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Daniel Laws

5 Tips to Jump Start Your Mobile Analytics

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Danny Laws, our principal owner, senior digital strategist, and chief dreadlocks connoisseur, covers his top tips to adopting mobile analytics*.
 
Learn to get your strategy in gear, your solutions configured, your reporting streamlined, and more!

Hi, my name’s Danny Laws. I’m the principal owner of DaBrian Marketing Group. I’m also one of the co-chairs with Philadelphia Digital Analytics Association. I want speak to you today about mobile analytics. One of the things that we’re talking about mobile analytics right now in the space is that mobile search is on the rise, mobile usage is on the rise, whether it be a
tablet or a smartphone, and we want to talk about how to jump start your ability to collect that information and what you should be considering in order to get you moving down the path.

The first thing that we recommend here is connecting mobile analytics with business value. So what we talk about from a business perspective is, are we looking to increase brand awareness from a mobile perspective; are we looking to cut costs; are we looking to become more efficient. By walking down this endeavor of mobile analytics, is it going to help position the company better in the long run? Those are some of the things you need to be considering from a value perspective.

The next thing that we recommend is is aligning the mobile analytics with the overall strategy, so whether it be a lead generation audit, part of an auditing process, part of discovery or education for internal purposes, you want to align that back to the organization’s high-level goals and objectives to make sure that it’s part of the plan, and that it’s going to influence what’s happening within the plan.

So the next component would be implementation or to implement with best practices. There are number of analytical platforms as well as mobile analytics platforms you can leverage in order to capture the data. What I say to that is “Great, but at the same time we need to configure, we need to implement best practices.” We need to implement the appropriate filters, the appropriate segments and slice and dice the data, get the cleanest possible view that we can in order to better analyze that information.

So you want to make sure that you’re implementing with best practices regardless of whether or not it’s Google, Webtrends, SiteCatalyst, you name it. You want to make sure that everything is configured appropriately or to the best of its ability.

The next thing that I would say is to measure what matters to the mobile audience specifically, so that you can better impact what’s happening to those customers and for what they’re seeing, whether be resolution, whether it be device, whether it be operating system, you name it. You want to be measuring what matters to that audience, and when we speak to that we talk about the journey. So as an example, you might want to take into account the device, the behavior, the outcomes, and then analysis of the information that’s happening from your mobile audience and consider what’s happening, and take that into account.

The last component of this is to make decisions that impact customers. Ideally, user behaviors simplify the process, make it easier for them, make it a better process overall to help impact their ability to download information, to view information, to make a purchase, to fill out a form, whatever it might be.

Once you get to this process, it’s important that you continue to target, whether it be from a device perspective, whether it be from a platform perspective, you want to target and test what you can to improve and continue to impact customers in the way that they interact with your mobile site, with your site, whether be from an informational perspective or from an eCommerce perspective, to be able to impact those components.

With that being said, my final recommendation is just to do it. Pull yourself together, allocate some time, get the ball rolling, and seize the moment while search traffic is on the rise and people are continuously getting access to mobile. If you have any questions, any comments, don’t hesitate to comment on our blog, to hit us up on Twitter, or to reach out to us direct. Thank you very much, hope you have a good day. Good hunting.

Why Your Company Needs a Digital Analytics Framework

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Regardless of how big or small your organization is, you’ve got data (sales, financial, customer, CRM, etc.), and you need a structure to inform how you collect or report on the data. This reason needs to be logical and ultimately impact your bottom line as well as multiple departments or individuals within a company.

What is a Digital Analytics Framework?

According to Webster’s dictionary, a framework is the basic or conceptual structure of something. In the case of digital analytics, it is generally the basic structure of applying digital analytics or web analytics to business goals and objectives. This terminology is popular with digital analytics consulting companies and “enterprise businesses,” but severely lacking outside of the industry. Digital analytics consultants such as Semphonic, e-Nor, and Tatvic have clear examples of digital analytics frameworks.

Data and Big Data Aren't Magical

A digital analytics framework is a necessary part of driving success with analytics.

Simply put, data and big data require a “basic structure” to handle them (i.e. a framework). At some point, your business must apply the digital analytics framework within the business. If you’ve started or manage a business without planning, a competitive analysis, research, a structure, or people, then it’s likely that you’re missing a fundamental framework as well. The analytics framework acts as the guiding structure to data, big data, integration, people, and the results (proven by analytics, obviously!). If the information you capture and integrate, the applications or tools to use, and the personnel you hire aren’t based upon a framework, you don’t have a direction!

But Where’s the Value?

When you’ve got a boatload of data all over the place, but no freaking clue as to how or what to pull together, a framework’s value shines through. For many businesses, this is the equivalent of finding $5 in your pants or shirt pocket every morning. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up! Here are a few real examples:

Reduce Your cost per new customer, Lead or Sale by $5

With this goal, an analytics framework provides the structure to collect information on new customers, identify the source of each lead, and explore possible integrations to identify trends as well as opportunities to cut costs by $5 per new customer.

Increase lead generation, but with less marketing budget

If you don’t plan to collect the lead generation data, lead source, cost per lead, and have people to analyze the data, then it’s difficult to identify the tactics driving leads and at a lower cost than others.

So, how can you begin to incorporate a framework? Start by leveraging your existing assets. For example, I spoke with a Business to Business (B2B) company last week that has a purchase lead list, telemarketing services, and is tracking the leads in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The scary part is that after the telemarketing department schedules a meeting and the sales reps follow-up, the leads enter a “black hole”! By employing this approach, so does their profitability and growth.

Do you remember the saying, “If I knew what I know now, I would have……?”. The value of a set framework is in cutting costs, identifying opportunities, capitalizing on competitive advantages, and adjusting to shifts in industry-wide trends.

But Data and Big Data Don't Apply to my Business

I’m going to put it in the simplest terms:

  • Overlooking data will result in a wasted marketing budget
  • Not evaluating competitors’ marketing efforts will give them the upper hand
  • Ignoring the industry will negatively impact your competitive position

Steps to Move Toward an Analytics Framework

I would recommend that you start by revisiting your company’s goals and objectives. Then, you should take inventory of all your data points across the company. For example, you should list the tools that you use for the following items: sales, CRM, QuickBooks, email marketing platforms, ecommerce platforms, digital analytics, etc. You should also compile examples of all of the reports that the business is using.

Identify 3-5 business related questions that will help you to achieve your goals and objectives that you don’t currently have insight into. You should review the latest industry privacy and legal requirements regarding data storage for your industry. The goal here is to acquire information, develop a strategy, and streamline the discovery process.

Finally, pick up the phone and call 3 digital analytics professionals for an estimate. In many cases, it will require more than one person to create the strategy, implement the technology, integrate reports, and identify insights. Don’t fall into the trap of asking a marketing professional to build an analytics framework. Think of it this way—you wouldn’t ask an electrician to build you a house!

Have questions about tying your company’s data sources together? Drop us a line or leave a comment!

Social Media—Risky Business or Filled With Opportunities?

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Oh, No. Managing Risk and Compliance

One of the first things I hear when talking to insurance and trust companies about social media is “managing risk and compliance.” Oddly enough, nearly half of these prospects don’t have social media guidelines or internal procedures to handle a social media meltdown, should one occur. What should you do when a client or prospect starts badmouthing you or your company? What’s been successful in the industry, and what should you be doing? To me, not being able to answer these questions sounds like the ultimate risk.

So, what’s the solution for managing social media for insurance agents or financial advisors? “I’ve got it,” shouts one of your over-zealous team members. “Let’s hire a college grad (with a hint of sarcasm)! They know this stuff and interact on social media all the time.”

Well that’s a heck of a plan (again, sarcasm) because, in most cases, your new social media “guru” doesn’t have knowledge of your brand, industry regulations, business-level social media platforms, or any real marketing experience to act on your behalf. Doesn’t this sound like a risky compliance nightmare, too?

So, Where Do You Start?

  • Start with a Social Media Strategy. What do you actually hope to accomplish with social media? Do you plan to be proactive with acquiring new clients or just limit the compliance risks?
  • Set your own internal “insurance policy” by getting social media guidelines in place. In most cases, this should’ve happened yesterday.
  • Protect your brand from negative claims and reviews with social media procedures (and don’t forget to claim all your assets).

Social Media: The Land of Opportunity

Whether you’re an individual agent/advisor or part of a company, you need to get involved with your prospects and customers. Insurance and trust companies often have internal sources or agencies working to develop the brand, but agents typically miss the boat on social media. In my opinion, insurance agents and financial advisors should be building their personal brand at the local level as everything else comes together. Don’t forget—even if you move on to greener pastures, you can always take your personal brand (and your existing relationships) with you.

Social media insurance groups
A simple search can unlock opportunities in your personal network.

Engage with your prospects and clients to build relationships as well as your visibility among their connections. Social media is a great way to listen for new opportunities, new trends, and your competitors. For example: One of your clients announces on social that they’re having a baby. Isn’t that a green light for life insurance, college savings plan (529), or an update to their beneficiaries?

Put simply, not engaging in social media is risky business. The fact of the matter is that your prospects, clients, and competitors are already there, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t be.

Got questions? Tweet our team @dabrianmarket or me (@daniellawsjr). Let’s keep the conversation going!

Sequential Messaging in Digital Advertising

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Defining Sequential Messaging

If you’re a follower of @DaBrianMarket or @DanielLawsJr, you have most likely seen our past tweets about sequential messaging. Sequential Messaging is generally a technique where messages are recorded in a preset order and executed individually based on the each activation of a device (tablet, smartphone, etc.).

Sequential messaging has been a hot topic for us on Twitter.

So, What’s the big deal with sequential messaging?

Sequential Messaging has an opportunity to leverage the initial user interaction into a micro-conversion and target high quality leads. As an example, a shopper would click on a banner ad on a newspaper site for a new tablet. This action identifies the shopper as being interested in a new tablet and generates a series of sequential messages specific about the new tablet. The series of sequential messages could be on banners, emails, and perhaps in search engines. In some cases, the ad mix can be modified based on the shopper’s engagement with them.

What are the Future Possibilities of Sequential Messaging?

I think the future of sequential messaging is positive but contingent on the availability of technology to executive effective campaigns. I think there’s an opportunity to “connect the dots between digital advertising, TV advertising, mobile and gaming consoles.” It’s going to get easier to customize messages across devices with online tool-based logins, smart TVs, mobile devices, and gaming consoles offering more functionality and capabilities.

Take me for example. I’ve got a Samsung smart TV, Galaxy S4, Kindle, and more. My cell phone, which is connected to my Kindle, can change my TV channel. Thus, there’s no reason advertisers can’t create customized sequential messages across multiple devices. The capabilities of ad technology will be important to align with customer behaviors across multiple devices in order to customize the user’s overall experience with the brand. More specifically, it’s important that we obtain insights from sequential messaging to increase the effectiveness of marketing budgets and the ability to increase lead generation or sales.

What are the Challenges of Sequential Messaging in Digital Advertising?

In my opinion, one the main challenges will be measuring the effectiveness of sequential messaging in digital advertising and optimizing the process. In addition, the measurement of sequential messaging along with A/B or Multivariate testing across multiple devices. With the increasing importance on customer privacy, it will become increasingly challenging to track prospective customers, and with the recent Target data security breach, customers are becoming aware of the negative aspects of data collection and value their privacy. Furthermore, the tracking of sequential messaging will most likely require the tracking of customers’ unique logins as well as combining the data on their behaviors across multiple devices. Without educating customers on the benefits of doing so, it could be seen as intrusive and encounter a legal backlash from customers.

What about Measurement?

Last month in AdWeek, I read an article from Garett Sloane of Omnicom Digital which spoke of “sequential messaging as digital advertising’s next act.” I agree with Sloane’s point that sequential message could be the next step in digital advertising, but the execution requires powerful technology as well as perfect coordination. I think there will be a few businesses that look at sequential messaging as the next buzzword (right next to “big data”).

No matter the approach, it still needs to solve a business problem. Without measureable ad technology and the capabilities to collect the data, we’re going to have challenges measuring whether or not a message is resonating with the “right” customers. The right message, right person, and right time require the right analytical approach to improve the impact that sequential messaging has on delivering return-on-investment.

Is sequential messaging on your organization’s radar? Share your thoughts in the comments!

A Guide to Data-Informed SEO Storytelling

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How our SEO Tools led us Astray

Experience has shown that for a large portion of business owners, a glaring issue exists with the accepted perception of search engine optimization and the plethora of assistive software suites. Everyone seems to tout that high rankings and “the top spot on Google” are the primary goals associated with an SEO campaign, so vendors make solutions to fit those expectations. The problem is that these tools are proving ineffective at impacting businesses’ actual goals and objectives because they don’t help answer some fundamental questions, including:

  • Why is the business choosing to explore search engine marketing tactics?
  • Why are high rankings the primary goal?
  • In what way(s) do rankings specifically impact future marketing efforts?
  • How will SEO be justified from a budgeting standpoint?
  • Where is the connection between SEO and more leads and sales?

Getting Back to Basics with Goals and Objectives

The first step toward finding the answer to the questions above falls to outlining goals and objectives. Generally speaking, these goals and objectives help businesses enhance their “kwan” (And yes, that was a Jerry Maguire reference!). An example of a business goal would be to grow sales. An example of an objective would be to grow sales among new customers through organic search traffic by 25% of the next 12 months. Note the distinct differences here. While goals are very general statements, objectives provide additional context with which appropriate metrics can be identified.

It is critical that all key stakeholders agree and sign-off on the business goals and objectives because they’ll form the foundation for the next step toward data-informed storytelling: identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Regardless of whether you work for an agency or an in-house marketing team, it always boils down to, “Did we make money or lose money as a result of our efforts?” For that, proper measurement planning is essential.

KPI Mapping that Aligns with Goals and Objectives

KPIs represent the way by which progress is measured regarding a marketing campaign. When defining these metrics, it’s important to also identify reasonable thresholds. That way, appropriate action can be taken if the numbers fall above or below your expectations. By aligning the KPIs with the aforementioned goals and objectives, it will help the key higher-ups to see SEO’s tangible value. Figure 1 (below) shows a very generic mapping of a goal and objective with a possible choice of KPI. If you complete this process, it will give you a better understanding of what data needs to be collected to show the impact the SEO is having on your business.

KPI mapping for Sales Growth
Figure 1 is a simplified version of mapping sales growth for new customers via organic search traffic and potential outcomes from this audience.

The Case for a Measurement Plan

The fact of the matter is that with all of this data making its way into your SEO campaigns, you’re going to need analytics to effectively capture your metrics and provide a way to visualize progress (and tell a truly impactful story). This will require an approach and a plan of action to accurately collect the data necessary for reporting. One of the most simple, but effective approaches can be found on Occam’s Razor By Avanish Kaushik. Just be sure to thoroughly document what data you’re collecting, how, why, and provide an example of the output. It should help everyone not only understand what you’re trying to show, but also offer them the chance to make changes to the approach if necessary.

Analytics Implementation

Google Analytics is a commonly used solution for analyzing this type of information. It’s important that you implement the measurement plan accurately and evaluate the data that’s being collected for reporting. A good place to start is the setup checklist and starter guide provided by Google. There are also numerous videos available on the Google Analytics YouTube channel.

Reporting

Using GA’s more advanced features as our primary example, there are multiple opportunities to not only streamline your reporting process, but also add deeper dimensions to your data-driven “story.” Creating advanced segments, custom filters, and dashboards can bring to light information you may not have otherwise seen. Exploring deeper into the data you’ve collected can make for more established insights, which lead to greater impact among your audience.

Custom SEO segments in Google Analytics

For your SEO campaigns, this could mean creating a dashboard showing correlations between site visit metrics and organic keywords or pages per visit organized by geographical location. With a little analytical know-how, you’ll have no problem tying your data back to your high-level goals and objectives.

SEO traffic data in Google Analytics
Conversions broken down by traffic source.

Figure 3 and 4 are example of items that might be found in your SEO performance dashboard.

Conclusion

There is a big misconception surrounding SEO for the average uninformed business owner, VP of marketing, or IT professional. On the frontlines, we always seem to hear business professionals talk about rankings, but they rarely care to understand why their business is even paying for or considering paying for SEO services. We still hear that the need for “visits” or more “hits” to the websites is the be-all end-all. Rather than the end in and of itself, SEO provides the means towards achieving unique business goals. The story of this journey from campaigns and tactics to business success is told through data, first and foremost.
Have your SEO tools and processes led you on the path to righteousness or dishonorable data? Let us know in the comments below!

SEO Tips to Increase Visibility and Stop Content Jackers

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Most of the time when we talk to prospective clients about SEO, the first things they think of are keywords, descriptions, and page titles. Now, just about every marketing person on the planet thinks they’re an SEO expert. Yeah right, just like everyone that can code HTML is a web developer too. The point is that SEO goes well beyond descriptions and titles; in fact, SEO includes a number of factors that impact rankings and these factors are always changing.

With that said, I’m going to cover a few “off-page SEO” tips to increase organic search visibility and stop people for stealing your content without giving you credit for it.

Use Rich Snippets for SEO

Rich snippets are a type of structured data that allow webmasters to

mark up content in ways that provide information to the search engines. Depending on the scenario, the websites that leverage rich snippets see better results or enhanced results in the search engines. An example of enhanced results could be reviews or ratings in the results. In general, this can lead to better click-through rates. Schema.org provides several types of examples of data that can benefit from structured markup which includes people, products, reviews, businesses, events, and more. Google has a tool called “Structured Data Testing Tool” to preview or get help with markups. In my opinion, you should read more details on schema.org to understanding it better before implementing.

structured-data-tool

Improve your Load-Time

You want to minimize web server response times to limit slow page loads. Remember that response time is going to vary from page load to page load. If possible, I would recommend a good dedicated server and an onsite webmaster to proactively improve server response times. Whenever possible, I would also recommend optimizing images, but not at the risk of poor-quality or low resolution visuals. There are a number of solutions to help with this, from Smush.it™ to some of Adobe’s Products. As you’re programming your website, you should consider opportunities to combine/compact CSS, optimize the order of CSS, move items to the head of the document, etc. This will all help to improve load time, SEO, and the user experience. Load-time is a factor that’s associated with search rankings, and Google Analytics offers a direct link to their PageSpeed Insights to test your site’s pages.

Have a URL Strategy

When you redesign a website, it’s usually due to updated branding or to support new business related functionality on the site. The linking structure, internal site links, and link building are usually on the minds of the webmaster or SEO person, but it’s important that you carry over as much link equity as possible by using redirects, a custom 404 page, and canonical links. Canonical links help to communicate to the search engines which page should be credited as the original. You should also use absolute links (“https://dabrianmarketing.com/blog.html”) instead of relative links (“/blog.html”) in the programming to limit scraping or “jacking” of your content. Remember that this content should be consistent with your updated branding and still support your business’s needs.

Conclusion

In the development phrase of your redesign or continued SEO, you should consider the impact that technical items will have on your brand’s reach and visibility. Furthermore, it’s important to categorize your business and products / services with rich snippets. I would recommend that you update your XML sitemap and submit to search engines as well as directories to reinforce ownership. You can even take it a step further with a good copyright and terms of use policy.

Take a look at the off-page SEO, improve your URL strategy, try rich snippets and try the PageSpeed insight tool to limit the number of issues that might be adversely impacting organic search traffic.