Digital Marketing Made Simple

Editor's Notes

• #5: In the early days of internet advertising on it was primarily display ads – like the ones you would run in print – only less information. Along the way images could be clicked and take you to your business website. And then those who clicked could be counted. The “click through rate” because the early barometer of whether your campaign was successful. And then in the past few years websites were rebuilt to be optimized so it would scale down to the screen size of a table or mobile phone.
• #6: I won’t talk much about the importance of this today but your website needs to be responsive – so that it detects what device is accessing it and then reshapes and moves the content so the user has a pleasant experience. Mobile sites started out as separate web addresses but that is not good – have your site changed to be responsive.
• #7: While what was presented on the screen and how it was presented was evolving, so were the types of advertising with search being the core product. Search engines such as Google made it real easy to find a business or content about any topic in the world. And if your product was tied to that topic then you could buy an ad to appear next to the search results, called Search Engine Marketing. Many early digital ad agencies promised shortcuts to jump your website to the organic results area referred to as Search Engine Optimization. Claiming your spot on a map became more important as folks use their phone to get directions. Each of these topics could be a separate workshop.
• #8: Few people probably remember the public debate over internet privacy concerns. When was the last time you heard about that topic? Basically, when you visit or now even if you are served any digital component, what happens next can be tracked. A cookie – a small snippet of code – is stored onto your computer and will stay there until you “clear your cookies”. There are ways to use the internet “in cognito” or anonymously but few do it. The attention shifted away from being tracked online to being hacked online which is a much more serious concern for us all. Many products and ways to minimize this have been born. Still, the mainstream digital marketing solutions are built upon being able to track users with cookies. So just how prevalent is this?
• #9: The invitations to this workshop said you’d get a few tips and so here is tip #1. Ghostery is a free plug-in for your Chrome browser that will show you what third party codes are at that website tracking your visit. Here at ESPN this plug-in detected 15 trackers. These trackers are invisible computer code that ESPN allowed to place on their website. By tracking what a visitor to your site does, you can then make adjustments to your marketing to improve the results you want. While there are many tracking programs, the big one is Google. That’s the one we’ll focus on because it’s the one that you can use immediately if you are not already, and perhaps do a few other items that you might learn about today. So to see if you are ahead or behind what your competition is doing, install the Ghostery plug-in to your Chrome browser then go to your competitor’s website and see what tracking programs they are using.
• #10: And the most important address is no longer your home address. It’s your “IP Address”. That stands for Internet Protocall and is a summary of another layer of numbers called a Subnet mask which defines how you are getting onto the internet – what host – and what network you are connected too. IP is a summary of all those numbers that basically does one thing -- defines where the computer you are on is located in the world. That is the most important address to digital marketers. Your IP Address can be detected and saved. And then as other characteristics of that IP address are obtained it is stored and you are basically being profiled.
• #11: And that brings us to the focus of our attention today, Google Analytics. This is a huge, powerful tool that maybe local businesses are not taking advantage of. Many local businesses are now buying AdWords, but they’ve jumped over a significant and FREE way to track their customers and to tie-in their AdWords campaigns. By linking a Google Analytics tracking ID to your web address or javascript code to each page of your website, here are the kinds of things you can learn about people who visit your website … [read list].
• #12: A graphical way of understanding how Google Analytics works is that they collect the data using a tracking code, configure the data so that it can be viewed in an understandable dashboard, and those reports can be customized by the user to show the information in a way that is most meaningful for them.
• #13: Our adtaxi agency has a mantra, Metrics that matter. What we mean by that is that digital marketing should focus on what matters. This graphic from Google illustrates that – audience metrics, behavior metrics and conversion metrics. We’ll cover these in detail.
• #14: So to get started, here are the basics. Create a gmail account. Go to the Google products page and click get started. Type in your website url, answer a few other questions and viola you’ve got your Tracking ID and also the javascript version. You use the Tracking ID to link your entire website, the javascript version is for multiple page websites so you can track visitors to each page.
• #15: I have a personal website. I used Go Daddy to build it. It’s just a one page website. So I typed in my Google Analytics Tracking ID in the space provided. So now I can get basic information on those visiting my site. So for local businesses who have even the most basic of websites built with wizard driven programs such as Go Daddy, you can still get good statistics just like other companies that pay to have their websites scratch made using html coding.
• #16: Here’s the overview dashboard of Google Analytics. You can see it the upper left that it is for my personal website. If you have multiple websites you can add them to the same analytics dashboard to make it easier to toggle from one to another. On the overview page you can see a few stats. When you mouse over the headings a definition of what that stat is measuring appears in a callout window. Sessions, for example, is the amount of time a person spends at the site. Google’s default is that a session is 30 minutes. That can be changed. The usefulness of this will depend on the type of business you are in. Users are the number of people who had at least one session during the date range. Pageviews are the number of different pages at your site that were visited. So of course if you only have a one-page website then that will affect this number. Every time a page is viewed even if it is by the same person it will get counted. The Pages / Session is just that, how many pages did a person visit during a session – this helps you measure ENGAGEMENT. We will talk a bit more about that in the coming minutes but ENGAGEMENT helps you so much in getting your website high in organic search results and really is the viewer’s score of how useful and interested they are in what you are presenting at your website. Another stat showing usefulness is the Bounce Rate, which is the number of sessions where the visitor went to your website, did nothing, and left. Why a high bounce rate? Not setting the right expectation Not providing a good experience And finally you can see the average amount of time of a session.
• #17: I mentioned another way of installing Google Analytics is by adding the javascript version of your Tracking ID to each page. You would do this by going to the html view of each of your pages and adding the code. We use Google sites for some of our internal communications at our company, so the way to do it here is the add an html widget box.
• #19: These two charts are from Google. In order to use Google Analytics beyond the basics we just looked at, you need to determine your business objective for your website. That will guide you to a better understanding of the sales funnel that has been around for decades that we all learned about in marketing classes. So what is the point of your website? What is your objective? What is it that you are trying to achieve? Consider the outcome column to help answer that. Based on that, it will help guide you to what should be on your website and what to track. For example, if you are an air conditioning company then your website very likely isn’t trying to sell a product, but rather acquire the visitor as a lead. So you should have content on your site that moves the visitor from the awareness stage – such as the brand names of air conditioners you have and some of the features – to filling out a form online to get more information or be helped.
• #20: The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, said those famous words, “that’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind”. A large portion of your digital marketing should be focused on the small step. That is called a micro conversion. Most of us want to jump to the macro conversion which usually is we sell them something. But with digital marketing, in the age where consumers can research you, your product, your service for weeks, you need to develop your website and strategies for your visitors to take small steps that will lead to the big one – the macro conversion and whatever that is for your type of business. In this illustration from Google, a micro conversion would be successfully get someone to sign up for email coupons. The macro step would be when they actually buy one of the products using the coupon.
• #21: The quote is from a late 1800’s early 1900’s owner of a large department store group based in Philadelphia that was an early proponent of advertising and considered a pioneer in large scale marketing. This is an often cited quote from people like me. Why do you want to track conversions? Because it will help clarify who brought that consumer to your website and generated the sale! In the old internet days we discussed click through rate and typically the ad provider with the click that led to a sale got all the credit. But with tracking through Google Analytics you can look at all of the micro steps that led to a macro conversion – and that allows you to move your advertising investments to where they work best. Think of the basketball analogy, usually the player who scores a lot of points gets most of the credit but those who follow the game know that “assists” -- the person who passed the ball to the person who scored is vital to putting the basket in the hoop. The same applies to digital marketing.
• #22: So let’s say I want to see how many people who visited my website went to a specific page. Let’s say that was my goal, to get visitors to go to the Digital Solutions page – or it could be who played the Simple Solution video or who downloaded a pdf or who filled out a form or if I sold products on line who went to the shopping cart.
• #23: To set a goal to track you click on the admin button in the lower left then click on Goals on the right.
• #24: Google Analytics is very intuitive – easy to set up what page you are interested in tracking and so on. So you can set a destination goal to that url. There are also templates that you can select then modify to meet your needs.
• #25: Google Analytics is very intuitive – easy to set up what page you are interested in tracking and so on. You can have up to 20 goals on your account.
• #26: Back on your dashboard there is a section that shows “conversions” with many ways to track how many people did what you were hoping they would do.
• #28: In case you don’t have an AdWords account yet, you can set one up yourself or we can do it for you. After you get through the set up you will be asked specific questions about your business type, and a monthly budget.
• #29: So let’s use our company website to set up an AdWords campaign.
• #30: Here are the basic steps to setting up an AdWords campaign
• #31: This is the AdWords Express dashboard that provides the overview of how your AdWords campaigns are doing. Basic easy to understand statistics. But you can link your AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics dashboard where you will be able to drill down on details of the visitors that went to your website by responding to your AdWords campaigns.
• #32: In the admin area of Google Analytics, select AdWords linking.
• #33: Analytics will detect what AdWords account is associated with the website you have connected to Google Analytics. If you don’t have an AdWords account set up, you’ll be prompted to do that first then return to this page and refresh.
• #34: You then give the configuration a name, and make sure you to on all website data to be tracked – if someone clicks on an AdWords ad, you want to track each page they go to when they move from the ad to your site. Also note that this linking will allow you to use remarketing services, also called “retargeting”.
• #35: Remarketing or retargeting is when someone who has clicked on your ad returns to the internet. Google offers to allow you to place your dynamically created display ads based on your past site visitors when these visitors go to other websites that are a part of the Google Display Network or Google Search Ad campaigns. Google has partnerships with other websites in order to provide this and they share a portion of the revenue that they charge you, the advertiser, with the websites. You can’t remarket with the Google Search engine. That is because their search results are based on relevancy and bidding. So if one of your past website visitors goes to the Google landing page to conduct a search, you can’t buy an ad to target their past actions online. The only way you can get your ad in front of them there is to have a relevant message and be the highest bidder.
• #37: Filters will help you improve the accuracy of your data. For example, if you have a lot of employees working at your website, updating content, etc., you may want to exclude them from showing up in your data. So Google Analytics has a filter area to remove their visits from your reports.
• #38: Today we learned about how to set up your Analytics and get your ID or javascript so you can “tag” your website and pages. We looked at how to establish goals. We reviewed how to set up campaigns and monitor the activity in the Google Analytics dashboard, using those dashboards to look at reports, and how to make sure your data is clean.
• #40: We often get asked the question of how much should a business spend on advertising. Well there is research to answer this question and we have it. Schonfeld & Associates is the largest aggregator and often quoted source of marketing expenditures in the U.S. Here’s just one example, furniture stores. They spend 6.8 % of their annual sales – called an Ad to sales ratio – on marketing. So we advise starting with that, and then increase or decrease depending on competitive and other factors.
• #41: Another question we get is how to spend the advertising budget – on what media or services. We lease a tool call AdMall that provides us with reports that shows how business categories invest their advertising budget. For furniture, about 22% of the total ad budget goes to digital advertising.
• #42: Once you have Google Analytics set up, you can use what you learn about your site visitors and those who convert to then improve your digital advertising. For our local website, we can use what your Google Analytics activity shows to target by time of day, geography, if one device is dominate over another such as desktop versus mobile, and content – what pages or types of stories your prospects are interested in. My colleagues here at the Santa Cruz Sentinel can do that for you.
• #43: Some clients want to target even more specifically. We lease a marketing tool called “Thunder” that will scrape your website, build various digital display ads in all shapes and sizes and then we select demographics such as gender, age and lifestyle interests, and through the Thunder tool we purchase ad units on national websites that are visited by IP addresses of residents in the geography you want.
• #44: The Ad Exchange is a bidding process. Here’s how it works … how did Big O Tires get their ad here on a national site like CNN? The bidding works similar to how you use AdWords but with some key differences.
• #47: Retargeting is simple to understand. Have you ever searched for a product or service maybe at Google, then later you start seeing ads for the product you were searching for on any website you visited later? That’s called retargeting. And we provide that service through our digital agency, Adtaxi.
• #48: In the early internet marketing years, the last click always got the credit for the conversion. But with Adtaxi’s view through service, we can track and follow people who visit a website that was served your ad, but they don’t click on it, but later they go to your site. This allows you to see accurately who is bring your site traffic and conversions to you and you’ll be amazed that it’s not always the last click.
• #50: Because Adtaxi is a Google Premier Partner – one of only 31 partners in North America, we have access to search tools that other people and companies don’t have. One of them is a search intelligence tool that allows us to provide sharper recommendations to advertisers who use us to manage their AdWords campaigns.
• #55: If you want us to analyze your website using your Google Analytics traffic, you will need to give our email address a “Read & Analyze” access so we can look at your statistics and make some recommendations to you. There are flyers on how to do this available when you leave.
• #58: Our Ad Mall tool also does a 90 second scrape of your url and shows your digital marketing footprint online. Basically red x’s are bad, meaning your presence is light, while green checkmarks are good. We’ll bring this audit along with us when we meet to share your Google Analytics results.