Chart of the Day: How good is your use of campaign tracking codes?
As this post on campaign tracking in Google Analytics shows, Google's UTM tracking codes provide an excellent way to see which of your marketing channels and content is influencing site visits, leads and sales. This week we have launched a simple tracking code generator for Google Analytics marketing source codes to make it quicker for members to generate these.
Yet, when consulting or training I find that many businesses don't fully track their inbound marketing activities, especially their content marketing where content is shared by email or social. This chart, from joint research by Smart Insights and HubSpot of content marketers in Europe also suggests room for improvement in tracking of content marketing.
You can see that fewer than half of businesses are able to track ROI or track links to content from other…
Chart of the day: How long do you spend on social media networks each day?
This chart looks at average daily time spent online and what we are actually doing with that time. It was reported that the most common reasons for using social networks are to “fill up spare time”. Users are now spending around 2 hours per day on social networks and messaging, that adds up to 5 years and 4 months spent over an average lifetime. This figure is up 15 minutes from 2012.
It's perhaps no surprise as our infographic of the social media activity every minute shows.
The increase we see here will be due to how social media platforms themselves are evolving their tools and options to further attract and engage new audiences. As they evolve the more time we will spend there.
What does this mean for marketers? Start researching when your followers are most…
Chart of the Day: Understanding subscriber loyalty - Part 2 of 2
This is the last of a two-part blog, covering subscriber loyalty and unsubscribing following on from - What is a good Unsubscribe Rate?
We all know about click-to-open (CTO) metrics and even click-through-rate (CTR), but what the heck is unsubscribe-to-open (UTO)?
UTO, is a good indication of how unsatisfied a customer is with your email. They are the customers, who open your email but promptly unsubscribe.
If your Email Service Provider (ESP) doesn't offer this statistic in your reporting, you can calculate it yourself.
(Total Unsubscribe/Opt-Outs ÷ Unique Opens) × 100
Eg: (20 ÷ 359) × 100 = 5.57%
Is this UTO rate good or bad? In today's chart, it shows that the average UTO is 2.59%. So the above example is performing rather poorly. The sector with the highest UTO rates is Sales/Marketing/Design at 4.89%. While the best performing is Public Relations at…
Chart of the day: User generated is the single most influential factor in determining purchase intent.
User-generated content (UGC) includes things such as photos and reviews sent in by previous customers. Nine out of ten (90%) of US customers who took a recent survey into UGC, said that user-generated content was the highest influencing factor when purchasing online. Search engine results came a close second. Promotional emails came third. It makes sense for SEO and email to have high influence, but this study shows that UGC is now heavily influencing shoppers, more than ever are buyers relying on reviews and the opinion of others.
Those under 30 were particularly heavily influenced by UGC. Those over 65 were least influenced by UGC. Clearly then UGC will become over more popular and is an area you should be looking at developing.
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Chart of the Day: After years of global growth, online ad spend outstrips TV spend for the first time
Online ad-spend surpassed TV spend in several mature markets a few years back. But now we have reached the watershed moment where online ad spend is higher than TV spend globally.
This spectacular growth makes it an interesting time to work in digital marketing. But we are seeing the lion's share of this growth to just two providers, creating a 'digital duopoly'. This may create a less competitive market, which could be bad news for advertisers in the long run.
Source: KPCB Internet Trends 2017
Data Source: Zenith Advertising Data Forecast
Recommended Toolkit: Marketing Technology and Innovation
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Chart of the Day: B2B marketers place SEO Rankings and Traffic Generation above Leads or Sales
SEO is one of the most important channels in any B2B marketing strategy but is often overlooked. Despite its track record in virtually every industry, B2B marketers can feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into ranking your business in the results pages of Google (and Bing etc). When you first starting out with your SEO strategy you need to research keywords, identify your target keywords, write the content, generate links and even after all that you still may not appear in the SERPs due to Google's reluctance to tell anyone how it actually works. Which is why SEO remains a unique challenge for B2B marketers.
But if you get it right you may find that Traffic Generation is less of an issue and you need to focus on turning that traffic into leads…
Chart of the Day: Is a 360 degree customer view a myth or a reality?
I have been involved in marketing since the mid 1990s and I was brought up by Martha Peppers and Don Rogers, authors of 1:1 marketing encouraging businesses to develop a single customer view. The nirvana of a single customer view for large organisations is that all employees from marketing and sales through to customer service can easily harness profile information about a customer and all their marketing communications interactions with a company plus their sales and service transactions.
Since that time we have had an explosion of channels, martech and data which has made the theory difficult to put into practice. So I found this insight from Blue Venn on marketers perception of the SCV interesting:
On the positive side it's good and actually surprising that the percentage of marketers who think a…
Chart of the Day: Understanding subscriber loyalty - Part 1 of 2
This is the first of a two-part blog, covering subscriber loyalty and unsubscribing.
What will be covered:
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe-to-open Rate
Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. Well in email marketing, there is only one: unsubscription.
Customers can move jobs, not feel engaged by the messaging or can just change their minds. In fact, I cannot think of one company that I have been subscribed to and stayed subscribed to. Having a unsubscribe/update preferences link is a legal requirement for all marketing emails. It's important to give your customers a simple and easy way to change their preferences/choices.
In today's chart, I look at unsubscribes by sector. The average unsubscribe rate is 0.49%. But the sector with the highest unsubscribe rate is B2B (non-retail) is displaying at 1.08%. While the best performing is Public Relations…
Chart of the day: Staying in touch with friends is the main reason behind social media use
We all use social media but why do we use it? A recent report interviewed a range of social media users and explored what keeps them coming back to social networks.
The study reported that 42% use social media to keep in touch with what their friends are doing. Conversely, it is becoming used less to share their own photos or opinions, with only 33% doing so.
Therefore what we can see is that many social media users are coming to view social networks as a passive form of networking. Users are just looking to consume content rather than sharing their own personal lives.
What does this mean for marketing?
It is good news that users are open to engaging with content, rather than just putting out their own. However, if users are uploading less of their personal content, this…
Chart of the Day: Snapchat's impressive growth is mostly confined to North America
Snapchat's explosive growth and popularity among 'Gen Z' means many marketers have started to see it as the future of social media. But perhaps this hype is only really relevant for those focused on the US market. Although Snapchat is growing in other areas, the level of penetration is far lower.
Snapchat's ad products are also clearly less used outside of the US, in part because of the lack of penetration. This can be inferred from the extremely low revenue per user in all markets other than North America.
Source: Atlas
Data Sample: 160,00,000 Snapchat users
Recommended Toolkit: Social Media Marketing
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