Archive: Advertising

Google Analytics is a free web analytics application that is quickly becoming one of the most widely used web analytics tools around. A common misconception that many people have is that GA can only be used to track Google AdWords. That’s simply not true. GA can be used to track any online marketing activity. And not only will Google Analytics track online marketing, it will also identify the conversion events that your online marketing creates.

There are two distinct steps to configure Google Analytics to successfully track online marketing activities:

1. Tag your advertising links
2. Create goals in Google Analytics

Before we can really get into how to track online marketing we must understand what we can track. With Google Analytics we can track 5 attributes of our online marketing campaigns. Each of these attributes provides insight into what is, and what is not, working, and are the foundation for making good decisions when adjusting your online marketing activities.

5 Aspects of Online Marketing

• The Campaign: The campaign is the high level marketing activity that you’re conducting. Think of it as a bucket that holds other activities. For example, you may conduct a big “back to school” marketing campaign. This campaign might involve an email blast to your newsletter subscribers, a special paid search campaign, and some banner ads. All of these activities are part of the “fall-sale” marketing campaign.
• The Medium: The medium is the mechanism that is used to push the message to the customer. Continuing the fall sale example, the campaign has multiple mediums because we’re using multiple mechanisms to reach the consumer. We’re using email, banner ads and paid search. All are different mechanisms for pushing the message out.
• The Source: The source identifies who is delivering the message to the customer and helps us better understand the medium. For example, there might be three sources for the paid search component of our campaign: “Google” for Google AdWords, “Yahoo!” for Yahoo! Search Marketing and “MSN” for Microsoft AdCenter.
• Term: The term is only used for paid search tracking and identifies the keyword that the visitor used in their search. It should be noted that you do not need to use a term. Every search engine will, by default, pass a keyword to your site and Google Analytics will capture and store that keyword. However, not every search engine will pass along the exact term that the visitor entered.
• Content: The content attribute is optional and stores information about the ad that the visitor clicked on. For example, we may want to send out two versions of our email newsletter during the back to school campaign. The emails will be sent at the same time, but will contain different formatting. We say these emails have different content. Using Google Analytics we can identify which ad performed better for us.

So now that we know what attributes of our online marketing we can track, how do we actually do it? We use a process called link tagging. Link tagging involves adding query string parameters to the destination URLs used in online ads. It doesn’t matter where the URL is used, it could be in an email, a banner ad or a paid search ad. If the URL has the appropriate query string parameters then Google Analytics can identify which ad the visitor clicked on. Once Google Analytics knows which ad the visitor responded to it stores the information in a cookie on the visitor’s machine. From that point forward, as long as the cookie exists, Google Analytics can connect the visitor’s actions with the originating ad.

We have one query string parameter for each campaign attribute.

All you need to do is assign a value to each parameter and attach it to the URL used in your online ad. What should you use for values? It doesn’t matter! Whatever you place in your parameters will be extracted by Google Analytics and appear in your reports. With that said, there are some best practices that will make your data easier to use.

1. Avoid white spaces. Separate words with a dash or an underscore.
2. Make sure that whoever is going to use the reports can understand the meaning of each value. For example, a value of ‘back-to-school-2007’ is easier to understand than ‘BTS07’.
3. Be consistent. Create a naming convention for each parameter and stick to it. Don’t use CPC for some paid search mediums and PPC for others.
4. Be aware that case matters. ‘CPC’ is different from ‘cpc’.
5. Track your values from one campaign to another. I suggest using a spreadsheet to keep track of all the parameters you create. I like to use a Google Spreadsheet because it is easy to share with co-workers and clients. Add a column for each of the campaign parameters, a date column and a note column. If you’re savvy with a spreadsheet then use the CONCATENATE function to automatically create tagged URLs. You can find an example on my blog, Anyalytics Talk.

How about some examples? Let’s look at a few links that will be used in our fictional back to school campaign.

The great thing about link tagging is that Google Analytics creates a report based on each parameter. For example, there is a Campaign report that identifies all the values in your utm_campaign parameter. You can then drill into the campaign to see which sources, identified by the utm_source variable, were better at driving traffic. I’ll discuss how to use these reports below.

Here’s another tip. If you’re unsure about your tagged links, run a small test. Send an email to 10 co-workers that includes a tagged link. Ask them all to click on the link. Wait a few hours and then log into Google Analytics. You should see data from the link in the email.

Once the tagged links are published Google Analytics will start collecting data.

I can’t stress how important it is to tag your links. It is the single most important step to tracking your online marketing. If your links are not tagged you won’t be able to track the traffic from your online marketing activities. Un-tagged links is one of the most common problems I see when working with clients.

A Note About Google AdWords

I just spent all that time explaining link tagging and now I’m going to tell you that you do not need to do it … sort of. Google Analytics is integrated with Google AdWords and one of the benefits is a feature called auto-tagging. Auto-tagging automatically adds a unique parameter to all of the destination URLs in your AdWords campaigns. There’s no need to go through the link tagging process, the unique parameter is used by Google to identify the ad that the visitor clicked on. Here’s an example of what an auto-tagged link looks like:

http://www.google.com.com/analytics/?gclid=CLTrqPOc2o4CFSBMGgod7ljIAg

Google Analytics decodes the unique parameter (named gclid) and creates the appropriate values for campaign, medium, source, term and content. The campaign will be the name of the campaign as defined in AdWords. The medium will be ‘cpc’ and the source will be ‘google’. Auto-tagging has a number of implications that you should take into consideration when tagging your non-AdWords links:

1. As I mentioned above, Google will automatically apply a medium of ‘cpc’ to your AdWords campaigns. If you want all of your paid search data to appear together (which you do) then your non-AdWords paid search links must also have a medium of ’cpc’’. This will cause GA to group all paid search traffic together.
2. The value for the content variable will be the name of the ad that you’ve created in AdWords. An ad with the title ‘Buy Widgets Now!’ will have a content value of ‘Buy Widgets Now!’.
3. The campaign value will be the campaign name that you define in AdWords. If this campaign has multiple source or mediums you want to make sure that your manually tagged links have the same value for campaign.

Remember, auto-tagging only works for AdWords. You still need to tag other paid search URLs.

Goals

Another extremely important step in tracking the success of your online marketing is creating goals. Goals are outcomes that we want our site visitors to achieve. Every website has a purpose, it could be to sell a product, provide information to the visitor or generate a sales lead. Measuring these outcomes is vital to web analytics and evaluating the performance of online marketing. To measure an outcome we need to configure goals in Google Analytics.

Goals in Google Analytics are simply pageviews. To set up a goal you need to identify the page on your website that indicates that a visitor has reached the desired outcome. To create a goal simply navigate to the goal setting for a specific profile and paste the URL in the Goal URL field for a profile.

There is more to setting up a goal. You could create a funnel to show the visitor’s path to the goal. But I’m not going to discuss advanced goal configuration here as I’m already pushing my word count limit. You can read more about goals and how they are configured in the Google Analytics help section or on my blog Analytics Talk.

Once you create goals, and once you tag your links, Google Analytics will automatically identify which marketing activities are generating goals. There’s no special configuration necessary to connect goals to marketing activities. GA will do that for you.

Analyzing the Data

You’ve tagged all your advertising links. You’ve created your goals. Now what? It’s time to evaluate your online marketing campaigns. This is the fun part. As I mentioned above Google Analytics creates a report for each of the query parameters that we attach to the URLs in our ads. Each report provides valuable information about the traffic and conversions that the markting generated.

Let’s start with the campaign report. It provides a high level view of how the campaign is performing. Google Analytics provides some standard metrics indicating how much traffic the campaign is generating (visits), how engaged that traffic is (pageviews per visit and average time on site) and how good the campaign is at attracting new visitors (% new visits). Campaigns are usually focused on attracting new customers to the website (which should yield a high % of new visits) or getting existing customers to come back (which should yield a low % of new visits).

Remember, these numbers just tell us about the traffic. We also want to understand if the ad generated any conversions. To view these metrics we use the Goal Conversions tab.

You’ll notice that the columns of the table have changed. We now see conversion rates for the various goals that were configured. But let’s go a bit deeper. Each tagged advertising link has a campaign, a medium and a source. We can drill into each campaign and evaluate how well the various sources and mediums are working. First, click on a campaign in the Campaign column.

We’re now looking at summary information for this campaign. I can use the Segment drop down box to view the sources and mediums associated with the campaign.

You can see how I’m evaluating what drove the success of my campaign. Was it a particular partner (i.e source) or a particular medium (i.e mechanism of communicating with the customer)? Again, I can use the Site Usage tab to measure how well a source or medium does at generating traffic and the Goal Conversion tab to measure the conversions for each ad.

The analysis does not end here. There are other reports that help us compare the effectiveness of our marketing in other ways. One of my favorate reports is the All Traffic Sources reports. This report creates a master list of all of the sources and mediums that drove traffic to the site. This report is great for comparing ongoing marketing activities.

We can dig into each campaign even further using the Segmentation feature in Google Analytics. Let’s say we want to know where, geographically, our campaign visitors are located. I can select a campaign from the Campaigns reports and then use the segment dropdown box located at the top of he report.

If I choose ‘city’ Google Analytics will show me which cities generated the traffic for the campaign. This is particularly useful if you’re doing any geo-targeted advertising.

So there you have it. Remember, you must tag your links and create goals to accurately measure the performance of your online campaigns. If you do you’ll have really valuable data to when evaluating your online marketing activities.

Marketing is one of those words that more often than not, gives engineers hives. Use ‘marketing’ in a presentation at a technology conference and expect every subsequent word to be met with suspicion. I certainly don’t blame people for distrusting marketers. We have a long history of being smarmy and despicable.

I spent the first part of my career trying to come to grips with being a marketer. I actually found the study of marketing and communications fascinating, especially the cultural studies. The understanding was that people were unique and influenced by their personal experiences, and that it was more beneficial to build relationships and learn from these individuals than it was to try and push messages repeatedly until someone picked them up.

However, when I entered the advertising world, that kind of attitude was frowned upon. It wasn’t ’scalable’ and it took too long to accomplish anything. The ROI on a billboard was simple: such and such numbers of eyeballs would suck in the message daily, leading to a certain percentage of others ‘acting on’ that message. It was up to us as a creative team to make that message as compelling and memorable as possible.

But something sat wrong with me in that model. It seemed that there was a huge amount of time and money squandered. It was sort of a ‘throw the paint on the wall and see what sticks’ mentality. The wasted paint was just a part of the equation. There is actually an infamous quote in advertising that “Half of all advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half.”

Compounded with the waste, I just didn’t see any long-term benefits from these campaigns. Sure, you may arrest someone’s attention with an ad that catches them in the subway. They may even be influenced to buy a product or service from it. But these advertising messages have little or nothing to do with the products themselves. They are brainstormed in an agency boardroom, with a team of people often different from those who designed the product. “We care about you” often results in another poor customer experience.

After enough experience with marketing messages misaligned to actual experience, people have grown to totally disregard these messages altogether. And this was years before ’social software’ allowed for word of mouth and peer-to-peer to travel like wildfire around the globe.

Then I read a book that changed my life. Actually, I read a website that was also a published book. The Cluetrain Manifesto, written as a series of philosophical rants by Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine, really hit home for me. Their first thesis, “markets are conversations” summed it all up for me. The future of marketing was not about pushing messages or yelling or broadcasting… they were about having a two-way conversation with your customers.

What Will These Conversations Do For You?

That is where companies get it wrong. It isn’t about you at all. It is about your user/customer. I could go on with the benefits of building relationships rather than SEO campaigns, such as:

1. Longevity and customer retention, not to mention repeat customers

2. Bug tracking and community policing (ie. Flickr’s ‘Flag this photo as “may offend”?’)
3. Amplified word of mouth
4. Built in market research
5. Buying ads is bloody expensive

But I won’t. I could tell you that if you don’t have those conversations, you will probably end up making decisions along the way that will make those few customers you have go away to someone who is listening. But I won’t say that either.

Because you don’t need to know those things. You really have no choice in the matter. You can’t afford not to have that conversation. The only thing that is standing between you and your customers is a blog, a forum, a clearer way of providing feedback, opening up your bug tracking system, or a published email or IM address.

It’s incredibly simple. It’s actually the most natural thing we do. The benefits are immense and it increases customer satisfaction and retention tenfold.

[p.s. it feels darn good, too]

But Is It Scalable?

When you are a humongous corporation with hundreds of customer service staff, you most certainly can empower each and every staff member to empower each and every customer they speak with. You can implement a very expensive customer relationship management system that makes it possible to remember every detail of every transaction and you have the person power to spend individual time with each customer.

But when you are a strappy startup, with three engineers, one non-engineer and an angel-funded project that you give away for free, you don’t have the same resources available to you. So, wouldn’t it be simpler to just buy those ads?

Let me tell you this: scaling issues are the best issues to have. You should be so lucky.

If you need to hire a community manager, you are doing something right. If you need to hire a community team, you seriously rock. There are ways to scale the conversation, and I will talk a bit more about that in future articles, but the first step is opening up those lines of communication today.

How Do You Open Up Communication?

The simplest way to do this is to take a look at how you communicate already. I would never recommend a blog for someone who hates to write or a forum for a group of engineers who have never spent time in one. If you are really efficient with email, put your email address on every page… top and bottom. If you spend all of your time on IM, publish your username on the website.

We’ve advised some of our clients to open up their bug tracking system to the public. Interested parties can see what is being worked on already and add suggestions directly to your process.

Make it incredibly friendly so people feel they can approach you, too. Put photos and bios of all of the members of your team up on your website, with clear contact information. Describe in clear language what ‘part’ of the website everyone is responsible for so customers will know who to contact.

Technology allows us to go further, but this is a start. In the community marketing series that follows this article, I plan to discuss the how of it, the where and when of it, the overall essence of it and the measurement of it.

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Few of us can afford to employ a PR company to get the word out about our new products or services. If you’re lucky you may be able to ask a friend to do it for you but for the most part the job of marketing comes down to you (along with most other things, right?)

It can be a daunting task. Once you’ve mailed all your blogger friends and asked them to post about your new ‘thing’ and pulled in a few favours from some sites, you may be running out of ideas to get yourself noticed.

You could try online advertising. Create a Google Ad campaign and put a daily rate of $5 to ensure you don’t break the bank, or create a banner and do an exchange if you have a high traffic site of your own to bargain with. We’ve all been there.

But if you’ve got no budget for marketing and you can’t afford single display ads or some of the ad networks out there, then you’re going to have to pull some lively rabbits out of the hat if your idea is ever to feature in the favourites of more than just you and your mum.

But there is another way to get yourself noticed – print media. Pah! I hear you say – no one reads magazines anymore. Not true. The magazine industry is still huge, especially when it comes to niche industries. Also, people are not exclusively either online or off. I bet some of you read Wired, and Business 2.0 as well as Vitamin, A List Apart and Signal vs Noise. Magazine circulation figures may not be what they once were, but they still offer valuable marketing real estate for your idea. Not least because they give you the opportunity to connect with potential clients who are not exclusively part of the online world.

So, assuming that you’re not Google and the press isn’t forming an orderly queue to interview you then here are some ideas on how to get mentioned in print media. And by print media I mean magazines, newspapers, trade journals, fanzines and well, even PDF magazines.

Research

Do some research. Read as many magazines and newspapers as you can. If you can’t afford to buy them stand in Borders all day reading them. But either way find out which covers your chosen market. And remember we are talking about your potential customers’ chosen market not yours, so hands off Mac-Porn Monthly.

With magazines it’s helpful to be able to pinpoint the ‘market leader’ within your chosen sector. And by that I mean the most respected and successful magazine. Don’t be fooled by flashy statements like:”Number one magazine for…” this is an empty statement. Look for “The Best Selling magazine in…” – get concrete figures for circulation from relevant bureaux (in the US, Magazine Publishers of America, in the UK, the Audit Bureau of Circulations). Check out how many pages there are in the magazine compared to its competitors: the thickest magazine is more likely to be the market leader. And, nitpicky I know, count how many editorial pages there are versus advertising pages. The more ad pages, the better the magazine is probably doing (financially), which is normally a good indication of how the magazine is viewed in the marketplace. Look at the quality of the adverts: are the big players in your space advertising in this magazine?

Get to know your publication

Buy three issues of the magazine and read it cover to cover.

1. Observe which sections change month on month and which don’t.
2. Make a note of what the cover theme is each month and which words or themes are repeated. Anything that is repeated time and time again on a cover means it’s a core topic for that magazine.
3. From your own research form a picture of who the reader is.
4. Create a profile of a typical advertiser and who they are trying to reach – this will help you understand where most of the magazine’s ad revenue comes from – and also who is currently successful in this market.
5. Imagine your product or service appearing in the mag. Does it fit? Will the readers be interested in it? Can they afford it?

Once you have chosen the publication that is perfect for you and your idea then you are ready to begin your marketing onslaught. First things first: find out who is responsible for which areas of editorial. This may not be clear from the editorial panel so ring the magazine to find out. Speak to the secretary if you can’t speak to the team. The same goes for a newspaper or indeed any other media.

Armed with this information, there are four main ways that you can get the attention of a publication: as an Expert in your field, as an Ideas Machine, by sending a Press Release, or by requesting a Review. We’ll deal with each one in turn.

The Expert

If you are indeed an expert in the topic the magazine is covering then offer yourself up as an expert in the field.

1. Write an e-mail setting out why you are an expert
2. Offer to write for the magazine
3. Offer to be an ‘expert’ who is willing to give quotes or opinions on news stories or feature topics
4. If they ask you to write, or to submit some copy, make sure you fulfil the whole brief (that means headlines!) and send the copy in by 9am on the day of the deadline.

The Ideas Machine

All magazine editors are busy and they need to fill pages with good feature ideas. If you send in enough ideas, one of them will get chosen and the likelihood is they will ask you to write it.

1. Send in all types of ideas (interviews, features, Q&A, columns, tutorials)
2. Don’t write the feature, just send a synopsis of around 100 words
3. Don’t send in news. They already know about it
4. Ask them which ideas they liked and which were way off the mark. Fine-tune them next time to hit the mark.
5. Be polite and don’t hassle the magazine team. If they don’t go for an idea even when you’ve given a good explanation of why you think it’s right for them, it’s simply not going to happen this time.

The Press Release

If you don’t know how to layout a standard press release find one online and copy the format. Use a release from a large and credible company in the chosen industry. Take a look at this from Adobe as an example. Bear in mind that US press releases are laid out differently than say European ones. Choose one layout and stick with it. Remember that to write a press release you must have some ‘news’ to announce. There’s nothing worse than a ‘non’ press release so make sure you have something to say. Here are some dos and don’ts.

Do:

1. Check it for spelling and grammar mistakes
2. Ask a friend to read it through
3. Put your contact details at the bottom
4. Put a link where you can download your logo and photos online
5. Attach the press release as a Word document but also copy and paste the text into the body of the e-mail
6. Send a follow up e-mail in a few days asking if you can provide them with any extra information or images.
7. Check the magazine the following month. They may have used it without telling you.

Don’t:

1. Title your e-mail ‘press release’. Write in the subject line the gist of the release, for example: ‘New photo-sharing website launched’.
2. Send the same e-mail to lots of different magazines – personalise it instead.
3. Cc: your e-mail to the editor as well as the section editor.
4. Attach large image files
5. Call the magazine to find out if they got your press release – they did.
6. Get pissed off if they use the press release without telling you.

The Review

Be sure that your product is in tip-top condition, fully finished, out of Beta and completely bug-less before you offer it up for review. The last thing you need is a bad review.

1. Find out who the Reviews Editor is
2. Make a list of the features that make your product perfect for the readers of your chosen magazine.
3. Ask yourself ‘is my product affordable for the readers of this magazine’?
4. Call the reviews editor and ’sell it’. Construct a tight argument as to why the readers will be interested in the product. Leave no room for them to say no.
5. Give the reviewer a full, unrestricted account
6. Help him or her set it up, or do it for them.
7. Ask which issue it will be appearing in and when the ‘press day’ is for that issue, i.e. the deadline for sending the issue to press.
8. Call the day before to ask if all is well and if they need anything else.
9. Don’t ask to see the review or what the score was.
10. If you want your review to go into a specific issue (maybe to coincide with the launch) then send the product in at least 2 weeks before press day. Press day is usually 3-4 weeks before actually publication (i.e. available on the shelf).

You might be thinking, ‘it seems like a lot of work for a small mention in a magazine’. And you’d be right if that’s all it was. However, it is worth the effort. It may only be one mention in a fairly small magazine but you can use it to get more coverage. You can take cuttings, extract quotes, use logos, put ‘as featured in Blah Blah magazine’ on your site – basically milk it for all it’s worth. This will encourage others to feature your product too. You never know who will be reading that magazine – a potential customer yes, but also an advertiser, investor, another journalist, etc. Thus the wheel is in motion and eventually, given enough column inches, the magazines, newspapers and TV stations will be coming to you rather than the other way around. Okay, you may need to work a little harder for the TV stations!

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