Every marketer feels pressure to demonstrate results for their marketing spend. Executives in the life
sciences industry demand accountability for budget expenditures.
The problem, of course, is that marketing performance isn’t always easy to measure. Clicks, views and
downloads contribute but don’t have a direct correlation to revenue. Eyeballs on an advertisement may be
just one of many touches that eventually lead to an order.
Is a marketing channel performing or not?
“As a marketing person, I'm always pressed to show the effectiveness of the actions I take, and sometimes
that can be very difficult,” said CJ Xia, vice president of marketing and sales at Boster Biological Technology
(Boster Bio), an antibody manufacturer specializing in high-affinity, high-specificity antibodies and ELISA
kits.
Founded in China in 1993, Boster Bio expanded internationally to the United States in 2011 with an office
in Pleasanton, CA. Since then, the company has aggressively marketed in order to gain market share. With
seventy percent of its sales coming from academic researchers, one of Boster Bio's key marketing channels
is Biocompare.
Finding The Best-Performing Channel
One of Xia’s challenges has been to discover the origination of customer orders. "Although customers may
discover us online, the actual transactions might come in an email, a phone call or a fax, and there was no
easy way to know how customers originally found out about us," Xia said.
To address the problem, Xia collaborated with a colleague at BizGenius, a Silicon Valley technology
company that helps biotech firms build high-quality, cost-effective marketing programs. Now, minutes
after receiving an order, whether via email, phone call or offline, Xia knows where the customer came from.
"I told him it was a challenge to measure the effectiveness of all the money we were spending on advertising,
and we were advertising heavily to gain market share. With all that budget at stake we wanted to know
how well our programs were working."
Xia said usual metrics such as traffic, views, click-to-cart, time spent on a page, and bounce rates were not
painting an accurate picture of which marketing channels contributed to actual orders being placed, due
to a buyer’s fragmented decision-making and purchasing process. The majority of orders are not through
Boster Bio’s online ecommerce channel. Thus, measuring click-to-cart does not tell the entire story.
BizGenius analyzed a different set of measures to help determine which referral traffic was the order
origination source. Innovative referral traffic metrics such as geographical locations of customers, IP
address nodes, and timing of visits in relation to order placement were included in the analysis, in addition
to more common data such as click to cart, scroll, time on page, image viewing and other behavioral
actions related to purchases.
"What we found out was significant,” Xia said. “We learned that Biocompare was a significant source of
product discovery for researchers who placed orders. Biocompare outperformed every other channel where
we were investing in marketing."
Immediately, Xia increased his marketing spend on Biocompare. "We decided to double down on Biocompare
and we significantly increased our marketing spend over the course of three years. The decision was driven
by this data and the specific analysis that BizGenius was able to conduct for us."
Optimizing Marketing Spend
As Boster Bio increased their marketing investment on Biocompare, they simultaneously cut back on
Google Adwords spending. The same analysis that demonstrated Biocompare’s significant contribution to
Boster Bio’s sales also showed that AdWords conversion was on the lower side.
Xia said that the sheer number of users searching for antibodies is much higher on Google than anywhere
else, but the Google searches are harder to parse out. The searches could be from consumers looking for
disease cures, students writing papers, or from other users who have no purchase intent. Yet Boster Bio still
had to pay for every unqualified click on its ads.
"Through the BizGenius analysis, we discovered conversion to sales through AdWords was much lower
than it was through Biocompare,” Xia said. “In comparison, anyone searching on Biocompare is already
several more steps qualified. They are in the industry, typically a lab manager, someone who is actually in
a buying process with buying intent. This isn’t necessarily the case on Google."
Demonstrating Results to Management
Xia also said that the new data correlating marketing channel to sales is very presentable and understandable
to management. "Now when I’m asked for results, I’m able to show how marketing investments are paying
off."
The original analysis that Boster Bio conducted with BizGenius was performed in 2017. Now, the company
analyzes its sales every month using the same methodology.
"Our ongoing analysis and increased budget allocation to Biocompare has led to increased revenue,” Xia
said, in summing up his experience. “When we increase advertising on Biocompare, we can map a spike of
end user sales within a few weeks. It’s very obvious compared to past data."