This coming weekend (Dec 18th), we will be releasing LoopFuse OneView v3.29. The coming release focuses on adding Conversion Analytics to our existing Lead Capture Forms, and Inbound Marketing / Search Engine Marketing functionality. These new features enable marketers to analyze which referring sites, search engines, and keywords are leading to the highest level of lead capture form conversions.
Archive for the ‘Web Analytics’ Category
Looking Forward: LoopFuse OneView 3.29
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010Taking Your Website to the Next Level: Analyzing Web Performance
Monday, November 22nd, 2010And finally, it’s very important to measure the performance of your website. Below is an excerpt from the article on “Analyzing Web Performance” from Taking Your Website to the Next Level, ……
Lastly, you’ll want to be sure you measure how well your website investment is paying off. It’s actually very easy to learn how many people are visiting your website, where they’re from, whether they registered, how they found your website, etc. This information is very helpful—it shows you how well your awareness generation programs are working (e.g. advertising, PR, etc.) so you can figure out which ones to keep investing in, or drop.
Setting web analytics is easy. Sign up for Google Analytics or LoopFuse FreeView (or both!) and follow the instructions they provide for adding their analytics to your site; it’s very easy to do, and here are some samples of what Google and LoopFuse can tell you about your website visitors:
The role of Business Directories in Marketing Automation
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010Web analytics data provides B2B Marketing executives a wealth of information regarding their outbound and inbound marketing initiatives. A critical and passively-collected component in a website visitor’s profile, is the distinct company or ISP used by a prospect while browsing your website. Visiting company information collected from site visitors provides marketers with indicators on just how broadly and deeply marketing efforts have penetrated a company. However, making that information actionable by marketing and sales alike is made easier with a consolidated marketing toolset, as found with most marketing automation software.
Although much of the information collected by web analytics software is collected passively (by resolving IP addresses to a Company’s name), the enriching of that data with third-party business directories such as Hoovers, Jigsaw, and LinkedIn is where the value lies for marketing and sales.
The value of business directory data is lost if it is kept in a silo, because the data is only valuable when it is joined with other behavior data from a prospect which may be composed of web analytics, email marketing, and CRM information.
Now armed with a complete view of a prospect along with business directory information, an organization can:
- Target a visiting company with focused campaigns.
- Identify and contact key personnel and decision makers.
- Effectively segment a lead database, ie. company size, revenue amount, industry, etc…
Although much of the value contained within business directories is nothing new to marketers and sales reps, as you can see, the real value is in making it actionable. Making information actionable is only possible when you have a clear picture of a particular prospect or company within one database (or marketing dashboard), such as those found in marketing automation solutions. Subscribing to business directory services without a plan on how that information will be used in your marketing campaigns will rarely if ever show fruit. Likewise, services such as Leadlander, that simply track users and display company information remain an island of unactionable information and don’t solve the problem faced by marketers today: How do I leverage all of my different databases of information for my marketing strategies? The answer is in selecting a marketing automation vendor that focuses on aggregating of all the random bits of information for you, in one place, so you can leverage it in your marketing initiatives.
First and Only Marketing Automation Solution with Inbound Marketing
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010LoopFuse, the leader in sales and marketing automation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), announced today the release of OneView v3.28, featuring inbound, content and search engine marketing. OneView, the best-of-breed marketing automation platform, is the first and only marketing automation solution to offer inbound marketing. The addition of these latest features, also available in FreeView, greatly reduces the “swivel chair effect” by integrating all of the most cutting-edge marketing tools in a single, user-friendly application.
Marketing Automation for the CEO
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Over the past couple years I have spent a considerable amount of time on the road meeting with customers to learn what they liked and didn’t like about LoopFuse. One of the more surprising discoveries for me is how many of these companies’ CEOs log into our product. Candidly, our product was never designed specifically for the CEO but rather for the marketing and sales teams. Primarily the CEOs are infatuated with the visibility provided by the real-time dashboards. It can be kind of hypnotic, like watching the stock ticker on CNBC because the dashboards automatically refresh themselves every few minutes (configurable). One of the executives I met with kept the LoopFuse dashboard running on his 2nd monitor throughout the day during large campaigns or major announcements to track the buzz generated throughout the day.
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Tracking the Effectiveness of your Banner Ads
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010I am only a few months into my new job here at LoopFuse, heading up their marketing team, and it has been full steam ahead with the exciting announcement of FreeView, the first and only free marketing automation solution. Being a previous user and advocate of LoopFuse, I found it easy to jump in feet first and start developing new marketing programs utilizing our own tool to create and track their successes.
As I continue to ramp up the marketing efforts here I wanted to share my experiences with everyone. Personally, I relate better to a product when I understand how I can use it to make my job easier on a daily basis. I am a marketing user just like you and I am going to discuss real-life use cases for using marketing automation in this post and future posts.
One of my first projects was to manage the launch of our new website and the messaging around it. The homepage was getting a makeover and one of the biggest changes was the addition of some scrolling banners. We wanted to get our audience’s attention with graphics that popped and content that was simple and to the point. Today we have four rotating banners.
Who is following your digital footprints?
Thursday, July 29th, 2010There is a natural trade-off that each of us makes everyday between convenience and privacy. You can drive through the toll booth and sit in line with everyone else waiting to deposit your anonymous quarters or you can drive through the SpeedPass lane at 80 MPH and have your wireless toll tag charge your credit card. For pragmatists, this decision is easy. But consider for a moment all of the information that has been generated about you and with whom that information may be shared.
Who (or more precisely which vehicle) was driving on which highway at what toll booth traveling in a given direction at an exact point in time. If the trip passes through multiple toll booths then a driver’s route, progress, and even his/her speed can be calculated. Applying analytical processes to all of the historical data for an individual allows us to generate a profile of the driver. For example, based on the time of day that the driver passes through certain tolls, educated guesses can be made about the location of his/her work. And remember, this data can be combined with the existing demographic data already on file to improve the accuracy of these guesses. For example, the driver’s home address is already on file for billing purposes. Using this home address services like Zillow.com can determine the cost of the home and therefore the driver’s likely household income. If that the driver goes through the airport toll road towards the airport on average twice a week and returns the next day and you might begin to suspect that this person works in sales or is an executive and travels extensively for short overnight trips to visit clients. With every data point collected this profile becomes more and more accurate; correcting false assumptions over time.
Of course, this kind of profiling can be used for many purposes, some mutually beneficial, some downright creepy. For example, the toll plaza could flash traffic warnings to you when you pass through based on your historical driving route. City planners could use the data to justify the installation of so-called “Lexus Lanes” based on segmentation of the income level of drivers on a particular highway. Or an unscrupulous individual could use this information to target homes for burglary when it appears the owner is out of town (remember the airport toll road). The possibilities are endless.
Online marketers are using a similar approach to profile their prospects in order to better measure level of interest and to segment and qualify prospects before handing them over to their sales department. Marketers who leverage this technology effectively can provide a more targeted and relevant evaluation and purchasing experience to prospects who truly show interest in their offerings and avoid annoying those who are “just browsing”.
Let’s review the kinds of information that marketers can collect online to build this profile:
Behavioral
The moment a visitor lands on my website, his/her browser is “tagged” with a unique ID that allows me to recognize him/her upon return visits to my site (or even across multiple websites depending on the situation). Now every click the visitor ever makes on my website(s) can be associated with his/her anonmyous profile.