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Google Analytics Makes Goals Easier

May 22nd, 2013 Lizzy Wilkins

Measuring the success of marketing campaigns is essential to the way we evaluate our campaigns. Today, Google Analytics announced changes to how you create Goals to measure conversion activity, making it even easier to determine whether or not your marketing activities are successful.

The biggest change is the addition of goal templates. These templates are dependent on the industry category you’ve selected in your Property Settings. Templates are organized into Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, and Engagement goals.

Google Analytics Goals

Furthermore, Google has added twenty additional industry categories you can select from. Your data are made anonymous and then used to create benchmarks for your industry category. These new categories are aligned with Google’s standard for industry vertical classification.

Peter Quale, VP of Technical Search Marketing at Nina Hale, commented on the change favorably, saying, “I just used [the new goal setup] this morning. It worked pretty well and saved me ten minutes!”

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Point of View: Panda & Penguin Updates

May 17th, 2013 nhsadmin

_Background

At SXSW in March, Matt Cutts alluded to a Google algorithm update within the next couple months. Google will not comment on a timeline or the details of the update, but we can expect it will be rolled out within the next few weeks. The purpose of the original Penguin update was to weed out spammers that attempted to find a loop-hole around Google’s algorithm. The 2.0 update is expected to go deeper and have more of an impact than the original version, becoming more strict and penalizing sites that appear spammy.

_{What can we expect?}

A video released by Matt Cutts on May 13^th outlines some of the possible changes. Cutts explained that while many of these changes are in the works, he couldn’t confirm that all will be included at this time. All in all, he reminded us that the goal of a Panda or Penguin update is to set uniform expectations that align with Google’s vision to provide search results that have high quality content for users.

Here’s a synopsis of what could be included in the Penguin 2.0 update, according to a YouTube video released by Cutts on May 13, 2013:

Further and stricter penalization of spammy sites. Cutts notes that black-hat spamming packages or trading will be punished.
Stricter rules for Advertorials. Cutts notes that there is nothing wrong with advertorials or native advertising with clear disclosure. You need to be careful of advertorials that violate quality guidelines.
Cleaner queries.
Google is going upstream to deny value to link spammers.
Changes to Webmaster Tools. Better hack site detection and communication to webmasters. More diagnostic functions, specifically around linking.
Detecting authority in a specific space. Google is working toward identifying authority and rewarding those sites. This especially refers to authorship and incoming links and social mentions.
Refined host clustering and host crowding.

_{What do we think is most important?}

Since we do not know the exact algorithm changes, we can’t tell you exactly how it will impact your website. That being said, we pride ourselves in staying current. In doing so, we provide our clients with best practices to provide searchable, high quality content for users, and Google likes that.

Last year, Google created a disavow links tool that allowed webmasters to tell the Google search algorithm that a set of URLs linking to their site might be spam and to ignore them. The disavow links tool was created primarily for sites that were hit by Penguin and gave a webmaster one last avenue to attempt to clean up bad inbound links.

With the disavow tool, Google has essentially asked webmasters to “tattle tail” on suspect websites. This allowed Google to collect information to help them see trends or schemes and allow them to programmatically identify linking practices that break their guidelines. Google also has data from Webmaster tool emails on suspect links. If a webmaster removed the link or disavowed it, they merely solidified Google’s suspicion. If a webmaster responded and justified the link, that also provides useful insight. Couple that with all the complaining, reporting, and feedback from the first release, and Google should have some pretty strong data to “turn up the heat” on spam and paid linking.

Based on the information at this time, here’s our two cents:

Google rewarding authority websites in a specific space by ranking them a little more highly. Many of our clients would be considered authorities, or are working toward it, this change could potentially provide a very positive impact to conversions.

Better hacked site detection (over the next couple months) and Google Webmaster Tools being the one-stop shop for additional information. Unfortunately even great websites sometimes get hacked. Luckily, Google’s increased detection will only help in preventing loss of revenue or lead generation.

For websites that were affected by Panda, this may be good news. If your website is in the border zone or grey area, where they were impacted but haven’t knowingly engaged in black-hat methods, Google has identified additional quality signals that may be of benefit to those sites.

We’re happy to see Google continuing to enhance Webmaster Tools by providing more information to the webmaster. Everyone with a website should also have a Google Webmaster account! Currently, this is the only way Google notifies a webmaster if they detect an issue.

As of now, this is all the information we can provide. Our team will continue to monitor our client’s websites closely to identify any issues. We look forward to seeing what Google delivers within the next few weeks and will continue to provide updates.

Tags: panda, penguin 2.0
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5 Google Analytics Audiences You Should Be Remarketing To

May 15th, 2013 Angela Needham

Now that Google Analytics Remarketing has been out for nearly a year – we thought we’d share with you five of our favorite audiences to remarket to.

1. Visitors Who Abandoned Your Conversion Funnel

Whether you’re a lead-gen or an e-commerce site, if you have a conversion funnel, you should be remarketing to visitors who started your conversion funnel but did not complete your final conversion. To reach these visitors, you can use Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segments. With Visitor Segments, you can set up a sequence filter to segment visitors that have completed specific sequential behaviors on your site. You can set these segments up for each step of your conversion funnel by including visitors who visited the pages of your conversion steps leading up to your conversion while excluding visitors who visited pages that appear later in the conversion funnel (see example below). This will allow you to send messages specific to each audience as they move through the conversion funnel.

Real world example: You sell custom screen printed t-shirts online. Your site uses a quoting engine to generate quotes on screen printing tee-shirts prior to the final sale. Below are example audiences you could remarket to with unique messaging.

- Site visitors who created a custom shirt design but did not receive a price quote. Remarket to these visitors with messaging to bring them back into the conversion funnel where they left off. Example: “Get a quote on your custom tee shirt design now!”

- Site visitors who received a quote but did not order the tee-shirts. Remarket them with messaging to drive them to order. Giving these visitors a unique offer in the ad to save XX% could help drive to higher clickthrough and conversion rates. Example: “Order your tee shirts now and save 15% off your purchase!”

2. Past Purchasers

When you sell a product that has low involvement in the purchase decision, remarketing to previous customers can be a great way to drive sales. One way to do this is by creating a Remarketing List in Google Analytics that targets visitors who have completed a purchase goal on your site.

For most products, you are going to want to wait to start remarketing to your customer as they may not be immediately ready to make another purchase from you. The length of how long you wait to start remarketing depends on your sales cycle. For a product whose sale cycle begins again after 30 days of purchase; you could create a custom combination list in AdWords that targets site visitors who have completed a purchase in the last 90 days and that excludes site visitors who have completed in the last 30 days. See examples below.

3. Visitors Interested In Specific Products/Services

For some products/services with longer sales cycles, you can target to visitors who have not yet converted on your site but have indicated that they are interested in one of your specific products/services through Google Analytics Visitor Segments. There are two ways I generally like to do this, but there are many other ways it can be done.

The first way I segment my visitors is by time on page. If a visitor stays on one of my pages about a specific product/service for longer than that page’s average time on page, I want to remarket to that visitor using an ad specific to the product/service they were viewing. This is set up by using Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s sequence filter to include page and time on page. See example below.

The second way I like to segment my audience is by, again, using Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s sequence filter to create an audience of visitors who have visited 2+ pages on my site related to a particular product or service. This is done by adding to steps of page visits in the sequence. See example below.

4. Soft-Lead Converters

Another way you can remarket to visitors who are making a high involvement purchase decision is by remarketing to visitors who have completed soft leads on your site without completing your ultimate conversion goal.

Real world example: Using the screen printing tee shirt company as our example again; you can remarket to visitors who have signed up to receive offer emails, but have not made a purchase on your site. For these visitors, showing them an offer ad might produce better results as they have indicated that they are interested in your brand but are waiting for a deal to make a purchase.

5. Visitors Within Highest Conversion Rate Range Metrics

Using your data in Analytics, you can determine when visitors are converting on your site at the highest rates. This can be based on number of visits, time on site, page views, and basically any other metric.

One example of this could be using Google Analytics to determine the number of visits that visitors convert at the highest rate. You might find that your visitors convert at the highest rate between five to six visits to your site. It may be that these visitors needed to visit the site more than once to gather more information to make a conversion. You might also see conversion rates drop after six visits because these visitors may have converted through another channel and are now visiting the site for very specific information and not to convert again. Using this information, you can create a remarketing list that target visitors to your site who have visited two to five times. To set this up, you can use the Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s dimension & metrics filter and include visitors based on their count of visit metrics. See example below.

Happy remarketing, friends!

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Attribution Across the Path to Purchase

May 10th, 2013 Lizzy Wilkins

The Consumer Journey is a hot topic in our cross-platform, digital marketing world. Understanding how consumers move throughout the path to purchase is a necessity for the digital marketer. Between awareness, consideration, intent to buy, and actual purchase, we sure don’t have an easy task in learning how our media channels work with one another! Beyond that, we also need to know what gets consumers to re-engage and become brand loyalists. As we learned at a recent Nina Hale educational event, tracking and attributing conversions across the path to purchase is something many companies struggle with.

Google’s Think Insights recently released a new tool that uses anonymized data from its Google Analytics accounts to set benchmarks for assisting and last interaction conversions across industries. It examines the roles that media channels play in encouraging a consumer to buy. “Assisting Interaction” channels are more helpful as awareness vehicles, while “Last Interaction” channels more directly influence a purchase. Using the ratio of “Assist/Last Interactions,” we can plot tactics along our journey to determine whether they drive awareness or conversion.

We played around with the data a bit and plotted our own clients’ data along Google’s benchmarked journey. You can do this yourself by pulling the “Assist/Last Interaction” ratio from your Google Analytics Assisted Conversions report (under Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels -> Assisted Conversions) and comparing it to the journey mapped in the Think Insights tool. It gave us a lot of insight into how our marketing activities currently work toward driving acquisitions and purchases. We also learned a lot about how we might change our media strategy in order to target consumers at specific points throughout his or her journey.

How does your attribution model relate to the consumer journey? Have you been surprised by your data versus Google’s benchmarks? Let us know.

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Why You Should Use Bing Ad Intelligence

May 7th, 2013 Jodie Miller

Bing Ad Intelligence has been around for a while now but many search marketers still do not use it. Bing Ad Intelligence is an extension that you can download free for Microsoft Excel. Once you download it, you can log in to your Bing account in excel to conduct your keyword research. I think that many people use their Google keyword research and just import it into Bing. We all know that what might work on Google, might not work on Bing. Here are some reasons why you should download Bing Ad Intelligence and start using the tool:

It’s more extensive than the Bing UI – Here is where you can do all the keyword research that you cannot do in Bing’s UI.

They have keyword research templates – Get started with your keyword research with one of these templates. These templates are great for keyword research and insights. Moreover, they are nice enough to send to clients when doing research.

You can use it for landing page optimization – Go beyond keyword research and gain insights on landing page optimization. Use the webpage keywords to see what keywords are the highest ranking from your website.

Keyword categories – Quality scores dragging you down? Plug in your keywords using the keyword categories to see what categories come up for your keyword. Most keywords will show up in multiple categories. These insights will allow you to better optimize your landing pages and also give you new ideas for negative keywords if you do not want to be ranking for certain categories.

Tags: bing, bing ad intelligence, excel add-in
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Local Takes Another Step Toward Social

May 3rd, 2013 Josef Severson

Did you know that 13% of local searches happen on social networking sites? Engaging socially on a location level is rapidly becoming an important local marketing tactic. That’s why we’re excited to announce that our partner, Yext, has added Facebook to their publishing network. This greatly increases the efficiency of the subsection of Local SEO and social engagement allowing you to:

Manage; Name, Address & Phone Number information instantly
Distribute enhanced content in the form of apps native to Facebook
- Calendars, Staff Bios, Products & more
Share local-social specific content to your Facebook location pages
- Positive reviews from your local SEO efforts
- Location specific photos & content
- Promotions
Report on likes, check-ins & more

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Another Reason Why Google+ Shouldn’t Be Ignored

May 2nd, 2013 Tess

If you haven’t noticed recently, Google’s knowledge graph has been pulling Google+ information into its search engine results pages. Frequently, you will see Wikipedia information displayed here, however, if your Google+ page is optimized and relevant, those profiles will be displayed there along with recent activity. This can lead to some significant opportunity for brands.

Here are a couple examples of Google+ being pulled into Google’s SERPs:

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 2.23.55 PM

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 2.30.25 PM

Here are some tips when considering your Google+ Page:

Make sure your page is optimized.
Make sure your most recent posts are something you want to be shared on Google’s SERPs.
Define your name, address, phone number (Use your REAL business name).
Claim your Google+ Local listing.
Think critically about the categories you use.
Link users to a page that keeps in mind that they are interested in a specific location.
Don’t merge with Google+ unless you have less than three locations and want to engage socially.

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Nina Hale, Inc. Participates in STEP-UP Mock Interviews

April 30th, 2013 Tess

Last summer, Nina Hale, Inc. partnered with AchieveMpls’s STEP-UP program to provide two high school students with the opportunity of a paid-summer internship that would help prepare them for future careers through beneficial work experience, mentoring, and connections. The experience presented more value to Nina Hale, Inc. than they could have imagined and lead Nina Hale, Inc. to commit to partnering with STEP-UP for another year.

STEP-UP focuses on working with Twin Cities companies to provide internships that create valuable workplace experiences for more than 16,000 Minneapolis youth. STEP-UP recruits, trains, and places low-income youth in a wide range of business, nonprofits, and public agencies. A vital element of the interns training process is their participation in Mock Interviews. STEP-UP works with their business partners to find volunteers to take part in providing candid feedback to help interns strengthen their skills and confidence. For many of STEP-UP’s youth, the mock interview serves as their first professional experience.

Nina Hale, Inc. team members were quick to volunteer for the event. Nina Hale, Inc. Senior Content Manager, Katie Pennell, shared her experience by saying, “STEP-UP mock interviews not only help the step up students, they’re also a great opportunity for professionals to confirm (or find!) faith in this next generation of young professionals. There are some amazing, driven talents coming up the ranks!” Nina Hale, Inc. is proud to be a partner of AchieveMpls’s STEP-UP program and looks forward to continuing their relationship and providing opportunities to youth who face the greatest barriers in finding employment.

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A Fearless Conversation On Race In Advertising

April 25th, 2013 Jodie Miller

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

Wednesday night, I attended an event hosted by The Brandlab on “Race In Advertising.” Mike Lescarbeau, the event’s moderator, opened up the event by showing two recent and controversial commercials and asked for opposing viewpoints on each commercial from the crowd. The quote by George Bernard Shaw really hit the mark on the night’s topic. Advertisers are creating spots that are not connecting with the multicultural audiences that they are trying to reach.

Getting positive and negative viewpoints on the use of race was a great opener for the panelists. One woman did not believe that the VW spot was offensive because while traveling, she had heard people of many different races speaking in an accent that was not expected of them. An opposing viewpoint to that was that the spot was offensive because of the stereotype it perpetuates. For the Taco Bell spot, one view was that bad translation was offensive. However, another woman thought that it fit the brand since it is Taco Bell. When she saw the commercial she felt as if she were in on the joke with Taco Bell. These varying viewpoints taught us how perception can vary by the individual and that advertisers need to be able to anticipate these situations.

The panelists of the event were: Carla Vernon, Director Family Favorite Foods, General Mills; Alfredo Martel, SVP Marketing, Caribou Coffee; and Mike Fernandez, Corporate Affairs, Cargill. Each panelist brought a different and diverse perspective to the conversation. The clear consensus was that while a shift has already happened, ad agencies have been slow to move along with it. The times we live in are diverse and we need to keep up with the growing multicultural population.

The panelists left us with a clear message that agencies need to keep up with the times or they will get left behind. During the conversation, Carla mentioned her family values and compared advertising to one of her main family missions; have a huge heart. I think that organizations like The Brandlab and Step-Up are doing a great job shifting our perspectives. However, I think that individuals could go one step further in mentoring and teaching minorities. A great example of this was how Carla has an all-star creative director from a smaller agency. Whenever the larger agencies are in, she makes sure he is in the meeting so that he can learn from all the talent.

I’d like to end with tying back to The Brandlab’s mission of creating opportunities for diverse students. I think that this is where we have to start to solve the problem of race in advertising. If we can teach and empower kids at an early age, I think we will find rock stars once they are ready to enter the workforce. Not only can the kids learn from their mentors but the mentors can learn from the kids. Let’s go outside our comfort zone and be daring!

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Earth Day 2013 Terra Searches

April 19th, 2013 Justin

Earth Day is upon us and coming up quick, April 22, 2013 to be exact, so what better time to share some searches about our beloved planet? Earth Day is an occasion to be particularly aware of how we care for our planet, and is a time to show and practice appreciation for this ball of rock, gas, and minerals that we, and other living organisms, call home. Our terra (or earth) searches deal with all varieties of questions, events, and ways to help our earth from pollution and other contributors to climate change. So save energy, pick up some trash, plant a garden, and try celebrating a day for our earth. Enjoy the most eco-friendly searches we have to offer:

earth day tee shirts

- A must to show off some Earth Day pride and why not make it fun!?

what is earth day

- Of course many may not know; but earth day is an annual day on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection.

what day is earth day on

- Earth day is always on April, 22. April 22nd is significant because it did not fall during exams or spring breaks. More so, it did not conflict with religious holidays.

earth day projects for kids

- Love it! Start respecting the earth at a young age.

free earth day activities

- Also a great search because best of all, most events are free and local! Most events include 5k fun runs, park clean-ups, events at science museums and local government offices, as well as music concerts.

earth day pledges

- This is always great because there really is not ONE pledge you can find. An Earth Day pledge is almost like a New Year’s resolution…so you can make it up and just stick to it!

earth day word searches

- This I always question, because I don’t agree with doing word searches for kids in a classroom during Earth Day, rather, GET OUTSIDE and contribute to the cause!

earth day ecards

- Most eco-friendly way to spread the word without the use of paper!

why was earth day created

- Credited to Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. Observing the effects of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and encouraged by the student anti-war movement, he called for an environmental teach-in, later called “Earth Day.” More than one billion people and many national governments in almost 200 countries participate.

how can I prevent global warming

- Love the ambition, but I would have searched “how can WE prevent global warming.” It will need to be a collective effort.

Thanks for joining us for 2013′s Earth Day searches from Nina Hale, Inc. Have a fun, safe, and eco-friendly Earth Day!

Tags: earth day, google natural search results, search
Posted in Google, Random Search Fun | No Comments »