Online Authority Blog

Spur Event Registrations using Facebook advertising

by Kelly Kubrick on November 16, 2018

Campaign Objectives

The RCMP Foundation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police‘s charitable arm, sought registrants for its first-ever online horse auction. Those same registrants were also welcome to participate in a sister event, an in-person horse auction: “See inside the RCMP Foundation’s horse auction” from CBC News.

The Plan

In advance of the campaign launch, the RCMP Foundation developed English and French landing pages announcing details for each auctions, and encouraging visitors to register to bid on any of the 30+ magnificent Hanovarian horses available for sale.

Where digital fit

In addition to securing traditional media coverage including PR and advertising in horse industry magazines, see examples below:

and publishing organic social media content and distributing email newsletters, the RCMP Foundation approved a paid media advertising buy on Facebook.

While researching potential audiences to target on Facebook, Online Authority oversaw the technical implementation needed for a Facebook advertising campaign as undertaken by the RCMP Foundation’s agency:

Following that, in the client’s Facebook Ad account, Online Authority created targeted Website Custom Audiences (WCA) based on past buyer lists and website visitors. Online Authority also developed necessary naming conventions for Google Analytics UTM tracking codes to track the impact of email efforts vs the Facebook ad buy.

In its research, Online Authority identified 65 possible target audiences within Facebook for review and approval by the client. Those were narrowed to 23 optimal choices for launch. Online Authority created each as unique Facebook Ad Sets in order to monitor the performance of each audience against one another.

As the landing page continue to evolve, Online Authority finalized the paid media creative, including copy treatment, and the campaign was activated. Below are three sample placements of the creative that ran, and some of the response generated:

RCMP Foundation Horse Auction sample Facebook Ads

Campaign Results

All 23 ad sets launched simultaneously and performance of each was monitored on a daily basis. Within one week, the ad sets were narrowed to the top performers.

By the number of auction registrants, the approach proved so successful that the campaign was paused at the two-week of a planned six-week campaign. The best news for this fundraising effort? Further, all horses were sold with revenue targets exceeded.

If you are interested in learning more about Facebook advertising, contact Online Authority today.

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Kelly KubrickSpur Event Registrations using Facebook advertising

Align your Google Analytics Channel Groupings with your marcom plan

by Kelly Kubrick on April 17, 2017

Cast your mind back to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the Steve Martin / John Candy comedy where those modes of transport were to deliver the travellers home. Media has a similar concept with sources, or channels, that deliver prospects to us. Traditionally, those channels included direct mail, radio or TV, and newspapers or magazines.

Today, we have “new” media sources like Google and Bing (search), or Facebook and Twitter (social). When rolled up into categories like Search or Social those categories are known as Channels. However, sources are increasingly fragmented (how many social networks are out there today?), distracting us from knowing which channels are working for us.

Are you confident you know which marcom activities are worth continued investment?

Picture a busy but under-resourced marketing communications team challenged with finding prospects for a new brand. From the get-go, this team has done everything right. They undertook comprehensive market research and used it as the foundation for their strategic plan. That plan led to multiple outreach tactics / activities:

  • Forming strategic partnerships with established, aligned, non-competing organizations
  • Creating relevant, valuable content to be shared across multiple social media networks
  • Publishing relevant blog posts to encourage community engagement
  • Producing a monthly educational email newsletter (with just a hint of promotion) to efficiently leverage their blog
  • Purchasing advertising to to uncover potential pockets of customers
  • Launching an affiliate marketing program to entice bloggers and other websites to promote their message for them

Further, the team put together a measurement plan with established targets, and set Google Analytics up correctly to ensure they captured ‘clean’ prospect data. And, gold star to them – they were executing comprehensive digital campaign tracking to measure the impact of their individual activities.

However as the time requirements for juggling that many activities increased, the available resources did not.

Increased pressure to undertake more (and more) activities without additional resources

Within a few months, everyone wanted to know if all the activities were worth the level of effort required to support them, or if some could / should be cut. However, even as the data flowed in, Google Analytics seemed disconnected from the team’s activities and their reports didn’t support decision making. For example:

The team regularly reviewed their Google Analytics’ Channels report, labelled in the Google Analytics interface as “Default Channel Grouping”.

Default Channels Grouping

Google Analytics Default Channels Grouping Report

If you aren’t familiar with it, Google explains that the Channels report displays

“rule-based groupings of your traffic sources, [showing] your data organized according to the Default Channel Grouping. Default groupings are the most common sources of traffic, like Paid Search and Direct.”

And, according to Google, this allows “you to quickly check the performance of each of your traffic channels.”

The problem is that Google’s Default Channel Groupings aren’t necessarily how organizations might describe their Channels internally. Further, Google’s language labelling the individual Channel might not even exist in your organization’s vocabulary.

Even with measurement best practices, it can be hard to prioritize

So, although the concept of Channels makes sense in theory, typically, the Default Channel Groupings only make sense to the person familiar with your Google Analytics UTM code naming conventions. And, as with many organizations, the majority of the marketing communications team members weren’t familiar with the UTM name/value pair naming conventions (how are we counting paid social? is our email traffic really captured correctly?).

This meant team members weren’t confident in knowing which activities were captured in which Channel. And, if there’s a lack of confidence in the data, people start disregarding it.

Frustratingly, even when this Google Analytics savvy-team used advance reporting features such as expanding their report view to include Source/Medium as a second dimension of data (see screenshot below), the volume of data still obscured any insights to help them prioritize their efforts.

Google Analytics Channels report by Source Medium dimension

Google Analytics Channel report with Source/Medium as a secondary dimension

What does (Other) mean?

One of the frustrations of Google Analytics is the (Other) line item found in many of its reports. In the Default Channel Groupings report, it’s particularly difficult to discern what (Other) contains. Even when used with a second Source/Medium dimension applied, the underlying data still only makes sense to those familiar with the original UTM campaign parameter naming conventions. Even then, Other can take a lot of digging.

Instead, what if (Other) could be eliminated and the remaining Channels sorted into buckets labelled in a way that makes sense to your team? That way, colleagues would have much more confidence interpreting what the reports are showing them.

What to do? Take charge of the Channel rules

Fortunately, instead of using the Default Channel Groupings provided by Google Analytics, you can create your own, reflective of your own marketing-communications activities. Google Analytics provides a useful, and relatively friendly, “make your own rules” tool that allows you to override its ‘system-defined’ rules.

Thus, instead of hoping Google attributes your email traffic correctly, you can ensure your Email traffic does in fact land in the Email channel. Or, instead of having Google lump all your social traffic into Social, you can segment it into paid versus organic.

The ‘Custom Channel Groupings’ tool is in the Admin section of your reports, by View, under Channel Settings > Channel Groupings. With it, you can create a custom set of your own business rules to define Channels, and then toggle between it and the Default Groupings View. This screenshot below illustrates how you can toggle between the two:

Toggle between Default Channel Groupings and your customized channel groupings

Toggle between Default Channel Groupings and your customized channel groupings

 

Six steps to customize your Default Channels Grouping

You can create a Custom Channels Grouping report for your team using these step by step instructions. It’s time to take control of how your traffic sources are attributed in your Google Analytics reports!

1 Review your historical Google Analytics “All Traffic” report, ideally for a minimum of 3 months of data.

2. Look carefully at the “Other” group, and categorize it according to your organizational lingo. Do the same for Sources and Medium, identifying consistencies in both – by determining ‘typical’ sources and mediums (media, for the grammatically inclined). How do those compare to your activities? Which are the sources / mediums of traffic that represent your traffic driving activities versus sources of traffic you’re receiving ‘passively’?

3. In your TEST Google Analytics View (not sure what a TEST view is? See Why you want multiple Views in your Google Analytics), create a new custom Channel Groupings (View Settings > Custom Channel Groupings > + New Channel Groupings) report. In it, define your rules. For example, create a rule that states:

a) If “Medium” exactly matches “organic”, attribute that traffic to the Channel “Organic Search”; or

b) If Medium contains a string of characters generated by your email service provider, attribute traffic to Email

4. Leave your traffic to accumulate for at least 1 week in the TEST view. Go look to see where your traffic has ending up, by Channel. Is it where you expected?

5. Regularly refine the rules and with the intent of squeezing your ‘Other’ bucket to insignificance. Rinse and repeat to identify, classify and refine traffic as it materializes on your website in your TEST view. This is why it’s critical to build the report in TEST; it’s a safe place to refine your rules without affecting your production data.

6. Once you are happy with how your traffic is being attributed by Channel, re-create the same report in your Master View (again, see Why you want multiple Views in your Google Analytics). However – excellent news – instead of needing to recreate it manually, Google Analytics offers a wonderfully efficient way of “sharing an asset” within your own Google Analytics account, via email. In a matter of seconds, this feature allows you to ‘import’ your beautiful new Channels report into your Master View.

Once you’ve imported the new report in your Master View you can now choose to view data using your custom channels. Ta dah!

Below is a final screenshot that shows the difference in traffic attribution between the Default and the Custom Channel Groupings. Take note of a few of the items noted on the screenshot itself:

  • Red circle: Notice how (Other) has been reduced from 16.39% of the traffic to a mere 1.11% of the traffic? This helps eliminate confusion about what (Other) represents;
  • Navy blue circle: Notice how Referral has been broken out in to 2 Channels – MLL Brands and MLL Partners? For this particular team, Partners represents their organization’s strategic partnerships, showing them exactly how much traffic is coming from organizations whom they have formal agreements with (instead of mixing their traffic with other random websites that might be sending traffic). MLL Brands equate to this teams suppliers and represents a different expectation / relationship to the organization (known only to and meaningful only to that organization).
  • Yellow circle: Notice how Social has been segmented into 3 channels – “Paid Social” where paid media buys drove social traffic; “Organic Social (driven by MLL)”, representing traffic originating from their own organic, UTM tagged updates distributed through their own social media networks, and finally, “Organic Social (received by MLL)”, representing social media traffic they have received without sending out updates.

Default vs Custom ChannelsThis Custom Channel Groupings report offers the team much clearer insight into the impact / effectiveness of their efforts. This allows for faster decision making about which activities to pursue.

I strongly recommend you consider implementing it in your organization’s Google Analytics account.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss how to implement this at your organization, please feel free to contact us at your convenience. It would be our pleasure to put together a proposal for your review.

Have fun!

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Kelly KubrickAlign your Google Analytics Channel Groupings with your marcom plan

Email capture of critical potential customer segments with Facebook advertising

by Kelly Kubrick on December 1, 2016

Campaign Objectives

MyLiberty.life, a Canadian online retailer, wanted to increase the number of email subscribers interested in a particular category of products.

The Plan:

In advance of its Facebook media buy, MyLiberty.life developed an informative, long format blog post that spoke directly to the needs of the particular customer segment.

In addition to the relevant content provided in the post, MyLiberty.life created a highly-value downloadable product comparison chart – a lead magnet – which they offered to readers in exchange for signing up for their email newsletter.

The blog post acted as the paid traffic campaign landing page, with calls to download the comparison chart incorporated repeatedly throughout the text.

Where digital fit:

Given the profile of the customer segment, MyLiberty.life elected to focus its paid media efforts on Facebook. In addition to researching potential audiences on Facebook, Online Authority undertook the necessary technical implementation, including:

  1. Creating and configuring the client’s Facebook Business Manager Account;
  2. Creating the client’s Facebook ad account;
  3. Creating the client’s Facebook Pixel and installing it the ecommerce platform; and
  4. Setting up Website Custom Audiences (WCA) within the client’s Facebook Ad account, including a) Traffic to unique content sections of the website, b) An audience unique to its email subscriber list;
  5. Developing naming conventions for Google Analytics UTM tracking codes for use later in the campaign.

As the landing page evolved and the lead magnet was finalized, Online Authority developed the paid media creative with MyLiberty.life. This included identifying a theme, which in turn drove the copy treatment and three possible approaches to the imagery.

The campaign launched with alternative creative tested in weekly rotation:

Results:

As the most responsive target and custom audiences were identified, Online Authority expanded MyLiberty’s ad sets to include ‘lookalike’ audiences.

“A lookalike audience is where you give Facebook a seed audience and then it uses this to match people with very similar characteristics.” Source: AdEspresso

This service is offered to Facebook advertisers, and uses technology to ‘look for’ Facebook users who exhibit similar profile characteristics of your already-know-to-be-ideal users. This allows you to access a uniquely qualified audience that you might not otherwise be able to uncover.

The approached proved so successful for email capture that to this day, MyLiberty runs periodic flights of the campaign so as to continually boost subscriptions of this segment to its list.

Updated: MyLiberty has replicated the approach for additional customer segments and intends to continue rolling out new ones as they are identified:

Examples of Facebook creative for Digital Advertising campaign

 

To learn more about Facebook advertising, contact Online Authority today.

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Kelly KubrickEmail capture of critical potential customer segments with Facebook advertising

Activate Your Silent Salesperson with Digital Retargeting

by Kelly Kubrick on October 31, 2016

Have you ever been tempted to taste a new wine because the offer of wine overcomes your resistance to trying something new? Then gleefully bought a case of said wine?  Me too. That’s what this is about: offering your prospects content that is so irresistible that you can entice them further into your conversion funnel, willingly.

First published through the Canadian Home Builder’s Association (CHBA)

Now that we’re well past the era of questioning the value of including a website in the marketing toolkit, today’s business concern is ensuring the digital content produced, actually contributes to the larger sales funnel.

Once a business has put its contact and product information online, the challenge becomes justification for continued investment in driving awareness and usage of the website. To date, low-hanging fruit included launching additional digital channels such as a blog, an email list and social media.

What happens when sources to stagnate?

Digitally, it used to be good enough to make sure you’d sorta-kinda made your website search engine friendly and populated your company’s social media account(s) profile pages with updates. But, if asked, your marketing team will likely admit that your website reach has stalled or that Facebook’s “people-reached” update performance indicator is declining. Now what?

As lead generation sources dry up, where will sales come from?

It’s no longer enough to merely hope that digital reach will continue to grow as it has in the past. What if you could efficiently reach new people likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to customers you’ve had success with previously?

More importantly, what if you could reach that audience in a way that both personalizes your interactions, while automating them, so there’s efficiency of effort? The concept is called a ‘lookalike’ audience and is available through a combination of advertising networks – like Facebook – and your existing website.

Activating your silent salesperson

The consumer packaged goods industry talks about a product’s packaging as a brand’s “silent salesman”. When a consumer buys a product and places it on a household shelf, the packaging dutifully reminds buyers its presence.

There’s a similar concept in digital, called re-targeting, also referred to as re-marketing. Digital publishers provide their advertisers with a small piece of computer code, often called a “pixel” – similar to a cookie – that won’t affect your visitors’ experience or your website performance, but is unique to you as an advertiser. By publishing your pixel on your website, you activate your silent salesperson.

Put your digital content to work

Next – instead of merely launching a sales-oriented advertising campaign, you use that pixel to build a new prospect list through irresistible content. Using Facebook as an example, here’s a big picture visual of how re-targeting works:

Activate your silence salesperson - digital re-targeting cycle

With that cycle in mind, it’s time to get granular. An effort like this has a lot of moving parts, but done right, your marketing team gets access to a rich source of digital leads.

Ten Steps of Digital Re-targeting

Using Facebook as an example, here’s what your marketing team will need to do:

  1. Create a Facebook Ads account for your organization and generate your Facebook pixel from within it. Publish that pixel to all pages of your website.

2. Define a specific buyer persona, with unique interests, such as ‘eco-friendly living’, or ‘vintage motorcycles’ that your company wants to pursue. Research and quantify those interest groups on Facebook – called Audiences – and then narrow that audience further by geographic – all of Canada? Or only one province / territory? and demographic ( age and gender) targeting.

3. Create a unique piece of irresistibly good content, written purely for that persona’s concerns, and publish it on your website. Provide enormous amounts of added-value information – imagine content that answers every question unique to that buyer persona, without the pressure of any kind of a sales pitch. Establish your subject authority while assuring the reader of your goodwill.

4. In parallel, create a digital advertisement that promotes the educational nature of your irresistible content, and run it on Facebook – but only show it to the unique interest groups identified in step 2.

5. As your advertisement is shown on Facebook, interested individuals will engage and click through to read your irresistible content, causing your Facebook pixel to activate.

6. However, in advance, you will have made your initial content even more irresistible by offering another piece of even higher added value information – enticing information (perhaps by providing a critical check list, a list of unique resources, a countdown calendar, or how-to instructions?) unavailable anywhere else.

7. That additional, enticing content will only be accessible in exchange for the visitor’s willing, forward movement into the sales funnel – say, in exchange for an email address. However, since most first-time visitors will shy away from giving you that information on the spot, because of the pixel, you can let them go without worry.

8. After an appropriate interval, your marketing team runs a second advertisement on Facebook, only shown to (or ‘re-targeting’) those who visited your irresistible content but didn’t convert to a lead by giving up their email. The second ad will offer a gentle reminder of the fabulous extra content they have missed out on, enticing them back to your content, this time with a higher likelihood to convert to access your higher value content.

9. As you identify the right audiences and use the right creative to entice them towards consideration, the automated – yet more personalized than a mass-media ad buy – process repeats until a lead converts. This allows you to engage with the lead on an ongoing basis through your existing qualification process.

10. As you identify the audiences most likely to convert, Facebook is able to give you access to ‘lookalike’ audiences – other people with profiles and behaviour that match those you’ve successfully converted – that you can now offer your irresistible content to. And the cycle repeats…

To access a lookalike audience on Facebook, organizations need to have a Facebook Ad Account, which provides tools to create your pixel, advertising campaigns, and Audiences, including lookalikes. In Facebook, lookalike audiences can be modelled from ‘source’ audiences including specific on Facebook, people who’ve liked your Facebook page or your own customer lists.

To create these lookalike audiences, Facebook looks at the common qualities of the people in your source audience and then finds people who “look like” your source audience on Facebook for a country. Organizations can choose the size of the Lookalike Audience during the creation process.

This combination of using technology to target the interests of buyer personas you can uniquely help, without even knowing who they are – while using automation to re-target them later – can be a powerful tool to help drive your lead generation efforts.

Although tactically, this ‘silent salesperson aka pixel’ approach may feel very far from how you’ve sourced leads in the past, my hope is that you will consider adding re-targeting as an arrow to your marketing quiver.

Questions? Ask away!

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Kelly KubrickActivate Your Silent Salesperson with Digital Retargeting

Six Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

by Kelly Kubrick on October 11, 2016

What are the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity?

Recently, I had the pleasure of chattting with Jeff Beale, aka Mr. Marketology as part of his Marketing Strategy Sessions podcast and YouTube channel. Jeff and I discussed the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity, the business planning model we first proposed at Digital Strategy Conference.

Watch our conversation on YouTube (20 minutes, 47 seconds) by clicking the video embedded below:

In this episode, Jeff and I discuss how the digital maturity model came about and how organizations can use it to their advantage. In particular, we talked about:Image of the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity - the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model

My thanks to Jeff Beale for his interest in sharing the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity the larger Mr Marketology community! Learn more at the Mr Marketology website, on Facebook, @mrmarketology on Twitter or Google Plus.

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Kelly KubrickSix Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

Measuring digital diplomacy and digital advocacy

by Kelly Kubrick on April 6, 2016
Updated April 15, 2016

On April 20-21, 2016, Global Affairs Canada in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy is hosting a conversation between foreign governments, academics and industry experts.

Entitled “#Diplometrics – Measuring up: Public Diplomacy & Advocacy 2.0 for Effective Results” the event is intended to explore results measurement for public diplomacy, advocacy and digital diplomacy efforts. As the event approaches, I found a handful of definitions for digital diplomacy:

  • “…the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media platforms in the conduct of Public Diplomacy (i.e. processes in which countries seek to accomplish their foreign policy goals by communicating with foreign publics)
  • “…the use of the Internet and new information communication technologies to help achieve diplomatic objectives”
  • “…more than a new tool in a used tool box…[it’s] a dialogue made possible by Digital Diplomacy which could replace the monologue of Public Diplomacy.”

I was intrigued as at Digital Strategy Conference, we defined social business strategy, one of the six definitions of digital maturity as: “the intent to facilitate interaction and collaboration in three directions: externally, with your community; internally, employee to employee; and between customers.” Immediately, I could see that being adapted for Digital Diplomacy –

In terms of advocacy or diplomacy campaign measurement, #diplometrics could be the “measurement, use, and impact of, social technologies to achieve diplomatic objectives”. Or is it broader than results measurement with social technologies, and needs to incorporate offline outcomes as well? To help answer my questions, I’m pleased to have the opportunity to moderate the Industry panel #Diplometrics. My panellists will be:

  1. William Carty – Manager, Public Policy for U.S. & Canada – Twitter Inc. and @WRDCarty;
  2. Kevin Chan – Head of Public Policy, Canada – Facebook Inc.;
  3. Colin McKay – Head of Public Policy & Government Relations, Canada – Google and @Canuckflack; and
  4. Donny Halliwell – Senior Strategist, Customer Success – Hootsuite and @DonnyHalliwell.

Given their backgrounds, I’m intrigued to learn more: William played a key role in the development and passage of US legislation in technology, telecommunications, cybersecurity, privacy, data security, public safety, energy and healthcare. Kevin has academic and Canadian federal government chops. Colin has been an advocate for both Open Government and privacy, which is quite the balancing act. Prior to his role at Hootsuite, Don operated the Twitter handle @BlackBerry with over 4 million followers and BlackBerry’s corporate Facebook pages with over 30 million fans.

Over the course of the day, we’ll hear from industry and policy experts all working to pin #Diplometrics down. Looking forward to it!

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Kelly KubrickMeasuring digital diplomacy and digital advocacy

Can we diversify Canada’s economy through digital policy?

by Kelly Kubrick on April 4, 2016

On Tuesday April 19, 2016, Canada’s Digital Policy Forum (CPDF) will host stakeholders and policy makers to discuss improving Canada’s performance in the development of its digital economy. The Forum proposes that “inevitably, any sound strategy for economic diversification must be a digital strategy.”

At Digital Strategy Conference, we defined digital strategy as “the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.” If you expand ‘your organization’ to incorporate Canada, we can extrapolate that organizational-level thinking to economy-level thinking.

If digital enterprises empower and drive growth, the CPDF Diversifying Canada’s Economy Through Strong Digital Policy Forum asks what kinds of policies and institutions are needed to encourage and scale that growth. How can we best enable digital innovations? The day is set up to:

  • Establish the current cyber-security threats and attack environment (behold the recent hospital system held hostage);
  • Discuss the potential for user-generated data to impact us socially, politically, and economically;
  • Ask if data from our devices be brought out of the private domain and used to serve the public good, without compromising privacy or safety?
  • Learn from Sweden’s model for exploiting the opportunities of digitalisation
  • Debate if government and the private sector are capable of collaboration and cooperation at speed, or if our  competitive skills will merely erode further?

As co-author of the dStrategy Digital Maturity model, I’m looking forward to hearing from industry such as Google and Intuit – and from academics and policy makers such as the Information & Communications Technology Council (who recently released Digital Talent: Road to 2020 and Beyond), the Social Media Lab, a multi- and interdisciplinary research laboratory at Ryerson University and at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and Sweden’s Digitalisation Commission.

If digital readiness interests you, consider participating in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. Intended to help organizations understand the dimensions needed for digital readiness, as with the Forum, understanding how we can build digital capacity at an organizational level can also serve to help us identify capabilities and gaps in advancing our national competitiveness.

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Kelly KubrickCan we diversify Canada’s economy through digital policy?

Communicators: take note of changes in digital analytics

by Kelly Kubrick on January 14, 2016

How have analytics changed?

Four years ago I participated in IABC Ottawa’s “Networking in the New Year” event, where communications professionals can speak informally with specialists in different fields. In 2012, I spoke about web analytics. I’m returning this year, and I will do the same. Which begs the question, has anything changed? Most definitely.

The bar is higher on what can (and should) be tracked

By January 2012, our community was

  1. Articulating more complex tracking requirements – instead of merely tracking website visits, there was increasing demand to measure the impact of social media / earned media efforts; while
  2. On the paid media side, measurement of remarketing (or retargeting) campaigns were at the bleeding edge of reporting requirements; and
  3. Google Tag Manager didn’t exist.

Website tag management emerges

This last item is critical, and links directly to item 1 and 2. “Tags”, in the context of tag management systems are used on your website to help you measure traffic and optimize your online marcom efforts. Examples of these website tags include:

  • Your website’s digital analytics tracking code i.e. your Google Analytics or your Adobe Analytics tracking code;
  • Conversion tracking tags (Google AdWords conversion code or the Facebook pixel); or
  • Remarketing (or behavioural retargeting) tags to target previous visitors.

Website tags are different from campaign tracking tags

For those of you familiar with campaign tracking tags such as Google Analytics’ “utm” codes or Adobe Analytics campaign tracking codes, note that they are different from the website tags above. It’s unfortunate that the terms overlap, but each accomplishes different things.

Prior to website tag management solutions, inserting website tags was a messy, inefficient coding effort requiring information technology resources. Then the inevitable would occur – organizations lost track of which tags were where, whether they were up to date or not, and who actually ‘owned them’. Not good. Thus, tag management solutions proliferated, including solutions like Google Tag Manager, Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager, Ensighten, and Tealium.

Website tag management: imagine never losing your keys again

bowl-for-keys
Today, tag management solutions are much better known – they have gone from an outlier technology concept to a critical tool in organizations’ digital toolkit. It’s exactly what we all need – a better way to facilitate the business discussion around determining what should be measured, while reducing the need for technical involvement for implementation.

How? By storing all those tags in one container in your website code instead of scattering different tags all over the place. Imagine that glorious moment when you successfully organize scattered key sets into one bowl at the front door. No more frantic searching as you try and get out the door.

Now, the business owner(s) can manage their tags centrally, outside of your HTML using a friendly interface. Other benefits include simplified tracking of video, social buttons or other interactive elements on your website. If your organization hasn’t looked at tag management solutions, I’d add it to your 2016 measurement plans.

Vanquish referral spam

The second big change since 2012 is the acceleration of referral spam clogging all our analytics reports. Consider this the second item on your organization’s analytics to do list in 2016: tackling the deeply frustrating problem of referral spam or ghost spam. What is referral spam? It’s garbage traffic that’s inflating your website traffic reports.

Example of referral spam - notice the 100% bounce rate with zero session duration time?

Click to enlarge example of referral spam: notice the 100% bounce rate with zero session duration time?

To give you some sense of how bad the problem has gotten, I was involved in a website launch in late November 2015. Not quite two months later 32% of the visits are is spam – fake traffic that could inflate our numbers and impact our marcom decisions. How can do we know that?

Fortunately, we followed best practices and set our digital analytics up with multiple data views. We use our primary decision-making data view to measure net visitor traffic (excluding ourselves and referral spam) and we can contrast it to our unfiltered data view capturing gross visitor traffic. This gives us a much cleaner – and more reassuring – view of our real audience numbers and their activities on our site.

Be sure you’ve got the same set up at your organization so that you can better measure the real impact of your communications efforts. Speak with your digital analyst or analytics team to ask them if and how the issue is being addressed internally. Like you, they’ll want to ensure ongoing trust in your organization’s data.

Web analytics broadens to digital analytics

One last important analytics change occurred only two months after the 2012 Networking in the New Year event. To acknowledge the proliferation of digital data sources, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) formally changed its name to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA):

“As more digital data streams became available, the responsibilities of the analyst broadened and the term “web analytics” became known as the study of data collected exclusively on websites…account[ing] for the analyst’s changing role of weaving together data from multiple sources and channels.”

As a long-time member, I heartily agreed with the change. To truly leverage the opportunities of digital, we in marcom need to take advantage of all of the data on offer. Data is a critical output of your digital initiatives and is what differentiates them from their offline equivalent. Knowing that, have you got a handle on your data strategy for 2016?

What’s on your 2016 analytics list?

I look forward to seeing the IABC Ottawa crew on January 28th and to discussing analytics. Bring your questions and concerns or feel free to ask any advance questions in the comments below. See you soon!

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Kelly KubrickCommunicators: take note of changes in digital analytics

Introducing MyLiberty.Life: online shopping for quality incontinence products

by Kelly Kubrick on November 20, 2015

Early in my career, I joined The Voyager Company, a digital publishing house that produced CD-ROMs. Our sister company produced the famous Criterion Collection, on laser-disk. Together, we published the media that was a precursor to DVDs, now rapidly being replaced by stream media. As there were no obvious sales channels for our products, we pounded the doors of book stores and record stores in hopes they would carry our product.

We also sold our catalogues over the Internet. I remember one particular day when our technical team called us into a meeting to show us a ‘database’ they had built to house the content for what had been 300+ static HTML product pages. They showed us how we could update the pricing for the entire catalogue with a single command. It was like hearing the Alleluia chorus break over my head. This would revolutionize selling online!

Well – it didn’t quite, but it helped build the foundation for my continued work in ecommerce. In 1997, I joined a small team at Time Warner’s interactive division, Time Inc New Media, to develop alternative revenue streams for digital advertising sales for Time Inc’s magazine assets. What an amazing era; we launched countless businesses – Fortune Database, an online community to support participants in Dr Andrew Weil’s “8 Weeks to a Healthy America” eating program, an affiliate program to drive subscriber acquisition for PEOPLE Magazine, an online customer service for our core magazines and more.

Back then, ecommerce technology was expensive and not particularly elegant. Today, things have changed, and for the better. What has remained true is that if you have a product that can be showcased online for buyers unable to find those desired products easily, you might want to consider ecommerce. Which is why, I’m very pleased to announced the launch of a new ecommerce venture for myself and two partners.

What began as a debate over likely trends in the marketplace over a summer lunch has become a Canada-wide company selling – wait for it – incontinence products. All online, all home delivery, all discreet packaging. The numbers are compelling: 10% of the population admits to being affected by incontinence and if asked about the occasional “leak” the number jumps to 50%.

Daily, we’re uncovering stories describing the need: those stick handling conversations with aging parents, runners looking for eco-friendly washables, grandparents indulging new family members with a monthly diaper delivery service, or simply those who would prefer not to deal with the teenager working at the drug store.

We’ve embraced the need for information, a bit of humour, good sense and a simple shopping experience for Canadians looking for discreet solutions for parents, for spouses, for special needs kids. Men, women, young adults and kids – My Liberty has options for all.

The product mix is changing rapidly through research and science; including an Australian line of products indistinguishable from regular underwear. We’re selling everything from liners to pads for women to guards for men, briefs (also known as adult diapers), cleansing and skin care and state-of-the-art washables in swimwear and bedding solutions to help reduce bed wetting burdens for young and old. I shake my head at the things I’ve learned in the last few months…!

We also provide a straight-forward, informative email newsletter to answer product questions and insights for consumers and caregivers, all with a comfortable, non-clinical approach. If you have a moment to take a look at https://MyLiberty.Life, I’d love to hear what you think; my partners are as eager for feedback as I am, so bring it on.

I realize it’s a rather unexpected category, and not likely on your radar, but if you know of anyone who might be interested in learning more, please consider sharing the website or newsletter with them? I’d really appreciate it. Alternatively, if you know of organizations/facilities we should be talking to, just let me know.

Thanks so much –

P.S. Feel free to check My Liberty out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook out as well.

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Kelly KubrickIntroducing MyLiberty.Life: online shopping for quality incontinence products

Digital Strategy Conference: Our Journey Comes to a Close

by Kelly Kubrick on August 31, 2015

Thank you for participating in Digital Strategy Conference

Although Digital Strategy Conferences are no longer being produced, we invite you to continue learning how to increase your organizations’ level of digital maturity using the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model.

In 2013, the journey began with a model and framework for understanding the six key dimensions of digital maturity.

The goal of Digital Strategy Conference was to provide inspiring examples of digital strategy; while the goal of our Mapping Digital Maturity workshop was to provide a process for establishing your organizations’ level of digital maturity by giving you benchmarks from industry.

We met those goals and so did you.

Since then, hundreds of organizations and over 1,000 attendees from across sector and industry have helped their organizations increase competitive advantage and/or succeed in delivering on its mission.

Who Attended:

Senior directors and managers from across the organization responsible for planning, managing or integrating digital initiatives, along with their digital team.

Successful digital initiatives are due to the effort of high functioning teams, therefore, we encourage a team approach to your conference education.

Today’s opportunities for business improvement using digital processes and technologies extend across the organization. In addition to sales, marketing and communications, Digital Strategy Conference informs and educates those responsible for internal communications, social business and workforce management.

What you learned:

  • Digital strategy definition and models
  • How to assess digital maturity
  • Data strategy fundamentals
  • Performance measurement and digital analytics essentials
  • Content Strategy – content, technology and experience
  • Paid, Owned and Earned Media – the pillars of digital marketing
  • Case studies and applied learning from peers and colleagues

Thank you all

Today, our journey comes to a close. We thank to the entire #dstrategy community for its contribution, enthusiasm and support since we first proposed Digital Strategy Conference.

We wish you all the best and much success on your future initiatives.

Andrea Hadley and Kelly Kubrick, Co-founders, Digital Strategy Conference and Workshops

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Kelly KubrickDigital Strategy Conference: Our Journey Comes to a Close