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Top 10 Google Analytics Features to Measure Your Marketing

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With so much industry emphasis on things like Big Data and Attribution Modeling, it can be a bit daunting for newcomers to the world of digital analytics to gain a proper foothold. That’s why we decided to put together a free webinar back in early November covering some of the top features in Google Analytics. Our presentation offered the best ways for you to obtain the insights that drive better marketing and a better user experience on and off your website.

In this webinar, we covered a host of features and functionality in Google Analytics, including:

  1. Multichannel Funnels
  2. Content Experiments
  3. Social Media Reporting
  4. Real-Time Reporting
  5. Custom Reports
  6. Shortcuts
  7. Annotations
  8. Webmaster Tools Integration
  9. Visitor Flow Report
  10. Email Integration

This webinar is now available for free on DaBrian Marketing Group’s YouTube channel, so we decided to share it with you today. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show! And if you like what you see, or have some suggestions for us, please leave a comment below!

“The 4 D’s of Web Design” to Help Drive Sales

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Web Design is arguably the most important aspect of internet marketing. “A recent study found that 48% of online shoppers viewed a branded website as the most trustworthy source of information.”Although Search Engine Optimization is often referred to as the foundation of it all, without a website the implementation of SEO or any other internet marketing component would be pointless. With that being said, a good web design can help businesses drive sales and increase their overall return on investment. It’s 2013 for God’s sake!!!  That means it’s time to ditch the websites that read like brochures and start creating websites that are going to attract, engage, and convert your target audience. So, what does an exceptional web design look like? Here is what I like to call “The 4 D’s of Design” to help you create the right website to meet your company’s needs and drive sales for your business:

1)    DECISION. The first thing you need to do is decide what your brand, look, and feel should look like. Collaborate with your peers and colleagues and figure out what would be best for your organization. Remember, your website is an extension of your company so make sure it reflects as such.

2)    DEFINITION. It’s also important that you define yourself as an organization. Meaning, make sure your company has a documented and unified mission, vision, and purpose. It is important that your website conveys who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you can help your target audience.

3)    DIRECTION. The user experience is one of the most important aspects of any good web design. If the user is not comfortable with their experience on the site, then they are most likely going to bounce. Make sure that your visitors are able to navigate through your site and find exactly what they are looking for in a timely matter. The key to a good website is the right combination of fluidity, simplicity, and creativity.

4)    DIFFERENTIATION. There are many organizations out there who believe they have great websites. However, their site isn’t really saying or doing anything that their competitors haven’t already said or done. In order to attract and retain more visitors, it is important that your organization differentiates itself from the competition. What gives you that competitive edge? Understand what sets you apart from your competitors, and then make the most of it.

Once you have a solid website in place, you can then begin to explore additional internet marketing components. The “4 D’s of Design” are by no means all it takes to create a good website. However, by adhering to these four basic steps it will point you in the right direction toward helping your business drive more sales.

If you would like to learn more about how web design can help your business drive sales, please leave us a comment below or call our office at 610-743-5602.

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!

How Implementing SEO Can Help Drive Sales

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What is Search Engine Optimization? Believe it or not, there are still business owners who have no clue what SEO is. Or maybe they have an awareness, but they are either too scared or not interested enough to see the benefits in it. Well, today I’m going talk about how vital implementing SEO is for your business and how it can help drive sales.

SEO “The Foundation”

When it comes to Internet Marketing, SEO is the foundation. Without optimizing and having the most relevant content on your site, it might be difficult to drive the most traffic and get the most engagement from your current and potential customers. Implementing SEO techniques will help get your business’s website to the top of the search engine rankings and reduce your costs per lead or acquisition by establishing relevant content and quality links.

Link Building is “King”

Speaking of links….links can point to information on the same webpage or another webpage. Link building is your business’s effort to create links that point to your page or pages. And in the world of SEO, Link building is “King.” Without an effective link building strategy that is consistent with your company’s on-page optimization, SEO cannot be accomplished.

Optimize for Opportunities

Optimizing your website’s content will provide your company the best opportunity to gain more traffic and ultimately drive conversions. It would also be greatly beneficial to optimize based on customer segments and seasonality as well. For example, an insurance company would focus on their recreational vehicle insurance during the warmer months of the year. This practice will help to keep your site’s content even more relevant and thus more likely to be highly-ranked in the search results.

So, how can implementing SEO help drive sales? As I mentioned earlier, by implementing SEO and optimizing your website’s content, you’ll be able to create more relevancy and improve your overall search rankings. The higher you are ranked in the search results, the more likely you are to generate more overall site traffic. Ultimately, the more site traffic that you generate translates to a greater chance that a user is going to convert and buy your product or service.

If you would like to learn more about how implementing SEO can help your business drive sales, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

Not Segmenting Your Data? Turn in Your Gun & Badge

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"Market segmentation is a natural result of the vast differences among people."

– Donald Norman (author of “The Design of Everyday Things” – excellent read! I’ll never look at doors the same way again.)

Donald nailed it when it comes to customer segments. Your customers are all unique. They all have their own interests and motivations for looking at your product and service offerings. You (hopefully) use your analytics data to gain insights for improving marketing initiatives. So why wouldn’t you arrange your data in a manner that captures these differences in motivation and behavior? Analysis of all-encompassing data can yield some interesting sticking points, however it can just as easily mislead you with regards to customer behavior.

What Can Be Done to Avoid This?

As marketing professionals and analysts, it is our duty to get to the information that leads to more effective campaigns. So if you haven’t considered segmenting your data, here are four steps to take to get it done in your web analytics tools.

  1. Look at your high-level offerings. Before jumping into the creation of segments in your solution, it is a good idea to take a few steps back. First look at your organization from a high level. What are the core service and product offerings of your organization? How do your target audience and customer demographics align with these service offerings? This information will give you the foundation on which to base your analytics customer segments. If you already have this figured out, great! Move on to the next step.

  2. Identify touch-points with your customer segments. Now that you know who your customer segments are, it’s time to determine how your analytics solution will identify them. For this, you’ll want to identify how they are discovering your brand. In the case of web analytics, are customers in a particular segment arriving via search engines (organic or paid)? If so, what search phrases did they use? What landing pages did they use? Use the trending you see with these questions to create the rules for each segment.

  3. Create your segments! You’ve identified your segments and how you can find them in your analytics data. Now it’s time to set up these rules in your solution. In the case of Google Analytics, set up the proper Include rules using Regular Expressions for related search phrases and landing pages.

  4. Make sure the segments actually work! At this point you may have put some significant time and effort into creating these customer segments. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste. Make sure it separates and organizes your data properly. Test them with different date ranges to ensure the results are somewhat consistent and make sense.

As modern day analysts and marketers, most of us do our best not to think in silos. This mentality should translate over when it comes to data analysis. Though some questions may warrant looking at high-level, all-encompassing data, the best insights will come from segmentation. Adapting these tips to your own process should help you discover hidden gems for converting more customers.

Have some other helpful tips for segmentation of data? Feel free to leave a comment and share the wealth! Also be sure to follow us on Twitter (link to the right) to stay up to date on the latest tips for better analysis.