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Archives for December 2012

Analytics Christmas Carol: 12 Things To Measure

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This time of the year we’re either busy analyzing the past year’s data for the new year or dreaming of great food, presents, and time with the family over the holiday. In keeping with both of those notions, I’ve decided to take a stab at song-writing with this fun cheesy little version of the “12 Days of Christmas” carol/blog hybrid!

Enjoy (or point and laugh profusely. Either way, you’ll have fun)!

On the 12th Month of Service the Client Wants to Track:

12 PDF downloads

In the case of Google Analytics, tagging downloads on your website with Event Tracking can reduce inflated bounce rates and give you greater insights into how supplemental information and deliverables impact the decision process of prospective customers and ultimately your bottom line.

11 Affiliate link clicks

The same methodologies that are used with tracking downloads can also be applied to links to affiliate websites. Tagging these affiliate links with Outbound Link tagging can help reduce those artificially-inflated bounce rates.

10 billboard adverts

Traditional marketing initiatives need not be segregated from your web analytics data any longer! Through a combination of vanity URLs and unique landing pages, you can easily track the effectiveness of initiatives like billboards and radio ads and uncover the insights to improve these campaigns.

9 PPC campaigns

There’s far more to a pay-per-click campaign than just clicks. Though Google AdWords provides cost data and click analysis, you can get the complete picture by tying Google AdWords and Google Analytics together. You can see how well the landing page content and call-outs are resonating with your paid search visitors, identify disconnects between a display ad and your site, and use these insights to hone in your PPC strategy.

8 Tweets-a-tweetin'

Don’t just throw Twitter and social posts out there and hope something sticks! Tag those links pointing to your site using Google’s URL builder so you can use Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of those Tweets!

7 QR codes

QR codes have enabled marketers to easily point recipients to their web assets via a hyperlink in barcode form. As an added layer of measurement, you can add tracking parameters to the destination URL of these QR codes. Another great way to bridge the insight gap between traditional and digital!

6 Customer segments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you’re not segmenting your web analytics data, you’re probably not doing it right. Customer behavior from your campaigns to your website can vary greatly depending on what segment they fit into. Slicing and dicing your data accordingly will help optimize your customer’s experience and improve marketing to those individuals.

5 KPIs!

You can’t measure without a unit of measurement to go by! That’s just a fact of life. When it comes to measuring your marketing, establishing solid KPIs that align with your business goals and objectives is crucial. You want to ensure that these KPIs are meaningful to the decision makers and speak to the success of your campaigns.

4 Vanity numbers

Similar to how vanity URLs and QR codes can be used with traditional marketing, there’s also opportunities to use vanity phone numbers that are integrated with call tracking platforms. This provides another great layer of measurement and yet another opportunity to bridge that digital and traditional gap!

3 Email blasts

Most email marketing platforms allow for varying levels of integration with Web Analytics tools. Platforms like MyEmma offer automatic tagging for links pointing to your web assets. This extends your analytical visibility beyond just open rates and allows you to see whether or not the subject lines, messages, and call-outs are really resonating with your audiences.

2 Subdomains

Perhaps your organization’s site stretches across several subdomains (or even across multiple domains entirely). This is often the case with websites that incorporate a blog, online application system, or 3rd party shopping cart. Seamless deployment of web analytics tracking through the use of cross-domain methods will shine light into problem areas of conversion funnels and other valuable tidbits.

And a CVAR in a tracking cookie!

Google Analytics allows for the use of CVARs, or Custom Variables, which allow you to set specific variables within the tracking cookie. These CVARs can be set when a user performs a specific action on your site, comes from a certain traffic source, or fits other specific criteria.

And there you have it, folks: My half-blog-half-Christmas Carol masterpiece! Hopefully you found it festive AND informative! On behalf of everyone at DaBrian Marketing Group, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy Holiday!

Content Marketing Resolutions for 2013

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As 2012 continues to wind down and we look forward to what 2013 will bring, a great opportunity presents itself to evaluate our content efforts throughout this year, make improvements, and get a jump on January 1. In the spirit of the holiday season and the New Year, we’ve gathered up a list of some Content Marketing “New Year’s resolutions” to make sure your business is ready to hit the ground running when the ball drops.

Revamp an Existing Content Strategy

Even if you’ve got a content marketing strategy in play, it’s always a good idea to take a step back and seek out areas that performed well vs. those that could use improvement. And this doesn’t just mean your digital content assets. If you’ve spent a big chunk of time optimizing digital content, social media profiles, etc., what does that mean for your tried and tested physical marketing materials, like flyers and brochures? Have these been updated as well, carrying over the same cohesive brand message, look, and feel?

This is just one example to consider when evaluating content as a whole. If you’d like more tips in this area, our team recently wrote an exhaustive white paper on the subject (and did we mention it’s free to download?).

Subscribe to a New Marketing Source / Blog

We all know the value of the Internet when it comes to gathering the latest trends, tactics, and updates from a marketing perspective. With that being said, branching out and finding a new resource can offer up better insights and give your marketing teams more fodder to drive their future actions toward innovation. There are a bunch of resources, blogs, and discussion groups out there that report on what’s “hot” among different audiences.

If your company would rather keep up with industry-specific trends, taking that route also has great advantages. Keeping up and interacting via LinkedIn groups is a great way to find and participate in industry-wide discussions as well as hear different opinions and viewpoints.

Evaluate your Brand and Content as a Tag Team

Nothing in digital marketing operates in isolation. Everything is interconnected, and different campaigns always influence and affect each other. From a content-based standpoint, one of the most direct relationships is between your content and your brand.

For 2013, it may be time to re-evaluate this relationship; does your content reinforce your brand promise and “mission statement“? Is there a solid “brand language” established for all company communications? Do these elements work together across all media and materials? Taking all of these concerns into consideration is a big step toward highlighting what makes your business stand out and carrying those differentiating factors over to the way you market and advertise.

What’s your marketing resolution for 2013? Leave us a comment below!

Bidding is More than Just How You Pay

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CPA or CPC? Which is best for your Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising Campaigns? To answer that, first let’s look at how these two strategies differ from each other.

CPA – Cost per Acquisition (Conversions): You set a target CPA and Google will automatically adjust your CPC bid to keep you relatively close to your target. From my experience, Google has been getting CPA just under the target CPA.

CPC – Cost per Click: This is the more common bidding strategy and allows you to manually or automatically (enhanced) set maximum CPC bids per keyword.

The Case for CPA

Obviously, the first requirement for using CPA is the necessity of Conversion tracking (which should be a priority anyway). But assuming you are tracking Conversions, is CPA your best option? From personal experience, a good campaign for CPA bidding is one that is well established and in a stable market. While implementing CPA strategic bidding, we witnessed a decrease in CPA, which increased profit margins.

The Turning Point

However, once there were changes within the market, such as new advertisers and increased competitors’ bids, the overall performance of campaigns using CPA dropped. Despite using some automatic tools to maintain average position, Google’s CPA bidding style was not able to remain competitive. The Campaign began decreasing in Clicks and Conversions. As a result of the decrease in Conversions, the CPA strategy automatically lowered the max CPC causing the ads positioning to drop, which further impacted the Conversion Rate. The CPA bidding strategy began a steep drop in performance.

The Case for CPC

Once the bidding strategy was changed back to manual CPC, the Campaign regained its positioning in the market, and the Clicks and Conversions increased back to normal levels as well. Although this required an increase in CPC, we were able to maintain the overall CPA at a very close level to the original target CPA.

Conclusions

The end result was no relative change to the calculated CPA, but an increase in overall Conversions. The conclusion is this: Google’s automatic CPA bidding strategy is great to use once your PPC campaign is up and running, but be sure to keep a close eye on it. Increased competition in your market could send your PPC spiraling downward quickly.

Have you had more luck with CPA or CPC bidding strategies? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Sizing Up Tag Management For Your Organization

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What is Tag Management?

Tag management is a way to add, edit, and remove tags from your website. The most common forms of tags (small piece of code) are for web analytics, search engine marketing, ad serving, and testing; however, there are many other types. These tags are usually in the form of JavaScript. Tag management systems provide you with flexibility to combine these tags into a single tag and control the deployment of the tag from a console, not directly on the website.

Do I need Tag Management?

In my opinion, it depends on the type of website (content management systems or “hard coded” websites), your marketing tactics, website performance, security policy, and business strategies. If you are not proactively looking to measure all marketing initiatives, then you’re not ready for tag management and you need to start measuring. If you have more than 1 million pageviews to your website and 3 different types of JavaScript or tags on the website, then you might want to consider tag management. In addition, if you have specific needs such as poor load-times, industry security issues, or to make a strategic decision to empower your marketing team, I would recommend looking into a tag management system.

Types of Tags supported by Tag Management Solutions

How it works: Common Approaches of Tag Management

There is a variety of implementation methodologies, but most vendors use client-side tag implementation. A few use server-side tag management and a combination of client-side & server-side tag management. Both options use JavaScript tags; however, the main difference refers to where most tags are fired, either at the browser or server level.

Why Tag Management?

Most tag management solutions have partners with prebuilt common tags to implement quickly and save you time. There are often workflow and user administration features to manage users and processes to manage quality assurance as well as approvals to launch tags. The uses of simplified user interfaces make it easy for everyone to use the tool. There are also reports to see if the tags are working effectively. Many vendors give you additional features for auditing, conversion analysis, and attribution modeling.

Recommendations for Tag Management by Business type

  1. For small businesses that need tag management, I would recommend Google Tag Manager. It’s free and it should provide you with the basic necessities of tag management with align with your marketing tactics.

  2. For mid-sized businesses with multiple tags, 1-10 million pageviews, and a need for tag templates, I would recommend QuBit. It has native reporting with API features and about 50 tag templates for ease of use. It’s fairly priced and has options for self-service or hosted management.

  3.  For enterprise businesses with multiple tags, mobile devices, security issues and more, I would recommend Ensighten. It has hybrid deployment options with additional modules such as mobile or privacy. It’s more expensive but worth the security features. There’s a one-time flat implementation fee plus the cost of pageviews.

Action Items to move forward with Tag Management

  • Take inventory of your tags and future tagging opportunities.

  • Review tag management solutions that meet your business’s needs.

  • Do your research on possible vendors & demo the solutions.

  • Select a solution for your business.

  • Find two tag management champions: Business side & IT.