Why “Closing the Loop” is critical for PPC Directories & Peer Review Platforms

What’s closing the loop? It’s exactly what every peer review or online directory needs to do in order to achieve their maximum ROI per .

Closing the loop ultimately means getting the right data to the right people at the right time in an organization. By gaining valuable insights through a means of interaction with a customer that goes beyond a cost-paid click or lead form; something that leads you towards determining an ROI for vendors.

There’s plenty of ways that you could achieve this. One way that a lot of aggregators I’ve spoken to have tried pursuing this in the past is direct integration with CRM providers that access deal objects and gather insights on deal attribution via their integration.

This method from what I’ve seen has never yielded a successful outcome, given the sheer amount of CRM’s and the fact that many vendors don’t wantthe people they buy leads from to possess that sort of information.

What are the options?

Closing the loop requires either combining behavioural data of buyers and sellers, or collecting feedback directly from buyers to understand their intent to purchase from a vendor and ideally a reported closed customer who’s identified.

It’s important that getting reporting from sales reps at vendor companies is done in a way that helps them do their job, not the other way around.

The critical component that breaks the loop if missed, is understanding or — at least being able to have a good guess of when a lead from your platform becomes a customer to the vendor. If you can gauge this with any information, you stand to gain a lot. Getting the Vendor ROI, and using that to fuel growth and optimize is consistently where I see these companies winning.

Here’s how OnSched helps close the loop for 3rd party validation platforms:

At a more granular level, OnSched combines data enrichment with buyer feedback to go deeper and collect even more powerful data.

For example:

When a buyer books a demo / consultation with a rep at a vendor company, after their demo they receive an email like this:

If they click a rating, they’re shown a page like this:

This allows the review platform (technologyadvsiors.com in this case) to collect mission critical sales feedback that would be invaluable for the vendor sales rep to know, i.e.: Timeline, budget, likelihood of purchase, competing products. This data can also help us understand the likelihood of a purchase and when to follow up with them to see if they purchased the product. As a back up, trickle emails are sent to the sales rep / customer at 90 day intervals after the first-demo ever happens to ask for basic reporting on if a deal is closed (either via rep reporting, or customer insinuating they made a purchase).

One of these two methods usually lands a good chance to get both a realistic close date of a customer, or; if a deal was closed / lost, while also lending insight into ROI if budget is disclosed.

With access to a data scientist + successful reporting from buyers / sellers, you can fairly easily deduce close rates, timelines (by category or other filters), and other actionable data.

What if I don’t collect any data?

If today you’re using an outdated PPC model and collecting zero buyer data you might reconsider either replacing or implementing call to actions that allow you to collect at least basic user data: name / email / website and phone if possible. Traditionally this is done through a lead form, one of many ways to monetize a lead aggregator. Or of course, you could start letting your buyers skip the most annoying part of the funnel and start letting buyers book appointments directly with sales reps at your vendor companies.

You can then use this data gathered to either: directly follow up with customers at a set interval or; micro target re-marketing campaigns to those user lists at set intervals with an offer in return for either buyer feedback or a review. The worst case scenario is that paid traffic who didn’t make a purchase might re-visit your platform, putting them back into the funnel anyways. Cheap clicks, high value.

What’s your data strategy in 2018?