The ability to work from home is helping businesses stay in operation as the world continues to find ways to overcome COVID-19. For some businesses, this is a mixed blessing as their now decentralized staff has to make sense of data that may not be as reliable due to the unexpected shift in work environments.
“One thing we’ve noticed a lot in B2B, almost more than B2C, is analytics data being terrible right now, because all of a sudden your B2B companies who are 10, 20, 30,000 employees are at home, logging into your corporate website and all your IP filters are gone,” said Brad Geddes of AdAlysis during our PPC for B2B session of Live with Search Engine Land.
Since the devices that employees use at home may not be filtered like in-office computers generally are, analytics for company websites may report increased traffic from their internal staff, indiscernible from prospective customers. Consequently, conversion rates may decline even if the volume of conversions remains intact.
“Depending on how you’re targeting people, it could be near impossible,” said Clix Marketing’s Michelle Morgan, noting that some companies have sent staff home with new computers to work from. “It has nothing on in, it has no search behavior, it will not have logged into [sites that use cookies], so now you can’t really target [some customers] because this is just a brand new machine.”
Why we care. Site metrics and cookies provide invaluable data that informs our campaigns, but for some companies, that data may be clouded by variables introduced as the nation responds to the COVID-19 outbreak. Although the initial pandemic response period has passed, businesses may need to reset expectations on what the data is telling them, especially as states begin to reopen and employees return to their workplaces. Offline signals, such as phone calls or quoting activity, can also help to inform your campaign strategies as these shifts continue.
Want more Live with Search Engine Land? Get it here:
- Click here for the full session.
- From the bottom to the top of the funnel, COVID-19 is flipping B2B strategies [Video]
- COVID-19 upheaval is actually speeding up some PPC campaigns [Video]
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More about marketing in the time of the coronavirus
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Source: IAB