If you don’t have set goals for intangible marketing strategies (like blogging and posting on social media), then you’re bound to fail. Seem harsh? There’s a couple of reasons for that: 1) goals help you work toward an objective; 2) goals help you figure out how successful your efforts are.
But how do you set goals – and determine the ROI – for the intangibles? Let’s dig in.
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CommentsYou probably know the number of leads your website generates every month. You probably watch your inbox for them. But do you know the number of potential clients who visit your site without making that transition from visitor to lead? According to a study by Google, home buyers visit an average of three real estate sites before they make contact with a company. So how do you make sure visitors contact your company instead of moving on to seemingly greener pastures? Answer: forced or encouraged registration.
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CommentsI ran cross country in high school. Rick Beattie – who doubled as my coach and European History teacher – used to tell us “The clock doesn’t lie.” If I performed poorly at a meet, I could say that my shoelaces were too tight, the rain slowed me down, or my mind was wandering. But the fact of the matter was this: I had a number waiting for me at the finish line, and that number didn’t lie.
Fast forward (gulp) 20 years. Cut to a Union Street Media Internet marketing meeting. We’re gathered around a conference table looking at a spreadsheet of numbers. I think of Coach Beattie and say, “The data doesn’t lie.”
This is a universal truth. Before the Mad Men-esque advertising brainstorm meetings you envision, before graphic designers turn winning ideas into marketing reality, before a catchy slogan ever hits the printed page, there’s a common foundation: data.
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CommentsLast week, as Google celebrated its 15th birthday, the search giant made two announcements that caught many by surprise.
One was that Google quietly switched to a new algorithm called “Hummingbird” about a month ago. This was a significant change that had (perhaps surprisingly) little fallout, so we’ll save that for another blog post and refer you here to learn more.
The other announcement that drew attention—and a big reaction from the SEO community—is that Google will soon be encrypting all search data in the widely used Google Analytics reporting platform. This means that detailed data about what organic search keywords were used to deliver visitors to your website will no longer be available.
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CommentsIn this age of data, people at all levels of business have access to their company’s website traffic metrics. Often, it’s those further down the ladder who are expected to stay on top of it, whether they like it or not. Richard Branson is famous for not wanting to understand his company’s financial data in too much detail. He doesn’t need to – but he does need to know the basics to make good decisions, which he does to great effect. His mind is free of the clutter to make the big picture decisions.
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CommentsAs some of you may know by now, the new Google Analytics 5 user interface is upon us, all shiny and new.
As a long time user and fan of Google’s previous version, I’ve been gradually trying to integrate the new version into my workday. As a disclaimer, this post is geared towards people like me, who will need to go cold turkey for a while, in order to wholeheartedly embrace this new UI. For anyone who is starting out with the new version, however: What you’ve never had, you won’t miss.
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Don’t get me wrong – I love Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS). I love seeing a client get to page 1 for their goal term in Google and they love me for helping them.
What’s not to love about this? Well, for one, making bad decisions about your site. You also need to understand why sometimes your site will experience fluctuations in ranking, just like the stock market.
Here’s a few factors to consider before becoming SERP obsessed and and reacting to fluctuations.
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CommentsNY Times writer David Segal wrote a great article about JC Penney attempt to ‘’cheat’’ Google and increase their organic rankings. As we know, Google’s goal is to search every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant sites that match the query you typed in. But what is the cost of being a relevant website and ranking number one for numerous keywords? JC Penney unfortunately found out the cost of trying to fool Google into instant rankings across the board. These sorts of tactics, known as “Black Hat” SEO, comes with consequences (and is of course not what we recommend). This article brings up the issue of using Black Hat versus White Hat SEO.
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CommentsJust as Justin Timberlake brought ‘sexy back’, it’s my goal to try to do the same with your Analytics, or at least attempt it! Analytics can be exciting and insightful or depressing and uninspiring, depending on how the data is interpreted and by whom. The biggest challenge facing SEO analysts can be in rendering the data for everyone else and going beyond observing basic metrics, sticking their necks out by making bold decisions about website changes. So, let’s look at some common scenarios we run into in digging into Analytics, provide some tips on navigating through your website data and how to effectively make decisions on actions to take.
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CommentsAs we know by now, measuring the ROI of offline marketing such as print advertising is tricky to say the least. Online marketing is the smarter, hipper cousin and gets all the praise and attention in the battle, since it’s so much easier to measure with tools such as Google Analytics. We have a window into the behavior of our customers like never before and in the case of GA, it’s free. In my opinion though, it is not a fair comparison to measure offline marketing with the same yard stick. Both ingredients can be crucial for the recipe; the trick is understanding how much is required, based on your industry and the behavioral trends going on.
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