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Google Analytics (GA) provides very powerful analytics tools right out of the box. However, most marketers are not familiar enough with what those tools can do, and are therefore not using them to their full advantage. But to achieve true content marketing success, customizing GA to your hub architecture and business goals are essential first steps. Failure to do this results in not just bad data, which will impact your ability to strategize correctly, but will also make you miss out on one of the easiest and more impactful methods of tracking ROI metrics that your CMO will really respond to. In this blog post, I’m going to break down your essential GA setup into two distinct sections:...
Too often marketers talk about activities instead of outcomes—for example, how many campaigns they ran, how many trade shows they participated in, how many new names they added to the lead database. These are metrics that reinforce the perception that marketing is a cost center, not a revenue driver.
To change that perception, marketers need to start talking about how their programs impact the whole sales process, with revenue being the core focus.
Instead of seeing marketing activities in isolation, marketers need an end-to-end view of buyer engagement. It’s not about the first “touch” that brings a prospect into the sales funnel, or the last “touch” before signing a deal. It’s about tracking all the touch points at which a prospect connects with your marketing programs, and measuring those multi-touch impacts.
So how do you do it? Here are four marketing analytics for demonstrating marketing’s ability to drive revenue:...
Metrics & ROI - Everyone seems to be talking about Big Data these days, but how many marketers really understand its potential and limitations? Here's a look at two big misconceptions regarding Big Data.
Among the misconceptions regarding Big Data, two important ones stand out: that correlations alone suffice and that Big Data means sampling bias is no longer an issue.
Fooled by AssociationFirst, Big Data mining advocates claim that correlations suffice and the quest for causal interpretation should be abandoned. The real danger is that you will be "fooled by association," as explained in Freakonomics....
In social media we have no shortage of data; our key challenge is to understand the data and to create insights that will help us improve what we do. Generating actionable insights from social data has been the core focus of the Zuum team. This week in the SMToolbox, we take a look at their tool and how Zuum's reports and analytics can benefit social media marketers.
Zuum bills itself as a social content strategy tool; in essence, it is a social analytics tool, but with a difference. The Zuum team are really focused on helping you to understand what causes things to happen in the social world. Thus, if you see a spike in engagement or rapid growth in followers, Zuum will help you identify what caused these particular changes. Zuum also allows you to compare your company's performance with that of other brands and gain insights that will help you improve your own performance....
...According to the results of the first annual Goo Online Advertising Survey, from Goo Technologies, 82% of Americans ignore online ads, ahead of television ads at 37%. 92% of Americans ignore at least one type of ad seen every day across six different types of media.
The online ads Americans are most likely to ignore included: online banner ads (73%), followed by social media ads (62%), and search engine ads (59%). The highest wage earners, those with a household income of $100k+ per year, were statistically more likely than those households making less than $50k per year (86% vs. 78%, respectively) to say they ignore online ads....
Web stat geeks will be stoked about Google Analytics updates that include real time widgets and interactive insights that help define how customers really decide to finally make a purchase.
Publishers, marketers and ecommerce sites can all benefit from seeing more closely how their customers find them and exactly what they are doing on a given site. With Google Analytics’ customer journey tool, a map of sorts can be created that shows the steps those customers take before they finally buy something.
This kind of 360 degree view of customers is valuable because it can show where the strengths and weaknesses are in a site layout or strategy. The Customer Journey to Online Purchase benchmarking tool is an interactive data set that demonstrates how buyers act in different industries and regions, and what kind of time frames they operate in...
Studies analyzing the value of Facebook fans, like this one from Syncapse, have been attracting lot of attention recently. So what really matters in measuring marketing results?
Studies analyzing the value of Facebook fans, like this one from Syncapse, have been attracting lot of attention recently.
The primary results of that study were that Facebook brand fans are: - 80 percent more likely than non-fans to be users of a brand - Spend 43 percent more than non-fans in respective categories - 11 percent more likely to continue using the brand than non-fans (loyal consumers) - 85 percent more likely to recommend your brand compared with 60 percent of non-fans
And that consumers like brand pages for two reasons: - Coupons, discounts, and rewards - Showing support for brands or receiving regular updates
While this study and others like it point to positive attributes of Facebook fans, it’s critical for brand marketers to really stop and ask themselves: Isn’t this just pointing out that good customers are more likely to like our Facebook page?...
Social media ROI is a messy business. How do you bring some order to it? There’s no getting away from it. The higher up the sales funnel, the harder and messier it is to make decisions on measuring ROI. Social media is, like any channel (if you choose to view it as one) not perfect to measure, though far from hard to get a good handle on it, and to compare channels with channels using techniques like Google’s Multichannel funnels or social reports.
It’s the scale of choices that become complex. It’s much easier to post rationalise and retrospectively connect the dots, but not easy to plan for it – otherwise why is ‘viral’ still so remarkable in social media – and why we don’t see the experts doing amazing campaigns repeatedly.
It’s always been a challenge, attributing the value of visitors through multiple channels, social media has made that more complex. Certainly when compared to lower down the funnel the touchpoints are more measured and explicit, visitor-to-goal completion is relatively simple to monitor and quantify.IAB suggests 3:1 return on social media investment...
The research revealed that, four out of five consumers said they would be more inclined to buy a brand more often in the future after being exposed to a brand’s social media presence, while 83% of consumers exposed to social media would trial a brand’s product. ...
When debate around sheryl sandberg's 'lean in' took a negative turn, agency sparks and honey urged client to scrap key theme of upcoming effort.
When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's modern feminist manifesto "Lean In" ignited negativity, Hyatt was forced to pull the plug on a main element of its content marketing strategy, months in the works. The quick decision was based on numbers as much as gut instinct. Hyatt's agency Sparks and Honey was monitoring digital discussions surrounding a theme the young Omnicom shop had determined was a good one for the hotel chain to hook to its brand: "women having it all."
"They called me up to say it's getting a little bit dark in that space," said Dan Moriarty, director of digital strategy for Hyatt, who said the firm originally intended to include the concept of women having it all as one of the trends around which it planned to build a campaign aimed at career-minded women.
When, about two days before the activation was planned to start, Sparks and Honey showed Hyatt it had tracked 80-some negative reactions to Sandberg's book, the partners decided to scrap the theme, despite three months of planning.
Instead, they replaced it with "travel hacks," or digital tools for making the most of travel. Other trends that Sparks and Honey had isolated as appropriate to align with Hyatt this spring were also relatively innocuous: among them yoga and meditation, getting a good night's sleep and maintaining rituals while traveling....
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Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is “metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.” OverstateGate brought a colorful rise out of Branding Professor Mark Ritson: “This little debacle once again confirms that nobody actually knows what the fuck is going on with digital media. Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box of turds and spiders that is programmatic to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse shit. Sure, it has more numbers and many more metrics but that does not make it more accountable, it makes it less so.” In general, marketers can’t always take metrics at face value. We have to get savvier and more sophisticated at questioning the numbers we use. We have to beware of faux metrics and fuzzy math....
In a post last week, I talked about turning your content marketing upside down and focusing first on what behaviors you want your content consumers to perform.
Once you’ve done that and created content that you think will drive the desired actions, you can start measuring the efficacy of your content program.
Content cannot be measured with a single metric, because no one data point can successfully or satisfactorily tell you whether your program is working. Instead, you need to create an array of metrics that are selected from four primary buckets....
... Unfortunately, that’s the wrong question. If there’s anything all that chaos and competition of the past five years should have taught agencies, it’s that too much “creativity” celebrated by marketers and advertisers really isn’t. Advertising creativity has long been a bit of a con job; the media world is filled with costly creative that neither builds brands nor sells products. The better argument is that traditional advertising and marketing firms have pathologically overinvested in creativity while consistently underinvesting in meaningful metrics. An even better case might be made that the multimedia successes of Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and so on, highlight just how flaccid and ineffective most creative advertising and market work has been. What’s the secret sauce these technologies all have in common? Their creativity is measurable, trackable, and accountable. That’s a winning combination. If you’re a brand manager or CMO, that’s what you should care about....
Earlier this week, Jason Falls – IABC conference head honcho, whiskey lover, and all-around fun Louisville host – wrote a blog post called, “The Death of Public Relations.”
I like Jason, but I saw that and got ready for a fight.
Then I actually read the post…and I agreed with him.
No, I don’t think PR is dead, but his point is the industry is at a cross-roads because, as a whole, we’re not so good at measuring our worth.
He says advertising equivalency and media impressions mean nothing and that we have to stop counting words and start making business sense for the CEO. Amen. That said, I have a quick story to tell you....
Wouldn’t it be great to have just one simple measure of business success? What determines success in most businesses is whether customers like and buy the products and services offered. This is where the Net Promoter Score (NPS) comes in. Many argue, that it is THE most important indicator of business success.
That’s a big claim and warrants a closer look at what the NPS is, why it’s a good measure, how to measure it, and how it can be improved to really become a key indicator of business success.What is it?The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is based on the fundamental premise that customers can be divided into three groups...
Did you know that 25% of Americans only use a mobile device to access the internet? Or that 47% of marketers have generated leads from Facebook, 35% from LinkedIn and 34% from Twitter? If those statistics are of interest to you, then you won’t want to miss today’s post which includes 36 other amazing facts just like those.Ready to dive in? Check these out...
When it comes to content marketing, your Chief Marketing Officer wants to see real, metrics-driven results. From storytelling to generating thought leadership, facilitating customer engagement and moving prospects through your sales funnel, it’s imperative that you develop a solid analytics strategy to navigate your content marketing maze and measure success.
Be sure to pinpoint areas of low engagement so you can make improvements, but also look beyond the numbers to fully understand why performance may be weak.
When thinking about virality, look at who made it go viral in the first place and understanding the quality of your audience and those who are reading and sharing your content.Word of mouth is powerful. When people value your services, they are more inclined to make their perspectives known....
Pinterest isn’t just for sharing photos of delicious recipes or crafts anymore. Check out this infographic to see how retailers are driving traffic to their brick and mortar locations using Pinterest....
When it comes to social media, there is an ongoing focus on driving traffic to your digital home bases and outposts such as websites, blogs, and social networks. But how about using these channels to drive traffic to your physical store?
In a recent post on Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel presents a series of data-driven Pinterest tactics that drive sales to brick and mortar retail locations. These findings are part of larger study, From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, that offers some great insight on the factors that impact consumer social purchasing decisions.
This infographic summarizes the 5 key tactics that retailers can use to help drive in-store traffic....
With all the marketing technology available it is much easier to track key marketing metrics, leverage marketing analytics, and measure the influence of marketing programs....
With the B2B customer journey being almost 70% digital, marketing program results can be measured more than ever before. But what’s curious to me is that most CEOs are not insisting on showing how a company’s investment is paying off. Manufacturing is measured, sales is measured, customer service is measured. But measuring marketing and its impact on revenue is not standard fare.
Most CMOs can tell you how many leads their organization generated last month or last year. But most can’t tell you what happened to those leads. They can tell you how many Website hits this month and whether the number of interested parties is growing or shrinking. But CMOs often don’t know how that activity is connected to revenue. Many CMOs can tell you how a nurture campaign is working to drive new leads but they can’t tell you if the quality and quantity is sufficient or whether sales has done an effective job in following up and developing sales from the leads. Mostly I think this is a lag in technology adoption. Here’s how I see it....
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![How Pinterest Drives Retail Traffic [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/Q1GdpbdVKBZK6vhCCjzWRzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Get your Google Analytics right and measure your success.