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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
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Despite all the cultural and technology changes in the past ten years, today’s enrollment marketing professionals are still largely relegated to email blasts, while the one-to-one interactions are the domain of their colleagues in recruitment. It is now time for marketing and recruitment teams that previously worked in silo — with separate revenue goals and success metrics assigned to each — to be much more closely aligned. And delivering on that promise means coordinating the technologies used by each department. Marketing teams used to be responsible for creating leads, which would then be passed along to the recruitment team for follow up. But advances in online analytics and other tools now allow marketing professionals to gain far greater insights into what prospects are doing online. Combining web analytics with landing pages, email and link tracking tools and other tools that aggregate social media activity has clarified the pattern of individual online activity. In other words, marketing professionals can clearly define … Continue reading
There’s a lot you can do with Google Analytics, but a lot of it is hidden behind the scenes. Sure, the Google Analytics graphical interface allows you to setup advanced filters, track secondary dimensions, and compare date ranges. That’s all fine and dandy, but if you’re like me, you need some tighter control over how you pull your data. Enter the Google Analytics API. I’m going to show you a trick that we use here at Elliance everyday. I’m sure Google is aware that people employ this tool in this way, but it’s not openly advertised. Think of this tutorial as an early Christmas present from your friends at Elliance! The Google Analytics Query Explorer This tool was introduced for developers who are building their own custom API applications. Google wanted to provide a way for people to test out API queries through a sandbox-like page, to make it easier to debug complex API queries. But you can also use … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics
At Elliance we are in the process of overhauling our clients’ monthly SEO reports – an effort which involves sifting through the mountains of data we collect on a regular basis, and identifying which metrics are most interesting and most valuable to our search clients. In this process, I realized that there are really three distinct actors in any SEO campaign, identified by three sets of interconnected activities: A) Our clients’ marketing efforts B) Our own SEO efforts C) The impact of external forces It turns out that during the course of an SEO campaign, and in our SEO reports, we define success by measuring the blending of these three efforts in four different ways: A) Elliance-Client Outcomes B) Elliance-External Outcomes C) Client-External Outcomes D) Elliance-Client-External Outcomes Since each of our SEO metrics measures a portion of one of these outcomes, we can place each metric at the intersection of two or more actors’ efforts. Take a look: SEO Metrics … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
You’re getting sloppy, SEO people! Let’s talk fundamentals. I’m sick and tired of hearing your excuses, about how the game has changed, and you’re caught standing there flat-footed like a kid who just hit his first tee ball. Shape up! I’m busting out the playbook. The following are inexcusable excuses: 1. “Search has changed dramatically and we’re still learning how to cope.” Search algorithms change all the time, each day in fact. Some changes are minor, and some are massive. You are allowed some leeway to rethink your strategy after a major algorithm change, like the Panda updates or Penguin, when those changes require a dramatic shift in link building techniques, content optimization, social messaging activities, etc. But you must not use this as a crutch, or throw your hands up in the air and blame Google. It’s like blaming the refs, people! Adjust your game plan! 2. “Demonstrable results are hard.” If you can’t show a client actual, tangible, … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing, Social Media
At the last AMA Higher Education Marketing conference, President Mark Putnam of Central College, profoundly claimed that he could know the health of any college by looking at just two metrics: yield and retention rate. This led me to a hunt for other metrics that college presidents consider indispensable. Here is what I have found so far: 1. Size of endowment, the war chest to attract the most talented students and faculty with financial aid and salaries. 2. Geographic reach of enrolled students, which is a measure of diversification and college reputation. 3. Average test scores, which pegs a college’s brand position in the prestige hierarchy. 4. Discount rate, the difference between the sticker price and what a student actually pays, directly impacts the net revenue or financial health of a college. 5. Acceptance rate, or conversely rejection rate, is a direct measure of school’s reputation and selectivity. Understandably, the more a college rejects, the better its reputation gets. 6. … Continue reading
You’ve probably been through this before. The status reports you prepare (regularly or by request) are well-researched, carefully detailed… and they’re going right over the heads of less SEO-minded people at your company. Your boss, your marketing folks, your IT team: they want the highlights, and they want to know that everything is going ok (or not). But spare me the details, please, because I have another call at noon. Call it lack of time or bandwidth on their part, but in the truth is, these internal “clients” just don’t speak your language. It’s not that they aren’t interested in performance, but everybody has a full plate of his or her own. They just want to get a high level survey and move on to the next thing on their busy agenda. So let’s talk about your SEO reports. What can you do to streamline some of your more arcane data points and help surface your most valuable information? Reset … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
In 2002, the Oakland Athletics made Major League Baseball history by wining 20 consecutive games and finishing first in the American League West, despite spending only $41 million dollars on player salaries — nearly $100 million less than big market teams like the New York Yankees. Their storybook season was later enshrined in the popular book and film, Moneyball. The secret to the A’s success was the team’s adoption of the principles of sabermetrics, which, while incredibly bold and innovative at the time, held simply that each player’s performance could be predicted based on objective, analytical evidence of his past performance. Remove all sentimentality, ditch any gut instinct or human intuition. Baseball success could be reduced to one simple metric: how often does a player get on base. As web marketers, we all too often make decisions based on intuition or feeling. It’s easy to fall in love with a major decision or to find ways to justify continued poor … Continue reading
At Elliance, we are extremely proud of the work we do on behalf of our search clients on a daily basis. We help improve their rankings, visibility, and brand awareness through a customized variety of search marketing services. But, it’s sometimes very difficult to value that visibility we’re providing, both for our clients and for our own internal marketing efforts. Even at its most basic level, valuation of search has been lacking. Most conversion reports of the past attributed new prospects or customers to either the first or last touch point. However, we’ve learned over the years that as searchers progress through the decision funnel, they tend to move from more general, non-branded terms like “digital marketing agency” to branded phrases like “Elliance Pittsburgh.” It’s unlikely someone would search on a very general term, navigate to our website, and immediately convert. Similarly, we’ve seen that once a brand or website is found in search results and becomes a part of … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
Marketers enjoy web analytics, because we like to count things. Naturally we love Google Analytics, because it lets us count our total website visitors, total time spent on our pages, top converting pages, referral sources, top cities, browsers, and more. Counting has never been easier (or more fun). One thing marketers don’t like is guesswork. For all our counting, we can never quite be sure whether people are actually enjoying our content. We assume that they enjoy it, because, well, it’s good content! But just how much do people enjoy it? We can’t actually place a number on that, and it drives us nuts. Or maybe we can. Despite the subjective nature of engagement, there are actually a number of ways of estimating user engagement and users’ enjoyment of your content. Combine the following eight methods together with a simple algorithm (math! counting!), and you’ve got yourself an objective, measurable metric. 1. Time spent on page Begin with a landing … Continue reading