Buyers step from Desire to Inquire in a complex sale

Every purchase starts with a desire, but the path from Desire to BUY will depend on how complex the purchase is. A complex sale might be described as one where there is a need for a lot of information.

For example, imagine you manage a company that manufactures vinyl windows, and the company is in the happy position that business is booming and they need to expand their manufacturing capacity. Let’s say that expanding production at the current location is not feasible, so you need to find a bigger location to move into, or build a new factory.

The new location will have to meet all kinds of criteria: it has to be in a convenient location for shipping and receiving, it has to be accessible for the workforce, it has to be large enough, it might have to include room for future expansion, it has to be affordable, and so on. Clearly, this is not a one-phone-call-does-it-all kind of purchase. You will have to consider leasing an existing building or buying a lot and building something new, plus issues like timing and transitioning from the old facility without disrupting business. It quickly gets complex.

To get a new factory up and running, you will start to do some research. Let’s call this the second stepping stone on your path to a purchase, “Inquire”. You might start out talking to colleagues, contacting associations you belong to, talking to friends and family, reading books and industry publications, and searching online for information on anything from negotiating land purchases to moving manufacturing equipment from one location to another.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, then you might call on people you know who have helped you successfully navigate all the ins and outs of a major manufacturing facility move. In this example, there’s probably no single top-of-mind vendor that can fulfill your desire to increase manufacturing capacity.

As a customer steps from Desire to Inquire, we know from many studies that the initial inquiries will include an online search component. The search terms at this early stage will mostly be general in nature. This is the point where a customer, to use the vinyl window factory example, might be searching for general information on the pros and cons of leasing versus buying property or equipment. Later on in the process, they might start looking at lots of details, like lighting fixtures, but in the early Inquire stage, they’re at the wide end of the information funnel.

The many faces of your customer
The path to the same end purchase can be different for different people in an organization. Let’s take a look at three personas: the “doer”, the “buyer”, and the “boss”.

A doer refers to the person who is going to be directly affected by the challenge/opportunity and interacting with the purchased solution; in a B2B purchase, the initial impetus for a purchase may start here, when a need is first realized and a desire for a solution is expressed. It could be the doer in an organization who first recognizes that their own efficiency and productivity could be increased with, say, a particular kind of software solution. In some purchase scenarios, a doer may touch all 7 stepping stones, or they may have dropped out much earlier on the path. They may also move back and forth as the sales process proceeds (or recedes, as the case may be).

Seven Stepping Stones on the Path to Purchase

The doer who initiated the sales process (i.e. recognized the desire) may drop out after the Shortlist step. Notice, too, that a sales person from a vendor may not have even touched the process at all until they suddenly find themselves at the Negotiate step; it may have been all Marketing up to this point. There are also a couple of different stones where the vendor’s process may move from Marketing to Sales, so it’s vital to get the process right for handing it from one team to the other.

The “buyer”, on the other hand, may not even enter the path until the Negotiate step. The buyer will be judging a purchase decision by very different criteria than the people who may be more directly involved in implementing the purchased solution (the doers).

Depending on a company’s purchasing process, a buyer may be able to assume that other managers have vetted the purchase up to that point to make sure it’s a viable solution to a recognized challenge or opportunity, and their job now is financing the purchase, getting the best deal and terms, and checking the vendor’s reputation to ensure long term support for the purchase.

Job #1 – Be There
Marketers need to be aware of the customer’s path to purchase, but also who, exactly, is on that path. Using the stepping stone metaphor, imagine you and the potential customer are standing together on the “Inquire” stepping stone. Look around and you’ll probably see any number of competitors standing there with you, and when you look at the customer you may be looking at one person or a collection of doers, buyers and/or bosses. In this potentially crowded space, a Marketer needs to stand out and be noticed.

For the customer, the Inquire step may include actions like conversations with people in their industry, reading industry publications, paying attention to advertising, surfing vendor web sites, and searching online. As a vendor, if you can picture yourself with a bunch of competitors, all precariously standing on a crowded “Inquire” stepping stone, you know that if you’re standing at the back of the pack the customer may not even know you are there.

As the customer’s journey down the path to a purchase progresses, will they find you later if they missed you at the “Inquire” step? Maybe, because at the early stage the customer’s initial line of inquiry may be so off base that they end up retreating to the first step, and reassessing the circumstances that triggered the process in the first place, or there may be such limited options for the solution they need, that your solution becomes more visible as they move from “Inquire” to “Refine”.

However, if they don’t see you at the Inquire step, you could be missing a chance to frame the conversation advantageously and influence the rest of their journey. That’s one reason why it’s so important to have a good search marketing strategy, to get exposure to customers early in their purchase process.

It may take months and months to get from the initial inquiry phase all the way to a final purchase, depending on the business you’re in and the perceived risks associated with the purchase. We’ve also seen six-figure purchases that went from inquiry to purchase in a week, but the point is that marketers need to make sure the right message is in front of the right person, at the right time in their purchasing process.

Job #2 – Stay on the Path
As we can see, there are two factors that can drop a vendor off the customer’s path to a purchase. The first is if the vendor fails to recognize who they’re dealing with at each step on the path to purchase. What is the customer’s approach to making the kind of purchase they’re considering? The vendor needs to be sensitive to the different needs of the audience – the doers, buyers and bosses. They have different ideas about the risk associated with making or not making the purchase, and different needs in terms of the kind of information they need to help them decide.

Secondly, if the vendor is clumsy in moving their sales process along from Marketing to Sales, the risk is that the customer moves on along the path but the vendor is stuck in one place. The Marketing team may have nurtured a sale along to the Shortlist step, only to hand off a qualified sales prospect to Sales and then not have them follow up in a timely manner, and ultimately losing the sale.

About the author
Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. This is the second article on the Seven Stepping Stones on the Path to Purchase. You can read part one on this blog, and view a slide deck at Slideshare.

So besides creating a tribe of raving fans, what are the things that a marketer can do to better facilitate word of mouth in their buyers’ natural purchase process?

1. Know Thy User
Deeply understand your audience. Not just the breakdown of who they are, and where they are – but really know what makes them tick. Dive deep into recognizing what their personal risks are in purchasing your product. Clearly understand the steps they take when considering your products. Who do they see as the authority in your space? How does your prospect validate you are the right choice?

2. Develop Influential Content – For Free
Enable the new word of mouth on your web properties. Give a voice to your prospects, customers, and your entire BuyerSphere. According to a 2010 report from Gartner: Majority of consumers (74%) rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions.

Ratings and reviews, online communities and thought leader forums are all word of mouth venues. Allow the most authentic voice to speak to your audience – their peers. I know what you’re thinking, I can’t do that. What will legal think? What if they say negative things? We will lose control of the message.

Think of it this way. Your buyers will seek out credible word of mouth insight during their consideration of your potential product or solution; that natural conversation is happening whether you’re there or not. Wouldn’t you rather be part of that conversation?

There’s a number of different methods you can use when developing your social media strategy. One that we’re fond of at Enquiro is Forrester Research’s POST method. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. One of the benefits of this method is how it keeps the user, rather than the technology, at the centre of your strategy.

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to know who you need to reach – the People part of the POST method. And this is where Buyersphere insights, from Enquiro’s research on how business buys from business in the online marketplace, can be really useful. Remember that in B2B sales, you actually need to reach two very different types of people: people who use your products and services (the “doers”) and people who decide whether to purchase your products and services (the “buyers”). This can give you two different target audiences who you need to reach with your social media strategy. They can have differing demographics, visit different social networks, and have differing levels of participation online.

The doer will be interested in information on the latest news about your industry and best practices that they can use in their own work. If they aren’t using your product yet, they will be looking for more information about your services. If you are using social media as a customer support channel for past purchasers, it is the doer you are talking to.

The buyer is looking to ensure that you are a trustworthy vendor. They need to know that buying your product isn’t a financial risk to their organization. Reputation management will be important in successfully reaching this persona. This speaks to the need to listen to what people are saying about your brand online. And while you can’t control what people say about your business, you can demonstrate that you respond to your customers’ concerns. If you have a high risk product (very expensive or if you an unestablished brand in the marketplace), showcasing your company as a thought leader in the industry can be persuasive for the buyer.

Knowing that there are two different personas also means that you will develop different objectives and follow different strategies for each group. The reason why and how you engage a doer will be different than why and how you engage a buyer. A doer, for example, is more likely to become an evangelizer of your product than a buyer is. And only once you figure out who you are trying to reach and why you want to engage them can you then ask “Do I need to be on Facebook?”. If you know your target audience and your objectives, then you will be able to decide what technology and platforms will best help your social media strategy to succeed.

In my previous post about The BuyerSphere Project, I mentioned three overlapping dimensions to consider – the product, the market and the buyer. Let’s focus on two of these , the product and the market.
If your company buys the same photocopy paper from the same supplier month after month without a problem, that is an example of a low risk purchase. You know what to expect, you know what it will cost, and no one is going to be putting their personal reputation on the line for picking up the phone and placing a routine order for more paper.

On the other hand, if you are responsible for acquiring new warehouse space in a new territory, that is a different story. It is more complicated (more can go wrong), it involves more money, and maybe you do not have a relationship with any commercial realtors there who can help you find the right facility, at the right location, at the right price. There is a high degree of institutional risk if you make the wrong deal, and a higher level of personal risk if you are the person responsible for signing the lease.

As a seller, knowing how buyers perceive the risk inherent in transacting business with you is a necessary step to effectively marketing and selling to them. The more a seller can do to lower that risk barrier, the less friction they encounter in closing the sale.

One way to see it from the buyer’s perspective is to plot your company onto a risk matrix, where the vertical axis is related to product, and the horizontal axis relates to your market.

Risk Matrix

In the other example, the new warehouse, product consideration would be much higher, likely pushing well into the moderate to high risk quadrant. Issues of price, location, quality of the building and so on are all factors that can push up the risk barrier, creating friction for a commercial realtor trying to close the deal. The market consideration could also be higher, depending on factors such as the brand recognition and reputation of the commercial realtor. At its simplest, for a realtor to close the deal, they would need to identify the buyer’s perception of risk and do what they could to lower the risk barriers that are causing friction in the sales process.

The BuyerSphere Project book suggests several key product and market questions to consider to help marketers and salespeople plot their companies on the risk matrix, and I’ll take a closer look at those in Part 3.

The BuyerSphere Project puts into context all that is changing with B2B marketing and B2B buying behaviors and purchases. It goes in depth on virtually every topic affecting how business buys from business in a digital marketplace. The content of this book is the result of an extensive research initiative conducted by Enquiro with the support of Google, Marketo, Covario, Business.com, and demandbase. While I purchased a copy of the book at Amazon, Enquiro also graciously offers the the book as a free download at the Enquiro web site.

In my Twitter #B2Bbookclub interview with Gord Hotchkiss, Author and CEO of Enquiro, we cover several topics presented in The Buyersphere Project. One thing you are certain to recognize in this interview is that Gord is one of the leading thinkers in understanding the B2B purchasing process and the phycology involved in it that many of us have overlooked for far too long. If you are responsible for or involved in B2B marketing, The BuyerSphere Project is a must read. There is little chance you will find as much useful, helpful information on the changing nature of B2B marketing as Gord has packed into these less than 200 pages. Enjoy!

Jeremy: Gord, thanks for joining us today. I enjoyed reading The BuyerSphere Project tremendously. It stretched my thinking and I think that is what all of as B2B marketers need right now, new thinking. Is this what prompted you to write the book?

Gord: It was a few things. I felt there was little research out there into how companies buy. Also, we had our own experiences that showed there was more to the process than we knew, looking at it with our vendor hats on. So we decided to peak under the hood

Jeremy: It was a good decision. The BuyerSphere Project is filled with useful, helpful information. How is the book being received so far?

Gord: I think it sneaks up on people. When people read through it they find a lot of information. They are surprised at how much is packed into 200 some odd pages. One marketer called it a fire hose…so, it’s definitely building momentum.

Jeremy: I can definitely see why. Let’s start with the definition of “The BuyerSphere.” And why should it be mapped.

Gord: Okay. The premise of the book is to really understand your prospect – to see the process through their eyes. That’s the BuyerSphere. There are three dimensions: their view of the product, their view of the market. And finally, their reality as the buyer. What type of organization, the degree of risk, their role.

It needs to be mapped to allow us to shift our perspective to that of the buyer. And the more risk there is in the purchase (for the buyer) the more we need to invest the time to map the BuyerSphere. Risk is the overwhelming critical factor to understand.

Jeremy: Where do you think generally we are in the adoption curve with B2B marketers viewing their customers this way?

Gord: Very very very very (you get the idea?) early! This is very uncommon, at least from what I’ve seen. It’s a little more common in the B2C world, as they have more of a history of ethnographic customer research, literally, observing their customers “where they live”.

We seem to accept that emotions are common with consumers, but what I think our research showed was that emotion is very much present in the B2B market as well. It’s not a rational marketplace. So, B2B marketers are slow to come to the table in understanding the need of a deep understanding of their prospects emotional reality and the psychology at play here. There just isn’t a big body of info about this.

Jeremy: I’d agree is super early, but when you step back and consider that’s where we are in 2010, it seems almost imcomprehensible. What challenges are b2b marketers having seeing this shift?

Gord: We get caught up in technology, and we forget that what’s really important are the people using the technology. I think B2B marketers are struggling to realize the magnitude of the shift that’s happening. There was a lot of talk in 1999 and 2000 about frictionless B2B markets. That idea was appealing to B2B marketers.

In theory, it commoditized B2B purchasing, Made it rational.But what really happened was that buyers had more information than ever before, which made things more complex, not simpler. The internet introduced a number of new dynamics, just not the ones we expected.

Jeremy: Compounded by the irrational nature of B2B purchasing?

Gord: Exactly. B2B purchasing is all about mitigating risk. And the internet gives us some powerful new ways to do that. Many of which would be surprising to vendors.

Jeremy: This was my first “a-ha” moment in the book. Humans (people) make B2B purchases – and there are often many different people involved in the decision, each with multiple priorities, fears, uncertainties, and doubts.

Gord: For example, we found existing relationships with vendors to be hugely influential in eventual purchases. An early chat with a favored vendor can essentially define the landscape of the purchase. And face to face is still vitally important in high risk scenarios. The web doesn’t change that.

Jeremy: On the topic of risk – will you define Risk Gap for us? And how the emotion of fear impacts the purchasing process?

Gord: We have this vision of a buying funnel, an ideal model of prospect behavior. There are some assumptions there – the process is linear, all prospects are treated equally, and that it is rational and logical. That’s almost never the case. There are incumbent vendors that block the funnel. New prospects come from nowhere. And above all, there’s a risk gap. The process starts with what we call “doers” -the people using the product.

But at some point it switches to “buyers,” -the ones who control budget and that’s usually where you find the risk gap. Suddenly, the decision criteria changes. It switches from product risk to vendor risk. That’s where the funnel often blows apart. Suddenly, vendors disappear from it and new ones come in.

Jeremy: You stress the importance of face-to-face interaction, does the amount of face-to-face interaction needed rise with higher risk?

Gord: Absolutely. We’re built to communicate face to face. There is a richness of communication that other channels can’t match. We need to be face to face to build trust. That’s just how we’re built. Online is efficient communication. Face to face is effective communication. [<--editorial insertion: brilliant quote]

What you need to do is plan a persuasion strategy so you’re using each channel to it’s advantage. Use online to get the right information in the hands of the right people. I called those IQ friction points – the need for information. And then there are EQ friction points – the need for persuasion. That’s the place for face to face.

Jeremy: To your firehouse metaphor earlier, we’ve only scratched the surface of Chapters 1 & 2. You really have packed this full. Let’s move to Maximizing Online Touch Points. Why does the influence of online factors increase with risk?

Gord: It comes to something called information asymmetry. The higher the risk, the more information we need. It used to be that the seller always had more information than the buyer, hence the asymmetry. The web changed that. That’s why we have some much more online activity in high risk purchases. Another thing, the “doer” goes much further down the path now, thanks to all the information available online. There’s more of an overlap between doers and buyers. This makes things a lot more complex for the vendor to understand.

Jeremy: How should marketers adapt in the face of this new found “information symmetry” between the buyer and vendor?

Gord: It sounds cliche, but understand that this is a partnership. You have to meet them halfway. Take a servant based approach to the process. You’re there to serve their needs. The better you do that, the more successful you’ll be. And you can only understand needs by getting to know them. Use online to enhance traditional sales practices, not replace them. There is an exponential increase in effectiveness.

Jeremy: And back to your definition of The BuyerSphere – looking at it through their eyes and note your own, right?

Gord: Yes! Absolutely. You can get by without a deep understanding in low risk, commoditized purchases (although this understanding would certainly help), but it’s essential in high risk purchases.

Jeremy: A few more questions before we finish up. First, why do you believe a company’s website is its most important digital asset?

Gord: Our research has shown that it’s the biggest factor in influencing purchases. There is a lot of interaction on it. Increasingly, we have a portfolio of digital assets: podcasts, videos, etc..but the website is still the crown jewel. That’s why it’s essential to understand what people are looking for on it. The rule is, make sure you do the basics first. Pricing, product info, comparisons with the competition, in forms that’s easy to pass along. People love info that they can quickly scan..random access info. Serial access..videos, flash demos, etc, come after. But you have to know who you’re talking to. To be a servant, you have to know “who do you serve?”

Jeremy: So what is your take on those that are beginning to say a Blog is the main hub or most important digital asset?

Gord: Blogs are great for thought leadership. That’s higher up in the chain. It’s essential in carving a niche in the market. It serves a different purpose. It’s an important one, but it’s not a replacement. Again, if you map the buyersphere. You’ll understand the role of a blog in risk mitigation of your prospects. Then evaluate it’s place in your strategy.

Jeremy: Great Quote (pg 145) Information gathering has to support the prospect, not violate the relationship. Question… Why are marketers reluctant to accept this and continue to place the same “lead form” in front every piece of content?

Gord: It’s all about control. Marketers want to control the process. It’s probably the single biggest mindshift that’s needed. They don’t realize other choices are just a click away. This is a path that you’re walking down with your prospect. You direct that journey by providing persuasive paths to follow, not forcing them into dead end alleys. Forcing only works if you prospect has no choice..if you’re a “vending machine in the desert” to use example from the book. And that is probably the single biggest reason why B2B marketers are behind the curve. They hate giving up control.

Jeremy: Just one last question. I agree with you that digital marketing is just preparing to cross the Chasm, what words of advice do you have for today’s B2B marketers?

Gord: Take nothing for granted. With chasm crossings, there is inevitably a changing of the guard. That means there is a dramatic shift in the market place. Treat this as a warning. Things are changing. Nimbleness, responsiveness, boldness and a willingness to make mistakes may not be a guarantee of survival. But they are by far your best bets for success. Online pure plays have eaten the lunch of the big guys in the consumer world. Expect the same to start happening in the B2B world.

Jeremy: Gord, thanks for your time. As a reminder…the book is available as a free download for anyone interested, visit http://www.enquiro.com/b2bresearch.

When making an organizational purchase, you have two types of personas involved: doers and buyers. Doers are the people who typically first recognize the need for your product. They will be the ones using your product. The question they are asking is “What does this product do?”. Their concern is not just what your product can do for their company, but for themselves personally. They need to know the features and benefits of your product.

The second persona who can be using your website during the B2B purchasing process are the buyers. These are the people who make the purchasing decisions and control the purse strings. They are concerned not only with the cost of your product, but also in eliminating the risk from the purchase. Buyers need to know who your company is, your company size and your financial stability. A buyer needs to know your company is established, dependable and reliable.

And this leads to your on-site content development strategy. Both doers and buyers need to alleviate risk and your website can help allay their concerns. Doers are looking for product information. Think of all the features and benefits your product can offer and if applicable, consider offering a free trial. You can build trust with doers by building your reputation as an industry thought leader through downloadable white papers or webinars. Buyers need to know you are a trustworthy vendor. They will be swayed by company information, references, case studies of success stories and testimonials.

The B2B buying process can be a long one, particularly the riskier and higher the cost of your product. But your website can be a key to removing friction points during this process – if you remember the types of people you need to serve up content to.

As a preview to the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Byron Gordon of SEO-PR caught up with our CEO & President, Gord Hotchkiss. Gord will be presenting at the search marketing conference as part of its B2B & Vertical track on August 12. He will be joined in person by the same B2B panel of experts that participated in our popular webinar series.

The BuyerSphere Project at SES San Jose
August 12, 4:00 – 5:15pm

- Gord Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro
- Mark McMaster, Senior Planner of B2B and Technology Markets, Google
- Ben Hanna, VP Marketing, Business.com
- Chris Golec, Founder and CEO, Demandbase
- Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo
- Matthias Blume, Chief Analytics Officer, Covario

A major B2B research initiative, conducted by Enquiro with input from Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo and DemandBase, showed that most marketers are not effectively leveraging online assets to their best potential. Among other things, the notion of a strictly followed, traditional buying funnel is simply not accurate in many instances, risk dictates buying behavior, search is incredibly important as an integrator across online and offline channels and face-to-face persuasion is still necessary in many high risk, complex purchases.

The BuyerSphere project looks at how online strategies became artificially separated from traditional best practices, how they can be more effectively integrated and the part search plays as a major influencer. This panel will review the research from over 100 face-to-face interviews, hundreds of eye tracking sessions and over 3,000 survey responses in total. The project represents a major step forward in understanding B2B buyer patterns and the part online marketing can play in influencing them.

For more background the B2B marketing webinar and white paper series, see www.enquiro.com/b2bresearch.

Our final webinar in the series will be – in my opinion – one of the most fascinating and thought provoking.  We’re calling it The Rise of the Digital Native: B2B Buying in Flux.  Gord Hotchkiss and his panel of experts are taking a look at a very basic but fundamental question: Does age play a role in marketing?  What does Enquiro’s latest research show us about B2B buying behavior as it relates to the buyer’s demographic, and more specifically, how and when the buyer grew up?

For the first time ever in an Enquiro webinar, we’re also joined by Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin, two very big hitters in the Search Marketing industry.  They will be part of the panel along with our own Gord Hotchkiss, Ben Hanna (Business.com), Chris Golec (Demandbase), Matthias Blume (Covario) and Mark McMaster (Google). 

As an attendee of the live event, you will get to hear the discussion as it happens, plus be able to send the panel your marketing-related questions.  We will also be touching upon the highlights of the rest of the series, so if you’ve missed previous webinars, don’t miss out on this one. To top it off, one lucky attendee will win a BuyerSphere hard copy white paper package, plus a 15-minute search marketing audit with an Enquiro account manager.

The Rise of the Digital Native
Live Webinar
Wednesday, June 24  2:00pm Pacific
Register now –>

The webinar explores:

• The differences between a Digital Native and a Digital Immigrant
• Why the brain gets wired differently in Digital Natives
• How this impacts interactions with technology and the web
• What are the implications for B2B buying
• How the landscape might shift in the next decade

Panelists:
Gord Hotchkiss – President and CEO, Enquiro
Rand Fishkin – CEO and Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Danny Sullivan – Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Ben Hanna – VP Marketing, Business.com
Mark McMaster – Senior Planner of Technology/B2B Markets, Google
Chris Golec – Founder and CEO, Demandbase
Moderated by Bill Barnes, EVP Business Development, Enquiro

Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of SEOmoz, and Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land will be special guests at the wrap-up to the BuyerSphere webinar series, June 24.

While we are thinking about the question of whom do we accredit the quote to, now let’s think more close to home; how to we accredit revenue to individual marketing channels?

The double edged sword of PPC measurability is the ability to measure with a great deal of accuracy how paid search is performing and yet it is still easy measure impact wrong when looking at performance rather myopically. There are many different ways to attribute ROAS, such as first click, last click and a linear attribution model. Making decisions based on an individual attribution window could introduce significant error into your decision process and affect the total ROAS of your paid search campaign.

The problem with most analytics tools is that they attempt to apply linear modeling to explain a problem solved with bounded rationality. Business-to-business purchase behaviour is not a simple linear series of events, but more of an entanglement of communication touch points where a decision can be easily swayed by a chance encounter or incalculable externality. Most revenue attribution models ignore that paid search is only one marketing channel that is interrelated to all other marketing activities; which involve both online and offline company touch points.

With B2B marketing, many purchases involve multiple interactions with the vendor from multiple touch points prior to purchase. A study of a retailers, conducted by Coremetrics, indicates that all buyers had interacted with at least 3.9 campaigns prior to purchase; in a B2B environment it can easily be many more. This does not factor in many of the elements active within the B2B purchasing BuyerSphere. Enquiro’s Brand Lift of Search research also indicates that sponsored listings increase a prospective customer’s propensity to purchase by 8% and occupying the top sponsored position increased aided brand recall by 150%. These are all facts that a simple revenue attribution model can easily de-emphasize.

The majority of companies are still solely relying of the last click attribution model, which attributes the entirety of the revenue to the last point of interaction with the site before purchase. The inherent risk with this type of attribution model is the emphasis on the conversion-oriented campaigns and gives no attribution to the campaigns that originally started the marketing conversation. By making bid management and investment decisions based on only this information, the risk of divesting into the acquisition or branding channels increases substantially; effectively reducing the overall effectiveness of the marketing efforts. This risk increases if the company has a relatively unknown brand in the marketplace. The same can be said for focusing only on the first click attribution where we are looking only at the value of the keywords at the beginning of the purchase decision cycle and can ignore the importance of the conversion keywords at the end of the purchase process.

The only answer to this analytics dilemma is to strike a balanced measure using multiple attribution windows. Coremetrics has recently released a great whitepaper on Appropriate Attribution models which is a great read for any marketer on how to better attribute revenue to your online marketing efforts. For quite some time Enquiro’s Sponsored Search Team has been using a similar model of revenue attribution within the confines of the abilities of existing analytics programs, which vary depending on the provider you are using. However, we have also found great success in determining how paid search integrates into the macro-level marketing equation by using a micro-conversion and correlation analysis.

Often Paid Search campaigns are evaluated based on the number of qualified leads they have brought in or the strict revenue they have generated, but there is a missing element of how this impacts the overall marketing efforts. Post click behavior is an important element to any revenue attribution analysis such as the subscription to an email newsletter, requesting a catalog, downloading a whitepaper or other important marketing collateral, calling the phone number listed on the site. Each of these interactions with the website is part of the marketing conversation and can be assigned a value based on historical conversion rates and average order values. These numbers can then be applied to the paid search campaign as part of the revenue attribution model to assist in determining the value of paid search.

Another important metric is to measure the correlation of paid search traffic with direct and branded site traffic. Paid search may be the gateway to starting the marketing conversation with the prospect, but may only be the initial touch point. Measuring the impact of paid search on the direct and branded traffic can indicate how paid search is acting to acquire customers and brand the company in the marketplace. A simple correlation analysis is effective in revealing whether paid search is having a positive impact on the overall traffic to the site. The user may not necessary complete the desired conversion in the same session, but may use a direct or branded search to navigate back to the site at a later time to continue the relationship building process. 

Unfortunately, analysis of the marketing efforts often collides with internal politics which often complicates issues and can even impact the distribution of budgets. However, knowing how your paid search campaigns interact with other marketing channels, drive revenue, and build relationships can assist in determining the total value of the marketing channel.

The key takeaway from this is to look at the impact of your paid search campaigns as holistically as possible to determine your total ROAS. What is the direct revenue from the campaign? Does the ROAS change when using an appropriate attribution model? How does your paid search campaign initiate the marketing conversation and act as a relationship development tool?