Gift basket material?  I’d say so.

Ever wonder what it looks like when a plan comes together with an aggressive Search Engine Optimization campaign and a killer Email Marketing Campaign?  Well, if you have Google Analytics tied in properly, it looks just like this.

Skills to pay your web marketing bills…

•    We implemented an aggressive setup and began a recurring custom SEO program December 11-ish.  See above.
•    Note* this is non-paid search traffic from Google only.
•    That increase, in that amount of time, is absolutely ridiculous.
•    If your site has been in the dark (SEO wise) for a long time, these are the immediate results you can see with the proper help.

Killing it with Email Marketing…

•    In 9 months we made 7 sends.
•    That equated to $77,370.49 in online bookings alone – That obviously DOES NOT include people that got it, went to the site, then called and booked.  We have those stats in another report, but let’s stay focused on online bookings for now.
•    Cost for that particular Email Marketing Campaign is $15k-ish over 12 months, including utilizing our ACE program.  Again, we have only sent 7 times and these booking numbers do not reflect the ROI for 12 full months.  Looking back, those 2 missed sends hurt, ouch.  Consistency is key, and would have made these ROI numbers look even better.
•    Let’s do the math – that is over 500% return on investment………so far.

Congrats to the SEM and Email teams for a solid performance.

Good Morning Vacation Rental Managers!

Listen to a very informative interview with Blue Tent President Peter Scott on Scott Colson’s VacationRentalTraffic.org Podcast.

VacationRentalTraffic.org is dedicated to bringing Vacation Rental Managers today’s best online strategies, tools and techniques to drive floods of traffic to their websites and maximize their bookings.

In this wide ranging interview Pete discusses some SEO challenges often faced by Vacation Rental Managers, some emerging threats, the importance of having solid content and clean code, various SEO strategies, and backing up your efforts with a Google Analytics set up.

In the financially troubled year of 2009, there were some interesting things we saw happen in the email marketing world.  The importance of email authentication continued to grow, as did increasing the reach of your email campaigns through the ever-growing social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But one of our clients in the medical education field showed us that taking a simple, disciplined approach to their email program by staying consistent and relevant produced extraordinary ROI. The annual cost of their email marketing program was $4,200, and it produced a trackable $219,500 in revenue from direct online bookings (and that doesn’t include any enrollments made over the phone)!

Our client didn’t do anything extraordinary to achieve such an astounding ROI  – they simply gave their subscribers the opportunity to choose the type of course information they were interested in receiving and then delivered that information on a consistent schedule. They created a targeted opt-in process which they then used to segment by “medical fields” for each send. They also stayed on a strict schedule of the third Thursday of each month with October and November as exceptions by doing two sends during the pre-holiday busy period.

Their content and creative was trimmed down from a lengthy newsletter to a single focus postcard style keeping it super relevant to what their audience was asking for. Their call to action was a simple discount with an expiration date associated with it. They kept the copy simple and gave direct links to the courses that were being discounted for that month. The site offered a direct way to enroll from the site and they also provided a toll free number for inquires in the email. Next, we’ll be proposing to use a unique 800 number so that we can tie those phone orders back to the email program as well.

Tracking the campaign was important not only to show the value of the campaign but also to for the client to know what courses where of most interest. All the links were tagged with Google Analytics and had eComerrce incorporated which was the main tracking tool but we also used a tool called “action tracking”. Check out the GA stats from the entire year of 2009. One major stat to notice is that even though the year campaign was responsible for only 2.95% of all site visits, it was accountable for 11.95% of all revenue produced.

Overall the client taught us that staying simple and relevant plays a big part in every email campaign. Display a clear call to action and always track every interaction from the campaign – and the results will often take care of themselves.

– Ryan Austin
Director of Email Marketing

Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει

"Nothing endures but change." – Heraclitus, Greek Philosoper (535 BC – 475 BC)

This is one of my favorite aphorisms of all time. We easily observe and experience the truth of this statement in our daily lives – it’s as easy as looking out the window. We detect changes in the weather, in the position of the sun, and the movement of the clouds in the sky. As humans we’ve evolved to become keen observers of change – ultimately so that our perceptions may positively influence our actions.

Web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, has a great old post titled "Making Web Analytics Actionable: Focus On What’s Changed." In it, he lets out the "dirty little secret" of web analytics that in most cases, it’s doubful that the "top 25" of anything (referrers, keywords, etc.) changes much at all. The point is that there are changes in traffic, in engagement, in referral sources occuring within your web analtyics data. Which raises the following questions:

Are you able to detect these changes?

What actions do you take as a result of these insights?

Most likely, the answer to the first question is no. Lucky for you, the team over at Juice Analytics has released an updated version of their Firefox Google Analytics Plugin that allows GA users to easily access some key change metrics within their standard GA reporting dashboard. Specifically, the plugin allows analysts to regularly access change report metrics in the Keyword and Referring Site Reports. This is a very meaningful report that gives you insight into how your internet marketing efforts are actively affecting your overall performance. You’ll quickly be able to see new referring sites within the past three days, as well as keywords with greater than 50% increase in referral traffic. This is data that once was buried and difficult to access, and is now literally at your fingertips, for free, with the click of your mouse! Thanks Juice Analytics!

Of course, the question remains: Now that you have visibility into this data, what will you do with it? How will these insights into these constant change metrics influence your ad spend, your PPC budget, your marketing strategy? As always, we’re here to help …

– Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

Google announced today a new set of features which makes Google Analytics more powerful, flexible and intelligent.  These new tools will be rolled out in the coming weeks and further Google Analytics as an enterprise level web analytics tool.  As Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAAC), Blue Tent is excited to share these new features with you.

Expanded Goals – Feel confined by just four goals?  Google Analytics now supports up to 20 goals per profile.  Also, you can now use metrics in your goals include setting benchmarks for time on site and pages per visit.

Advanced Analysis Features – Tired of exporting your data into a spreadsheet to perform more complicated data analysis?  Try using table filtering to perform advanced data analysis.  This new tool allows you to filter rows based on metrics.  When used with pivoting and secondary dimensions, this new feature becomes even more powerful.

Multiple Custom Variables – Define and track visitors based on specific visitor attributes through multiple custom variables.  Attributes include page-level (viewed movie), visitor (returning vs new visitor), and session (logged in or not).

Sharing – Easily share segments and custom report templates across multiple accounts and profiles.

Analytics Intelligence & Custom Alerts – Stop combing through data to find significant changes in metrics that matter for your business.  Use Analytics Intelligence to alert you to the most significant changes.   Google Analytics is now in its initial phase of an algorithmic intelligence engine.

Mobile Reporting – Track your mobile websites and apps with Google Analytics.   GA can now track mobile devices even if they don’t run JavaScript.  PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites will be supported.

Visit the Google Analytics blog or contact us for more information on these exciting new features!

We just returned from our first annual pilgrimage to the GooglePlex for the Google Partners Summit – a weeklong event for Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs) and Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants (WOACs). The highlight of day one, was the keynote entitled “Crime Against Humanity” by renowned Google web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik.

Much of his presentation centered around the concept that web analytics as we know it is undergoing fundamental, rapid change. He highlighted the limitations of Javascript based analytics tracking in the increasingly fragmented ecosystem of online information consumption.

“The website is no longer the center of the universe,” he said. “In this new world, javascript tracking does not work … Current metrics for web analytics lose their value everyday.”

Marketing & Influencing People is Fundamentally Changing

By example, Avinash pointed to some of the most popular and widely consumed sources for information and online purchasing: Twitter and Amazon.com.

In regards to a book listed for sale on Amazon: How do you measure the value of content publishing on Amazon? At what point is the value of that page maximized? How may reviews are needed before the tipping point is reached upon which many new sales are generated? How do negative reviews affect the value of this page? How will we identify and integrate such influences into our web analytics ecosystem?

And how to measure success on Twitter? Avinash stressed the importance of viewing Twitter as a brand channel. Think the number of followers you have matters – nonsense! One important smart metric that we’re all aware of is the all-important “re-tweet” or RT. Check out Retweetist.com to measure the viral value of your tweets. Then divide the number of RTs per 1K followers to arrive at your RT metric. This metric shows your capacity to influence people!

“Influence not because I did it, but because you did it – that is marketing,” said Avinash.

In regards to your blog, focus on your number of subscribers – what Avinash described as the “future of permission marketing, the future of email marketing.” Another engagement metric is to analyze the number of words in posts versus the number of words in comments.

You’ll notice that many of these metrics aren’t readily available in Google Analytics. For the time being, you’ll need to “automagically pull, scrape, integrate, invent, correlate and compute” to arrive at meaningful behavioral metrics that lead to actionable outcomes. Then set long term goals and continue measure and refine your approach.

The “A” Stands for Agile

It’s clear that web analytics is evolving at lightning speed. Avinash stressed that the smaller shops, not the giants (or elephants in his words) are the ones leading the charge into this brave new world of web analytics. Take a look at companies like statsit.com, percentmobile.com, and brizzly.com for a glimpse of the what the future holds for web analytics.

Cheers to Avinash for a thought-provoking, entertaining and insightful keynote. We can’t wait to dig into his new book, “Web Analytics 2.0” – how about you?

- Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

With the emergence of social applications there has been much debate as to which marketing channel is more efficient, Email or Social Media. Although new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook can be very effective when used correctly, they are more of a way to spread news in 140 characters or less than a marketing channel. These social applications don’t replace the need for relevant, well-executed Email Marketing.

The truth is that people still use email to communicate more than any social application, but that doesn’t mean we can’t combine the two to create an even deadlier email program! 15% of your email list will read your emails and research on Facebook or Twitter to see if others are chatting about the message before taking action. Solid evidence there is room for both Email and Social Media.

About 6 months ago Blue Tent started using a Share With Your Network (SWYN) application called AddThis (which is free) that allows recipients of an email message to post the online version of the email to any social application. Through AddThis you can track which message was sent and to what social media applications it was sent to. AddThis allows you to post to any social application but from our experience Facebook has hands down been the most popular with 172 posts in the last 6 months (pictured).

Using this application allows the audience of those who view your latest email a lot larger and increases the chances of your email marketing campaigns to "go viral". With 300 million Facebook users and the average person having 120 friends, you can see how tying in social media to your email program can create fast, efficient results. By adding in an email subscribe option to the posted online version allows the postee’s friends or followers to sign up for future emails. By allowing these folks to sign up through the posted eNewsletter is key since it also further adds to your premission based list!

The facts speak for themselves. There is still a demand for properly executed email marketing while the advantages of combining your email marketing efforts with your social campaigns are simply too good to pass up. Use the benefits of social media to create more exposure, increase ROI, and increase the list size of your email campaign.

Eric Taylor
Email Project Manager

Many sites have internal site search functionality which allows visitors to search for content, products and more.  Google Analytics can track these site search terms.  Analyzing this data can be beneficial for your search engine marketing campaigns.

To set up site search for a Google Analytics profile, log in and select “Edit” website profile.  Select the “Do Track Site Search” button and then enter your query parameter in the provided field.  You can determine your query parameter by going to your website and performing an internal site search.  For example in http://www.domain.com/search/?q=site%20search%20query the query parameter is “q”.  For more information on setting up Google Analytics site search check out the GA help center.  Depending on the volume of your site, give Google Analytics a few days to collect data and then analyze the data.

Access the report in the content section of Google Analytics.  Identify high volume search terms and compare these to the content currently on your site.  If you don’t already have content dedicated to these topics, consider adding new content.  This will help improve visitor retention.  Strategize on how to generate more search engine traffic from these terms.  Is paid or organic search more appropriate?  In this example, we might add a new page dedicated to area hiking including safety tips and recommended trails for all levels of hikers.  In time we would expect to start ranking in the search engines for keywords relating to [Aspen hiking] and thus we would begin to drive search engine traffic for this keyword.

Check back next week for another Google Analytics’ reporting tip.

Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

Blue Tent search account managers use Google Analytics everyday to help manage clients’ campaigns and to maximize ROI.  Here is one of our favorite reports for paid search.  Check back next week for another Google Analytics’ reporting tip.

Determine the Best Time of Day to Run your Paid Search Account

Most paid search campaigns operate on a budget and all seek to maximize their ROI.  One way you can spread your budget more effectively is to use ad scheduling which lets you specify when you would like your ads to run by hour and day of the week.  The Google AdWords scheduler includes an advanced setting which allows you to adjust your bids during certain periods of the day.  When should you run your paid search campaigns?  Should you increase your bids at certain times of the day to increase your click through rate?  Rather than guess and test, turn to the following Google Analytics’ report and see immediate results.

You can apply this custom report to an advanced segment such as your search engine traffic or to your paid search traffic if your campaigns have already been running for a while.  Analyze the data to determine those times of the day where visitors perform the best. Look for goal conversions, e commerce transactions, a low bounce rate, high pages/visit and high average time on site.  Be sure to consider sample size before drawing concussions.  Once you have determined the hours of the day that perform best, set the ad scheduler in your paid search campaign appropriately.  Also, you can create a similar report for day of the week to determine if your paid search campaign should be turn off some days of the week.

Stay tuned for next week’s Google Analytics tip relating to site search data.

-Lindsay Reither
Director of Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics

We’re excited to announce that we’ve officially been designated as the only Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) based in Colorado! While we’ve been working with GA since the spring of 2007, this marks an important milestone not only in the development of our web analytics department, but also in the ongoing development of a “culture of optimization” within our clients and within Blue Tent. Since the beginning, our mission has been to help our clients “Win on the Web” and this designation is just another step in that direction.

As you probably already know by now, Google Analytics is a powerful, free, web-based analytics program that enables its users to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing programs. A successful Google Analytics configuration allows the user to see how their site visitors interact with their website, identify where their traffic is coming from, and track the number of those visitors that convert into new leads or sales. Google Analytics allows companies to connect the dots between their website, organic and paid search marketing, online advertising, and email marketing programs to identify which efforts contribute most to their bottom line. It’s all about ROI.

So what’s the big deal about becoming a GAAC? Essentially, we’ve received the “stamp of approval” from the web analytics gurus at Google. The GAAC logo demonstrates that Blue Tent Marketing has gone through the extra steps to prove itself as an expert in Google Analytics configuration, consulting, analysis and training. With a large percentage of GA setups installed incorrectly, it’s important that you choose an agency that can get the job done right. We’re uniquely positioned to help our clients in the real estate, fractional, vacation rental and resort industries maximize the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts.

It’s clear that in today’s economy you simply can’t afford to be guessing about where to direct your precious marketing dollars. So whether you’re looking for greater insight into how your current internet marketing initiatives are performing, or whether you’re ready to take the next step to begin optimizing your web presence with Google Website Optimizer – we’re here to help. 

Contact us today and get ready to take your internet marketing initiatives to new heights!

Until next time,
Josh Lewis
VP Marketing