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In recent years, digital marketing has exploded with rapidly changing landscape and technology making tracking and analytics a challenge.
Posted in: digital marketing analytics
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Businesses spend money on marketing channels to attract right-fit prospects and take a desired action on their website, e.g. make a purchase, request information, download a pdf, sign-up for newsletter, etc… Each of these actions when completed is counted as a ‘goal’. However, most visitors to the website find their way to the goal after interacting with various marketing channels. Google Analytics (GA) provides a way to help understand and evaluate these encounters. All this digital touch-point information is captured during each website visit but standard GA reports do not provide this information without some additional setup. Using the ‘Goals’ feature in GA helps measure the above engagements and understand their contribution in meeting the business objectives. Setting up goals is easy in GA profile admin. There are existing templates to choose as well as the ability to create new ones. The goals overview report under the conversion section is the starting place to check goal completion trends, compare relationships … Continue reading
When launching a new marketing campaign, especially in Higher Education, tracking code and tag placement on websites, landing pages, blogs, emails and all pieces of the campaign are critical to evaluating campaign effectiveness and success. The process to set up and test this can be very time consuming and challenging. Coordination with the client marketing and IT departments, any third-party websites or services for installation, testing and corrections can easily result in delays to the campaign launch due to the complexity. Many technology vendors have come up with solutions to minimize/eliminate this problem. They utilize code snippets that enables users to make changes to data collection code remotely through a simple admin interface. These solutions were available at a cost and eCommerce sites were their main users. Now, with no-cost availability of tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM), Digital Marketers for Higher Education can take advantage of this opportunity. Any website that is already using Google Analytics (GA) can easily … Continue reading
Visitors to a website can come multiple times using any combination of direct, online search, ads, emails, etc. as sources before they convert. In previous versions of Google Analytics reports only the last touch point for a conversion was reported on. With the introduction of multi-channel funnel (MCF) reports, prior touch points which led to a conversion can also be reported on now. As I talked about in my previous post, Google Analytics (GA) campaign tags can be used to get information which otherwise is lost due to web protocols. Reports under the Acquisition tab in GA provides information on sources of website visits such as direct, search, referral, social, newsletter, banner ads, etc. as shown in the screenshot below: In one of my previous posts, I showed how to identify and tag various marketing touch-points, which otherwise show up as direct visits. As a follow-up to that, our next step is to measure the effectiveness and contribution of these … Continue reading
Landing pages and vanity websites are an integral part of digital marketing. These are mostly single HTML pages and come in a variety of flavors from simple text to more complex media rich pages. The latter may contain any combinations of image & video galleries, flash-driven elements, download resources, ajax elements, gadgets etc. Visitors interact with these objects without leaving the page. For example, Google Analytics (GA) tracking code will not track any of the following interactions from the visitors to the media rich page: How far down the page visitors are scrolling after landing on the page? How much time are they spending on the page? What resources on the page are they interact with? How many visitors are filling out the form? If there are videos on the page, which videos are they watching and for how long? Which content pieces on the page are most effective and engaging? And so on… Without enhanced data-collection techniques, the default … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics
Email is one of the most widely used digital marketing tools in the communications landscape, and every email marketing platforms has built-in tracking to report on metrics such as email delivery, bounce, open, click-thru and un-subscribe rates etc. However, this integrated email tracking systems can’t provide insight on activities and behaviors of email referrers on the website. Useful information is missing from most tracking systems. For example: What content email visitors are viewing after landing on your website? How much time they spent on site? What technology they used to access email/website? How many repeat visits do they have? What share of events, goals conversions, revenue etc. can be attributed to this channel? Which email list is most engaged/effective/profitable? Visitors landing on a website as a result of clicks from email links generally end up as ‘Direct’ traffic in analytics reports. Segment intelligence that can help make better decisions is lost. However, if links to the website in your emails … Continue reading
Posted in: email marketing
Comparing last four months of pre-launch and post-launch analytics data of recently launched responsive website for a client, revealed some interesting insights. Website traffic remained unchanged Share of Mobile traffic increased Share of Direct traffic increased Shift in Desktop traffic to Mobile Overall, for the new website, traffic visit numbers remained relatively unchanged. However, the share of desktop users dropped giving a huge boost to visits from mobile users — increasing their share from 7% to 25% of total site traffic. As shown in the chart below, the old site was not friendly to small mobile device users as majority of the mobile visits were from tablets. With the new responsive website, non-tablet mobile traffic growth was significant and for the first time it was almost twice of the tablet users. It is evident from the following chart that the new responsive website is a huge success. Now with significant traffic coming from Mobile devices, it was natural to compare … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
In our experience, measurement, collection and reporting of website data are usually not a well-defined piece of a marketing plan for many businesses. One such area where marketers often struggle with Google Analytics (GA) reports is related to campaign attribution. Due to technicalities and nature of the internet, it is not straightforward to know the details of all inbound links to your site. However, appending inbound URLs with parameter/value pairs helps assemble the additional information. The following simplified example illustrates how to reclaim some valuable data by including GA campaign related parameter/value pairs in links inside emails, banners, social media, etc and get meaningful insights utilizing various reports. Often easy to remember URLs are used in print and banner ads. Take the following custom or vanity URL as an example: http://www.yourdomain.com/short_name Let’s say this URL redirects visitors to the destination page as follows. http://www.yourdomain.com/pagename In doing so, the action is recorded as a direct visit to the ‘/pagename’ and crucial … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics
Although marketing creativity is a right-brain activity, in today’s digital realm marketers are also responsible for the left-brain activity of measuring, analyzing and reporting on the effectiveness of their marketing programs. One of the most common web traffic measurement techniques involves…
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Digital Marketing