Successful Campaign Analysis Via Tagging Strategies

There can be a lot of unknowns when it comes to marketing campaigns. Who's seeing your ads or print pieces? Of those people, who are they resonating with? Are your strategies working? These are all very important questions, that if answered, can lead to valuable insights into improving these strategies. But how can you gain visibility into these in the first place? If these marketing initiatives are designed to drive traffic to your company's website, you're already headed in the right direction!

If you have advertisements on billboards, print, you likely already have a web analytics platform selected to measure your site. If not, what are you waiting for? If you are using a platform like Google Analytics, you can mark your campaigns for easy analysis via URL tagging. New to manual tagging? Here are a basic outline so you can get the most analysis out of your campaign data.

1. Identify Advertising Methods & Locations: The first step is to get your ducks in a row by laying out all of our advertising methods. What type of ads will they be? Where will they be placed? What will the call-to-action be? What URL will be featured on the ad? These are all things that should be considered before proceeding.
2. Evaluate Campaign Flexibility & Constraints: It is a good idea to identify any strengths and weaknesses with the campaign. Are the placements permanent, or is there flexibility to change the ad up periodically? It is good to know whether or not you will need to prepare additional tags for the different ad variations, be it a billboard or a banner ad.
3. Create Information-Rich Tags: Now that you have all of the information you need, it's time to make sure you carry as much of it over to Google Analytics as possible through information-rich URL tags. What do I mean by this? For Google Analytics URL tagging, you have the option of using several different fields for labeling, including campaign source, medium, and campaign. There are also other fields like term and content which will allow you to differentiate even more. You'll want to make sure you get as much information as you'll need down the line. The more information there is, the deeper you can drill down for analysis in the future.
4. Test, Test, Test! This step is pretty self-explanatory, but perhaps one of the most important steps of all. You should the new tags with their URLs to ensure that they send you to the proper page, as well as verify proper data collection within Google Analytics. You don't want to find out after deployment of these tagged links that something isn't right!
5. Deploy & Analyze: And now, the waiting game! Once enough data has begun populating in your analytics profile, you can begin slicing and dicing for deep analysis!

It is important to understand that this entire process can be time-consuming to start, but will serve to be a wise investment as the data comes rolling in. The insights that will be brought forth will be well worth it, as they'll help you understand how well all of your advertising is performing, regardless of the medium.

Top 5 Features of Google Analytics Content Experiments (vs. Website Optimizer)

For about 5 years now, marketing professionals have been using Google’s Website Optimizer to run A/B tests and Multivariate tests on webpages. Google recently announced that Website Optimizer will be replaced with Content Experiments. Content Experiments offers similar functionality as Website Optimizer with a few limitations; however, I’ll highlight the top features that I think Content Experiments offers. Here are my top 5 features for Content Experiments when compared to Web Site Optimizer:

1. Experiment Integration within Google Analytics

Content Experiment’s integration within Google Analytics is much improved compared to Web Site Optimizer. Web Site Optimizer did not integrate with Google Analytics, which limited a user’s ability to obtain additional information about the test variations for each experiment such as time on site, bounce rate, or the possibility of segmentation.

2. Simplified Workflow with the Set-up Wizard

The simplistic workflow to implement an experiment is streamlined as well. The process went from 5 basic steps to 4 basic steps. The set-up wizard for the experiment clearly identifies where you are within the set-up process and the next steps. In addition, there are icons to help you throughout the process to understand what you’re doing.

3. Visuals of the Experiments within the Console

The simple workflow is enhanced with visuals of the experiment variations, which was not part of Web Site Optimizer. Within the console of Google Analytics Content Experiments, you can see exactly what your original design vs. the variation(s) will look like prior to launching the experiments.

4. Better, More Simplified Reporting

In my opinion, the reporting in Content Experiments is much better than before. Content Experiments provides high-level experiment detail at a glance (visits, days of data, status of the experiment, and percentage of included visitors). The conversion data is also much improved by providing separate columns for visits, conversions, conversion rates, and basic green & red arrows to compare the variation(s) to the original page. Finally, the look of the reports is now more consistent with the newer Google Analytics interface.

5. Rewrite the Variation URLs to the Original within GA Content Reports

By selecting to rewrite the URL variations, you can consolidate all of the traffic to your original and variation pages. These URLs will appear under the original page within your Content Reports. This ability makes the Content Reports easier to read and streamlines the analysis of the experiment’s impact on page metrics in addition to its data. This provides increased functionality with custom reporting and experiment segmentation.

What’s the BIG Deal with Content Experiments?

The simplified shift from Web Optimizer to Content Experiments will save companies and marketers’ time, money, and allow them to easily create testing experiments. Ideally, Content Experiments will reduce the amount of time to create experiments and simplify their data, making them easier to understand as well as more actionable. With more actionable information, companies and marketers should be able to improve their users’ online experience and generate higher conversions.

Get off the excuse bandwagon! Start experimenting for better lead generation and online sales, what are you waiting for? Leave your feedback on Content Experiments in the Comments section below!

Want to Improve Your Advertising? Align Your Measurement Strategy With the Right KPIs

The ability to measure nearly every facet of marketing campaigns and websites is nothing new. Solutions have existed for several years now and are continuously receiving updates, improvements, and new features that allow for even more in-depth analysis of customer and visitor trends. Tools like Google Analytics even allow for tracking of everything from your business's website, to social media interactions, to your television ads (just to scratch the surface). With such a powerful (and free) tool available, there is really no excuse NOT to have insight into your initiatives!

With such a robust arsenal available to today's marketers, however, it can become quite tempting to report on every available piece of data. While much of this data is indeed important, only a small selection of them does a good job of gauging the impact of marketing and advertising effectiveness.

So your organization chose an analytical tool to measure its campaigns and website: What should your measurement be focused on? Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)!

KPIs and You

KPIs are metrics and insights that are used to measure the success of a website or campaign. These KPIs typically demonstrate the success of your website at accomplishing the tasks it was designed for. Check out the visual below for a nice little example:

In order to identify KPIs for measurement, you must first determine the purpose of your organization's website or campaign. In the case of the above visual, the website exists to generate brand awareness, increase leads, and increase sales. Once you've identified these high-level goals, you must then look at what your analytical tool can measure and align the right metrics to the appropriate goals. For example, the amount of new visitors and direct traffic to the website are great indicators into its ability to generate brand awareness. Keep in mind that these KPIs shouldn't always be limited to a single tool! In some cases, they may even require insights into foot traffic (i.e. increases in foot traffic to a branch or ATM).

Want to impress the decision-makers even more? Use those KPIs to demonstrate Return on Investment! The people with the power to allocate budgets and make decisions often glaze over when presented with standard metrics. While they will definitely be impressed with the KPIs you've come up with, showing them ROI on the marketing budget will knock the ball out of the park. This requires that you have visibility into profit margins for a given initiative. If that isn't readily available to you, you might want to find out how to get it!

Conclusion

It is imperative that KPIs are identified with any measurement strategy, as they greatly benefit all facets of your business. They can help individuals in your team identify opportunities for increased efficiencies. Campaign performance can be easily determined by the marketing department, which would then allow for improvements. Your entire business benefits from a solidified base in measurement and improvements, and KPIs can be great building blocks for that foundation.

Selecting a Sensible Web Analytical Platform For Your Organization

There’s countless blogs, articles, and studies out there that preach about how web analytics is the greatest thing since sliced bread and how it can tie together virtually any marketing effort for an organization and measure their effectiveness side-by-side and against each other. All the features, reports, visuals, metrics, and alerts are great…but only if your organization can dedicate the time, talent, and funds to properly implement and support the platforms.

There’s been more than one instance where we’ve seen a large organization invest in a big and flashy analytical platform like Omniture and WebTrends, and not dedicate the necessary resources to properly implement, support, maintain, or even use it properly. It almost seems like some organizations view these platforms as set-and-forget endeavors, when in reality they are no different than the machinery that is used to make their products or the buildings in which those products are sold. Just because it isn’t tangible does not mean it won’t need ongoing support.

One of the driving reasons these platforms and strategies are improperly executed is because of a lack of budget. Most of the larger analytical platforms use a pay-per-pageview approach to their billing, which for well-traveled websites can add up quickly. After figuring in servers and databases, the total cost for the year can easily stretch into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This usually swallows up the majority of an analytics budget and doesn’t leave much more room for bringing on talent for proper implementation and usage. So this brings us to the driving point of this blog: Choosing a web analytical platform that your organization can actually afford to support (via either internal talent or external agencies) is a critical step that should not be overlooked.

For some of the aforementioned organizations, selecting a cheaper (or even free) platform like Yahoo! Web Analytics or Google Analytics would have yielded much better insights. We even saw this with one client, as they had both WebTrends and Google Analytics, and the latter platform offered exponentially deeper and more insightful reports.

So whether you are the individual or an agency pitching to the higher-ups of an organization why they should go with analytics, make sure you ask the right questions: What do we really need, and what can we actually afford to support moving forward?

Keep your eye on DaBrian Marketing Group’s website for a more in-depth article on this. Also be sure to follow DaBrian Marketing Group’s new Google+ Page!

Event Tracking to Reduce Bounce Rate Due to Affiliate Sites

One of the greatest challenges a web analyst faces in the field is gaining full visibility into all facets of an organization’s online presence. As analysts, we are curious creatures by nature with an unquenchable thirst for data and knowledge. We want to know where traffic is coming from, how these visitors are using the website, and where they are going. Discovering a missing piece to a data collection puzzle can be a double-edged sword: It means we aren’t getting the complete picture, but it also serves as motivation to always be on the lookout for new sources of analytical data.

In the past year, we were approached by a client in the financial services industry that wanted to track their website’s organic performance on search engines as well as receive monthly analytical reporting and recommendations. A few weeks after initial implementation, however, we noticed a consistently high bounce rate to the website. These bounces were primarily happening from the Home page of the website, which is a major red flag to even the most inexperienced of analysts. After some additional analysis and a look at the navigational summary of visitors, we were able to determine that most of these bounces weren’t leaving the website: They were proceeding to the separate secure Online Banking portion of the website. Due to internal security policies of this particular bank, we were unable to implement any direct tracking of this platform beyond the Home page of the website. A new solution to alleviate the high bounce rate needed to be identified.

That’s where event tracking came in. With Google Analytics, event tracking is a method traditionally used to track actions visitors can perform on a website that aren’t captured by the standard analytics script. This often takes the form of a PDF or document download. Since we could not place any sort of tracking code on the Online Banking platform itself, we decided to place the event tracking code on all links on the bank’s website that pointed towards it. The change in the skewed bounce rate for the website was noticeable almost immediately:

Not only did this help alleviate the high bounce rate, but it also provided more insight into how the bank’s customers used the site and where the entered the Online Banking platform from.

There are never perfect circumstances when it comes to web analytics. More often than not, internal policies, procedures and security will stand in the way of getting the complete picture of an organization’s web presence. Learning these policies from the start and identifying alternative solutions will help in overcoming these obstacles.

Be sure to follow us on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest in web analytics, SEO, and more!

Impact of Google Analytics Premium on Web Analytics & Consultants

Web Analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, WebTrends, and Omniture have continued to evolve with increased functionality for social media and mobile analysis. Unfortunately the gap between free web analytical solutions and enterprise solutions was significant until now. The introduction of Google Analytics Premium not only impacts the web analytics enterprise solutions market but also analysis service providers, business intelligence solutions, and consultants. Before Google Analytics Premium, small and mid-size businesses were forced to use free tools such as Yahoo Analytics or pay an “arm and a leg” for enterprise web analytics solutions such as WebTrends and Omniture. Realistically, there wasn’t much of a middle ground in this space.

With the addition of Google Analytics Premium and several improvements to the free Google Analytics solution, the gap between enterprise solutions just got a little smaller and puts more pressure on the industry to continue demonstrating value for web analytics/business intelligence dollars. It will be interesting to see the industry’s response in the future to Google Analytics Premium as well as how Analytics Consultants will modify their service offering to avoid direct competition with Google.

Internal Site Search Usage: Gateway into the Visitor’s Mind

The main goal of virtually every single marketing strategy is to understand what the target market wants. Whether your particular strategy involves generating more leads or increasing sales, it is common marketing knowledge that you must know what your customer is looking for. In the wide world of web design, internet marketing, and web analytics, there are many avenues of data and insights that can lead to more targeted marketing.

In particular, internal site search is a very important aspect of your website that should be tracked and analyzed carefully. If your website supports this functionality, visitors can use it to find specific products, services, or other pages on your site quickly and easily. Just as monitoring the top-performing keywords and phrases visitors used to find your website organically on search engines is very important, paying close attention to how your visitors search your internal site is also crucial. It can raise the following questions:

What are visitors searching for the most?

Are they able to find what they’re looking for? If not, is it a product or service you can carry or offer in the future?

Are visitors searching for pages more than using the actual navigation menu?

Paying attention to the internal site search report for your website can yield some interesting results you may not have anticipated before. It may indicate that people are looking for products or services you don’t currently offer. It could also point out detrimental holes into the structure, navigation, and optimization of your website that could negatively affect conversion rates. Monitoring this aspect of your website can help streamline your overall web presence and internet marketing approach, as well as provide a look into the minds of your visitors.

Web Analytics: Usage Analysis Leads to Improved Customer Relations

Knowing how your target audience uses your website is integral to increasing visitor conversions and improving customer relations. Various retail stores around the world spend millions of dollars on researching how their customers browse their brick and mortar stores. They use this data to arrange the store in the most efficient manner, even engaging in testing to increase purchases by the customer.

Your internet marketing campaign should adopt a similar approach. Focusing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within your web analytics solution can provide insights into how your target audience is using the website. The KPIs can bring troublesome drop-off points within your goal conversion funnels to your attention so you can make the required changes to the design of the page or its content to increase conversions. Perhaps certain landing pages have a consistently high bounce rate. Or perhaps the pageviews-per-visit or average time on site are down. This could indicate that the content on the page is not relevant or targeted enough for the consumer.

Customer relations are not only managed in brick and mortar stores, over the phone, or in emails. Implementing web analytics into your internet marketing approach can provide an integral avenue of improvement to customer relations and conversion rate.

Google Analytics: New Site Speed Report Measures Page Load Time

We all know that using web analytics is key to running successful internet marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. It is always good to know what content on the website is driving conversions and where those visitors are coming from. The quest to improve your visitors’ website experiences doesn’t end there, however. With the latest version of Google Analytics, you can now monitor the average page load time via the new Site Speed Report. This new report comes along with the latest version of Google Analytics.

So why bother monitoring your website’s load times? Here are a few reasons:

• Browser Compatibility: Ensure that your website performance is top-notch for all of the most widely-used browsers.
• Search Engine Optimization: Make sure your landing pages not only have optimized content, but are also performing to the best of their ability.
• Goal Conversions: Increase goal conversions by ensuring your visitors are receiving the best possible performance and load times from your website.

Search engine optimization and internet marketing efforts don’t stop at optimizing content and online advertising. Monitoring website performance through the Site Speed Report of Google Analytics benefits both you and your visitors, and results in higher conversion rates.

New Version of Google Analytics: Improved Interface Means Improved Reporting

On March 17, 2011, Google announced that their new and improved version of Google Analytics has been released to beta. They have started rolling out the beta version of the new interface to a small group of users, and have also provided an option for people to sign up for the free beta.

Google Analytics Version 5 brings quite a few improvements and additions to the table, including:

• Streamlined, easier to use interface.
• Customizable widgets.
• Ability to create multiple totally customizable dashboards for each profile.
• New, customizable visualizations, including pie charts and term clouds.

The smoother, more efficient design and added functionality should allow for improved reporting and better insights into the performance of your website. Internet trends are changing day-to-day. Luckily, the tools to monitor these changes are evolving at the same pace.

Increase Marketing Effectiveness With Web Analytics

When it comes to marketing your product or service, it is best practice to determine who your target audience is, both demographically and geographically. You figure out who you want to market your product or service to, and then where to market it.

When it comes to traditional marketing, it can sometimes be difficult to determine how effective your marketing campaign is, or how many people view it. With internet marketing, however, it is possible to not only determine who is viewing your website, but where they are from, and how much they interacted with your website. With web analytics, you can find all of this information, as well as:

· How much those visitors interacted with your website.

· What traffic sources they came from.

· Where they went after landing on your page.

· Success of e-commerce transactions.

· Determine whether those visitors are generating ROI on your site.

Internet marketing does not stop the moment you launch your shiny new website. It is an ongoing and continuous process, which benefits greatly from being monitored. Implementing web analytics tracking and reporting can provide the key insight to get your results.

Tracking Other Search Engines In A Google-centric World

When you mention the term “search engine” to any internet user, the first name that comes to their mind is usually Google. It is obvious why; Google has held the top spot for search engine usage. Their name has even become a term in itself. Don’t know which companies in your area sell the type of widget you’re looking for? Google it.

When it comes to tracking, Google Analytics tracks a comprehensive list of the most widely used search engines on the internet. This of course includes the three titans Google, Yahoo, and Bing, however it also includes over 40 other organic search engines. But what about the other thousands of organic sources that are out there? Google Analytics does not recognize these sources as search engine traffic by default, and as such, your Traffic Sources report will be somewhat inaccurate and skewed. Even though the “Big 3” search engines drive a great deal of traffic to your website, ignoring the other search engine traffic is statistically irresponsible.

In order to track the search engines not found in Google’s list of recognized ones, you can use the _addOrganic() method. This allows Google Analytics to identify the unrecognized search engines and classify them properly in your reports. By doing this, you can make better-informed decisions and recommendations for with your website’s Web Analytics and determine whether your Search Engine Optimization is working, and not just on the titans.

Web Analytics: An Invaluable Tool

Websites have become the new storefront. Every year, more and more product and service transactions are completed over the internet. With this increase comes the need for functional and visually appealing websites.

The tactics that web design and marketing organizations have taken over the past decade have varied with trends. For a while, the emphasis was placed on having creative, visually appealing websites using platforms such as Flash. These sites were slick and cutting-edge, demonstrating that the company was in-tune with the latest and greatest technologies. All too often, however, this approach affected the usability and functionality of the website across the board. Different browsers handled Flash differently (if at all), and the hardware requirements to actually view it properly were often too steep for large amounts of the visitor base. Perhaps the greatest factor of all was the fact that the websites were not laid out logically, and often sacrificed functionality in the name of style and vanity.

Nowadays, Flash-based sites and the like have gone by the wayside, being replaced with designs that are more functional. Flash has been replaced largely by sites using CSS and Javascript. Companies have gone for designs that maximize the amount of transactions or allow the user to find exactly what they are looking for in the least amount of time. So if a company has designed a website that fits all of their functional and cosmetic needs, they are good to go, right?

Wrong!

The success of that website can and should be tracked. Think about this: Virtually every product (tangible and intangible) ever created and sold has been tested in some way to ensure its success. If your company’s reputation and even a fraction of its success rely on its presence on the internet, you should definitely make sure that website is doing what it should! One of the best ways to do this is to track who is visiting your site and how they are using it. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can not only view these usage statistics, but also manipulate and present them in a way that you can determine what improvements you can make to your website in order to increase your traffic.

The common misconception is that a web design project is complete after it has been implemented and has gone live. The reality is that it is an ongoing process. Something that may have worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. This is why usage should constantly be tracked and analyzed. The internet is always changing, as is how people use it. Logically, this usage should be monitored so you can act on it immediately. Even if you are not literally selling a service or product, you are still presenting or “selling” an idea or information via your website.