The Spy Who Loved Me

ion runs a tangled web of marketing tools. We’ve used lead-gen to build a house list of over 50,000 that continues to grow by thousands each month. We nurture that list constantly and identify prospects that go to inside sales. We have metrics at every step, making our marketing inputs and sales outputs relatively predictable.

Less predictable are anomalies within that tangled web of tools.

Each tool in ion’s arsenal has the potential to quietly undermine our predictability and erode our marketing ROI. Actually, most of them have already fulfilled that potential, at least once.

Anyone who’s actively engaged in marketing technology faces the significant risk that their tools just flat out don’t do what they say they do. But how do you even know?

You need a spy on the inside.

The only way we’ve found to audit the actual performance of our tools is to check and balance what we’re expecting against what we actually get. Our spy on the inside is LiveBall. It gives us an unobstructed view into the actual lead data that reveals what’s really going on with our tools. Time and time again, we’ve learned that blind trust in tools is bad — very bad.

Examples of what our spy has discovered…

LinkedIn

We use LinkedIn paid ads as a partial substitute for paid search lead gen. We specifically buy North American traffic to keep our CPL and ROI in line.

When our sales team began to notice reduced lead quality from LinkedIn, we checked our targeting and confirmed that it was North America only. LinkedIn confirmed that as well.

Since we use LiveBall to create and test our LinkedIn landing pages and conversion paths, both profile and behavioral respondent data is collected in LiveBall. This includes IP geolocation. Our hunch paid off when we checked the geolocation data in LiveBall and found that 60% of our LinkedIn paid clicks were not originating from North American IPs. We presented that data to LinkedIn, they investigated, found a bug, fixed it and all is well.

Thanks to LiveBall, our hunch was supported by hard data and a leak in our funnel was patched up.

Eloqua

ion now uses Eloqua for marketing automation. Specifically, we use Eloqua to manage sophisticated and segmented email nurture campaigns. We opt out of their forms and landing pages as LiveBall offers much better alternatives.

A basic tenet of good marketing automation is the collection of anonymous user data and the subsequent mating of that data to a user when they become known. Essentially, you want their prior history to hook up when they finally submit a form.

In order for unknowns to become known, you need their cookie to mate up with their explicitly submitted data. Eloqua provides some javascript to track anonymous users and to set a cookie for anonymous-to-known sync up. If the Eloqua cookie doesn’t get written, the anonymous-to-known doesn’t happen. In fact, nothing behavioral gets tracked — before or after conversion. That pretty rapidly erodes the value of marketing automation — especially to sales.

Soon after ion adopted Eloqua, we noted lower-than-expected behavioral activity. Since we collect user data in LiveBall, we were able to take a look at the raw data and see which records included Eloqua’s cookie. To our surprise, some did not. In the end, we were able to share LiveBall’s hard data on the cookie with Eloqua, which resulted in the identification of a problem (and a pending fix).

Without LiveBall’s insight, we would have been seeking a needle in a haystack in the dark without a flashlight.

Saving time, money and sanity with a check & balance.

We have more examples like the two above. In the end, by having a reliable secondary source of data, we’ve saved time, gotten refunds, avoided lengthy debugging loops and preserved our ROI. Tools are great, but they’re not always going to perform as promised. LiveBall has been our check and balance. It’s helped us identify and solve problems in our tangled web of marketing technology. It may not be as fun as a Bond flick, but for martech geeks, it’s getting close.