Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

School board maximizes return on investment with comprehensive web analytics

Challenge

The Conseil scolaire de district Centre-Sud-Ouest (CSDCSO) manages the French-language public schools in the central southwestern region of Ontario. Currently, the board oversees 38 schools in a territory that stretches from Windsor and Sarnia in the south to Barrie and Penetanguishene in the north. Over 7,000 students attend CSDCSO schools.

To support French language education throughout its territory, the CSDCSO needed to increase registrations. To achieve this in a way that was both cost-effective and compelling, the board had to determine its most effective marketing channels. To do this, it needed to monitor the performance of its website and determine where its marketing dollars would be best spent.

In 2006, the CSDCSO began to upgrade its existing website, recognizing that, even in a time of tight budgets and reduced spending, the potential for using the site as a communication and marketing tool to both new and existing students justified the investment. Although the CSDCSO had run both on- and offline marketing campaigns (aided by community partnerships and government-sponsored initiatives), the board still needed to address some very real challenges, including:

• Determining which marketing channels would bring the highest return on investment and avoiding investment in initiatives or partnerships that might not yield results
• Justifying marketing spend to trustees and other stakeholders with concrete, tangible results
• Focusing on its regional marketing efforts and assessing its penetration throughout its territory to determine key areas for targeted student and staff recruitment efforts
• Assessing which sections of the website were best serving student, parent and staff needs and deciding how to optimize under-performing pages
• Tracking key website activities that had direct relevance to return on investment—such as downloads of registration forms—rather than just generic metrics like “hits”
• Gathering accurate website performance data through the installation of web analytics tools that, despite prior investments in website upgrades, had yet to be added

Solution

Although the CSDCSO was headed in the right direction, the board needed help to create an end-to-end reporting plan to ensure future marketing decisions would be firmly rooted in hard data and based on past successes. To assist, we implemented a comprehensive system, enabling the board’s marketing team to determine which web marketing initiatives were realizing a robust return on investment.

Specifically, we:

• Conducted an audit of the CSDCSO through personal interviews to fully understand the board’s objectives—and how well its web marketing efforts were supporting them
• Created a strategy defining key website metrics relevant to the board’s objectives and our plan for installing and configuring an analytics platform to measure and report them
• Installed Google Analytics in the CSDCSO’s website content management system and customized tracking code to measure key performance goals such as registration form downloads
• Configured profiles in Google Analytics, filtering irrelevant data and ensuring that the data the board received was relevant and actionable
• Educated key stakeholders in interpreting analytics data, ensuring the tool was usable and useful and helping to establish a culture of data-driven decision making

Results

Installing Google Analytics in mid-2009 has already given the CSDCSO relevant, actionable data to optimize marketing performance, including:

• More robust return on investment data
  The CSDCSO has done some on- and offline promotions, and there are government-funded programs designed to highlight the board’s offering. With analytics data, the board now has details on which initiatives are working and which aren’t. For example, while government websites aren’t driving a large amount of overall traffic, they’re top referral partners for visitors who download registration forms, and have the highest conversion rate of any referral site. This important source of traffic would be missed with a simple focus on hits or page views.
• Greater understanding of qualified traffic sources
  Too often, website success is measured simply in terms of visits or impressions, without thought to where visitors are coming from or how they engage with site content once they’ve arrived. With specific goals for the website—such as encouraging registration form downloads—the CSDCSO now has data about where qualified traffic comes from, allowing the board to optimize its website and marketing not just for traffic, but for performance that actually matters to its objectives. For instance, one referral source with a high conversion rate is a government site providing information for new immigrants, giving the CSDCSO a prospective new partner.
• Potential areas for expansion
  As with referral partners, analytics data also revealed differences between top cities for website traffic and top cities for registration form downloads. These differences provide information for geographically targeted student recruitment campaigns that are likely to be most effective. And while the vast majority of visitors are from Canada, there are small contingents from France, South Korea and Belgium, all of which indicate some level of foreign traction, and an opportunity to reach a powerful secondary market for foreign students.
• More information on site usage
  After the home page, a website page illustrating the board’s territory and listing its schools is the most popular choice for external visitors. Such information allows the board to create linking and promotional strategies to drive registrations from high-profile pages. The board can also determine which content items are under-performing to avoid investing in content that fails to engage visitors.
• More detailed data to inform website capabilities
  One interesting observation is that many visitors to the board’s French site use Google Translator and other online tools to convert key pages into English. As well, 38% of visitors had their browsers set to English, indicating that more comprehensive English resources on the website would be a worthwhile investment.

Enbridge engages us to optimize communication and establish a long-term strategic plan to reduce call center costs and enhance brand reputation

Challenge

With 1.8 million customers, Enbridge Gas Distribution relies on its website to communicate essential information on natural gas rates, rebates and safety, as well as to promote sustainable energy consumption. Yet after years of growth, the website’s content had become hard to navigate and use—meaning more calls for help to customer service.

After participating in an industry-wide assessment of utility sites, Enbridge’s communications team strove to enhance customer satisfaction by further improving their site’s usability. Recognizing that their site could better serve and educate customers—and that their internal content development process could be streamlined and centrally coordinated—they engaged us to assist in assessing and improving a number of issues:

• The site’s approximately 400 pages were out of date, often duplicated and, in many cases, contained contradictory claims
• Because different departments within Enbridge controlled various sections of the site, the content’s lack of cohesion made for a choppy and often frustrating user experience
• The content, much of which had been written by industry experts without adherence to usability guidelines and web-writing best practices, lacked a consistent overall theme and voice
• Many of the site’s pages were poorly optimized for search—both through external search engines and within the site itself

Solution

To sharpen the focus of Enbridge’s site and to help the company’s communications team meet its goal of providing an optimal user experience for customers, we worked closely with key members from multiple departments within Enbridge to implement the following measures:

• After reviewing research on utility website best practices, we performed a detailed content analysis of Enbridge’s site, covering such areas as search engine optimization and web-specific readability
• Based on our findings, we created a content strategy that included targeted customer personas, research-based keywords, and a consistent tone for the site
• With the strategy in place, we guided each page through an editorial process that included writing, rewriting, revising according to stakeholder suggestions, obtaining legal approval, staging, proofing and publishing
• To organize and keep track of our improvements to the large quantity of interdepartmental pages, we created a collaborative environment for collecting internal stakeholder opinions and suggested wording

And to ensure the quality and consistency of eventual updates, we also conducted an on-site web-writing best-practices workshop to educate Enbridge team members who would be responsible for future content.

Results

Throughout our year-long engagement with Enbridge, we worked to improve the company’s vision of an engaging site optimized for usability and readability. This included through reducing the website’s page count, streamlining navigation, and ensuring that website content served customer needs and thereby reduced expensive calls to customer care. Evangelizing for customer-centered content, usability, design and functionality, we were subsequently engaged by Enbridge to create a strategy for a complete overhaul of its web communications. This strategy is slated for implementation by 2011.

Rogers relies on our web-writing expertise to convey a new direction to customers and prospects

Challenge

To keep pace with ongoing developments in the internet service industry, and to continue providing a high level of internet service to its customers, Rogers Communications needed to change its internet-service pricing structure. These changes included the creation of new service tiers to give customers greater choice for customized service options.

To ensure that customers recognized the benefits of an updated pricing structure, Rogers recognized that conveying the underlying purpose of its new service tiers was of utmost importance. Specifically, the company needed to:

• Clearly communicate these changes to existing and prospective customers in a way that would help them understand both the reasons behind the changes and the advantages they offered
• Create an online tool that would help customers and prospects find a service tier that best suited their needs
• Ensure customer satisfaction while providing useful information in a clear, respectful tone

Solution

We helped Rogers strategically educate customers about the purpose and benefits of its new service tiers by implementing the following measures:

• We conducted a thorough analysis of Rogers’ existing messaging, the messaging of its competitors, the technical details of the new service platforms, and applicable web-writing best practices
• Based on our findings, we developed a content strategy that included voice and tone samples, navigation labels and information architecture recommendations
• We then proceeded to develop all of the copy for the campaign, including functional copy, information copy, marketing copy and copy for Rogers’ service tier selection tool
• After developing the content, we worked with Rogers to complete internal revisions and incorporate feedback, then proofread and tested the entire website upon completion to ensure a friction-free user experience

Results

The Rogers Keeping Pace microsite launched in March 2008. Throughout its development our consultants worked closely with Rogers to ensure the following results:

• By meeting all of Rogers’ content needs, we helped to facilitate rapid development of the microsite within less than three months
• The positioning and voice we established carried through to all of Rogers’ communications initiatives, helping to inform customers as well as anticipate and proactively address media criticism
• In 2008, Rogers grew its high-speed internet penetration level to 68% of basic subscribers, and by the end of 2008 had reached over 1.5 million total high-speed customers

INTERxVENT Canada finds success through effective marketing and communication backed by our strategic testing and ongoing analysis

Challenge

INTERxVENT Canada helps organizations reduce healthcare costs and increase productivity. The company holds an exclusive Canadian license for INTERxVENT, a platform for cost-effective health screening, management and reporting owned in the US by Nationwide Better Health (a division of Nationwide Insurance). Over 14 years, more than 190 corporations, academic institutions and government employers have used INTERxVENT programs to improve the health of over 1.5 million participants—with benefits documented in more than 80 peer-reviewed studies.

INTERxVENT programs were developed and have been used extensively in the US, where corporations absorb more healthcare costs and are thus more likely to invest in health and wellness programs relative to the Canadian market. But with healthcare costs and interest in health-promotion programs on the rise in Canada, INTERxVENT Canada aimed to bring INTERxVENT programs to the Canadian market, including through a direct-to-consumer channel utilizing an online store.

As a start-up, INTERxVENT Canada faced significant marketing and communication challenges, including making an unfamiliar brand known to a Canadian market that isn’t used to paying for healthcare. More significantly, to thrive in this new market, INTERxVENT Canada needed to quickly identify the most effective marketing and communication channels and messages.

Solution

Since INTERxVENT Canada’s inception in mid-2007, our consultants have worked closely with the company to achieve its objectives. From the beginning, we used Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of online and offline marketing initiatives to identify those with the greatest return on investment. This included through the following services:

• Based on a comprehensive and strategic marketing plan, we implemented marketing and communication across channels including print, broadcast (through a narrowcast health network broadcast to Canadian health clinics), direct mail and Google AdWords search marketing, using unique URLs to track each initiative and determine the most effective communication and sales channels
• Using Google Analytics, we tracked all website activity, including ecommerce purchases for retail programs purchased by individual participants. Data directed us to the most effective marketing vehicle for driving program participation, which was the sending of direct mail letters from a patient’s physician. Google Analytics and AdWords analysis also revealed a new market for diabetes, whereas INTERxVENT was initially positioned as a solution for cardiovascular disease
• With our emphasis on measurability and tracking, we also worked with INTERxVENT Canada to devise a proprietary (patent pending) coupon system that allowed us to track the purchase of INTERxVENT programs online and in retail outlets, and thereby determine which retail channels and offers were most effective over a customer lifecycle. Cross-referencing Google Analytics data and coupon redemption data allows us to provide a more comprehensive picture of marketing channel performance

Results

Our extensive engagement and emphasis on measurability allowed INTERxVENT Canada to rapidly launch to the Canadian market and refine its approach based on hard data to achieve some impressive results:

• By May 2008, INTERxVENT Canada was set to launch its first pilot program in Canada with Gamma-Dynacare Medical Laboratories, Canada’s largest lab services company, signing up 50% of 400 staff
• INTERxVENT Canada’s early successes have impressed investors and secured funds and interest for launching pilots within three Canadian corporations to over 3,000 employees this year
• INTERxVENT Canada’s continuously analyzed and optimized direct-mail campaigns have reached a near 25% response rate, with nearly 28% of respondents signing up for an INTERxVENT program at a cost-per-conversion far lower than any other channel tested to date; use and optimization of this channel was driven largely by reporting from Google Analytics
• Based in part on data from a Google AdWords campaign demonstrating the success of diabetes-targeted ads, INTERxVENT Canada has developed a diabetes module in response to market demand, giving it a significant competitive advantage that might have been missed without analytics to support investment in the module’s creation

We continue to work with INTERxVENT Canada in analyzing, strategizing and implementing effective marketing and communication, and we are now applying findings from the past two years to further improve return on investment for campaigns, create profitable business models, and guide investments of time and money into the activities and channels most likely to yield results.

Belbin North America engages us to cost-effectively—and measurably—bring a new brand to a crowded marketplace

Challenge

3Circle Partners, an executive coaching and team development company, has provided team-building consulting services for Xerox, the UN and a number of Fortune 500 organizations. To help clients build more effective teams, the company administers Belbin team role assessments to determine an individual’s strengths when working within a group.

While the Belbin brand was highly regarded throughout the rest of the word (particularly in the UK), it remained relatively unknown in the US and Canada. So when 3Circle Partners formed Belbin North America to administer and distribute its assessments in a new market, it encountered some serious obstacles, including a saturated marketplace and an underperforming corporate website.

After investing in AdWords campaigns and a campaign on Globeandmail.com (the website of Canada’s largest national newspaper) without significant results—and with little measurability—3Circle Partners recognized the need for data-driven decisions and measurable performance.

Solution

While Belbin North America clearly needed a brand-specific site to introduce its offering to a new audience, the company was wary of repeating the mistakes of its parent company, investing money in initiatives with little trackability or data for optimization. So Belbin approached us for more strategic, measurable online marketing. In response, we:

• Analyzed the company’s existing sales funnel and previous search marketing campaigns to determine which messages achieved the greatest results and which areas needed improvement
• Created a new, search-optimized Belbin North America website with a clearly defined sales funnel and key performance indicators, goals, and specific user behavior tracked using Google Analytics
• Developed a continuously optimized search-marketing campaign through Google AdWords, driving prospects to a standalone lead-capture landing page
• Initiated an email marketing campaign offering free Belbin assessments and personal coaching to qualified leads, further closing the company’s sales funnel; split testing versions of the campaign’s landing page with Google Website Optimizer enabled us to continuously optimize the campaign (for example, by determining whether a long information-gathering form drove more qualified conversions than a short one)
• Launched a refreshed corporate site to drive traffic to Belbin North America, acquainting customers with 3Circle Partners’ larger range of services and providing measurable information about prospect and client behavior
• Provided monthly Analytics and AdWords reports summarizing key performance indicators and making recommendations for improvements
• Familiarized key decision-makers with Google Analytics reports, allowing them to access and understand the interface quickly and easily

Results

Between May 2009 and September 2009, our online marketing has generated over 630 qualified leads for Belbin North America, while our analytics services have identified the most effective marketing channels (primarily AdWords, with a greater than 14% conversion rate) and messages.

Thanks to an end-to-end system we implemented using Salesforce.com, qualified leads are now automatically filtered to screen for top-tier prospects with which Belbin North America’s sales team can follow up. And with Google Analytics and Salesforce.com data, we can report end-to-end results—from the first click on an ad to the latest purchase of consulting services.

While initially skeptical of web marketing, Belbin North America now aims to spend the majority of its marketing budget online, including through increasing its Google AdWords budget and creating a new AdWords campaign for an Italian affiliate.

Camp Walden engages us to revitalize its online marketing and generate targeted, qualified leads

Challenge

Camp Walden is one of Canada’s largest and most established high-end camps, with over 39 years of history, over 750 pristine acres of land, and 200 staff members who work to create unforgettable experiences for up to 500 campers every summer.

For the past four years, Camp Walden has used web-based marketing to promote its camp globally and acquire new campers. This includes through search engine marketing and search engine optimization.

The camp’s site ranked high for essential keywords and drove an impressive amount of traffic. But the camp’s administrators had a problem: for all of the traffic their website received, relatively little of it converted to sales, the traffic was highly untargeted, and there was little insight into which online channels were driving the greatest return on investment.

Walden’s online conversion funnel was, essentially, blocked—with no way to turn traffic into qualified leads or to measure lead conversions. The camp’s administrators were beginning to worry that their online expenditures—and particularly their search engine marketing activities—were likely losing them money because they weren’t designed to turn visitors into customers.

And they were done with fly-by-night internet marketers and black-hat SEO firms. They needed to devote their energy to creating the best possible summer camp experience for their campers—meaning they needed a trusted, experienced partner to analyze their website’s performance, turn more visitors into customers, and make appropriate recommendations for improving their online marketing performance on a regular basis.

Solution

Recognizing that acquiring more campers required a more sophisticated solution than simply increasing traffic to Camp Walden’s site, we:

• Audited the effectiveness of Camp Walden’s web marketing and sales funnel and created a strategy to improve the conversion of visitors to prospects, improve the conversion of prospects to customers, and track the entire process to identify the most effective marketing channels
• Applied our strategy to implement a cost-effective lead-generation campaign through Google AdWords without any substantive changes to the camp’s current site; developed a strategy-aligned AdWords campaign linking to targeted landing pages featuring a strong offer—a free weekend at Camp Walden—and split tested 20 variations to determine which would pull the greatest conversions
• Connected each landing page to a customized Salesforce.com instance, allowing us to set up sophisticated auto-response functionality and lead-assignment rules that mapped to Walden’s existing sales processes, and eliminating the need for the camp’s administrative staff to manually process unqualified leads
• Used the collected data to optimize the campaign accordingly, combining data to create end-to-end reports that allowed us to optimize according to which ads were driving the most clicks; which landing pages were driving the most lead conversions; and which keywords, ads and landing pages were driving the most sales
• Expanded our Google Analytics reporting to include the entire Camp Walden website, allowing us to determine top sources of qualified traffic—and the most effective channels for driving conversions

Results

Since engaging Commune, Camp Walden experienced a dramatic increase in landing page volume and conversion rates during the three essential months leading up to the 2009 camp season.

Improvements during this period included:

• An increase of 52.6% in new visits to Camp Walden’s site
• An increase of 28.8% in pageviews, indicating that visitors were more deeply engaging with the site’s content
• A total of 148 landing-page conversions in the first three months
• An additional 100 conversions from the camp’s online brochure request form, which was, for the first time ever, tracked in a detailed way

Additionally, our work with Google Analytics allowed us to identify high-performing and low-performing marketing channels. For example, we discovered that Facebook was a top source of referrals, but that very few of these referred visits converted to leads. We also discovered that two other search engine marketing services—those of Yahoo! and Microsoft—were taking more time to manage than they were worth, due to their low volume of clicks and conversions. At our recommendation, Walden adjusted its online advertising budget accordingly.

Our work with Camp Walden has also led to some important long-term benefits. Walden now has a measurable advantage for its subsequent marketing activities, allowing us to use the data gathered this year to launch more effective campaigns for the next season. For example, in our July and August reports, we found a high volume of traffic to the camp’s photo gallery from the cities where many campers’ parents live. This discovery suggests that parents come frequently during the summer to see Walden’s regularly updated photos, meaning that the photo gallery would be a prime place to promote re-registration for the subsequent camp season—getting an early jump on marketing and sales for each subsequent camp season.