Blue Tent Marketing

The days of looking at aggregate data to determine trends, behaviors or performance are long gone. Let’s face it,  aggregate data just doesn’t give you reliable, insightful or actionable data anymore. So the solution has come at a time when marketeers can’t avoid it any longer – SEGMENTATION. For years, we had to apply custom filters to Profiles in Google Analytics in order to gain a more clear look into the objective of a marketing campaign, such as stacking paid traffic next to organic traffic. Using the new Advanced Segmentation features in Google Analytics is a great (and easy) way to  begin segmenting your traffic within minutes.

Since the whole idea of Segmentation is tailored towards dividing something into separate parts or sections, Analytical Segmentation is no different. Let’s take a look at how you can begin applying Advanced Segments to some common examples.

To start, click on the Advanced Segments link under Settings. Google has already created a batch of default segments for you to apply, such as All Visits, Paid Traffic, Non-Paid Traffic, etc.. If you choose to use a default Segment, simply click ‘apply to report’. The alternative [and recommended] is to create a new custom segment, which will earn you major big brain points with the boss.

To manage your Custom Segments requires some drag & drop skills – find the Dimension or Metric under the list view and add them to the Segment.

A few pointers – make sure you are using the accurate condition – for example, if you want to create a keyword segment that contains the keyword ‘marketing’, make sure that you have chosen the ‘Contains’ condition. Once you have set the value, test the segment and you’re off.

When creating your new custom segment, take a moment to think about what you are trying to accomplish with this data. Remember that you can segment virtually anything you want, so begin thinking about;

• keywords
• traffic sources
• landing pages
• site behavior metrics, such as page depth, time on site & bounce rate.

Once you have your custom segment created, it’s time to apply it to your aggregate data. Enter the dashboard and choose you’re new Advanced Segment. Now you can begin to dig into your reports & leave with some fire power.

Contact Jonathan at bluetent.com or comment on this post to learn more about applying & creating Advanced Segments to your Google Analytics account.

As we say goodbye to 2008 and look ahead to the promise of the New Year, we are well aware of the challenges that lie ahead. It’s no secret that the current economic conditions have created a very tough business environment. Just about everyone has been affected by the financial crisis and the melt-down in the real estate market. And when people lose confidence, they tend to stop taking risks and adopt a “back to the basics” mentality. It’s a time to separate wants from needs and boil our lifestyles, our operating budgets and marketing expenses down to the most basic essentials.

This is not such a bad thing. Because surviving through these challenging times is often what makes businesses better and stronger. It makes us take an honest look at ourselves – to identify what’s working and what’s not – and to make those difficult decisions that might otherwise get overlooked. Frugality is in, excess is out.

This reality certainly also applies to our client’s internet marketing programs. For many, now is not the time to take on big, new projects that require significant expenditures of time and money. Rather, now is the time refocus, refine and revitalize your existing internet marketing strategy. Identify what’s working and find ways to do it even better. Determine which programs are faltering and overhaul them or cut them altogether. Following are some simple suggestions of how you can get “back to the basics” with your internet marketing strategy in order to go from good to great in 2009.

The Year-End Review
You’ve got to know where you are before you can possibly know which direction you need to go. Schedule a comprehensive review of all of your internet marketing initiatives from 2008. Are you able to clearly measure your ROI for each online marketing channel? If not, why not? How will you measure your ROI for 2009? Which programs were the most effective and which ones bombed? Where will you spend your coveted marketing dollars?

Affordable Website Enhancements
Take a critical look at your website. Have you worked to improve it over the past year? What enhancements can be made at minimal cost for maximum impact? Analyze your web analytics data to determine where your site needs fixing. Do certain pages have a higher bounce rate than others? Are your visitors abandoning your site at a certain stage of the conversion process? Look for simple design and content enhancements that will improve the user experience.

Evolve Your Email Marketing Programs
Many of our clients have very good email marketing programs. However, there’s always room for improvement. Make sure your email programs is “authenticated” to increase the delivery rate into the inbox. Measure list subscriber growth and attrition. Redesign old templates that may not render nicely on newer email clients such as Outlook 2007. Segment, test and get creative with more advanced email marketing techniques. Encourage participation and feedback. Remember that it’s about building relationships and good communication. 

Refine Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy
Search engine optimization is one of the more convoluted aspects of internet marketing. Schedule a year-end review with your search account manager to get a clear understanding of how your SEO program is performing. How have your rankings, traffic and conversions improved? How does your paid search (PPC) strategy fit into the picture? Can your campaigns be optimized to be more effective? Can you cut spending on unproductive keywords? Should your paid search campaigns focus on one, two or three search engines? What are your most productive keywords? Are there other long tail keyword phrases you could be targeting?

Assess Your Analytics Program
The core function of your web analytics program is to show you what’s working and what’s not. Are you spending the amount of time necessary to decipher this critical information? Is your Google Analytics configuration as comprehensive and customized as it should be? Are you consistently measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) or do you spend most of your time report surfing pretty pie charts? Make a commitment to understand and leverage your web analytics data to improve your overall internet marketing strategy. Hire a part-time account manager to help you identify and measure key metrics. Discover the actionable data and act on it. 

Thanks to everyone for a great year, and may 2009 bring you peace and prosperity!

Happy New Year!

Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

“The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.” – Claude Hopkins, “Scientific Advertising”

Would you invest $350 in an email marketing campaign for a $7,595 return on that investment? The answer is obvious! The graph below references a Google Analytics snapshot from one of our client’s recent email campaigns. And this figure only represents online orders, it doesn’t account for any additional orders that were completed by phone!

It’s widely touted that email marketing produces some of the highest R.O.I. of any online marketing channel. One statistic that is frequently referenced is, “Email R.O.I. per $1 spent equals $51.45″ 
(Source: Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct report October 2006). While, that sure sounds nice, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to measuring the effectiveness and value of your email marketing program.

Do you know exactly how many visits, leads, conversions, and sales are generated from your email campaigns? Can you accurately measure your return-on-investment? If your answer to these questions is no, then it’s time to integrate Google Analytics into your email marketing program.

A basic Google Analytics installation into your website and your email campaigns is easy to do. Not only will you have a more complete picture of how your site visitors are interacting with your site, but you’ll also have a clearer understanding of how your email programs compare to your other online marketing initiatives such as your Search Engine Marketing efforts. Establishing revenue goals for leads gained from form completions is easy to do. If your site includes an eCommerce component, then enabling eCommerce tracking within your GA account is a must.

Use the Google Analytics URL Builder to add a custom tag to every link with your email campaign that goes back to your site. Keep the “source” and “medium” consistent, but update the “campaign” variable with each send. In this way, you’ll easily be able to see which campaigns worked and which ones failed.

With every email campaign you should always be testing new ideas to find out what really works with your audience. Taking a scientific approach to your email marketing will not only help you improve each campaign’s effectiveness, but also help you create a road map of what works for future campaigns, and will help you make the case for allocating more of your marketing budget to your most productive marketing channels.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to measure the true R.O.I. for each email campaign, as well as for your email program as a whole. You’ll be able to measure revenue generated, average value per visitor, goals completed, conversion rate, and eCommerce transactions.

So whether you’re new to email marketing or have a current email marketing program in place – contact us today to take it to the next level, and remove the guess-work from your email marketing program!

- Josh Lewis & Ryan Austin

Constantly digesting and spewing loads of data that reflect the performance of your web marketing initiatives is addictive. As marketeers and business owners, you can’t avoid questioning your decisions to better increase your ROI through web marketing campaigns. Who cares that the the ‘nth percentage of your Buffalo, New York traffic used the apostrophe version of your name, what will that get you? Most people overlook the simple things, such as how to focus their efforts to make the largest impact.

I feel that you can gain more insight to your website and future web initiatives by asking yourself one simple question,

“Do I want to gain or retain traffic?”

There are two main approaches to increasing your conversion rate, the first is to gain traffic and increase the number of unique visitors. This approach supports the idea that by increasing visitors to your site, as will an increase in conversions. Tailoring your marketing initiatives to this approach is fairly straight forward.

You can use a variety of “Traffic Sources” reports, to better identify a short and long term strategy to gain traffic. Simply pairing a strategic paid search campaign along side an aggressive organic search campaign can bring you the increase in traffic you are looking for. Even though many webmasters and marketeers have this idea or theory logged in their brains, there are numerous holes to it. Simply put, who cares how many uniques you gain every month if 75% hit the back button! That is just silly traffic.

This brings up the often neglected approach to increasing conversion rates – understanding your website well enough to increase the visitor retainment. Since most websites don’t even reach a 1% conversion rate, getting your traffic to stick around long enough to convert is a real challenge. So how do you identify your visitor retention? First we need to identify who these visitors are. By cross-segmenting your return-visitors report by a specific traffic source, you can begin to identify sources that are under performing. Once we have identified a specfic source that is sending traffic with low retention or a high bounce rate.

The next step is to create a dedicated profile for each campaign or source that is showing signs of concern, this will allow you to “bucket” data.

Once you have created dedicated profiles for the sources and/or campaigns with high bounce rates, you can drill deeper to gain a huge understanding of the visitor’s footprint & interaction with your website.

You can now focus on the main metrics that will give clear insight to increase your sites visitor retention.

Visitor Distribution and Recency

Are you losing majority of these visits within the first 10 seconds, while majority of the pageviews are simply 1 page deep? These metrics allow you to visualize the entire distribution of visits instead of simply relying on the average pageviews per visit. By applying this report to the “bucketed” profile, you are lowering the chance to have skewed results for this particular metric.

Interpreting the visitor footprint is extremely useful when identifying solutions to increasing visistor retention. By identifying pages in your Top Content report with under performing bounce rates, you can begin to drill down to your page optimization techniques. Identify a page that is under performing in the Navigation Summary report and visualize the users experience.

Where are they getting stuck or confused? Are you offering a clear Call To Action?

You may even want to consider making this approach the first priority. Ultimately, by focusing on the source of low performing traffic, segmenting that data into a dedicated profile and analyzing key performance indicators, you will have a solid understanding of how well your site is retianing visitors. So rather than investing in new marketing initiatives that may bring your site a giant leep in traffic, you may want to look at what you can be doing better to improve conversions and retain existing traffic.

Best,

Jonathan Georger

Director of Search Engine Marketing