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Saturday, September 17, 2016

9 Ways to Measure Digital Marketing Success

A positive return on investment is the goal of every digital marketing campaign.
 
However, while the endgame of digital marketing is to increase profits, not every campaign directly leads to dollars and cents. Some campaigns raise awareness of your brand, while others might bring visitors to your blog – both help increase profits in the long run, but short-term results can’t be quantified with monetary values.
 
This begs an important question – how do you know whether your digital marketing efforts are successful?
 
Here we’ll review nine ways to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns. And to add further clarity to the question above, we’ve split these methods into two categories: conversions and website behavior.
 
Interesting Image     

Conversions

Conversions occur when visitors or customers take specific actions as a result of your digital marketing. Unlike website behavior, conversions are more directly linked to sales and revenues. Since your ultimate goal is increasing profits, making sure your digital marketing converts is absolutely essential.
 
Here are five types of conversions that can indicate successful campaigns:
 

#1. Online sales

Online sales from your website is perhaps the simplest conversion for gauging success. Tracking your online sales is easy if you use Google Analytics or another Web analytics platform.
 
After installing a small snippet of code on your website, you’ll be able to see which of your campaigns are driving the most online sales. This is the most important conversion for strictly e-commerce business owners.
 

#2: Online-to-store sales

Not everyone who finds your business online will buy from your website. Local customers are likely to visit your store and make in-person purchases. How do you measure these conversions?
 
Don’t worry, there are ways to gauge online-to-store sales.
 
For example, you can collect information from prospective customers on your website, such as email addresses, that can later be compared with data collected at the cash register.  Or, you can offer a special discount code on your website so when customers redeem the discount you’ll be able to easily match it back to the marketing campaign.
 
Or, you can be really low tech and just ask customers whether they found your business online. Clarify how they found you – such as via a PPC ad, Facebook or a Google search — and record their answers in a spreadsheet. Then you can see which campaigns drive more in-store conversions.
 

#3: Leads from Web forms

Most websites have forms that customers can use to request services, schedule appointments or get more information. If you’re using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see which campaigns result in the most use of your various Web forms.
 
Any visitor who completes a Web form to request a quote could later convert into a customer. Therefore, marketing campaign success can be measured by the number of leads (Web form submissions) generated.
 

#4: Leads and sales from phone calls

Tracking leads and sales from phone calls is also important for businesses that drive sales via the phone.
 
To track calls, you’ll need to set up dynamic number insertion (DNI), which shows visitors different phone numbers depending on how they arrived at your website. You can then view your phone logs to see which campaigns result in the most calls.
 

#5: Leads from live chats

Does your website offer live chat for visitors? If not, then you might consider adding it as another way to engage your visitors.
 
Once you have chat installed on your website, then you need to track which marketing campaigns are driving the most chats.  This can be done using the built in tracking in your chat program or by integrating Google Analytics into your chat tool.  In both cases, you’ll be able to see which campaigns are driving more leads for your business via live chat.
 
Now that we’ve covered 5 ways to measure conversions from digital marketing, it’s time to move on to tracking how visitors behave on your website.  Just because a visitor doesn’t convert right away, doesn’t mean she’s never going to.  For that reason, it’s not enough to only look at conversions.  We must also review website behavior metrics to measure digital marketing success…
 

Website Behavior

Here are four ways to determine digital marketing success based on website behavior:
 

#1: Website visits

This one is simple – which of your digital marketing campaigns are putting the most eyes on your website? Although this is a rather shallow metric compared to e-commerce and Web form conversions, it’s still important to measure visits per marketing channel.
 
This is especially helpful when you view the traffic trends over time.  For example, you’ll want to measure traffic from Organic Search (SEO traffic) over time so you know if your SEO efforts are working. 
 
Plus, you’ll be able to spot potential problems early on if you see a sudden drop in SEO traffic.
 

#2: Page Views per visit

Website visits are important, but they don’t really indicate whether people are engaged by your business. What if nobody who visits your sites clicks around to your various products and pages?
 
Fortunately, Google Analytics can show you how visitors click through your site while also providing average numbers of page views per visit.
 
Pay close attention to which webpages your customers are visiting most. You might find that online customers are more attracted to certain aspects of your business or specific products in your inventory. If you’re promoting your blog, you can also get ideas about the topics your visitors find most interesting.
 

#3: Time spent on the website

How much time are people spending on your blog or website, and which of your digital marketing campaigns is bringing in the most engaged visitors?
 
Analytics can track this, too. Again, time spent on your website doesn’t directly lead to sales, but folks who spend more time browsing are more likely to later buy.
 

#4: Bounce rates

In the world of digital marketing, bouncing is bad for several reason.
 
If any of your campaigns have high bounce rates – meaning people hit their “back” buttons as soon as they land on your website – then there’s probably a serious disconnect between your marketing strategy and your landing page. Just as bad, though, Google might interpret websites with high bounce rates as low-quality or spam, resulting in an SEO penalty.
 
Use Google Analytics to measure your bounce rates over time to spot trends in each of your marketing campaigns.
 

Conclusion

Knowing how to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns will save you a lot of stress down the road. You won’t need to guess whether you’re wasting your time with various campaigns. You can adjust or turn off campaigns that aren’t working, or you can sharpen campaigns to really hone in on your goals.
 
And one more thing – always know how you’ll measure a campaign’s success before you launch it. Yes, this requires a more carefully constructed game plan for your marketing efforts, but you should never launch a digital marketing campaign that doesn’t have a specific goal.
 
Plan ahead, aim at your target, and you’re more likely to get good news when measuring the success of campaigns.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Google expanded text ads are live, and device bidding & responsive ads for native roll out

Standard text ads will no longer be accepted as of October 26.

The day has come: Google has officially launched expanded text ads. 

Expanded text ads rollout begins

As Sundeep Jain, who oversees text ads at Google, told the audience at SMX Advanced in June, existing standard ads will continue to run alongside expanded text ads (ETAs). As of October 26, 2016, however, advertisers will no longer be able to create or upload standard text ads. Google has not set a date when standard ads will no longer run with ETAs, but Jain noted advertisers should have sufficient time to test standard and expanded ad formats against each other to ensure they are properly using ETAs.

In other words, the expectation is that advertisers will run A/B tests with standard and expanded text ads for a period.

Expanded text ads include two headlines, each with up to 30 characters and a description of up to 80 characters. Google has said the extra copy was specifically designed to give mobile users more information and cited an average CTR bump of 20 percent in early tests. Robert Spears, digital marketing director for Guitar Center, whose ads are featured in the screen shot below, said as an early adopter, its non-brand campaigns “have seen more than a 2X increase in CTR.”

AdWords Editor and the AdWords API support ETAs, as well as third-party tools including DoubleClick Search, Kenshoo and Marin.

A caveat is that even though Google gives advertisers a total character count of 60 for headlines, advertisers have seen the second headline get truncated on desktop if Google doesn’t wrap the headline. On Twitter, Google actually suggested using just a total of 33 characters on the conservative side to avoid headlines getting cut off, though that seems extreme. You can use the ad preview tool to see how your ads will appear before launching them.

Google has published a new best practices guide on using Expanded Text Ads and device bidding, which is also getting a big update.

Separate device bidding is here

Advertisers can now start setting base bid adjustments for mobile, tablet and/or desktop, control that was lost with Enhanced Campaigns. (Update: Google has clarified that this roll out is going to take up to a few months to get to all accounts.)

Bid adjustments can now be set for each device type at the campaign level in AdWords.

Even as it rolls out these new controls, Google is pushing its automated bidding tools — now under the umbrella of Smart Bidding — and recommending that advertisers not go back to separating their campaigns by device type. Automated bidding will soon take advantage of the device separation as well, initially with the ability to set Target CPA by device.

Despite Google’s downplaying this new manual functionality, there’s likely to be quite a bit of experimentation in this area among advertisers that have the expertise and resources to test new campaign structures now feasible with separate device bidding.

Responsive display ads for native inventory

Also announced at Google Performance Summit are responsive display ads that Google will auto-generate from a headline, description, image and URL provided by the advertiser. The ads can serve across the GDN (Google Display Network) on all devices and, more interestingly, are eligible for the native ad inventory Google has opened up across publishers on the GDN.

Advertisers provide a short 25-character and a long 90-character headline, a description up to 90 characters (This might appear cut off with an ellipses in some cases), an image and a landing page URL.

These are rolling out now, and advertisers will find the option to set up a Responsive ad in the +Ad drop-down in AdWords when they become available. For more on setting up Responsive ads, see the Google help page.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Google’s Keyword Planner tool just became even more inaccurate

You’re probably familiar with the Keyword Planner tool, which is one of the best sources we have to spot opportunities and make the business case for an investment into paid or organic search campaigns.

One of the things it provides is guidance on the volume of searches for any given query. The numbers reported in the tool have always been somewhat vague. They are rounded up and numbers end with at least one zero. A pinch of salt has always been required when digesting the data.

It turns out that these numbers are now even more imprecise.

Manish spotted that Google has started to combine related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one (bigger) number.

No longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation.

As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change. No sudden jump in search queries, just an amalgamated number. Be warned.
Here are a couple of examples…

Bundling together anagrams and regional spellings

Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 11.10.33

Lumping together plurals and phrases without spaces

Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 11.08.47
The problem could be exacerbated by third party tools. Manish says:
“For those that don’t notice the change – or worse, pulling the data from tools that haven’t updated to take into account the change – this means that some advertisers and SEOs are grossly overestimating those numbers, since many tools will combine data, and there is no notification alert on the results to show that how Google calculates average monthly searches has been changed.”
So yeah, this isn’t exactly good news. In fact, I can’t think of any benefit to the end user, but Google has a history of obfuscating data, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

That said, it once again pushes the focus towards relevance and context rather than pure volume. Advertisers and content creators would do well to focus on optimising clickthrough rate and landing page performance, rather than just shotgun marketing.

Guesstimated data aside, you can use Search Console to make sense of actual performance. Map your page impressions to organic (or paid) positions and you’ll get a sense of how accurate the Keyword Planner data is for any given term.

It’s also worth remembering that there are seasonal factors at play with the reported data. Volumes shown are an approximate figure based on 12 months search data. You might get a better idea of more accurate monthly figures if you cross-reference data from with Google Trends, which will show seasonal spikes (February is a big month for flowers).
Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 10.48.33
Keyword Planner replaced Google’s Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator about three years ago. Users of the old tools initially complained about missing the broad match and phrase match options. Now, they’re going to miss even more detail around keywords and data.


Proceed with caution, as ever. 

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