Everyone can agree: Google Analytics’ custom variables are a great feature. It lets you label your visitors with all sorts of fun stuff. Male or female? Member or non-member? Cat person or dog person? If you can identify your visitors’ answers to these sorts of questions, you can tag them with a custom variable.
But sometimes website owners implement the custom variable code and start gathering these valuable segments of traffic, completely unaware that the numbers aren’t very accurate. What could be causing such a heinous mistake?
Believe it or not, Google warns against the issue right in those instructions there, but they don’t call it out quite enough for my taste. It’s extremely important that you “call the _setCustomVar() function when it can be set prior to a pageview or event GIF request” (emphasis mine). Here are the details:
In certain cases this might not be possible, and you will need to set another _trackPageview() request after setting a custom variable. This is typically only necessary in those situations where the user triggers a session- or visit-level custom var, where it is not possible to bundle that method with a pageview, event, or ecommerce tracking call.
What exactly does this mean? Well, if a visitor fills out a survey on your site, hits submit, and you run _setCustomVar() after the _trackPageview() of the submission success page, that _setCustomVar() call just sits there in deep space, waiting for another _trackPageview() or _trackEvent() function to carry it along to Google’s servers. If that is the visitor’s final pageview in the session, then the call floats away forever, never to be heard from again.
The worst part, though, is if the visitor goes to another page, then the _setCustomVar() will tag along with any subsequent GIF requests. This means that it may appear as if the custom variable is working just fine, according to the reports in Google Analytics, but the numbers are just inaccurate.
So, to ensure that you are tracking your custom variables as precisely as possible, make sure that you always run the _setCustomVar() function before the calls to _trackPageview() or _trackEvent(). If this isn’t possible–you have an include at the top of every page, for instance, and can’t modify it–then be sure to include a second pageview or event after the _setCustomVar() function, like this:
This will ensure that every single time that function runs, it gets counted. Guaranteed!
Update: Tyson Kirksey, of Vertical Nerve, reminded me to set the event to non-interaction mode so that it won’t influence bounce rate, pages/visit, time on page, etc. I’ve also borrowed his clever naming convention for the event. Thanks, Tyson!
If there’s one PPC practice that should be instilled among all advertisers, it’s to make your brand stand out: not just physically or visually, but behind the scenes as well.
Of course, advertisers want their brands to stand out above the rest, that is a given; but it’s important to keep this same methodology in place when compiling your PPC campaigns (and I’m not just talking about writing an eye-catching ad).
Here’s an example: Imagine you work for an athletic shoe company. If a potential buyer searches “(Your Brand Here) women’s tennis shoes,” you don’t want your generic keyword “women’s tennis shoes” to battle with other brands’ generic keywords in order for your ad to appear. Sure, it’s possible that your generic keyword will trigger your ad as a result of this search, but chances are that any click captured in this way will be much more expensive than a click as a result of a branded keyword. You’re paying more for that click than you should have, and fighting for that click with more competitors than necessary; having brand keywords could have helped your ad show up in a better position while obtaining clicks at a lower price.
PPC gurus know that to develop a successful structure for Paid Search campaigns and accounts overall, product and services should be grouped tightly, in order to ensure potential customers are seeing ads that are relevant to their search queries and landing on site pages that take them where they need (and want) to go. You’d be surprised, however, by how many advertisers group their brand keywords with generic non-brand keywords, assuming that as long as the campaigns and ad groups are specific enough, brand and non-brand keywords will work the same. Moreover, you’d be surprised at how many advertisers don’t bid on brand keywords at all! Always make sure you have brand keywords throughout your account… always! I have seen VERY few instances where not bidding on brand keywords has been the better choice for an advertiser.
The Value of Separation
While the simple example above explains why it’s important to have branded keywords within your account, we still haven’t touched on why these terms should be separated. Just as any campaign in a PPC account is separated from another, brand and non-brand campaigns perform differently, and can therefore be managed differently.
Let’s use another example from the same athletic shoe company: The keyword ‘women’s tennis shoes’ should not be found in the same ad group or the same campaign as the keyword ‘(Your Brand Here) women’s tennis shoes.’ The main reason for why we should do this is obvious: user intent is different, and therefore performance is different. When a user types a brand name into a search engine, whether or not it is long- or short-tail, that person already has that brand on his or her mind. Therefore, a campaign consisting of only brand terms will almost always have a higher click-through rate than generic campaigns, while also likely spending at a lower rate due to the lower price of the keywords themselves.
Put it to Use
As I touched on in a past blog post, click-through rate is the strongest factor in determining quality score, and having a strong quality score is key for PPC accounts. While you can’t see the direct effect of quality score instantly, the strong click-through rate of brand campaigns will earn you some extra brownie points with Google when it comes time to determine CPCs and ad rankings. Mixing brand and non-brand keywords in the same campaigns would not result in the strong click-through rates an all-brand campaign would see. In another blog post I also explained the value and importance of negative keywords, and brand vs. non-brand is a perfect example of such usage. By having brand and non-brand keywords separated, you can ensure branded searches are never triggered by generic (and remember, more expensive!) keywords by setting your brand name as a negative throughout your generic campaigns/ad groups. This will help keep your costs stabilized and also ensure that the best ads are showing up for the right searches.
Split your branded keywords into appropriately relevant campaigns and ad groups just as you would non-brand campaigns. Once this is complete, I recommend giving these brand keywords strong max CPCs to ensure they appear in top rankings. Also be sure that the ads contain your brand name itself in the headline, so that potential customers see right away that you are the company they are looking for.
Thanks to Google’s automated rules tool, you can set a rule to run for these campaigns that will ensure these keywords remain above a certain average position, specified by the advertiser. I recommend setting a rule to keep the average position of keywords somewhere between 1.5 and 1.3, but this should be set based on what you know works for your keywords (and this can be changed at any point in time).
When a keyword drops below the set position, Google will increase the max CPC by the amount of the advertiser’s choice, and will discontinue any bid increases when it reaches the maximum CPC you indicate (if you so choose). These changes can be made based on the time interval of data you choose, but I usually set the rule to run based on data from the previous day, and to run everyday around noon or 1pm. I highly recommend the use of this tool – there are many different ways to set automated rules and they can be updated or discontinued at any time.
Setting up separate brand campaigns will help you efficiently capture additional conversions at a lower cost, while allowing you to separately manage your more expensive generic keywords with results that won’t negatively affect the results of your brand keywords.
What does it mean when “search/organic” turns up as Source/Medium in your Google Analytics reports? It could mean some of your visitors are using the search engine Search.com (yes, there really is a search engine called that), but it could also be bad data because Google Analytics mistakenly attributed visits to Search.com even though they came from somewhere else.
How could that happen? Suppose your site www.anything.com has a search box (of course it does!) so visitors can search the entire site. Unfortunately, the site search engine returns search results pages with URLs like this:
search.anything.com?q=anything
I say, “unfortunately,” because that’s exactly the kind of URL that Google Analytics mistakes for the search engine Search.com.
How Site Search Gets Mistaken for Organic Search
Google Analytics keeps a list of search engines, and it recognizes them by looking for certain items in the referring domain and referring page query string. If the domain contains “search” and the query string contains “q” then GA thinks the referrer is Search.com.
There’s even more bad news. Suppose this visitor originally came to your site from an email campaign, which you cleverly tagged with cool campaign info (newsletter/email), as you should. As soon as the visitor uses your site search, GA mistakenly sees a new traffic source (search/organic)… and starts a brand new session.
This scenario played out recently for one of our clients. The previously documented solution, using _addIgnoredRef, did not work. So we reported it to Google engineers, who reproduced and confirmed the issue and promised to get back to us with an update.
In the meantime, we devised a simple workaround that immediately improved the data. If your data has been compromised by this issue, it can help you, too.
How To Fix It
Our solution is a little script that we include on every page on search.anything.com. The script looks at all the links on the page and if a link goes to anything.com, it appends a parameter to the URL that tells GA not to change the source/medium to search/organic.
If you’re already familiar with GA parameters you’ll see the key to the script is the parameter utm_nooverride=1, which is more typically used when visitors return to your site from third-party shopping carts, or for ad campaigns where you don’t want to overwrite existing referral data.
In this case, utm_nooverride=1 means GA won’t write a new traffic source (and mistakenly start a new session) just because a visitor uses site search.
Remember you also need to refer to the jQuery library before you call the script, like this:
Local businesses have long doubted the possibility, if not the potential, of ranking favorably for geo-modified keyword phrases in the organic search results. In markets where competition is stiff and ahead of the curve, spending thousands of dollars for results that are anything less than guaranteed is reasonably unjustifiable. Likewise, PPC costs in these markets can be through the roof, costing small businesses upwards of $10-15 a click – a rate that bodes well for too few industries. While websites that are well optimized for conversions can turn these high-cost clicks into profit, it is often difficult for small businesses to stomach the costs of redesign and analytics that it takes to mold such sites. All things considered, it can be a trying, expensive endeavor for a small business to gain traction in the paid or traditional organic search results.
Enter Google Places, Google’s online local directory – an avenue through which all local business owners can (and should) pursue organic traffic for their websites. Know a local business owner? Own a business yourself? Great! The following post will walk you through the steps of setting up your Google Places listing, complete with tips for optimizing your listing for Google’s local search results. If you’re already familiar with the setup (and curious about the optimization exclusively), you’re welcome to skip ahead to Step 3.
1. Create a Google account for your local business/website.
Believe it or not, this is one of the most important steps in the process. Not only does your Google account enable you to claim your listing, but it also is the account that you’ll need to access if you wish to make any changes/updates to your Places page. Whether you’re the business owner or not, I recommend creating an account that’s specific to your business, rather than using a personal account. If the responsibilities of maintaining the listing or the business itself should ever change hands, you’ll not want to grant the new employee or owner access to your personal account. Trust aside, it’s just not something that’s preferable – for managerial, organizational, and personal reasons. Keep the login simple – something that’s easy to remember, but also sufficiently secure. I’d go with mybusinessname@gmail.com. That’s simplicity! Also, when creating your account, you have the option to specify an “other email address.” Be sure to specify an address that uses your businesses domain name, for example joe@mybusinessname.com. This is one more signal that helps Google trust the information you’ll provide in the following steps.
2. Claim your Google Places listing.
Once you have your account set up, it’s time to claim your listing. Go to the Google Places homepage, where you’ll see two options. For our purposes, we’ll be choosing the option on the right – Claim your business listing on Google – for free.
After you click “Get started”, you may be asked to log into your account once more. Kindly oblige to this additional step towards security and continue on. If this is your first time listing a business under the new account (which it likely will be), you should be directed to a page that prompts you to search for your business by telephone number. Enter your business land line (formatted like the one below), select your country, and click “Find business information”. Be mindful that, due to its integration with Google Maps, Google Places must be provided with a land line to associate or pair with a physical address. You should not use your personal or company cell number when completing this step. I’ll explain more about this later.
If Google was unable to find your business information (which is fine), you can move onto the next step. If it does, that’s generally fine, as well. In most cases, you’ll be able to edit and claim your existing listing (which may simply consist of basic information pulled from the various sources like InfoUSA, Yellowpages, etc.). In the rare case that someone else has already claimed your listing, you can either determine who has claimed it (if, perhaps, it was claimed internally) or claim it again.
3. Edit your Google Places listing.
This is where the bulk of the work gets done. First, I’ll address how to go about editing an existing listing (should that be the case). If your business is found, you should arrive at a screen like the one below, where you’ll see your business name, land line, and physical address. To edit your listing, simply click “Edit” on the right hand side. Don’t worry about verifying anything just yet; we’ll get to that in the next step.
Alright. Now it’s time to do the legwork that will serve as the foundation for our Google Places listings. Appropriately enough, this section will be a little longer than those before it; so hold on tight. This is like that 30-minute, touristy train ride at the beginning of the National Park that all the kids want to replace with “exploration”. You can go on and explore or stick around, learn, then explore. I’ll let you be the judge of which is more beneficial. Anyways, let’s get to it. While most of the sections of the listing are pretty self explanatory, I’ll outline the two that I find to be most pertinent to our listing’s ability to rank.
Basic Information
In this section, you’ll fill out some of the basic information about your business, including country, company name, street address, city, zip, etc. If you have a website, this is where you’ll enter the URL. One thing to keep in mind in this section (and throughout all of your online listings) is consistency. Consistency across multiple listings and seed channels is often considered to be one of the key determinants of search engine visibility for Google Places listings.
For instance, when filling out the Address field, something as simple as using the shorthand “Mulberry St.” , rather than the written form “Mulberry Street” is something that you should monitor for the sake of consistency. An integral component of a given listing’s ranking potential is the availability of information with which Google is able to triangulate validity. When moving from one seed site to the next (be it Yelp, Citysearch, Hotfrog, what have you), be mindful of any discrepancies between inputs – however minute they may be. Remember, when it comes to the inputs that are indicative of your physical location or contact information, the more consistent your listings, the better.
When typing up the description, you have 200 characters to describe your business. Use these 200 characters efficiently and effectively, maintaining a healthy balance of your targeted geo-modified keywords and usability. Do your best to include partial match keywords in your category selections, as well. You can choose to list up to five different categories (many of which are predefined).
Service Areas and Location Settings
In this section, you’ll specify whether your business operates out of one location or offers business/service to customers at their homes. If you choose the first option – “No, all customers come to the business location” – you’re essentially guaranteeing that the primary root location of all of your geo-modified key phrases will be the city/town in which your business is located. In selecting the second option – “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations” – you’re (perhaps) indicating that all towns within your scope should be given equal weight when tacked onto your key phrases as geo-modifiers. Makes sense, right?
As far as determining your coverage area goes (for those of you who select the second option), you have two choices. The first – Distance from one location – allows you to specify a location and a radius (measured in miles). All areas within the circumference of the resulting circle are considered to be part of the coverage area. The other option – List of areas served – allows you to list specific cities/towns in which your business or service operates at the customer’s home. This is handy for those of you who don’t necessarily work within or without the confines of a given circumference with a defined center. It’s also useful for showcasing for Google the towns for which you’d like your listing to rank locally. In my mind, there’s a time and a place for each of these different options. Do your best to discern which will work most effectively for your type of business.
Other Information
It should be clear at this point that the Google Places listing requests a pretty comprehensive set of inputs and information. If I were to offer you one word to help you make your listing the very best that it can be, it would be ‘completeness’. Not only does completeness give your listing a better chance of ranking, but it also provides for the best user experience. Have pictures of your storefront? Upload them. Have a product review video or a 30-second television spot? Upload it. You get the idea. Substance is optimal. Make sure you have something for every field.
Once you’ve assured that your Places listing is both consistent with other online listings and ripe with completeness, you can proceed to Step 4.
4. Verify your Google Places listing.
Verification is a necessary step of listing your business on Google Places, and there are two methods for doing so. When you’re done editing your listing, click “Submit” at the bottom of the page. If everything is status quo, you’ll be taken to the verification screen, where you’ll be asked, “How would you like to validate your listing?”.
In most cases, you can choose from either phone or postcard verification. If you choose to verify by phone, moments after you click “Finish”, you will receive a phone call from Google’s automated machine at your business’s land line. When you answer the phone, the Google “bot” will read a 5-digit verification PIN, which you’ll need to write down. Simply input this 5-digit PIN under its respective business within your Places account, and voila – your listing is live. Verification by postcard replaces the phone call to your business address with the mailing of a postcard to your business address. The postcard (from Google) should arrive within two to three weeks of clicking “Finish” and contains the 5-digit PIN that you’ll need for verification. The downside to this method is obviously the time that it takes to get your listing live. While phone verification is almost always preferable (as it is instant), it is not always provided as an option.
5. Manage, maintain, & market your Google Places listing.
We’re at the end of the road . . . or are we? Once your listing goes live, it’s up to you whether or not you want to devote time and resources to managing, maintaining, and marketing it. Let me limit your options, here. DO IT. Take a few minutes every now and then to monitor your page.
If you have Google Analytics set up on your business website, consider tracking traffic and conversions from users finding your listing through the local pin drop results. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on your Places page. Post semi-frequent updates – including special offers and coupons. Build your online reputation by creating listings with other notable local directories, keeping consistency in mind throughout. The honest pursuit of these tasks, when coupled with an underlying quality of business or service, provide for a socially engaging listing that’s fit to rank well in location-specific results.
And so ends in brevity this guide to Google Places for local businesses. If you’re looking to learn more about specific ranking factors for local SEO, have a look at David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors. That should give you some further insights into what it takes to rank for local queries. If you have any questions, comments, or tales of the Google Places you’ve been, don’t hesitate to share! In the mean time, have a safe, tremendous holiday.
2011 saw a lot of action in the social media stratosphere, especially when it came to Facebook marketing tactics. Each year social media will continue to change at a faster pace and marketers will need to continue to stay ahead of the curve. Here’s a list of some of the most important tips & tricks for marketing on Facebook from 2011.
1. Use the improved menu for Facebook Page Administrators with more than one Page. Detailed in this article on AllFacebook, the recently added feature eliminates a few clicks to view the notifications to your various Facebook Pages. In a nutshell, it makes the whole process of monitoring your various communities on Facebook a lot quicker.
2. Enable subscribers on your Facebook profile. Are you actively sharing content about a particular topic? Is one of your clients a well known personality? Are you a journalist? This year Facebook made it so people, who couldn’t view your activity before, can now follow your personal profile and follow information you choose to make public. Here’s how to enable subscribers to your profile. Take a look at following people and how they have a massed a huge following to their personal profiles for a variety of purposes:
3. Add the Subscribe button to your website, especially if you have multiple contributors. Of course, you’ve got to enable the Subscribe feature to your personal Facebook Profile first. Here’s where to find the code to add the plugin to your website.
4. Posting on your Facebook Page between 8PM & 7AM receives 20% more user engagement. Buddy Media produced a white paper on strategies for effective wall posts, sharing a variety of insights on marketing for Facebook based on the analysis of 100′s of Facebook Pages.
5. When posting on your Page’s wall, tell your audience to Click “LIKE” in your posts. Calls to action work wonders for driving engagement to the content in the newsfeed. Here on CVS’s Facebook Page they’ve used this technique at the end of their post to increase the amount of like’s this video received.
6. Use fill in the blank’s style posts for high levels of engagement from your Facebook audience.
7. Optimize your Facebook Page’s photo banner to give a branded experience to your fan base.
8. Have your Page favorite/like other Facebook Pages of related product lines, other store locations or any other relevant subject matters to feature on your Page. These featured likes will rotate between 5 different pages each time your browser refreshes, although you can add more than 5 pages to the list. It’s mainly a chance to express what your brand like’s, giving it a voice it didn’t have prior to the February Page redesign.
9. Ask open ended questions in your Facebook posts to help increase the amount of comments that post receives.
10. Use Sponsored Stories to increase brand lift and utilize this new social aspect of Facebook ads. When people hear about a brand from their friends, they’re twice as likely to engage.
11. Switch between uploading the video content you share from your YouTube channel and from Facebook videos. Uploading your videos on YouTube will get the video greater exposure in the search engines, but uploading your videos in Facebook will get the video added exposure in the newsfeed and the ability for someone to like your page and video from within the video itself.
12. Optimize your Profile photo to highlight your brand, product lines, promotions, fans and more.
13. Choose to set your wall to either display posts by everyone or just from your Page. For some brands, it might be best to hide posts from fans on the everyone tab and only show the Page’s marketing messages as the default views. This depends on many factors, one of which is audience size.
14. Use the vertical link menu on the left hand side of your Page to display applications and destinations that serve as resources for fans about your brand and offerings.
15. Engage with other Pages as your Page, to help drive engagement between Pages and between the related audiences of those Pages. With the Facebook Page redesign in February, Page admins have been able to log in as their Facebook Page and act as if they’re a regular user that’s able to comment, like and interact on Facebook.
16. When creating tabs for your Facebook Page, use the Static Tab 2.0 application. It’s free, easy to use, gives you many options for customization, helps you move away from soon to be deprecated FBML to iFrames and allows you to add up to 7 tabs to an unlimited amount of Facebook Pages. Here’s how to setup your Facebook tabs using Static Tab 2.0.
17. Don’t rely on Facebook’s link function alone, leave the link at the end of the text in your post as well. By giving your fan base more opportunities to click a link in your post, the more clicks you’ll get to the content you’re sharing.
18. Schedule your posts for when you’re away from the computer, but want to reach audiences at times of the day that have the highest levels of engagement and less competitions from other Facebook Pages. Previously, Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, EdgeRank, would give less visibility to a Page’s content when posted through a third party tool like HootSuite or TweetDeck. Now, Facebook’s newsfeed has been altered to not negatively affect posts of this nature, allowing for the same visibility as if it was posted from Facebook. I recommend switching between posting from Facebook and the third party tools.
20. Mentioning your fans by name in the comments on your Facebook posts is one of most beneficial ways to give a personal touch to your brand’s Facebook presence. In some cases you’ll be able to use an @ sign and tag a user in your comments to them, in other cases you’ll just have to type out their name. Either way, this gives a personal feeling that social media is all about, connecting with your advocates one on one.
21. When engaging with your Facebook audience, sign your name when directly interacting with users. By signing your name after a comment, you’re removing the mystery behind who your audience is actually chatting with and again, adding your personal voice to your brand’s page.
22. A handy tip for measuring successful engagement per post, look for 1% of your audience to interact with each post that is shared on your Page. Just take your existing audience size, divide it by 100 and the result will be the number of people who should be engaging with your post via shares, comments & likes.
23. Enable users to tag your Facebook Page in their photos to help organically grow your audience and impressions. Go to Edit Page, then Manage Permissions and be sure to check off the box that says People can add tags to photos by [Your Page Name].
24. To improve the SEO of your Facebook Page, set three keyword rich sub-categories for your Place Page. Go to Edit Page, then Basic Information and then define these sub-categories keeping Facebook search and the search engines in mind.
25. Draw your audience from your YouTube videos and channel to your Facebook Page by including annotations throughout your video with a URL to your Page.
Here’s a wonderful example of using YouTube annotations to grow your Facebook fan base:
26. Use the Talking About This metric to get a true sense of the engagement on your Facebook Page. This public metric give you a better sense of your interactions with your audience, outside of the number of people that just like your page.
27. Add a Facebook Like Box to your website to easily allow your web visitors to become a fan of your Facebook Page.
28. Incorporate photos in line with your other posting strategies, to get higher visibility in the newsfeed. Photos have a higher weight with Facebook’s EdgeRank (plus people love them), so utilize them when you can with other strategies to help get your content get more traction.
Here’s an example of Sephora doing just this:
29. Repost the same article on your Facebook Page for added engagement, but be sure to alter the text/title of the post to give the appearance of different content. Utilize this reposting technique over a short period of time so there’s a gap between when you post the first and second time, while also not waiting to long and risk losing the relevancy of the content you’re sharing.
30. Keep the narrative short to maximize the number of shares of your content, preferable 80 characters or less. Learn some of the many other ways to get your Facebook content shared.
31. Don’t automate connections to your other social networks on your Facebook Page. Having your Twitter feed or YouTube videos as a tab on your Facebook Page is a wonderful way to give your audience as much content about your brand as possible. However, it’s important that your tweets, YouTube videos or content from other platforms aren’t being automatically added to your Facebook Page’s wall. This could lead to too many posts on your Page, repetitive content being shared or irrelevant platform specific messaging, all of which could being to irritate your fan base.
32. Use the updated Facebook mobile app to engage with your fans on the go. There’s a few different versions of the application depending on what phone you have, here’s a deeper look at how to manage your Facebook Pages from the iPhone.
33. Browse Facebook Studio for insights on how others are marketing on Facebook, especially when it comes to creative and innovative ideas that Facebook themselves thought were one of a kind.
34. Occasionally drive traffic to your website from the content you post, being clever or mysterious will often lead to higher click through rates. By clever or mysterious, I mean be vague about the destination of your link but enticing with the copy you use in the post. Basically, teaser content so people are interested to visit your link.
Target’s Facebook Page utilized this exact tip not too long ago, which seemed to get high levels of engagement:
35. Use Facebook Questions to add some variety to the content you share and as a way of polling your audience to see what aspects of your brand they truly enjoy.
36. When offering coupons, don’t make fans do the math. Buddy Media’s study incidcates that “$ off” offers generate twice the engagement of “% off” offers for the retail industry on Facebook.
37. Share milestones you’ve reached on Facebook or as a brand with your audience. Whether you’ve finished a volunteer project as a company or reached 300,000 fans on Facebook, tell your fans, so they can help celebrate and spread the word.
38. Encourage check-ins on your Page and at your physical location. Although Facebook Deals was a flop, getting traction from check-ins on Facebook is still a useful way to grow organic impressions of your brand, especially when it comes local & small businesses.
39. Share the testimonials, positive feedback and recommendations about your brand. If your fans love your brand and are vocal about it, share this sentiment with the rest of your audience, making sure to mention the original feedback. The addition of the recommendations feature on a Facebook Page, specifically when you first like a Page, gives marketers an opportunity to promote their praise and feature one of their most active and happy fans.
40. Measure your return on investment with Facebook’s updated Page Insights. The new version of Page insights has shifted the focus of these internal analytics around engagement as opposed to audience size. Understanding how each post has affected your Page’s virality overall is a wonderful way to see what worked and didn’t work and how you can continue to strategize for the future.
Did you find any of these tips applicable to your own Facebook marketing strategy? Share what Facebook marketing tips and tricks you live by in the comment section below.
This is part one of a multi-part series on the fundamentals for maximizing the conversions for your business’s website.
When people hear that LunaMetrics does consulting and training for Google Analytics, I often hear “Really?? There’s that much to Google Analytics? Everyone knows how to use that!” Possibly, but if I had to guess how you use your Google Analytics, it’s probably something like this:
If you happen to remember, you login to GA
You look at the default date range, and see if the overall visits are up or down
If there is a large spike up or down, you look into the referrers and organic/paid search reports to see why, otherwise you close GA and call it a day
Done. Right?
But then you wonder “Why am I only getting 5 sales a day from 1,000 visitors?”. Someone suggests you update the website to be Web 3.0. It’s not converting because people think it looks dated. So you spend the money to get a new pretty website. And then you check your graphs. Maybe they look the same, maybe they’ve gone up a little, maybe they’ve gone down a little, but you really have no idea how this new website has impacted anything. And your conversion rate is about the same. Sound familiar?
This is what many people I talk to do, and even though a select few are obsessed with some aspects of analytics, they still feel helpless with regards to conversions because they don’t complete what I call the “Infinite Conversion Loop”.
What’s the Infinite Conversion Loop?
I’m glad you asked! This is a process I’ve used over the years and it takes the guesswork out of what will and won’t improve your conversion rate. It sounds time consuming, but as I go into detail in the next couple of posts, you’ll see it really only requires a few hours a week. At the worst, you’ll understand why you only get a .5% conversion rate, but in the best case you may be able to double or triple your conversions.
Measurement of a baseline – To do any part of this process accurately, you need to make sure you have all of your Analytics configured so that everything is being measured equally and effectively from the beginning. This is not complicated, but it does involve more then just slapping GA code on every page (although that’s a great start). Specific details of what to do here will be the subject of my next blog post, but to really visualize what’s going on here, this is a crucial first step. Do you know exactly how much money your website makes? Do you know what your shopping cart abandonment rate is? Do you know what people are searching for and not finding on your site? Do you know how your site is being shared on social networks? If the answer is no to any of these, you’re still on step one.
Identify your visitors – Not all visitors are alike. You love seeing traffic go up, but that doesn’t always mean an increase in conversions. Now that you are measuring everything, how can you tell who is visiting your website, and more importantly why are they not converting? How much of your traffic is even likely to convert? If you have 1000 visitors and only 5 convert, surely you must be wondering what the heck those other 995 were up to.
Passive User Testing – There’s some answers you will never be able to get by just looking at the numbers, you really have to study how people use your website to see what they are doing. There are great tools that allow you to watch recordings of what people are doing on your site (completely passively) and study their behavior. You don’t get to ask them questions, but this often helps you identify larger problems with your website, including that JavaScript error you never discovered on Firefox 3 for Mac.
Active User Testing – I always do passive user testing before active, because active user testing is more expensive and time consuming, and you want to make sure you’ve fixed the big problems first. With Active User Testing, you’ll write a script for people to follow, often based on confusing behavior seen in the previous step, and let them narrate their thought process as they try to do it. The best user testing lets you ask people along the way, “Why did you do that?” or “Did you notice X?”. The difference between Active and Passive user testing is that with Active you hear their thought process as they are using your site “Oh, I thought the search would show me this, but instead it showed me another search”. or “Hmm, I want to checkout, but I don’t see the Visa logo”
A/B and Multi-Variate Test – The previous four steps should have given you some ideas of changes you can make to improve conversions. The final part is something that scares most people, but some new tools make this once complicated task quite simple. Start with an A/B test to test larger theories, and then use multi-variate tests to figure out the absolute most optimal combination of elements.
By the end of this cycle, you’ll have a very good idea what percentage of visitors have the potential to convert, what’s keeping people from converting, and whether you need to do more SEO/Marketing to increase your conversions or structural/wording/HTML changes. The cycle doesn’t stop here. After you make these changes you start from the beginning. This cycle is infinite after all!
This is a very high level overview, but stay tuned for future posts describing exactly what each step involves and how you can accomplish them easily. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments if there is something you want to see covered!
If you weren’t in Paris today (c’est la vie!), you may have missed Google’s announcement at Le Web. Don’t worry, we’ll fill you in on the details. The announcement unveiled their efforts to collect data from social networks and platforms in an effort to be able to more fully report on social activities related to your site/business/product/etc. that may not happen on your site. For example, wouldn’t it be nice to open up Google Analytics and see which of your content was shared on Facebook, tweeted about, or plus-oned, Dug (or Digged?), Stumbled, commented on or otherwise mentioned?
Social platforms are being invited to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. To do this, Google has built a social data hub to make it easy.
The social data hub
The social data hub is a data platform based on open standards to enable social data partners to submit their activity streams, eventually making the data available to Google Analytics users. This means that GA customers will be able to determine down to the activity level – e.g. +1 button, comment, vote – what activities are taking place relevant to their content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.
The social data hub will make it easier to aggregate social data that analytics users are looking for. It isn’t a product in and of itself, merely a standardized process to get data into GA. This will help marketers and publishers easily access and measure all social platforms and actions side by side.
Who’s in?
Google is kicking this off with a respectable list of partners:
Delicious
Digg
Diigo
Gigya
LiveFyre
ReadItLater
Reddit
TypePad / SixApart
VKontakte
(and of course)
Google+
Google Blogger
Google Groups
However, to make any future social reports useful, they have a lot of work to do on the data acquisition side. Measuring social media without including Facebook and Twitter (and arguably LinkedIn) is a lot like measuring SEO without looking at Google, IMO.
Fortunately, this announcement is aimed at attracting more social networks to the social data hub. The benefit, they claim, is that by social networks providing their data to GA, marketers and publishers will more easily be able to see the value of social media to their business, prompting them to use/spend more with those networks. It’s a pleasant spin to be sure, but it remains to be seen who will jump on board.
Eventually, this data will make its way into GA, allowing users to see both on and off-site social engagement with their content, including visibility into social actions such as voting, commenting and sharing, amongst other metrics. This brings us one step closer to analytics nirvana - the ability to connect social activity and conversions.
The technical details
Google will be following the Activity Streams Specification (yes, there actually is one), for describing socially interesting events, or “Activities,” about the people and things an individual may care about. In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object. For example, “Robbin posted a photo” or “Phil shared a video.” Any of the data submitted may potentially be used but it must adhere to the specification.
Search Engine Optimization can be a mysterious field. Every other SEO guru has a different opinion about what tips, tricks or incantations cause your website to rank highly and cause conversions. These tips and tricks can be incredibly useful, and can certainly cause serious increases in your website’s traffic. What these lists don’t mention, however, is that SEO tricks alone do not make a website perform well. SEO tips, tricks and techniques should be icing on the cake.
The backbone of SEO is a well designed and well written website. A well designed website is intuitive and easy to use, and is fashioned to allow search engines to easily spider your site. This means that no pages are forgotten about or lost in space, and visitors to your site can easily navigate to their intended destination. No amount of SEO is going to help your conversion rate if people can’t find what they’re looking for.
Well written copy also performs two basic functions: it provides important keywords, specifically keywords that help make long tail keywords, and it’s the primary source of communicating to your customers. Well written copy is a wealth of information for both search engines and visitors to your site. It allows search engines to determine what your site is all about, while giving important information about your company and your services to visitors.
This might seem a straightforward topic, but often times companies will pour money into SEO projects only to see drastic increases in website traffic that never converts, often due to web designers knowing little about SEO. Without a solid foundation, SEO will unlikely be able to help you reach your goals. Luckily, SEO specialists understand this. If you see phenomenal website traffic for qualified keywords, but not the conversion rates you’d like, it might be worth contacting an SEO company that conducts usability testing. They can help determine why your site is underperforming and can suggest ways to improve your website that dovetail with your current SEO strategies.
If you’ve been to one of our Google Analytics trainings, you may have heard me say this: tracking visitors from one domain to another is a huge pain in the neck. Whenever someone goes from domain1.com to domain2.com, you have to take their cookie data and pass it over to the second domain via the URL. If you don’t, the visitor generates a new visit and their referral data gets jacked up.
Normally, this is a tedious, manual procedure. After making a minor change to your Google Analytics Tracking Code, you then have to modify every link on domain1.com that takes a person to domain2.com. If you have a few links, no big deal. But what if you have thousands of them?
We’ve posted before about automating the cross-domain tracking process, but a lot has happened since then. Namely, Google Analytics has a sexy new asynchronous tracking code. So we finally got around to creating a script that automatically links domains using the new code syntax.
Not only that, but this script tracks outbound link clicks and downloads, all automatically. They’ll show up as events.
We’re pretty proud of it, and since it’s so darn useful to us, we figured we’d share it with you. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!
Step 1: Modify Your Google Analytics Tracking Code
First, you’ll need to make sure that your Google Analytics Tracking Code is set up to allow for cross-domain tracking. The _setDomainName and _setAllowLinker methods are required for this to work:
If I wanted to track the domains lunametrics.com and lunametricsstore.com, I’d modify line 5 to read:
var domains=["lunametrics.com", "lunametricsstore.com"];
And if I wanted to automatically track downloads for PowerPoint presentations, I’d add .ppt to the list on line 6:
var fileTypes=[".doc", ".xls", ".exe", ".zip", ".pdf", ".mov", ".mp3", ".ppt"];
Step 3: Upload Script and Include on Pages
Upload the xdomain.js file to your web server and then reference it on all pages of your site. Place the reference below your Google Analytics Tracking Code:
Because the script relies on jQuery, you will also have to reference the jQuery library at some point before the call to the script. You can download a copy of the jQuery library and host it on your web server, or just reference the one hosted by jQuery:
To make sure the script is working, click on one of the links that takes a visitor from one domain to the other. Check the URL that displays in your browser location field after the new page loads. You should see a string of information in the query string:
You can also view your cookies (I use Firebug and Firecookie). Check out __utmb. The number after the first period is the pageview count. If cross-domain tracking isn’t configured properly, then it will reset when you hit the secondary domain.
__utmz should also maintain the proper referral. If you visit your primary domain directly and then move to your secondary domain, __utmz should still reflect this:
Conclusion
Hopefully this helps you set up cross-domain tracking (and outbound link tracking and file download tracking) on your site easily, without a lot of headaches.
This script was a collaborative effort by myself and Phil Anderson, who did most of the heavy lifting in jQuery. It’s supplied as-is. We’ve tested it internally, but it’s your responsibility to make sure it works on your own sites. And if you notice anything that doesn’t seem to be working, you’re free to correct the code. It’s released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, so feel free to modify and redistribute. We just ask that you keep the copyright notice on the top, and that you share any cool additions with us so we can use ‘em too!
Of course, advertisers want their brands to stand out above the rest, that is a given; but it’s important to keep this same methodology in place when compiling your PPC campaigns (and I’m not just talking about writing an eye-catching ad).
When a keyword drops below the set position, Google will increase the max CPC by the amount of the advertiser’s choice, and will discontinue any bid increases when it reaches the maximum CPC you indicate (if you so choose). These changes can be made based on the time interval of data you choose, but I usually set the rule to run based on data from the previous day, and to run everyday around noon or 1pm. I highly recommend the use of this tool – there are many different ways to set automated rules and they can be updated or discontinued at any time.
techniques should be icing on the cake.
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