Marketingeasy Internet Marketing Explained » ROI in marketing

Google’s real changes

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:00:06 +0000

While everyone is losing time talking about the changes of Google’s visual and it’s new icons there’s a real change rolling out from Google that has a much higher impact for Web marketers.

The company has just announced they’re opening a full App Gallery for Google Analytics.

Google Application Gallery

This gallery contains applications that extend Google Analytics in new and exciting ways.

They are solutions that help analysts, marketers, IT teams, and executives get more out of Google Analytics
(if you are part of the ones that believes that Analytics=Visits stop reading here).

Apps are available in 12 categories, including business intelligence, campaign management, content, data collection, e-commerce, email marketing, mobile marketing, phone tracking, reporting tools, SEO, site auditing, and widgets and gadgets.

According to Mashable website – Coming Soon Google Analytics will release a new set of Analytics reports for Adwords.

Ahhh so good to see Direct Marketing working!

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:45:17 +0000

Lately, Digital Media has been receiving all the spotlight but it’s nice to revisit how old school creative marketing with a business strategy, clear objectives and defined target can produce a great cost/efficient, measurable response, with clear ROI.

This is the case of a Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore campaign for Singapore Navy Services.

Problem:

Singapore navy service was struggling to attract high-level, intellectual professionals with a combination of mental aptitude and strategic thinking. Even though they were receiving thousands of applicants, most had not the combination of skills necessary for the position.

Challenge:

To attract 5-10% of top graduating students who might never consider a career as a naval officer and one day would command a multi-million dollar, state of the art frigates.

The idea:

Working with a selected database list rather than a fancy app on facebook or a pushy broadcasting account on twitter, they decided to work in a direct, clear and selected database list which targets the top 5% of graduating students from universities.

The agency selected the best university minds in the country and sent them a direct mailer pack, which contained the actual Naval Officer’s uniform including medals and decorations. This awe-inspiring uniform is revered and respected the world-over.

The crisp, fancy white Naval uniform instantly appeals to the prospect, giving them a 5 minute opportunity to live the experience. The life-sized uniform could be held up, allowing for a real-life experience. As a last token a business reply card was placed in the pocket.

Mechanic:

6000 direct mailers sent.

Response:

5% response – 300 applicants – a much higher rate compared to previous numbers + the time saved recruiting and avoiding wrong applicants.

Champion!

(Click the image to enlarge)

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

Post published on www.marketingeasy,net

Social Media Resistance – Breaking the Shell

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:51:27 +0000

There are way too many articles about Social media benefits, importance etc.

Even though we all know Social Media can be used for business in different ways (sales, research, customer services, branding, etc) when reality knocks on the door it is a different story.

A simple search on Google will present tons of how/why/when to use Social Media, but (with all respect) most of these guides have been written by users for users.When it comes to selling internally for your company the story changes.

Recent research by EMarketer lists where the level of resistance to Social Media in organisations is higher.

Not a surprise as the higher the executive position the more Social Media Resistance will be found.

You are probably wondering why resistance to Social Media is higher among CEO’s?

My instant response would be, it’s his/her ass on the line. If something goes wrong, they are the first to blame.

People are creatures of habit and CEOs are no different.

It’s just natural for human beings to try to preserve the status quo and to avoid changes leading to places they don’t know. Fear of the unknown, can manifest in excuses / barriers.

Though 70% of US marketing, management and HR executives say they plan to increase social-media use at their companies, more than 80% say they are concerned about the risks, and most do not have policies or training in place to avert reputation mishaps or lost productivity.

From a management perspective, the common Global (American) business culture (top-down) might be a tough environment to achieve full social media internal engagement.

Too often I hear consultancy agencies speak about how ’social media’ can be used to achieve a ‘flatter’ organisation. Well, it’s true but the key is to have leaders who understand that they have to adjust their management / leadership habits to allow innovative thinking and to support the process of it, and that’s exactly where the attrition starts.

From MCharts

“Ignoring the need for responsible guidelines can leave an organisation open to unnecessary risk and can impede efforts to use social media proactively and competitively in the marketplace,” said Carol Russell, CEO of Russell Herder.

“Rather than bypass the social media opportunity, organizations should embrace it while taking steps to educate their team about internal guidelines and best practices,”

According to Ethos President David Baer, good social media policies are organisation-specific, but must take into consideration the form, substance, philosophy and culture of the organisation.

Good policies should include “the need to respect confidential and proprietary information; as well as the sensitivity of potential conflicts of interest,” he added.

A recent study by Nucleus Research found that social networking costs employers 1.5% in lost productivity.

Ok, companies should embrace it, but what to do and how to sell it internally?

Companies should be more methodical in their approach to social media, better educating themselves on risks and benefits, and putting into place plans and policies to produce benefits while also minimising risk.

You still need to overcome the internal resistance, how?

From Chris Brogan

“You’re probably the most passionate person in your company when it comes to social media. When it comes to explaining this to your senior leadership, a different approach is required. They’re busy. They have other concerns. They might not be as studied up on the tools as you.

Here are some suggestions.
1) Start strong – “I’m thinking that a blog will improve our marketing efforts and overall SEO. I’ve built a plan that shows rough costs, time involvement, and my predictions of what we’ll get for our efforts.”
2) Explain things from the senior view.
3) Use case studies.
4) Find and keep a senior sponsor for the project
5) Finding your top competitor already using the tools, that’s won several social media enthusiasts the chance to get things going.”

At The Online Circle we always find that showing what competition is doing is highly appreciated by CEOs’.

It does 2 things:

1) It gives them a sense of safety and reliability

2) It arouse their sense of competitiveness

After that we then guide them through a logical process, bringing to the light some normally over-looked aspects (liability, IT, Human Resources, etc)

To break the shell isn’t easy, but approaching CEO’s and high level executives with a different language, with a non clear plan and without a solid real case is almost asking for a big No.

SUN TZU on The Art of war:

Now the general who wins a battle makes many
calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought.
The general who loses a battle makes but few
calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations
lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat:
how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention
to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.

Measuring your website Goals. I think you’ve got one don’t you?

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:36:44 +0000

Disclosure: This is a simple but extensive guide. After have read this post you’ll be able to set up and manage your website more efficiently. Reserve yourself around 30 minutes to read and apply what I’m about to teach you here. Also make sure you have access to your website background (FTP/Cpanel, etc), or if you have no idea what it means, go ahead, read the post and if you still have doubts drop a comment.

Some of you know Jeff Richardson and I are running the Internet Marketing Academy’ seminars for some time now.

You can read all about it here www.internetmarketingacademy.com.au.

We cover website design (under business perspective) and optimisation, social media (twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, etc), online advertising (like Google AdWords), and other online strategies like email marketing and online PR.

One of the big discussions we’ve got around the sessions is about ROI and Measure tools. One is scared of using the various tools available online that allow you to track more than visitors on your website.

Let’s talk about Goals

Goals (with a capital G) are a way to measure business objectives for your website in Google Analytics.

Goals must correspond to a measurable action performed by your website’s visitors, for example, a visit to a “contact us” page.

This combination of a business objective and a measurable action make up a Goal. Here are some common examples.

Business Objective	Visitor Action	Success Measure webpage
Generate Leads	Complete Contact Form	form_submitted.html
Relationship Marketing	Sign up for Newsletter	subscription_confirmed.html
Revenue Generation	a Complete buying transaction	thankyou.html
Raise Awareness	Whitepaper Download	download_redirect.html

To use a real world example, the Internet Marketing Academy objective is to get attendees, and the measurable action is a complete registration.

Keeping this goal in mind helps us focus on the objective and not worry about things that may don’t matter — like the number of visits and how many citations on Twitter (just example-in some cases this might be important). Goals serve this same purpose in Google Analytics.

Understanding the Goal Funnel

Usually the visitor action that’s associated with a goal involves multiple steps.

Together these steps make up the Goal Funnel, or the sequence of steps that lead up to the successful completion of a Goal.

Like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action, such as a pageview of a specific page.

Here’s a real world example.

Let’s assume we, from Internet Marketing Academy want to generate more registrations using a specific action.

The path for that play is as follows:

User comes to the home page, clicks on agenda page, after reading the agenda, the user decides to check on Price/Location and then convinced is a good deal, clicks on registration and complete the transaction.

In this example, the Goal is to complete a registration and the Goal Funnel is:

Home > Agenda> Price/Location>Thank You page.

The user moves from one page to another until either registration (Goal completed) or bounce out (Goal abandoned).

How to set up a Goal and Funnel:

Step 1) Define your Goal Funnel

Navigate to your website, and move through the steps required to complete your Goal.

As you navigate, note down the URLs for each page in the sequence. You will need it the url

If the sequence includes only one step (the Goal) than you don’t need to define a funnel at all. If the sequence includes events other than pageviews (such as clicks), you will need to use virtual pageviews or another method beyond the scope of this tutorial.

On our example:

http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/ (home page – step 1)
http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/internet-marketing-classes-agenda/ (agenda – step2)
http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/price-locations/ (price/location – step3)
http://ima-melbourne-cbd1.eventbrite.com/ (registration – step4)
http://ima-melbourne-cbd1.eventbrite.com/thank_you.html (thank you/completed – step 5)

Step 2) Configure Goal Settings for Each Profile

You will need to configure goals for each profile you want them to show up in.

Go to Conversion Goals and Funnel and click “Edit”

Set “Active Goal” to “On”

Set “Match Type” to to either “Exact Match,” “Head Match,” or “Regular Expression Match.”

In our example, we chose “Exact Match,” because there is only one exact URL for our Goal page “thank_you.html.”

If you have multiple Goal pages, or multiple pages for one of the steps leading up to the goal, you might need to use a different match type.

If your Goal has a specific $$ value, be sure to enter it under “Goal Value”.

You may need to look at your financial data to determine how much a Goal completion is worth to you.

Step 3) Define Your Goal Funnel

Enter the URL and a meaningful name for each step in your funnel.

In our example the Goal URL is “/thank_you.html” and the name we gave it is “Conversion.”

If you only have one step (the Goal) than you don’t need to complete this section.

Step 4) Wait a Few Days and Analyze your Goal Performance

Your Goals will not work backwards, so you will need to wait for Goal data to appear in your reports.

Once you have data to analyze, navigate to the Goals section and open the Funnel Visualization Report.

Now we can analyze the entire goal funnel or just an individual page.

The report will show things like:

Visits entering the funnel (at home page)
Visits in which the person moved from one page to the next step in the funnel .
Visits that completed the entire funnel and reached the Goal

Summary

So there you have it.

Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics let you see how well your website is living up to your business objectives.

They also help you identify specific areas of your website to improve on. Overall, they’re a crucial element in a successful web strategy.

Before implementing Google Analytics Goals, identify what your business objectives are for your website, and what visitor actions they correspond to.
Identify the steps visitors must go through to complete the desired action, and note down the specific pages that make up those steps.
Use this information to configure Goals and Funnels.
Take action on the data. Make simple design changes or try using Website Optimizer to make improvements.
Work on your landing pages

Post inspired by Google

Best Regards

Lucio Ribeiro