Marketers know that the ability to measure success online is far more accurate than measurements offline. Tracking, analyzing and responding to the data is your key to success. Begin by defining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your campaigns.
With your marketing goals in mind, what is measurable? As Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook notes, social media’s goals are about increasing online visibility. This means creating awareness about your products, services and brand. When determining metrics, think of actions that indicate people are aware of your brand and, from these actions, what is measurable.
The development process for KPIs can be visualized as a funnel:
Goal > Action > Measurement (KPI)
Web Stats To Measure
KPIs linked to product and brand awareness should focus on visits your website and how they found it. Are people aware of, and visiting, your site? If they are, how did they get there and were they aware of your brand before they visited? The following is a list of web stats that can help gage awareness about your product and brand.
Unique Visitors. This shows how many people are visiting your website.
Direct Traffic. This shows how many people are coming directly to your site by typing the URL in their address bar. These visitors are coming to the site having already heard about your product or brand.
Referral Traffic. This shows where your visitors are coming from. This is important because referrals are like recommendations. You will want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to your site.
Keyword traffic. This shows how people are finding your site. Are they using your brand’s keywords? This shows that they already knew about you before they visited your site. What other keywords are visitors using? If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it shows a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site’s content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.
With these KPIs, you can create a KPI scorecard. Fill in the scorecard monthly and go back over previous months to determine a baseline. Looking at the numbers month over month, are they the same? Where do they fluctuate? What does this mean in relation to your marketing activities? What should be repeated, modified, or discarded for something new?
One of our clients, BC Book Prizes, is holding their Summer 2010 Online Auction. They have some amazing prize packages that are open to bidding and the proceeds go to supporting the achievements of British Columbian writers and publishers.
Prizes Include:
The Illustrator Pack. Bid on an original, framed, gouache illustration on watercolour paper by Kathryn E. Shoemaker entitled “Snowy Eye” as well as four children’s books (Good-bye Marianne, Floyd the Flamingo, A Telling Time, and My Animal Friends) that feature the illustrator’s work. Value: $950. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
Betsy Warland Writer’s Retreat. Bid on admission to the upcoming writer’s retreat with Betsy Warland at Annie’s Acre Bed and Breakfast in Nanoose Bay. Value: $250. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
The Heart of Vancouver. Bid on a one night stay for two in a one-bedroom deluxe suite at the Rosedale on Robson Suite Hotel (valid after October 1st), a voucher for two tickets to the Vancouver Opera’s December 7th or 9th production of Lucia di Lammermoor, and a gift certificate ($50) to book’mark, The Library Store at the Vancouver Public Library. Value: $540. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
Bidding ends in August. As the auction progresses, prizes will be added and removed weekly, so check back for updates.
How Bidding Works
Send an email to cody[at]rebuscreative[dot]com with your name, address, phone number, email address and your bid for the package you’re interested in. The minimum bid increment is $5.00. Bids and bidders are updated as frequently as possible. Additionally, most items can be shipped worldwide. (Note: Additional costs may be incurred to cover shipment of item(s) when necessary.)
Back in April we talked about How to Understand a Google Analytics Report and since then we’ve been providing a lot of Google Analytics tips. Since it’s handy to have all of our tips in one place, here is a roundup of our Google Analytics guidelines and how-tos. Following these best practices will bring you one step closer to becoming a Google Analytics pro.
Technical Basics
How to Filter Out My Internal Traffic in Google Analytics
Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data.
How to Give Someone Access to Your Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you the ability to add users to your account and to grant them different levels of access. This is useful for when you want to share access with others in your company or when you hire an outside consultant who would benefit from looking at your web stats (like us).
Techniques for Tracking Campaigns
How to Use Analytics Annotations to Track Your Marketing Campaigns
Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is a really useful tool that doesn’t get used as much as it should. It’s an easy feature to apply and it’s great for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns because it creates an activity timeline that positions your marketing activities in relation to your website traffic. Annotations are extremely useful for creating benchmarks and measuring and tracking your marketing campaigns.
How to Use Google’s Advanced Segments
Analytics’ Advanced Segments tool allows you to segment your website users into separate, defined channels to see how different audience groups are interacting with your site. The ability to analyze your reports by particular user groups and compare one traffic channel to another is extremely useful and helps to make your Analytics reports more meaningful.
Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Why? Because they are busy working on the site, doing programming maintenance or adding content. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data.
To get accurate analytics data, you can filter out your IP address.
How to Exclude Your IP Address From Google Analytics
Go to your Account Overview and click on Filter Manager.
In the Filter Manager screen, click Add Filter on the right hand corner.
In the Create New Filter page, enter a name for your filter.
Under Filter Type, choose Exclude > traffic from the IP addresses > that are equal to
Enter your IP address.
Under Apply Filter to Website Profiles, select the website profile that you want to block your IP address from and click add. This adds your filter to that website.
Click Save Changes.
Now in the Filter Manager screen, your filters will be listed.
If you need to edit your filter, you can do so from this screen.
Finding Your IP Address
There are a number of free sites that will help you find your IP address:
Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is a really useful tool that doesn’t get used as much as it should. It’s an easy feature to apply and it’s great for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns because it creates an activity timeline that positions your marketing activities in relation to your website traffic.
How To Set Up Annotations
Sign in and view your analytics report
In the Dashboard under the main graph, there’s an arrow tab, click on it.
The tab should expand and reveal a “Create new annotation” link.
Click “Create new annotation”. A field should appear.
Enter the date and description of your marketing activity.
Choose whether to share the visibility of the annotation with other members of the account or keep it private.
Click Save.
You can also create an Annotation by clicking on a date on your Dashboard graph. A bubble will pop up, click Create new annotation.
Now when you look at your Dashboard with the arrow tab opened below the graph you’ll see a list of your marketing activities. You’ll also see little activity bubbles on your graph to indicate that an activity happened on that day.
How To Use Annotations in Your Marketing
Annotations are extremely useful for creating benchmarks and measuring and tracking your marketing campaigns. For example, say you held a contest on Twitter from May 10th to May 20th. If you enter both these dates as Annotations you can quickly and easily see how the contest affected your site traffic—and if it had any long lasting affects. Plus, if you have advanced segments setup, you’ll be able to see where this traffic came from and how your traffic sources were affected by the contest.
The most useful feature of Annotations is that they last for as long as your account exists. This means that if you want to hold another Twitter contest next year, you can look back on your numbers from last year and set a baseline for what to expect from the campaign this year. Once the contest is finished, you can compare how the contest fared in terms of site traffic in relation to last year.
We’re always looking for more ways to measure our online marketing activities and Annotations is an easy tool to do just that.
Facebook Pages aren’t a new feature, (although they keep changing the types of pages available), but when creating a Facebook Page it is difficult to know which type of page to choose. And Facebook doesn’t make this easy—once you’ve chosen a page type the only way to change is to delete the page and start again. To stop this from happening I explored the page types and the best, basic Facebook pages that I’ve found are these two:
Local Business > Professional Service This page will give you fields for address, phone number, and hours (which you can leave blank), website URL and general info about the company. Default tabs include: Wall and Info.
Brand, Product, Organization > Professional Service This page will give you fields for when the organization was founded, company overview, mission and products. Default tabs include: Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions.
New: Community Pages
Facebook introduced Community Pages in April for all of the unofficial pages that users have created in support of random topics or causes. If a page becomes popular enough, Facebook will give administration over to the Facebook community—like a wiki.
Community pages provide a space for fans to gather and express themselves while Pages can remain a space managed by brands.
Google Analytics gives you the ability to add users to your account and to grant them different levels of access. This is useful for when you want to share access to others in your company or when you hire an outside consultant who would benefit from looking at your web stats (like us). Here’s how to grant a user access:
Sign in to your Google Analytics. Click on Analytics Settings in the top left corner. Click on the User Manager tab near the bottom of the page. Note: you will only see this tab if you have administrative access to the account. If you only have user access, you won’t see the tab.
Click Add User.
Enter the user’s email address. For example: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Note: The email address must be a Google Account. If you’ve used iGoogle, Gmail, Google Groups, AdWords or Google Checkout you already have a Google Account. If not, you can create one here.
Choose the Access Type for the user. Your options are: View reports only or Account Administrator (this allows the user to edit your account settings).
Select the websites that this user will have access to. Click Add to move them into the Selected Website Profiles list.
Click Save Changes. The user can now login to your analytics using their Google Account email address and password.
If you want to edit the access for an existing user, click User Manager and find the user in the Existing Access list and click Edit. Here you can edit the user’s Access Type and the profiles that the user has access to.
When you give someone access to your Google Analytics, you are not giving them access to your Google Account. You are assigning their email address only to your Google Analytics account so they will only be able to view your Google Analytics reports.
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Vancouver internet marketing strategists James Sherrett and Monique Trottier are experts in online marketing strategy. Talk to us about internet marketing, web design, search marketing
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