Overview
Right now, Google AdWords and Google Analytics can tell you the quantity of leads and conversions that you receive by campaigns. Chatbots can tell you the quality of leads you are receiving from each campaign. The first step is using UTM parameters in your Google AdWords Campaigns. We’ll take you through it step by step by step and show you how to design your chatbot in concert to provide information on lead quality and tie this information back to each campaign. By using these tactics, you can see which campaigns generate the most qualified leads. Increasing spend on campaigns that bring in higher quality leads provides more value and will increase your ROI.
The Problem
Every marketer has faced the issue of seeing a number of leads come in from campaigns, and then heard from the sales team that they aren’t “good” leads. Marketers are under pressure to bring in a large quantity of leads, but also high-quality leads, which is a difficult balance to achieve. The higher the lead quality, the faster the conversion cycle. For e-commerce companies it’s simpler; you can tie campaigns directly to sales. For companies with a longer, more nuanced sales cycle, the process of tracking lead quality is much more challenging.
The Solution
The solution is first tying leads to campaigns, and then analyzing the quality of the leads provided by each campaign. Doing this manually can become an impossible task and is rife with anecdotal commentary. Chatbots can automate lead qualification and tie the information they collect back to campaigns, thereby telling you both the quality and quantity of leads.
Let’s go through this process using Google AdWords as an example. (Keep in mind you can use this process with other platforms as well.)
STEP-BY-STEP DIRECTIONS:
1) Set-up UTM parameters in your Google AdWords account
2) Design a chatbot conversation to include qualification questions
3) Create custom analytics in your bot to identify qualified leads
4) Launch chatbot on your site
5) Instabot will automatically tie qualified leads to each campaign
6) Perform campaign lead analysis
7) Redistribute budget to campaigns that bring in more qualified leads at a cheaper cost
This will lead to qualified leads backed by data, a happier sales team, and better ROI.
WHAT ARE UTM PARAMETERS?
UTM parameters stand for Urchin Tracking Module. This is not a technical term, it’s just the name of a web analytics company invented by these guys.
(You can read all about their story here.)
It was later bought by Google and became Google Analytics, but the name stuck. Generally speaking, UTMs are just a way of tagging where a visitor on your website came from.
This is how it works - a visitor clicks on one of your ads in a Google search.
When they click the ad and get to your site, this technology will tag the visitor with UTM parameters, which will show up on their URL. UTM parameters look like this in a URL:
The URL shows that the user came from a Google ad, and from a specific campaign named “Instabot brand.” These UTM tags will stick with the URL as people copy and paste it, or share it on social media. (The one loophole being that users can copy the URL without the UTM tags, but very few users will take the time to do so.)
When Instabot talks to the visitor on your website, it will capture the UTM information and push it into the user’s profile. This will show you that this user came from a campaign and tie all their conversation information to it.
HOW TO ADD UTM PARAMETERS TO YOUR GOOGLE ADWORD CAMPAIGNS
1. In your AdWords console, select the campaign you want to add UTM parameters to
2. Open the Ads & extensions menu
3. Click the pencil icon for the specific ad you want to add UTM parameters to, and select Edit
4. Scroll down to bottom to the “Final URL suffix” setting
You will need to enter three UTM parameters. If all three are not present, some platforms may ignore UTM tags:
a) utm_source: This is to help you show where the visitor came from. In this example, googleadwords
(other examples could be: Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn, etc.)
b) utm_medium: This is the type of digital campaign you’re using. In this case, we can say: adwordsppc
(other examples could be: banner ad, PPC, email, PDF download, etc.)
c) utm_campaign: This will be the name of the campaign that this ad belongs to, for us, we’ll say, instabot_brand
(other examples could be: Outreach Campaign, Nurturing Campaign, etc.)
The format you’ll write this information in under the Final URL Suffix is:
utm_source={Insert value}&utm_medium={Insert value}&utm_campaign={Insert value}
So in the Final URL Suffix, for this example, we’ll write:
utm_source=googleadwords&utm_medium=adwordsppc&utm_campaign=instabot_brand
So it looks like this:
Here, you will add custom UTM parameters to the landing page of your search ad click-throughs.
5. After adding your UTM parameters, save the ad and repeat for any other ads. You’ll need to add the UTM parameters to all ads in all campaigns. I contacted Google to see if there is a way to do this faster, but unfortunately, you must do this one by one. (Boo Google)
Keep in mind the following:
utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign should always be present
If adding multiple UTM parameters, follow the required format:
param1=value1¶m2=value2¶m3=value3
All UTM parameters and values should be lower-cased
Wrong: Utm_source=Google
Correct: utm_source=google
If the value of your UTM parameter has a space in it, always use an underscore eg:
Wrong: utm_medium=blog-post
Correct: utm_medium=blog_post
BUILD A CHATBOT TO AUTO-QUALIFY YOUR USERS
As you design your chatbot conversation, make sure to ask qualification questions. This is helpful to both you and your user. No one wants a product or service that isn’t a good fit for them, or where they can’t find value. We’re happy to help show you how to design your bot to ask qualifying questions in an organic way.
Some good ways to start this part of the conversation is,
“Let’s me ask you a couple questions to see if we’re a good fit”
“Let me get some information so I can recommend a solution”
“I need some details to connect you with the right person.”
Then you can ask 1-3 qualification questions. For example, our client VolunteerMatch asks questions about current solutions in place and the size of the organization. See example below:
TAG QUALIFIED USERS WITH CUSTOM ANALYTICS
If visitors answer questions in the way that makes them qualified, lead them to a goal node in your bot. You can then mark a user as qualified by setting a goal in our platform. In the above example, we ask the user how many years they’ve been in business. If they’ve been in business for 2-4 years, we consider them as a qualified lead and mark this user as qualified. We can do this in Instabot by leveraging “goal” functionality. Using a goal is much like a custom analytics, tagging a user with a specific property based upon how they speak to your bot. You set-up a “qualified_lead” goal. If they’ve been in business for 1 year, or 5+ years, we redirect them down the “not a good fit” path. You can learn how to set a goal by following these instructions.
SEEING SOURCE OF YOUR LEADS + PROSPECTS
When a visitor arrives on your website landing page and engages with a bot on that page, the bot will immediately pull the information from the UTM parameters into the user’s profile. The bot will also ask the user qualification questions and tag the user as a qualified lead.
For example, using the advanced-user search, here’s how you can find all your visitors who:
1. Gave you an email address in the bot
2. Arrived on your site through paid ads from Google
REVIEW NUMBER OF QUALIFIED LEADS FROM CAMPAIGNS
At the end of the month, you can then go to our “Users” tab and pull a list of all users that came from Google Adword Campaigns, and identify which leads came from what campaigns, how many times you collected an email, signed a demo, or received a qualified lead from each AdWords campaign. This can provide valuable signals for showing which campaign brought in the most quality leads. You can automatically push this information into your Salesforce to better help your sales team, or to Eloqua to help your outbound marketing team, etc.
PERFORMING MARKETING CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS
Let’s take a very simple example. Normally, when we look at our marketing campaigns, one of the factors we are looking at is the number of leads for each campaign and the cost per lead. With Instabot, we can look at this information as well as the number of leads that were qualified by the bot, and the cost per qualified lead.
If we look at the example above, the New Users campaign brought in the highest quantity of leads and for the lowest cost, but if we look closer this campaign brought in a lower quantity of qualified leads. The two other campaigns, Discount Pricing Campaign and the Fiesta Microsite Campaign, brought in the most qualified leads and a much lower cost than the New Users campaign.
While nothing is clear-cut, this type of information, can provide valuable information for you to better understand marketing campaign success, and distribute budget more efficiently to gain a higher ROI.