A how-to guide for campaign reporting with examples
One of the most important (but often overlooked) aspects of digital marketing is setting up your analytics properly. It’s a little bit technical but easy to do once you understand a few simple steps and see why it’s so important.
Being able to track where your visitors are coming from is a valuable opportunity to improve your engagement and your ROI during the campaign. Additionally, when you benchmark your campaign performance you will be able to improve your campaigns in the future, and budget more effectively. It’s worth investing a little time in analytics!
In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or landing page. This is the critical first step in being able to understand how your campaign is performing.
Once you can accurately see where your visitors are coming from, you’ll be able to build more…
If you are going to optimise your digital campaigns you need to measure them accurately
How do you measure the effectiveness of your digital campaigns? In this video, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights talks to Grant LeBoff, founder of the Sticky Marketing Club about tools and key metrics to use for digital campaign tracking monitoring that companies should start to consider. Have a watch to find out all about the best practices in the area of measuring your campaigns.
[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFebyszqGKA" /]
Or here's the transcript for the quick version:
Grant Leboff: So Dave, one of the things that business owners, marketing managers, really struggle with, I think, a little bit on digital, is measuring the effectiveness of what they are doing. How would you go about looking at that?
Dave Chaffey: Yeah, that's right, Grant. It's a huge challenge. Almost every business I talk to hasn't really got that nailed yet. The good news…
3 Steps to make the case for better call-tracking
I get it. You’re an online marketer. Equipped with the best there is to offer in web analytics, you save the day for client after client, letting them know what drives visitors to their websites. Clients want to know if visitors actually read the content on their websites? Done. Businesses enquiring on what sites visitors go to after leaving their website? You got it covered.
But what happens when these visitors you thought you knew so well visit your clients website then decide to pick up the phone? Even with a powerful tool like Google Analytics, you still need to be tracking phone calls.
I know… I know, this isn’t 1876, and you aren’t Alexander Graham Bell. You’re a digital savvy marketing pro, why should you worry your clients with something as old school as telephone calls?
Why you should be tracking phone calls
A recent…
Google Analytics adds Data Hub and Trackbacks to the Activity Stream Reports
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Analytics post: the Activity Stream in Social Reports
In March 2012, we highlighted Google’s new Social Analytics as they were then described in the Beta we were reviewing. In August 2012 the Social Analytics feature became part of the Social Reports we now see in Google Analytics as a standard feature.
This latest update to Social Report has two new additions:
1. Data hub activity - This feature, shown below, was originally available through a drilldown, so isn’t entirely new, but is now highlighted in the menu as Data hub activity.
It's an interesting reminder from an SEO perspective that Google is able to track comment activity on a blog. If you're setting up a blog it's worth using a Google Data Hub partner. I recommend using Disqus which we use, or Livefyre.
…
An introduction to the 6 new Social Reports in Google Analytics
In my previous post I wrote about the increasing importance of social media with SEO. In this follow-up I'll show how Google Analytics can be used to assess how effective you are in generating social signals through an engaged audience.
Using Google Analytics social reports to measure impact
Google Analytics introduced a new Social report suite in March 2012. This makes it much easier to evaluate the contribution of traffic from social media domains and sharing of content from your site on social networks.
When it was first announced it was known as "Social Analytics" (see Dave Chaffey's introduction to 10 features) and had its own menu option. Now the Social report is integrated in the Traffic Sources report, available by selecting "Social". There are 6 reports available which I will explain. If you haven't used them, I recommend it, it certainly…
Not Provided search queries will affect how your report on your search engine marketing
Source : Google Inside Search Blog
Importance : [rating=4]
Our Commentary
A recent announcment on the Google Inside Search blog post confirmed Google's plans to roll out encrypted search across local Google services (.co.uk, .fr, .de etc).
You may recall this change was rolled out across Google.com in October last year and you will have undoutedly seen the impact in your own analytics as the amount of keyword data set to "Not Provided" has grown.
Consultant and Smart Insights commentator Dan Barker has catalogued the impact of the recent change in the UK and we have seen this also in our analytics. Here he shows the recent change.
Dan refers to this as Google "hiding search data" and that's how we see it - it's…
Using Multi-Channel Funnels to analyse the impact of marketing channels on conversions
Many marketers struggle to identify which sources of traffic are most effective when it comes to converting web visitors. When conversions take place over multiple visits rather than a single visit to a site, it's really important to understand the complete customer journey and not use the standard "last click wins" model of attribution.
This is particularly the case in the area I work in, B2B marketing, since buying cycles can be as long as 18 to 24 months and include multiple campaigns in between.
The new Multi-Channel funnel reports in Google Analytics is a step closer to providing marketers with much more detailed insights into the first and last interactions visitors have with your website before turning into a lead. At the end of the post I show an example of how they can be used to understand the…
An introduction to Google's new multichannel funnels feature
Multi-channel Funnel Reports in Google Analytics bring us a whole new depth of understanding to how people come to web sites over the course of several visits.
And there’s a bonus: we can also start working with our SEO keywords and other sources of traffic with a level of control which was previously only available for paid advertising and other campaigns.
In real time. Retrospectively. With no pre-configuration effort (so not like campaigns, then).
The most stunning of these reports, in my opinion, is the Top Conversion Paths report. For the first time ever it shows the history of a series of visits.
What’s more, it groups them by channel so that you can see the most common sequence of routes to the site.…
8 questions to ask to help get your brand messages across in Google
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Official Google announcement on sitelinks
Folks have been discussing Google’s experiments with Google Sitelinks through August, e.g. http://www.hallam.biz/blog/2011/08/12-google-sitelinks-2011.html but yesterday we started seeing this more consistently on all Google searches and now Google has made the announcement above.
If you’re not familiar with Sitelinks, they are the listing of extra links below the brand main site description when you search on a brand name. We have a briefing on sitelinks which shows the previous simple format of just 8 links.
This example shows they now take up much more of the page with 8 to 12 alternatives and include more detailed descriptions:
Marketing implications of sitelink change
Well for almost all sites, the most important searches…
Four options for tracking offline marketing campaigns showing the method for Google Analytics
To track offline campaign effectiveness requires use of a campaign URL within offline communications like Print or TV ads.
There are several choices with which URL to use, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Here's a quick run-through with links to more detail at the end. I'd be interested to hear about your preferences for which are most effective. Do most people ignore campaign tracking or vanity URLs so it's a waste of time or is it worthwhile?
1. The standard home page address
Example: http://www.domain.com
This is a common approach by advertisers since it's the simplest. The main disadvantage from a measurement point-of-view is that there is no way to directly track this. Although you can review an increase in direct traffic arriving at this URL through a segmented landing page report.
From a marketing point-of-view this also has the…
