it varies based on the campaign, industry and traffic. 

6. Analyse results:

Once the test is complete, the experimenter can interpret the results given by the A/B test. It is important to ensure that the result is statistically significant. In other words, if one version saw better results than the other version, the changes can be confidently attributed to the new changes (and not coincidences).

7. Make changes:

Finally, now that the marketer has data backing their new ideas or proposed changes, they can go ahead and implement them to reap the reward of a more effective variation on metrics such as conversion rates, drop off rates, click-through rates and so on.

How do A/B testing tools work?

In short, every A/B testing tool has a piece of code that decides which variation of the webpage, email or ad each visitor sees. It also collects the data for the visitors of each variation which helps you compare and analyse visitor behaviour. 

This code works by incorporating the URL of the page(s) that are being tested. It also incorporates the metrics that you want to test. The results from this will determine which variation performs better. The tool’s cookies track visitors and opt them into the experiment. It will divert the traffic where half the visitors see version A (the control) and half see version B (the variant). The cookies track which version a particular visitor is opted into and measures their actions on the webpage towards the specified goal. 

There are several tools on the market today for A/B testing including Hubspot’s A/B testing tool, Google Optimize, VWO, and Optimizely.

‍Finding the Relevant KPIs for your Business

Identifying KPIs that are relevant to your marketing team depends on your particular type of business. For D2C businesses that sell directly to customers, website traffic and cart abandonment rate are two essential KPIs. The former helps guage how successfully a given marketing campaign is able to encourage customers to click on desired CTAs and advertisements, while the latter helps figure out possible pain points for customers that may be hindering their completion of purchases. If your cart abandonment rate is high, retargeting ads on customers’ social media feeds with their in-cart products can serve as useful reminders to complete a purchase. Alternatively, it can help identify customers’ pain points like contentions with shipping or exchange policies, pricing, etc. Such insights are useful in determining next steps. Similarly, for B2C companies, customer retention rate is an important KPI. Unlike B2B businesses, B2C deals seldom involve long term contracts and a continual inflow of revenue from paying customers. Finally, for B2B companies, a KPI like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a useful measure of the overall cost involved in onboarding a customer. 

In this article however, we deal with a primary KPI(s) that impacts all businesses: Conversion Rates.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates may refer to different concepts. It can mean conversions per activity; which measures how many customers perform the desired activity  (clicking on an ad, signing up for a webinar, downloading a free booklet, etc) — all of which can be a part of an overarching campaign or strategy. Conversion per Activity is an important metric in it's own right when it comes to determining what works in your overall strategy. 

While these activity conversions contribute to the ultimate success of the marketing campaign, the actual success is measured by sales conversions — How many people actually converted to paying customers?

Hence, conversion numbers usually fall into two categories:

Category 1: Lead Generation

These include conversions per activity, website traffic, social engagement, etc. Sometimes these indicators receive a bad rap for being some what superficial. However, they have their own value to marketers in understanding the overall efficacy of a strategy. 

For example, Website traffic may not directly measure the impact of a strategy in acquiring new customers, but it can help determine impact of a strategy on brand awareness. This can be particularly useful when there is a strong correlation between awareness and sales. If 20% of your website traffic has converted to paying customers, improving the website traffic may have a positive impact on the final conversion numbers. Alternatively, if boosting website traffic does not seem to have any positive impact on sales, it can be a sign of potential customer pain points or inefficiencies in the overall marketing strategy. 

Category 2: Sales Conversions

These are conversion metrics that measure for concrete, direct impacts on revenue. Here are three influential metrics to keep an eye out for:

I. Campaign Conversions or Conversions per Campaign:

‍This determines what percentage of traffic to a certain campaign landing page/webinar/new subscribers to a newsletter — turned into a customer. 

How to measure: To find the campaign conversion rate, divide the traffic by the customers attributed to that traffic. For example, out of a 100 attendees to a webinar, 7 convert to paying customers, the conversion rate is 7%. Or if your ad had 200 interactions that can be tracked to 15 conversions, then you divide 15/200 to find the conversion rate of 7.5%.

Having a proper attribution model or platform in place is key to finding accuracy in such conversion numbers.

II. Website Conversion Rates:

It is safe to say that almost all B2B or D2C companies have websites which are their primary point of contact with potential and returning customers. So, the conversions from the website becomes an ultra important KPI. Although this indicator is calculated pretty much the same way as the campaign conversion ratio, it can get tricky as the customer journey gets complicated. There might be other touch points that impact the customer’s conversion decision even before they visit the website. Again, having a good attribution system is key to understanding the true impact of website traffic on conversions. It can help understand customer journeys and isolate the impact of the website on conversions. More importantly, it can help identify what works for the website and what doesn't. Insights like what pages converted users visited, how long they spent on those pages, what CTAs they acted on, etc can help figure out possible pain points and improve website conversions.

One thing to remember is that regardless of how customers make their way to the website and when they made the decision to buy, a website has important consequences for the conversion. In the digital age, a business’ website is essentially its storefront. It influences the customer’s perceptions and opinions of the business. In other words, it plays an important role in the customer journey. As such, the website conversion numbers are all too important to ignore for online businesses. 

How to measure: The most common and direct way of measuring the website conversion rate is to divide the number of conversions in a given timeframe by the total number of people who visited the website in that timeframe. For example, if in the past week, a site had 100 visitors, and 10 visitors converted to customers, the website conversion rate is 10%.

III. Lead-to-Close Conversion Ratio:

The Lead-to-Close Conversion Ratio, more popularly known as CVR, measures the number of sales that were made in comparison to the total number of leads the marketing team started with. This indicator helps marketers focus not only on creating leads but also on actually closing them. In other words, it helps create quality leads who will actually make the purchase. The effectiveness of the various components of the marketing strategy can be measured with the CVR. It gives the all important insight of which campaigns convert leads to customers and which do not.

How to measure: Similar to the aforementioned, the CVR is calculated by dividing the number of sales by the number of leads generated. For example, if you started out with 1000 leads from webinar attendees or newsletter sign ups or holiday ad campaigns and 170 of them convert to paying customers then you have a CVR of 17%.p

In This Article:

1. What is Search Marketing?

2. Why is Search Marketing Important For You?

3. Types of Search Marketing

     - 3.1 Organic Search Marketing

           - 3.1.1 SEO

           - 3.1.2 How to get started with SEO?

           - 3.1.3 Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO

    - 3.2 Paid Search Marketing

           - 3.2.1 Pay-per-click(PPC) or Paid Advertising on search engines

           - 3.2.2 How to get started with PPC?

           - 3.2.3 Advantages and Disadvantages of PPC‍

What is Search Marketing

‍As its name suggests, search marketing refers to that segment of digital marketing that focuses on marketing through Search. This involves improving your online presence on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and more. 

Search marketing improves a brand’s presence on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) using techniques like brand building, SEO, and paid marketing. Simply put, the higher you rank on the SERP, more are the potential users who notice your content, and are thus likely to click on your content. This translates to increased traffic on your website, which in turn influences conversions positively.

Why is Search Marketing Important for you?

Around 80% of consumers conduct their product and service research online. Resultantly, search marketing should have a big role in your digital marketing strategy.

Search Marketing is intuitive in nature. The targets of your search marketing practises are individuals looking for your brand,  your competitors, your category, your use-case, the pain points you solve for, and so on. 

Ranking high on the SERP is easier said than done. As is expected, users click on the first few links on the search results page after making a search query. More than 90% of user traffic only visit websites that appear on the first page of Google’s search results page. However, as important as appearing on the first page is, it is even more important to show up high enough to catch the user's eye. Paid search marketing has better luck on this end. Further, considering that there are over 200 factors that impact your ranking on Google’s SERP, carefully planning your SEO and PPC marketing can help rank your website and content in the upper echelons of the SERP.

Search Marketing is of two types

1. Organic Search Marketing

As the name suggests, this comprises organically improving the website’s position on the SERP without any payments made to the search engine. Organic comprises Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

2. Paid Search Marketing

This comprises PPC aka pay-per-click marketing. It involves placing ads on the SERP and paying each time the ads are clicked. 

Organic Search Marketing

Organic listings refer to links that appear on the search engine’s results page after a user has entered their query. These typically depend on the type of query: 

Navigational queries

where the user is searching for a specific website but does not enter the URL. Here, it is important to ensure that users are able to find your website with the simplest of google searches. 

Informational queries

where the user is trying to find more information about something like a term they haven’t encountered before, a problem that they are facing and want to understand more about it, a tool or category that they wish to learn more about, etc. This is also called the learning stage where the user might not be ready to buy a product but they are learning more about the use-case and the problem solved by that product. Exposure of the users to the brand at this stage of the customer journey through content marketing can steer the users towards the brand. 

Transactional queries‍

Where users are looking for specific products in a broad category. For example, if I feel like my company has scaled up and I need an ABM tool to improve my marketing and efficiency track all my accounts, I go on Google and search ‘ABM Tools for B2B SaaS 2022’. This would count as a transactional query. 

Search engines crawl the internet and review all the text, downloadable whitepaper, documents, media and all other content on each website. This data is used to rank websites on various quality signals like quality of content, how useful the content is for a user using their search engine, site speed, links to other websites, etc. The goal is to ensure that users are getting the best results for their search queries.

This is what determines the ranking of the websites on the search engine’s results page. SEO comes into the picture as the tool that helps you improve upon all the various factors that help Google and other search engines determine the quality and ranking of your website. SEO helps you optimise your website by including keywords and help you ascertain authority over the domain or area that your product or service caters to by creating high quality content. 

How to get started with SEO

SEO is a skill that takes time to learn. However, the fact that the learning curve is gradual does not mean that you cannot get started. SEO is a skill that gives returns at every phase of learning. 

As you improve, your ROI will increase but a good place to start with SEO is with these three important concepts:

Keyword research

This is the process of researching and analysing keywords and search terms that users enter into their search queries. Keyword research helps figure out what search terms your target audience is using while searching on Google and other search engines. It also helps figure what queries the target audience is using, popularity of search terms within queries, etc. This can help in ensuring that your content reaches the right audience and increases your traffic. The idea is to target the searches that your target audience is bound to make. Keyword research can help with getting your content in front of your intended audience.‍

Link Building

Link building or building links from external web pages to your webpage is another method of improving your website’s validity and authority in Google’s eyes. Backlinks, not only from other websites, but from sites with authority, improve rankings and visibility on the SERP. Since backlinks often connect websites with similar content, it is a way for Google to ensure that relevant content is being delivered to the users. 

Domain Page Authority 

Domain authority determines how your site compares to others in terms of how relevant it is within your category or industry. A site with a high domain authority ranks higher on the SERP as search engines identify these sites as having authority and therefore relevance over the information that the user is seeking. Domain authority is also scored by google based on those 200 factors that we mentioned earlier. So there is no set way to know how your website is being scored. However, there are ways to compare how strong your website is, compared to other websites that have similar content.

Advantages of SEO

1. SEO is free if you’re doing it yourself or internally with your marketing team.

2. The ROI is more long term with SEO, as compared to paid. If you have cracked your SEO and Google identifies your website as an authority, traffic increases and in turn, the increased traffic makes it easy to retain a higher ranking. 

3. Organic growth is a better judge of brand awareness. Increased organic traffic and ranking higher on organic queries is a sign of a strong brand. The brand gets more consolidated when people find you ranking high on their search results.

Disadvantages of SEO

1. As mentioned, learning SEO takes time. Even though any amount of SEO can improve the strength of your website, SERP rankings are highly competitive and it takes time to actually show up on the first page of the SERP. It is important to remember that many websites are creating the same content as you and these competitors are also continually improving their SEO.

2. SEO can be hard to scale, especially within small organisations where the team has to focus on improving the product, strategy, outreach and even on other aspects of marketing. Converting your entire website, existing content and incoming content to excellent SEO is a long task.

Paid Search Marketing

Pay-per-click or paid search marketing involves paid advertising where you pay for each click on the adverts placed on the search engine results. The amount spent per click is the cost per click or CPC. Search engines determine where to place the advertisement based on keywords and search terms that potential users are going to go to. The main platforms for PPC are Google Ads, Image Pack and featured snippets. 

But there are several companies that may be using the same keyword groups and search terms. And as with organic, the goal of the search engine is to show the most relevant content to the user, even for advertisements. Resultantly, search engines need to also rank ads that are placed on the first page of the SERP.

A Few Factors That Affect Your SERP  Rankings:

1. PPC bids

‍Also known as keyword bids, these are bids that online entities place on various keywords or keyword groups to secure ad space. This is commonly used by entities like Google AdWords where auctions are held on various keywords and search terms.

It is important to ensure that you are bidding on keywords that will bring in relevant users. Common keywords are usually more expensive since many people are bidding on them, plus they target a larger audience, a large chunk of which may not have the intent level for your product. On the other hand, niche keywords may be harder to research and figure out, the cost is lesser and the intent of the targeted users is higher.

2. Landing page experience

The landing page or the page that is linked to the ad plays an important role in how Google ranks your ad. Site speed, user experience, ease of navigation, etc are important factors that search engines take into consideration because a website that takes too long to load, is hard for the customer to navigate all spell bad customer experience and search engines won’t want to direct their users to such pages. 

Ad Quality: Apart from the landing page experience, search engines like Google also determine a quality score for your PPC ads. The other two components are 

CTR or the click-through-rate, which determines how likely it is that your ad is  going to be clicked when shown to a user.  

Ad Relevance, which determines how closely your ad matches the intent of the user’s search query.

Advantages of PPC 

1. PPC is easier to figure out than SEO. This is because the level of control that you have to ensure that your ad shows up on the SERP is higher than the control you have in SEO. The level of uncertainty regarding what works and what does not when determining factors that improve ranking on the SERP is also lower for PPC. The results are instantaneous and you can also A/B test your ads to see which ones perform better.

2. PPC is suitable for new companies. PPC is better for scaling up as you just have to pay more money to get more listings and more exposure. 

Disadvantages of PPC

1. Paying for each and every click can be expensive. Moreover, it is important to remember that each click simply re-directs the user to the website and does not guarantee conversions. Therefore, even if it is easier to scale with PPC than with SEO, there are budget constraints that may limit your ability to scale. 

2. The gains with PPC are more short term in nature. As compared with SEO, where the gains are more long term and the ROI increases as your organic reach becomes better, the gains for PPC are relatively short term. The ROI at each instance is dependent on how much you paid for the ads and how many conversions came from those ads. Once the ads are discontinued, they stop bringing in visitors to the website.

3. Issues with the steep learning curve. Although figuring out PPC and getting results is faster than SEO, issues can crop up with how steep the learning is. With SEO, even if the learning and growth is gradual, you get improved results at each level of learning. However, if you jump into PPC without learning the ropes behind keyword bidding, customer research, etc, you may lose a large chunk of your budget bidding high amounts of money on keywords that may not be bringing in conversions. This can lead to a wastage of money.

In conclusion, both PPC and SEO have their pros and cons. But rest assured they are really powerful tools that can scale up your marketing efforts and have a positive impact on website traffic, leads, sales and most importantly, revenue. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out Episode 7 of The Factors Podcast where we discuss both the organic first approach as well as the paid first approach for a company that has just found its product-market fit.

In this article we’ll cover,

1. What is Revenue Intelligence?

2. Why are teams increasingly opting for Revenue Intelligence?

3. Revenue Intelligence to Optimize Conversions

• Breaking down silos between marketing and sales
• Solves for uncaptured data
• Solves for outdated and stale data
• Targeting entire accounts with ABM
• Give sales leaders total visibility/Access to the larger picture
• Accelerate sales cycles with more efficiency
• Forecasting

4. The Emergence of Revenue Operations and Intelligence (RO&I)

Revenue intelligence (RI) is a popular buzzword in today’s marketing landscape. This enthusiasm may be warranted. RI is revealing itself to be a powerful tool for marketing and sales teams to derive powerful data insights that were hitherto unforeseen. RI uses AI to gather data that would otherwise remain uncaptured.

Let’s start with an example. 

GrowNow is a marketing agency for start-ups. They focus on both digital and event services. Their content team has put out several articles on how marketers should approach scaling at various stages of growth. 

Akshat is the marketing head of Company X that has a fintech product. They’ve found their product-market fit and now they are looking to scale. He is searching online for ways to scale marketing and branding efforts. He comes across GrowNow’s website and finds the information that he is looking for.

He is not a lead yet but marketing has the information on how he came upon the website and what pages he’s engaged with. He finds his way back to the website a few days later whilst searching for more information on what tech stack his team would need. He downloads a free report on GrowNow’s website on the latest trends in martech. 

Finally, after a few weeks, Akshat comes back to GrowNow’s website, this time with a direct search and the intent to check out the services that GrowNow provides. He even fills a form for a preliminary call. 

Now that Akshat has been converted, he is pushed to Sales and GrowNow’s CRM has the information that he filled on the form: his name, email address, title and company. They might also have other information like the report downloaded by him. Marketing directs a few more adverts towards Akshat over the next few weeks. Soon sales gets on call with Akshat, they use this information to convert him and they are successful.

Later on, Deepti, the CEO of clothing brand Y which has several pop-up stores finds GrowNow in an article on up-and-coming marketing agencies and clicks on the link which redirects her to their website. She spends some time looking through the website and fills a form. On receiving a call from an SDR, she learns more about their services. Marketing continues to send the same adverts based on Deepti’s website activity. However, after a few calls, they quickly realise that Company Y and GrowNow do not have a good fit. Sales had the same basic information about Deepti as they did with Akshat. 

Both Akshat and Deepti’s customer journeys were a little different which sales were unable to access — like the data on their journeys pre-form fills. Similarly, marketing was unable to personalise websites based on Deepti and Akshat’s activities once they went down the funnel to SDRs. This in part, came about due to different locations of this data. Marketing has its data on first touch, web pages visited, time spent on webpages, adverts clicked on Google Analytics or other marketing platform while sales has its data on its CRM like Salesforce. Both departments were unable to access the other’s platform nor did they have an integration in place that allows for seamless flow of this information. 

This is where Revenue Intelligence comes in.

What is Revenue Intelligence?

In its simplest terms, revenue intelligence refers to the process of leveraging AI to collect, sync and analyse data across sales, marketing and customer success to produce critical insights and generate revenue. 

It is a powerful revenue operations tool that helps companies bring synergy between their customer-facing teams (marketing, sales and customer success) and make decisions that are powered by metrics. 

Why are teams increasingly opting for Revenue Intelligence?

More and more companies are increasingly realising the limitations of human intelligence in identifying important data points as well as the limitations on relying only on CRM data for insights on customer journeys.

The solution to this, has been to look at AI to collate and identify data that humans cannot. Furthermore, RI helps teams coordinate and capture data at the right time, before data decay diminishes value - 

1. Breaking down the silos between marketing, sales and customer success

Data silo is a problem when there is a lack of seamless coordination between teams, especially in terms of data collection and storage. A huge chunk of insights get lost when the data captured by these teams remains limited to their own teams. This is propelled by storing of data on different locations and difficulty in cross-departmental access of this data. All three of these departments are interacting with customers and have intelligence on customer trends and opportunities that get lost with interdepartmental misalignment with data getting siloed.

A revenue intelligence system captures and integrates the data from all these teams in real-time and creates a single, consolidated platform for the entire organisation. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and allows for seamless coordination between teams that helps create a unified strategy.

2. Solves for uncaptured data

Sales and customer success teams have to manually enter customer data like contacts, engagements, etc into their CRM. Two problems arise with this:

1. Manually entering data for each and every customer interaction is time consuming. 

2. This leads to negligence as many sales and customer success fail to enter all a lot of this data. Around 55% of salespeople admit that they do not enter all lead and customer data.

Resultantly, a lot of available data remains uncaptured and the company relies on this incomplete data for reporting, planning and forecasting.

RI solves for uncaptured data by automatically capturing contacts and engagements data from all customer facing teams, solving for both time and incomplete data, leading to more accurate and reliable sales reporting and forecasting.

3. Solves for outdated and stale data

Sales and marketing data is susceptible to becoming stale. 

Relying on manually entered contact details and the fact that people change jobs and positions and do not update their linkedin profiles leads to databases and CRMs being outdated and filled with errors. Good, high intent leads are very critical for both sales and marketing to reach their conversion goals. 

Then there is also the consideration for the hidden cost of redundant data. Bad or outdated data can muddle up research, competitiveness and accuracy of forecasts. Poor data leads to the wastage of sales’s time and IT’s time in syncing systems. It causes frustration when data-backed decisions fail to execute results.

RI solves for this by automatically tracking and updating changes to the leads in the CRM. This ensures more up-to-date and reliable prospect data.

Revenue Intelligence To Optimize Conversions

1. Capturing missing sales activity

We’ve spoken about the problems of unco-ordination and data silos between sales and marketing. When marketing is unable to access sales data, it prevents potential for improving marking activity and checking for inefficiencies in the existing process. As discussed earlier on the Factors Blog, getting multitudes of leads won't have a positive impact on revenue unless they are good, qualified leads. Infact, it may just lead to a waste of the sales efforts. In such a case, RI helps marketing access sales data that is pertinent for marketing’s processes and planning for more efficient campaigns.

Auto-creating of leads based on sales’ experiences, auto-removal of leads that sales has already dealt with or are low-intent based on previous experiences — both lead to coordination of data as well as a more seamless process of lead identification and capturing of contacts.

Furthermore, automated opportunity association of leads and tracking of interactions (emails, meetings, etc) helps get more insights from available data.

2. Attributing Marketing Touchpoints

Apart from sending better leads to sales, RI also helps paint a clearer picture of how marketing is helping sales acquire leads that lead to conversions. This helps in both having a better understanding of customer journeys and measuring the impact of marketing in the organisation’s overall functioning.

Revenue intelligence helps with marketing attribution reports that highlight marketings total impact, impact in each channel and the creation of first-touch, last-touch and multi-touch reports. RI also simplifies visualising the opportunity journey with easy spotting of marketing email and campaign touchpoints and deal updates as leads move through the funnel.

3. Enhances ABM 

Revenue Intelligence helps optimise ABM by improving the data quality of the contacts that are captured for the various accounts. With automation, more contacts can be captured. These contacts are also of better quality due to the improved tracking of customer engagements. 

RI also allows you to pursue better personalisation and target marketing efforts based on an account’s firmographic features and funnel position. So teams can get more meaningful insights from CRM and build improved target account audiences.

4. Giving sales leaders access to the larger picture

RI helps sales leaders have a better understanding of the customer journey and gain insights into the prospects that are coming in. Furthermore, having a real-time system of data relating to sales helps with insights into the sales process.

5. Improved sales pipeline

Better prospects, higher intent leads determined based on historical and real-time data improves the quality of leads entering the sales pipeline which in turn leads to higher conversions. Apart from higher output, RI also helps SDRs close deals faster and improve productivity. 

6. Forecasting

Revenue Intelligence helps sales forecasting by solving for outdated and uncaptured data to improve the reliability and accuracy of predictions. 

The Emergence of Revenue Operations and Intelligence (RO&I)

RO&I is a tech category that leverages AI to perform the principal task of revenue operations: integrating sales, marketing and customer success. In other words, RO&I is technology that allows the integration of sales technology, marketing technology and customer success technology to provide an end-to-end solution from customer acquisition to retention and expansion.

Revenue Intelligence tools help teams get the best out of revenue intelligence and empower their Rev Ops efforts with better data and more improved efficiency in mapping customer journeys. Knowing when to reach out to potential customers with the right information at the right time is critical to improving experience and conversions. 

Martech has been around for what feels like forever. However, it’s in recent decades that the ‘tech’ half of martech has evolved to warrant an entirely separate category of industry. 

The rise of martech has been significant. Chief Marketing Technologist lists more than 7000 products in the martech landscape in 2022 and this number is steadily increasing. All of these products rely heavily on personal data collection. It’s fair to say that the industry is not a heavily regulated one, like finance and insurance. However, with the rise of data privacy laws, things are changing and marketing is at the forefront of its impact.

The primary categories of marketing technology:

1. Advertising

2. Content Marketing and Experience

3. Social Media

4. Commerce and Sales enablement (includes CRM tools)

5. Data and Analytics

6. Administration and Productivity

The tools from all these categories are dominantly data-driven and are aimed at giving more and more information and insights for marketers to work with. Teams all over are dependent on data to derive a 360 degree view of a customer profile. 

However, there are two prime marketing technologies that are heavily dependent on user data:

1. Identity resolution: Identity resolution is the process of aggregating and collecting data points on an individual user across platforms and devices. Identity resolution is a key marketing practice as teams use these ‘identifiers’ collected across martech platforms to create true customer journeys and profiles.

2. Customer Data Platforms: CDPs serve as the central depository of all marketing-related data. It is used for identity resolution and serves as a unified customer database.The data is collected from both internally and externally sources in real time across various touchpoints. This enables creating a database of customer profiles that are both centralised and updated. 

The Changing Landscape Of Marketing Data

There has been a rise of the personal data economy (PDE) where individuals want greater control over the use of their personal information. A recent survey has found that 97% of consumers are somewhat or very concerned about the protection of their personal data. 

However, though conversations surrounding consumer and personal data privacy have gained major ground since 2016, it is only recently that policy has made headway in this regard.

Legal initiatives like EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act  (CCPA) which is soon expected to be modelled in other US states, are aimed at regulating the business use of personal identifying information or PII.

These laws place limitations on the types of data that marketers and companies are allowed to collect and analyse. They also require explicit consent from consumers to use data for reasons beyond what was initially specified. 

To learn more about these policies and their effect on marketing, read on here. 

Apart from these laws, various companies like Firefox and Apple have also taken steps to limit the access of tools to consumer data. While Firefox now blocks tracking cookies by default, Apple has changed how marketers engage with user data and it doesn't allow them to see insights by device. There has also been a significant rise in the users of search engines like DuckDuckGo whose USP is ensuring customer privacy, with a 65% increase in its traffic. The largest benefactors and users of such data have been the marketing and advertising industries. 

The Impact of Data Privacy on Marketing

On one hand, a lot of martech is dependent on user data. On the other hand,data privacy laws and the limitations that they pose on the collection of user data are on the rise. Resultantly, the impact of these regulations and limitations will hit marketing teams harder than others as they become more ubiquitous. A recent study by Gartner found that 1 out of 5 marketers report privacy compliance as their main strategic concern. Furthermore, 73% of marketers are concerned that privacy regulations will have a negative impact on data and analytics that are used to collect and understand visitor behaviour. This can also make it harder to access consumer insights for personalised marketing. 

Another major impact of increased privacy concerns is the volume and quality of data that marketing has become used to. Marketers are used to leveraging a large quantity of consumer data to create campaigns that target audiences based on intent. However, as privacy concerns become larger and regulations and compliances come into effect, this will impact the volumes of good audience data. This, marketers fear, can lead to their current funnels becoming narrower. 

How do marketers move forward?

Even though data privacy laws make getting granular insights on volumes of data from certain channels difficult, it is definitely not going to be a thing of the past. Good attribution tools and analytics systems can use available data (even at less volumes) to give relevant insights. 

In coming times, quality over quantity will take up a whole new meaning in the martech landscape. Getting a granular understanding of consumer journeys will depend more on first party data and technology that makes use of less data to give more insights. Marketing teams will have to focus on finding the right tools and analytics solutions that are compliant with regulations and respectful of consumer data.