luni, 5 octombrie 2015

Importing Cost, Click, & Impression Data to GA Using GA’s Data Import Feature - Moz Blog

Importing Cost, Click, & Impression Data to GA Using GA's Data Import Feature

Posted by TrentonGreener

Google Analytics (GA) is a phenomenal tool that most of us, including myself, use in a very limited capacity. It's not that we don't want to use all of the functionality of this great product, but that we're unaware of the potential opportunities available to us as marketers. Often times, when we do find that new and exciting feature, it astounds and astonishes us; I often find myself consumed by the possibilities. That's how it felt when I first found GA's "Data Import" feature. I had no idea that I could load not only my AdWords data into GA, but also all of my other paid efforts as well—from social, to search, to display, and even direct mail. I could import the cost data of each campaign into Google Analytics and do an ROI analysis using functionalities such as the Model Comparison Tool. In this post, I'm going to walk you through how to do exactly that.

We'll be diving into GA's ability to import relevant campaign data such as cost, clicks, and impressions using the built-in Google Analytics "Data Import" functionality. This feature is useful for not only importing your non-AdWords paid marketing channels—such as Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, AdRoll, Outbrain, and so on—but can also be used to import refund data, customer data, and much more. To see the full scope of use, see this support documentation.

For this guide, you'll need to have Universal Analytics installed. You can check that you indeed do have Universal Analytics under the "Admin" section of the GA interface, within the "Property" column. Under "Property Settings," if your Tracking ID begins with UA, then you likely do.

If you're not yet upgraded to Universal Analytics, here's the Google documentation on getting started and here's a great resource from Kissmetrics to help get you on the right track.

All righty, let's get started on this. For our example today, we'll be importing cost, click, and impression data from a sample Bing Ads account to sync up with our existing session-based data at the campaign and keyword level. There are five major steps to importing this data into Google Analytics. We'll go through each step and ensure you have a deep understanding of the process required to make this all go off without a hitch.

Step One: Custom Campaign URLs

While it's not technically an action step, since we're adding Bing data at the campaign and keyword levels, the first thing to note is that we can only add data to a custom campaign that has already been defined within GA through UTM parameters. This means that we cannot add cost, click, or impression data to traffic that's being incorrectly tracked within GA. If you don't currently have auto-tagging or manual tags within your (in this case) Bing account, then the traffic will likely come through as organic, referral, or possibly even direct. Here's a link to Bing's support article on how to implement these tags if you haven't already. However, this same principle applies to any type of import you'd be trying to do here, no matter whether that be Bing, Facebook, etc.

Step Two: Creating the Data Set

Now that we have our Custom Campaign ducks in a row, it's time to create the actual data set. We'll need to establish which data set type you want to use (full list here). In our case, we'll be using the "Cost Data Set" type. To do this, we're going to go into the Admin panel of the GA account that we're trying to upload the data to. Under the "Property" column, we're going to select "Data Import" (see image below). Don't fret about this being property level; we'll select the views within this property that we wish to affect later.

We're then going to select the "New Data Set" option, select the "Cost Data" radial option, and continue. This can be seen in the following two slides:

Now that we've selected our type, the next action for us to take is to properly name our data set and select the views within this property that are to be affected. You can choose to select no views and edit this at a later time, but I'd recommend adding these changes to a copied view that you have created.

Next we select which columns are to be added to our schema. "Medium" and "Source" are required in our case as we're doing a Cost Data Set, but then we're given the option to choose at least one of "Clicks," "Cost," and "Impressions," and finally we are given the option to add as any additional columns as we'd like. I've added all the possible selections for a Cost Data Set in the below image. Note that we won't actually be using all of these, as many of them aren't able to be used outside of AdWords campaigns. This just serves as a demonstration.

You'll also notice the option to either overwrite or sum the data. We're selecting overwrite, but if you wanted to add additional data to specific days, you might select the summation option.

We'll be adding "Clicks," "Cost," and "Impressions" in the first section, and "Campaign" and "Keyword" in the second section. You can see what this looks like below:

Once you select the "Save" option at the bottom of the page, the Data Set has been created. You'll notice that "Save" becomes "Done," and an additional section appears. We want to select "Get schema," which will create an additional popup window which allows you to download the Excel template to use for this upload.

When the dialog box shown below appears, select the "Download schema template" option and an Excel file will be downloaded with the required headers already inserted for you. You can set this aside for now, as we'll need it at the end of the next step.

Below is the Schema CSV template for our example.

Step Three: Generate the Upload Data as a CSV file

Now all that's left is to download the data from the relevant source, do some minor formatting, and upload our data.

Since we're trying to add clicks, cost, and impression data at the campaign and keyword levels, we need to ensure that our downloads include all of this data. We also need to ensure that our data is defined at the day level. I won't dive into how to download the data from each individual source, as each platform is a little different and each has sufficient documentation of these steps, but there are a few important formatting items to remember (here's a link to documentation). Line breaks and commas will break the data set and force it to fail to upload correctly, or worse, upload incorrect data. Because of this, you'll want to remove any commas from your data. Date formatting has to be in YYYYMMDD format. When you export data from most of these sources, they'll be in another format. Below is a quick and easy way to fix that. I prefer to do this before transferring the data from our data export to our data schema template, but there's no one correct way to do it.

First, select the first cell you want to edit, and then choose "More Number Formats" under the number formatting section.

Then, choose a custom category and type "yyyymmdd" in the "Type:" field. This should change the "sample" to look similar to my own—just likely with different dates.

Finally, select the cell that you changed, and then use the format painter to copy this format down through all of your dates. Voilà, your date formatting is now Google approved!

The last part of step three is to copy the data over to our Excel schema template and match up the columns. It's usually easier to reorganize this first so it's a simple matter of copy and paste, but that's up to you. Save this file and head back into the Google Analytics Admin interface.

Step Four: Upload the Data as a CSV

We're returning back to the Data Import section within the Admin panel and clicking through to the "Manage uploads" button that has appeared next to the Data Set we created in step two.

We're going to select "Upload a file":

Upload the file. Note that data can take up to 24 hours to actually appear in the GA interface. Even if the upload has been successful, it will likely still take additional time to sync the data throughout GA. In my experience, it usually takes about four to six hours, but Google's documentation says up to 24 hours.

Remember in the last step where I mentioned date formatting? You don't want to be like me. Here's why: If you try to upload the data without using YYYYMMDD formatting, you get an error and have to re-upload the data—but the real kicker is that there's no way to delete your failure! =\ It's a cruel reminder every time you go back to upload again.

Now that we've successfully imported the data, all that's left to do is wait until it's synced.

Step Five: Reporting

Once the cost, clicks, and impressions data has been imported and has finished syncing with the existing traffic data at the source/medium, campaign, and keyword levels, you have the ability to see this data in two important places within GA. Firstly, the "Cost Analysis" section of "Acquisition" under the "Campaigns" parent tab displays campaign and ecommerce information similar to what you'd see under the "AdWords" section of "Acquisition." This will display all source/mediums and campaigns, not just CPC campaigns—viewing the data can be a little funky, as you're unlikely to have cost, click, or impression data for your organic traffic. Adding some filters to narrow down your point of view can really help make this easier to digest.

Secondly, and in my opinion much more excitingly, we have the Model Comparison Tool. If you haven't discovered this majestic beast, you should set aside an hour, grab a cup of coffee, and just play—particularly if you run paid marketing campaigns and have revenue or ecommerce data in GA. But while having the ability to do attribution-based ROI analysis is an amazing way to get a better read on the effect your marketing campaigns are having on the business's bottom line, there's the added benefit of being able to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns and keywords in aggregate across multiple sources.

I hope this walkthrough helped to guide you during your first GA data import and gives you the confidence to continue to utilize this extremely powerful feature for more than just cost data imports. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below, and if you have any questions, feel free to drop them there as well.


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How to combine 2 tools to recover lost link equity!

How to combine 2 tools to recover lost link equity!

Link to White.net » Blog

How to combine 2 tools to recover lost link equity!

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 06:46 AM PDT

"Take care of your backlinks, and your backlinks will take care of you"

Me, last night

As we're all aware, backlinks make up a vital part of any website's online visibility.

Under the constant pressure of acquiring new links to a website, the links you already have can easily be forgotten. Your current backlinks are just as important as the new links that you're acquiring, even those you got a year and a half a go, because they're what make up your backlink profile.

In this post, I'm going to be demonstrating how you can use and combine two great tools to help take care of your existing backlinks, as well as spot where you might potentially be losing some of that tasty, tasty link juice from pages returning a 404 status code. For this post I'm going to use Pets at Home as an example.

"Bobby, why Pets at Home?" I hear you exclaim. Let me explain.

Using Pets at Home wasn't premeditated, and actually stemmed from a conversation I had earlier this evening with my housemate, when she entered the house carrying a hamster, and what can only be described as a hamster palace. In what turns out to be a regular occurrence, she had gone to Pets at Home to pet the various soft animals after a particularly stressful day at work, when she spotted the hamster in question, now called Butterbean, and the rest is history. So as I sat at my desk wondering about a website to use as a (sorry to continue with this animal theme…) guinea pig, guess what sprang like a rabbit to my mind… I digress, but you get the idea.

The two tools that I'm going to be using for this demonstration are Ahrefs and Screaming Frog. For those that don't know, Ahrefs is primarily a backlink analysis tool, although their new tools are multiplying like (sorry) rabbits, and Screaming Frog is a website crawling tool. Both have free and paid versions and I highly recommend both.

Step 1. Gather your data.

  • Navigate your way to the 'site explorer' tool on the Ahrefs site, and enter your website. As of a week or two ago, you can now choose between 'fresh' and 'live' links; I chose 'fresh'. Now in the sidebar you will see 'Top Pages', which will give you a list of the top pages on your website, which can be ordered by social shares, or backlinks. Make sure you select backlinks, it's quite small!
    Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 11.22.51
  • You'll now see all of your top pages, which in the case of Pets at Home numbers over 30,997! Fortunately, we're not going to be dealing with anywhere near that number (unless you're doing this for Amazon maybe), but export the full list anyway to a CSV. Download and open it.

Step 2. Locate all URLs on your website with at least one backlink pointing to them.

  • First things first, delete any URL that has 0 referring domains or returns a 200 status code, ain't nobody got time for that. Second, we're going to use Screaming Frog to check our status codes, as I've seen Ahrefs not be completely correct in the past, as well as some URLs having the status code '0'. So copy your URLs and paste them in to Screaming Frog and crawl them in list mode.

    Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 11.23.25
  • Once you're finished, paste the status codes back in to the spreadsheet (make sure it's in the correct order), or if you're good with excel, put it in a table (Ctrl/Cmnd + t) and just use a simple VLOOKUP to pull your status codes in. Whether you use a VLOOKUP or not, using a table will allow for easy filtering of status codes, but I'm sure you're clever and you knew that already didn't you?

Also: Filter for any 301s/302s and put these to one side, I'll share a quick tip for these later in the post.

  • By now you will have a list of all other status code errors, which in Pets at Home's case, is 272 pages returning a 404 status code. In other words, that's 272 pages that have earned link equity, but are not passing any of it on to the website.

Bonus: Check other versions of your site, such as .co.uk/.com versions and old sites to ensure you don't have links pointing to old pages that don't redirect or return a 404.

Step 3. Redirect, redirect, redirect.

  • Now that you have a full list of non-equity passing passing links, it's time to get that lovely link juice to your website, through the classic 301 redirect. (Note: don't use a 302 redirect unless it actually is temporary, please).
  • As we know, Google isn't a massive fan of you just redirecting all old pages en-masse to the homepage, so to get the most out of your relevant link equity, work out the best page to redirect your 404 URLs to. Implement those redirect and that's it, you're done. In the case of Pets at Home, they'd now have reclaimed link equity from 202 pages now pointing at their site, from just an hour or two of work. Simple.

Bonus Step. Stop losing equity through redirect chains.

  • A great report that Screaming Frog can generate for you is the redirect chains report. This report shows you where redirects from one URL to an intended URL occur more than once, thus losing equity along the way.
  • For example, ideally a redirect should happen once: A > B. Sometimes though, possibly due to sitewide redirects or rules, you can end up with one, two, or more redirects before your original URL reaches its intended destination: A > B > C > D. The problem with this is that equity is lost over multiple redirects, so you only want your redirects to happen once.
  • To get this report, simply paste your list in to Screaming Frog, go to Configuration, ensure in the 'Advanced' tab that 'Always Follow Redirects' is turned on, and crawl away. Once this has finished, click on the reports option, and select the 'Redirect Chains' report.
    Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 11.23.05
  • Voila, you have a nice spreadsheet showing you all the pages that redirect, and you can see where any are going through more than one redirect. Once you have found these, you need to cut these surplus redirects out and BAM, you've recovered some of the link equity lost.

So there we have it, 3 quick and easy steps to taking care of your backlinks. As I said late last night to a housemate who had no idea what I was talking about, "Take care of your backlinks, and your backlinks will take care of you".

Did I miss any tricks? Got any other methods you like to use? Should I have got more sleep last night? Let me know in the comments below or join me on Twitter at @bobbyjmcgill or @whitedotnet.

Also, my clever colleague Charlie Williams wrote a more in-depth, 2-step post on this back in 2013 about plugging your link leaks which you might like!

The post How to combine 2 tools to recover lost link equity! appeared first on White.net.

BrightonSEO Key Conference Takeaways – September 2015 Edition

Posted: 18 Sep 2015 06:32 AM PDT

The team from White.net have touched down in Brighton! We have joined together to attend the UK's popular digital marketing conference BrightonSEO. We are covering the most exciting sessions/talks, taking notes so you don't have to.

For those unable to attend the conference, our live blogging will keep you updated around the world of SEO so you don't need to feel you are missing out. Key takeaways are also always helpful to refer back to once you're back in the office, allowing you to refresh your memory.

If you have any questions about any of the topics covered at the conference, leave us a comment, we are always more than happy to share our insight and thoughts.

Here is the important bit! What topics are you interested in? Follow the internal links below to navigate easily to areas of interest to you…

Onsite sessions

Jon Earnshaw: Is your content working better for someone else?

Key points:

  • 37% of global marketing budget is spent on content
  • Creation of content wont work effectively without curation – you need to make sure you keep an eye on your content
  • Have you noticed a drop in visibility? – check the SERPS
  • A glass ceiling is created by the theft of web content
  • Stealing content can cause peaks and drops in traffic volumes which is a continual process – but the person who steals the contents ends up in the better position

What should have been done?

  1. Be alert to the initial flux
  2. Explore the historical data from SERPS
  3. Identify the offending URL/Website
  4. Carry out a scraper report

Don't turn your back on content

  1. Make it unique
  2. Rule out cannibalisation
  3. Delve into the SERPS
  4. Has someone taken your place?
  5. Monitor resellers and channels

Chris Green: Cannibal Content – Stopping Your Website From Eating Itself

Cannibalised content are web pages that compete with each other in search or web properties that you own, resulting in content that eats itself. Is your content competing with itself?

  1. Be aware of cannibalisation
  2. Look into the right tools to fight cannibalisation
  3. Do something about it

Is the content that overlaps duplicate content? The answer is yes and no. Cannibalisation can be pages talking about the same thing in a different way.

Have the right tools in place to track your content and its performance. For example:

  1. Rank tracking – use this to track URLs for specific key words over time
  2. Google analytics
  3. Check ranking shifts against organic traffic
  4. Search analytics reports

Time to identify the cause:

  1. Screaming frog – carry out a full crawl
  2. Majestic – carry out a backlink audit

What’s ranking and why?

  1. Canonical tags
  2. Internal linking
  3. Off-page signals

Put it all together!

  1. Rank tracking – two pages ranking
  2. Site audit – what are your pages targeting? Are there overlaps?
  3. External signals – what is the cause?
  4. Reflections – what are you dealing with?

How do you fix it?

  • Change your site structure
  • Change or add internal links
  • Give your preferred page
  • Give more love (marketing wise!)
  • Have keyword targeting.

After all,

  1. Prevention is better than a cure
  2. Linking signals are hard to change
  3. Sister sites and brands don't go away over night
  4. Restructuring sites can be a nightmare

Do it right the first time! How to do it right?

  1. Through keyword research
  2. Identify primary and secondary terms
  3. Assign to sitemap
  4. Be logical in how you do keyword mapping

Take a step back and look for potential overlaps e.g sub categories with little difference such as B2B and B2C areas on your site talking about the same terms and services.

Pete Campbell: From SERPs to Markup: How to Increase Your Earned Traffic.

Google works to finds the answers to what you’re looking for before you ask the question.

  • By 2019 162 billion queries will be on mobile devices and 62 million on desktop
  • Apps are becoming increasingly influential over a browser experience e.g snapchat discover
  • Google saw a fall in searches last year – mobile had a role to play in this

Increase earned traffic by:

Micro data – form of html markup to inform google about the context of your web page. 66% of 100k top websites don't have micro data which can be used to increase click through rate and lower bounce rate for example, open graph (social media) and schema (websites).

  1. Organisation schema
  2. On site breadcrumb
  3. Site links search markup
  4. Article schema
  5. Product/aggregate rating schema
  6. Open Graph Tags
    • Can control the description, image, title etc, can use CTA button e,g, shop now.
    • Meta tags – twitter firstly needs to approve twitter card markup and then you can also use twitter card analytics to track performance
  7. Google now cards: Structured data in email campaigns

Social Content Sessions

Charlie Williams – Understanding Your Audience; Agile Thinking & Our Content

  • Content that connects with our audience is the only way to stand out for increasingly similar products/services
  • By putting the audience first, we can connect with our audience to also build better content experiences
  • Tell stories about your products; this can be about the users experience of your product and service
  • Think in topics (bucket lists) rather than optimizing for individual keywords
  • Agile thinking + SEO, keyword research, UX & content strategy = a content development environment
    • Agile thinking gives a framework, an attitude, to why we want to take bits of SEO, keyword research, UX, social media & content strategy, to develop great content
  • What can we learn from agile? Fixing one content issue at a time, and having user goals as our primary focus
  • Questions, questions, questions – every search is a question, those who answer them best get the most credit, so find the questions your audience is asking
  • Where to find the questions our audience is asking? Google Suggest, Google Trends, competitor FAQs, Quora, user-centric keyword research, surveys (ask your audience to tell you their questions!) and user testing (especially of competitor websites)

Google tells us that ‘a question can take you anywhere’ and this is exciting because if we can answer, it can take the searcher straight to us.

All in all agile thinking helps SEO in two ways:

  • Focus on one issue at a time
  • Help us understand the audience, so we know what to target

Stacey MacNaught – Your Content Is Awesome – Now What?

When you are working on a piece of content a good idea is great, but you can't ignore promotion. Without promotion, your piece will get nowhere. Outreach alone does not count as promotion.

To be successful you need to learn a variety of things about your industry and your audience which you can do by following these steps:

  1. You simply need to ask yourself, what does success look like?
  2. Conduct research into how your audience behave and what their interests are. Once you know this you can start to test your messaging across the different social platforms, to see how your audience respond before you roll out the full campaign
  3. Find out who your influencers are and organise them into tiers so you know the difference between your major and minor influencers
  4. Develop a "cracking" headline that will get you noticed

Why people share content

There are many reasons why people share content online, but do you know why?

Understanding these reasons will help you to develop the right types of content and enable you to promote them effectively. Stacey recommends taking a look at a study by New York Times which looks at the reasons why people share online.

Promotional tactics

Outreach is only one promotion tactic but this alone does not count as promotion. There are a number of tactics you can employ to promote your content:

  • Paid press release distribution
  • Paid social and content discovery
  • PPC for content promotion – most advertisers do not target "research" terms – it means you can get incredibly targeted and cheap traffic
  • On-page SEO for content

Hannah Thorpe – Ideation to Impact: How to Create and Sell a Digital Marketing Asset

There needs to be a process behind your ideas:

  • Take notice of your commander’s intent – what does the business need to achieve?
  • Carry out effective research
  • Carry out industry content analysis
  • Use your creativity
  • Sell!

Industry analysis:

  • Work out who your influencers are, and organise them into tiers, running from the *top* influencers, who need the most personal attention, through to small bloggers, who have a smaller, niche influence
  • Work our where the gaps in the market lie
  • Does your audience actually care about the gaps?

How to sell your idea:

  • Reinforce your commander’s intent – it is crucial to tie the idea back to the business first and foremost
  • Show why you chose your idea – don’t just explain the data behind the idea you chose, show the data which made you pass-up the chance to follow up other ideas to explain your process
  • Make it look good – don’t go designing the entire campaign (that won’t work!), instead, create something compelling that looks great!
  • Encourage discussion and debate around your idea

Christoph Cemper – How To Measure Real Success Of Content Marketing

Christoph takes a look at the metrics that really matter when running a digital marketing campaign:

  • "Social signals measure only distribution"
  • "I can like 50 posts per minute, but does that mean I'm engaged?" – probably not.
  • Links = user engagement
  • Comments = user engagement
  • Downloads = user engagement
  • Clicks and views = user engagement
  • User engagement = an impact metric
  • Measurement splits into two areas:
    • Take 'buzz' and 'impact' (distribution and long term impact)
    • You only understand the value of a piece of content by looking at buzz and impact together

Christoph put forth the argument that in order to measure success, you need to understand the relationship between 'buzz' and 'impact'.

Digital PR Sessions

Tanya Korobka: How to Master Digital PR?

Digital PR is ultimately about connecting people and building relationships.

Superstar PR

  1. 84% of people trust recommendations from friends
  2. Relationships are like spider webs – they continue to grow. Every one of your personal contacts can introduce you and connect you with more people
  3. We connect with people through their vulnerable/weird selves
  4. How do you keep personal connections? Be helpful, give not take

Promoters

Social media = niche interests e.g. reddit rather than traditional media

Writers

  1. Get attention, replies and conversation
  2. Got a good story? Make sure you have good email subject lines, use words such as opportunity, people love this word

Takeaways

  1. Everyone you meet has the potential to change your life
  2. Don't be an annoying business person be the real weird you
  3. Be generous and helpful (you'll get back in return what you give without having to ask – give not take)
  4. Mobilise people through movements they are passionate about
  5. Care about customer stories not your brands stories

Lucy Freeborn: What we can all learn from the content strategies of premium brands

  1. Define the reason for engaging in specific channels so consumers know what they are going to get from brands
  2. Coherent content strategies across website and channels, making sure messaging is connected
  3. List of guidelines you follow when on social media. For example: 3 filters you stick to on Instagram
  4. Make sure the people you’re working with have the same language and feel e.g. bloggers
  5. Use different content across social channels. Make each unique and give a reason for people to follow you across all platforms

Ask yourself this:

  • Do you know what type of content your customer wants?
  • Have you worked out what you want your content to do?
  • Are you ensuring consistency across your brand?
  • Are your PR and digital content teams talking to each other?
  • Are you maximising e-commerce functions within the social media? Data capture, rich pins etc.

Razvan Gavrilas: Dominating Organic Search using Cutting-Edge SEO Analysis

Increase your SEO visibility by carrying out analysis:

  • Keyword research
  • Large scale localised top 10 SERP extraction
  • SEO visibility analysis

Links:

  1. Link prospecting
  2. Create campaigns to attract high quality homepage links
  3. Can easily overtake competitors due to link diversification

Content sharing audit:

  1. Social shares extraction
  2. Social visibility calculation
  3. Google ranks vs sharing correlation

Social mention is a helpful brand monitoring tool.

Matt Roberts: Inspire investment in PR

PR is about reputation! 

What do SEO's want PR’s for?

  1. Angles
  2. Outreach
  3. Journalist influence
  4. Links

What do PR’s want SEO’s for?

  1. Visibility of PR content
  2. ROI justification
  3. Content strategy
  4. Technical SEO

SEO’s need to know when their own entity should rank, understand the value of content and what it should say.

PR’s need to plan, to help manage those moments that impact reputation and what searchers do next.

  1. Reputation and consumer behaviour is front and centre
  2. Set goals and become strategically aligned with one another both, SEO’s and PR
  3. Tell a cohesive and data driven story

Data Sessions

Anna Lewis (Wiggle) – Making sure your analytics makes money

5 key areas in analytics:

  1. Analysis
  2. Tracking
  3. Reporting
  4. Insights
  5. Testing

Work out which one will help you move forward:

  • Accuracy and understanding
  • Goals and KPIs
  • Choosing effective strategies
  • Balancing dev insights and service provision
  • Testing and optimisation

But first, avoid making a decision based on flawed data!

Top tips for avoiding mistakes:

  • Test installation – make sure the data coming in is correct
  • Use debugging tools
  • Check reports for issues
  • Get multiple eyes on it
  • Review regularly

Common GA errors:

  • Filters
  • Multiple tags
  • Sampling
  • Cross domain tracking
  • Campaign tracking
  • Property level settings

Top debugging tools:

  • GA debugger
  • Tag assistant
  • Event tracking tracker
  • Google tag manager preview

Check you're making money:

  • It's not all about sessions
  • Understand business objectives
  • Line your metrics up with bottom line
  • Segment to ensure you don't miss details

Implement a method for choosing analytics priorities

Choosing priorities:

  • Potential
  • Importance
  • Ease of implementation

Test, but know what you want to achieve:

  • The more you test, the more you learn
  • Testing proves your theories
  • Helps you choose future directions

Key points:

  • Make sure everyone's on the same page
  • Share your definitions of metrics and dimensions
  • All reports need keys and descriptions
  • Reports should always have commentary from the relevant team
  • Make sure you know the direction you need to go

Kristina Baus – Data Driven Digital Marketing Strategy: How to do it?

Why do we need to analyse data?

  • Data driven marketing strategy is extremely important
    • 64% of people feel they need to be connected to the internet at all times
    • 4% – the average no. of touch points before a conversion
  • Almost everything will be connected with the development of the internet of things
  • Measurable data is actionable data
  • Too much valuable data is being ignored
    • Data companies analyse only 12% of their total data
  • Data driven marketing spend is constantly increasing

How should we approach big data analysis?

  1. Determine how data-driven you are as an organisation at present
  2. Determine what drives your decision making
  3. Establish what data you need to collect to support your decision making process
  4. Collect the data
  5. Analyse the data and think of the data in the view of the customer experience
  6. Roll out your customer focused information
  7. Measure ROI
  8. Repeat and improve

Analysis Examples

The amount of data collected is increasing and we need to understand to how to analyse and create the right strategies for our clients.

Content Sessions

Shelli Walsh: How To Have Ideas for Creative Content

  • Content marketing has been around for over 100 years, it isn’t a new thing
  • Content is not king, concept is king
  • Don't limit your ways of thinking to create ideas
  • Be a lateral thinker – remove limits, it doesn't matter if you are wrong

Brainstorming:

The six thinking hats – Helps you generate ideas thinking from 6 different perspectives

The why technique – Keep asking why, never stop thinking like a child

Combine ideas – For example, the mobile phone and camera were two separate devices. Apps such as, snapchat and Instagram would not be around if these concepts had not been combined

Anyone can learn thinking skills!

Cathal Berragan: Lessons Learned on the Way to Half of a Million Twitter Followers

Starting with a Twitter page that isn’t getting many followers?

Cathal came up with an idea to create a twitter page about exam problems, gained a lot of followers which led t0 companies such as Spotify and Tippy Tap approaching him. He has featured in the press including Daily Mail and Buzzfeed.

Hi advice?

  1. Your profile shouldn't look like a book
    • Humans crave visual content
  2. Make sure you are always online in order to communicate with your audience
  3. Don't give your social media profile to an intern
  4. Don’t develop 'cool dad' syndrome. Your content should be natural and reactive i.e. the people who run your channel should run their own channels well

Pippa Moyle: Merging Your Business Into The 24 Hour News Cycle

  • You have 3-5 seconds to engage your audience
  • Think like a journalist – create content that would be in the news cycle

4 Vital qualities of a journalist:

  1. Know your reader
  2. Produce good quality content
  3. Follow the news
  4. Keep thinking about your reader

What’s the secret?

Know your audience and get the thinking right!

Paul Madden: A Systematic Approach to Managing Relationship & Links

  • All about the people and the relationships with the right people
  • Outreach – reaching out to the right people after creating your content
  • The aim is to build a network of influencers in niches, that can benefit all future projects

How to find the right contacts:

Use tools such as, Buzzumo and Ninja outreach to connect you with the right people.

  • Outreach by email is common but it makes it hard to gain that personal interaction
  • Social media allows you to relationship build (although it is a long game)
  • Think like a salesperson – every conversation gets you closer to your goal
  • A lot of us use email but in order to be noticed you need to do what is over and above what everyone else is doing, such as having a conversation over the phone
  • Set a goal for each communication
  • Decide what broad niches you want influencers in and connect with those people

Key steps:

1) Build inventory of relationships before project

2) Foster relationships over time so they come to you

3) Unless you go the extra mile you will lose out on that race

Paddy Moogan– Reverse Engineering Successful Content

Keep in mind;

1) The story

2) The data

3) The production

Brainstorming:

  • Brainstorming and idea generation is difficult for most of us
  • Brainstorming ideas needs structure and guidelines
  • Not all ideas are good ideas

Brainstorming consistently is the hardest part!

  • Some ideas fly but you don't know why
  • You only learn by doing stuff
  • Look for trends

Brainstorming and the idea generation stage:

  • Create a brief for everyone involved in the brainstorm, this should be the goal
  • Should contain themes, data, visuals, guidelines and constraints
  • Find your content competitors i.e. for travel, targeted keywords such as cheap flights, cheap holidays
  • Look wider than your direct competitors. Sometimes these are the people that do things really well
  • Look at those with a bigger audience as well as direct ones
  • Find visuals, don't over think this. Look at ones that have been created. Think about if you can  do it better

Tools:

  • Buzzumo has a feature for content analysis to look deeper into websites.
    • You can gain useful analysis from this
    • You can also get an average number of shares per post, but you need to have realistic expectations
  • You can find out what posts work well and create a word cloud by using a tool called word up. Ask yourself can you do any of these aspects better?
  • Huballin, Google’s keyword planner and Brandtale are tools useful for keyword research
  • Statista.com can be used for data sourcing. If you can’t find data online get your own e.g. google consumer surveys

Kelvin Newman: How to have less rubbish ideas

The majority of what I am going to tell you is not new but this should help you to start thinking differently about things that you should do, that you might not currently do.

  • You will have better ideas when you understand your context and when you create reliable methods and the right environment
  • The web is a network – too often we talk about link building. It is important to understand the quality of the link and who is linking to you as well as the context
  • Everything happens in context – what might be a good campaign for others might not be right for you
  • Use fusion tables as a way to visualise link relations giving you an interactive/visual snapshot of your site
  • “An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements” – James Young Webb
  • A new idea can be generated through remixing ideas

You will have better ideas when you understand context and have reliable methods.

The post BrightonSEO Key Conference Takeaways – September 2015 Edition appeared first on White.net.

Market Report: Cooking and Baking

Posted: 18 Sep 2015 01:25 AM PDT

baking-cover-icons

This September we are launching our latest Market Report, this time focusing on Cookware and Bakeware, with a few food processor insights to added to the mix. We looked at the biggest brands, retailers and manufacturers in the market in order to see who’s coming out on top. Here are some of the highlights:

    • Our trend insights show the growing product types and key times of year for bakeware and cookware retailers
    • Our spotlight features on supporting content and product pages provide insight into creating that comprehensive customer journey
    • Social Media Specialist Kasia Piekut looks at this market’s approach to Social Media.
    • We look at why the BBC is winning on Twitter when it comes to baking
    • Social Media campaigns that caught our eye

Take a look at some of the well known brands that feature in our report:

 

Brands

Why this sector?

The past couple of years has seen a surge in popularity for home baking. The desire to save money, coupled with a trend towards nostalgia, has seen many Britons turn back towards mum’s tried and trusted recipes.

Vivianne Ihekweazu, Mintel

 

To enjoy the Cookware and Bakeware report, you can view further details of what’s inside and download it here.

Enjoy the gallery of White.net’s baking attempts below!

As you grow older, you will discover that

The post Market Report: Cooking and Baking appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : Promotion, demotion and opportunity

Promotion, demotion and opportunity

You can learn a new skill, today, for free.

You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone.

You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now.

Or not.

In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind.

The question, then, isn't, "when am I going to get promoted?"

No, I think the question is, "will I grab these openings to become someone who's already doing work at a higher level?"

Act 'as if'. If the people around you don't figure out what an asset you've become, someone else will.

       

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