marketing

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Networking in the New Year

by Kelly Kubrick on January 27, 2020

On January 29th, 2020, join myself and IABC Ottawa (the International Association of Business Communicators Ottawa chapter) community for a “speed-dating style event to learn…topics such as measurement, internal and crisis communications, climate change and ethics.”

You will have time to meet with each expert, ask your questions, and of course network with entire group! At the end of the night you will be able to walk away with new ideas and a clear understanding of how to grow your communications toolbox.

The event is called “Networking in the New Year: Level Up Your Communications Toolbox!” and it will be held at Charlotte, 340b Elgin Street, Second Floor in Ottawa, Ontario. Look for the door to Charlotte in the lobby of Pure Kitchen.

Event details:

When: Wednesday, January 29th, 2020 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Where: Charlotte, 340b Elgin Street, Second Floor in Ottawa, Ontario
Cost: $20.00-$35.00 and includes an assortment of appetizers

This event is brought to you by IABC Ottawa: “The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) provides a professional network of over 15,500 business communications and marketing professionals in over 80 countries. Members of IABC Ottawa can tap into a wealth of resources and opportunities that will help increase your value as a communicator. IABC Ottawa brings communications, marketing and creative professionals together to grow in their career and succeed in their jobs.”

See you there!

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”.

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

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.

This 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!

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:

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:

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!

Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity episode Mr Marketology podcast

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:

Findings uncovered about resource imbalance in our ongoing dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey
A description of the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity dimensions, including: Human Resources, Technology Resources, Data Strategy, Content Strategy,
Channel Strategy, Social Business Strategy
The challenge of overcoming legacy silos in an organization when it comes to implementing your digital strategy
Evolving job titles in the digital space
The challenge of attribution in an increasingly omnichannel world – should digital get credit for sale or leads vs other channels, or does it even matter anymore, as we all shift towards customer lifetime value models.

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.

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

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
On the paid media side, measurement of remarketing (or retargeting) campaigns were at the bleeding edge of reporting requirements; and
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

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.

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!

How to track digital campaigns using Google Analytics utm codes

by Kelly Kubrick on November 27, 2013

“Tagging” Credit When Credit Is Due: Understanding Digital Campaign Tracking

Imagine a website…It’s a good website. It deserves visitors.

Those responsible for it agree, and the marketing / communications plans initiate:

Press / news releases are issued
Advertising is purchased
Keywords are bid on
Emails go out
Social media gets conversational

Good news! Website visitors start showing up…

Lots more visitors…

Image credit: Penguins sculpture, by Nao Matsumoto

And right in the middle of all the celebrations, you get the dreaded question. Someone asks you which marketing or communication effort did the trick.

They start pummelling you with questions – which effort brought the visitors? Which didn’t? How did the efforts compare? Which should we do more of? Less of? Should we double down on any of them? Or discontinue any of them?

And once they hit you with all the ‘quantity’ questions, they then want to know the ‘quality’ questions: which effort(s) brought the right visitors for the campaign objective?

And you slowly back out of the room…

I am pleased to tell you there is good news – you can answer all those questions, and with flair and panache. The bad news is that it does take some advance planning.

Campaign tracking is about taking – or ‘tagging’ – credit

Web analytics tools attribute visitors to 1 of 2 ‘default’ traffic sources: the “Direct” (aka No Referral) or the “Referral” source:

“Typical” split measured as by web analytics tools

Direct is traffic a measure of brand awareness

Direct traffic website visitors are those who arrive by bookmark or memorized domain or URL. Think of this source of visitor traffic as a measure of brand awareness; visitors must have had previous exposure to your brand or URL, to recall or type it into a browser window and / or bookmark it.

Referral traffic is closer to publicity

By contrast, the Referral traffic source ‘refers’ (get it?) to visitors arriving via a third party website. However, to make Referral more useful, we immediately segment those third parties into more specific organic (or unpaid) sources. Examples include:

Search: traffic from commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing or About
Social Media: traffic from social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram
Publishers such as online newspapers, magazines or bloggers
Institutions such as universities, hospitals or government websites

Think of these referral sources as a kind of publicity (for good or bad). And, as wonderful as all that referral traffic generally is, it can be challenging to secure, and it can be unpredictable. When it does show up, it is fabulous. And when it dries up, it can be scary.

To combat the unpredictable nature of referral traffic, we have another category of traffic source, known as “Campaigns”.

Campaigns are sources of traffic that you have defined in advance of your effort / spend

The definitions are unique to your organization’s marketing / communications / advertising efforts. When those definitions are aligned with your digital campaign tracking efforts, you’re able to isolate those visitors and report on them separately. You can answer questions such as”

Do particular campaigns bring more new leads vs. other sources?
Are those visitors of a higher quality? Do they read more content? Do they exhibit higher engagement?
Do they convert at a higher rate?

Campaigns are sources of traffic unique to your organization’s efforts to drive traffic

Campaigns might include:

Emails sent to your newsletter subscribers, prospects or customers that drive traffic back to your site
Display advertising (banners, buttons or other ad units) you purchased or traded for
Keywords you bid for via networks such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads
CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per thousand) or CPA (cost per action) media buys from publishers
Social media updates posted to your organization’s profiles / feeds
Press or news releases distributed to your networks
Affiliate / partner websites where you negotiated placement; and even
“Offline” efforts such as print or radio ads (where you included a unique, or vanity URL)

As they typically require additional effort or cost, campaigns are those sources of traffic you’d like to measure return on, compared to the default direct and referral traffic sources. To do that, we need to isolate campaign visitors from Direct or Referral traffic sources.

But how do we isolate campaign visitors?

By tagging those sources of visitors:

Like marine biologists who tags wildlife to identify an animal later, or farmers who tag livestock to identify animals in a larger herd, digital analysts ‘tag’. We tag sources of visitor traffic to identify different segments in a larger herd of visitors to a website.

It’s just that we do our tagging via campaign tracking tags, otherwise known as “utms” codes in Google Analytics. FYI, ‘utm’ stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was the predecessor technology to Google Analytics, and the legacy term has stuck.

Examples of tags

Penguin tag

Animals are tracked via physical tags that are attached to them. And digital campaigns are tagged via ‘extensions’ to the URLs we send visitors to.

Every digital analytics tool has a unique set of extensions available to track campaigns.

As a result, the specifics of campaign tracking implementation differ depending on whether your organization uses Google Analytics, Webtrends, Adobe Analytics or another tool.

Below, I’ve provide campaign tracking tags for Google Analytics vs Webtrends:

Google Analytics campaign tags

utm_source=source1
utm_medium=medium1
utm_campaign=campaign1

Webtrends marketing campaign or paid search tags

WT.mc_id
WT.srch=1

Web analytics tools recognize their own campaign tracking tags

When visitors arrive at your website via URLs that contain your campaign tracking tags, your digital analytics tool will recognize them as belonging to particular segments of traffic, and will attribute their arrival to the correct segment for you. Here’s how the magic happens:

When you create content that drives visitors to your website, you typically provide a link: http://www.mysite.ca

In digital analytics, we consider that an “untagged” link. And, regardless of which analytics tool you use, visitors who arrive via untagged links are attributed to the “Direct” source of traffic.

If you want to attribute visitors to a different source of traffic, you need to tag the link accordingly. To tag links, you ‘extend’ the link with extra information. And – the best part is that the extra information does not interfere with the way the web page is displayed to visitors.

Here’s an example of a tagged link:

https://www.onlineauthority.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=2013

What makes the link above special?

Seriously. It’s the question mark.

The question mark signals that the link is what’s knows a ‘parameter’, and in the case of particular parameters, they are contain messages recognized by particular technologies, and ignored by others. So web servers ignore campaign parameters. Internet browsers ignore campaign parameters. And thus, there’s no impact on the user’s experience of your content.

Parameters have a particular structure: a question mark followed by an ‘equation’ separated by an equal sign:

?parameter-name=parameter-value-decided-by-you

So, if the parameter name were “source”, then you might decide the parameter value is a publisher or your house email list.

Or if the parameter name were medium, then you might decide en the parameter value is a banner or a particular email edition or issue.

Or, if the parameter name were campaign, then you might decide the parameter value is a campaign name like thanksgiving or rrsp-season-2013.

Examples of untagged links:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics

Examples of those same links, tagged:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=2013

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=2013

Notice how there are actually three parameters in there, all strung together by ampersands?

Examples of those same links, tagged in colour:

In the first URL, I’ve shown the parameter name in blue:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=segment-a&utm_campaign=2013

And, in the second URL, I’ve shown the parameter value in red:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=segment-a&utm_campaign=2013

Once you’ve tagged your URLs with campaign parameters, or utms, and distributed them via email, social media, or as the destination URLS for your display ads, those visitors will appear in your campaign reports.

Where do the tagged visitors appear in my reports?

Look for them in your Traffic Sources, or Acquisition reports:

Screenshot to show where campaign-tagged visitors show up in your Google Analytics or Webtrends reports.

Campaign-tagged visitors are found in campaign reports in Google Analytics, Webtrends or other digital analytics tools.

Each parameter represents one report. Thus, the values of your campaign parameter utms will will appear in your Google Analytics campaigns report:

And, your Source and Medium parameter values or utms will will appear as secondary dimensions in your Google Analytics campaigns report, and as a stand alone Source/Medium report.

How do I tag my emails with Google Analytics utms?

In the code of an HTML email, an organization can include links to their website. And those links can be extended, inside the HTML, with campaign tracking tags or utms.

So, again – instead instead of attaching a tag to an animal…we tag the link inside the HTML code in the email that brings visitors to the website. The tagged links inside this email might look like:

cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/trades/apply-who.asp/?utm_source=bulletin&utm_medium=email_03&utm_campaign=aut2013

cic.gc.ca/francais/immigrer/metiers/demand-qui.asp/?utm_source=bulletin&utm_medium=email_03&utm_campaign=aut2013

How do I tag my social media with Google Analytics utms?

In a social media update, organization can include links to their website. And those links can be extended prior to being shortened, with campaign tracking tags or utms.

How do I tag my display advertising banners with Google Analytics utms?

When providing creative to your agency or to the publisher you’ve purchased advertising with, you also provide them with the URL you want them to link to. The button and banners above might have the following tags:

digitalstrategyconference.com/ottawa/2013/?utm_source=publisher-a&utm_medium=250×250-ros&utm_campaign=dscott13-eb

digitalstrategyconference.com/vancouver/2013/?utm_source=publisher-b&utm_medium=728×90-biz&utm_campaign=dsvan13-reg

In the examples above, the value of the source parameter is the name of publisher where the button ran (publisher-a vs b), the value of the medium parameter represents the size of the ad unit (250×250 vs 720×90) and its placement (run of site vs business section) and the campaign name represents the offer: the city and pricing codes.

How do I create my utms?

You can certainly create utms and tag URLs manually, using something like Google’s URL builder:

But, it’s far more efficient to do it via a spreadsheet, which will help you create and organize Source, Medium and Campaign naming conventions. That way, over time, you’ll maintain consistency, adding more value to your reporting and analysis efforts. In addition, you can use very simple formulas in Excel to automatically build the URLs and thus eliminate potential tagging errors.

Below is an screenshot of an example spreadsheet I created for my clients:

And with that – congratulate yourself! You’re now ready to ‘tag credit’ for your brilliant campaigns!

And of course, you’ll be annotating your Google Analytics reports throughout to provide context to the changes in traffic, right?

If this intrigues you enough to begin developing your organization’s digital campaign tracking strategy, contact me to request my campaign tagging spreadsheet template.

When you and your team are ready to roll up sleeves and dive in, we would be happy to provide a proposal to provide your team with training or consulting to implement digital campaign tracking for yourselves.

Feeling fragmented by digital?

by Kelly Kubrick on October 15, 2012

Working in digital is like being caught in a earthquake of change.

Late in April 2011, after many conversations with my web analytics industry colleague, Andrea Hadley, I made a fateful comment. Since first meeting in 2008 and as a past member of her advisory boards for Internet Marketing Conference, SMX Canada and eMetrics Canada, we had spent many hours debating the future of our industry.

Kelly Kubrick, Vice-President and Partner, dStrategy Media, producers of Digital Strategy Conference

Andrea Hadley, President and Partner, dStrategy Media, producers of Digital Strategy Conference

Andrea is as passionate as I am about digital, and also happens to be a conference producer, based in Vancouver. She and I regularly discussed how it seemed that everyone we spoke to felt increasingly overwhelmed by the never-ending tactical options in digital.

The only advice out there seemed to be “You should quit; go work for someone who ‘gets’ digital”.

We didn’t like that advice. How could our industry build capacity in digital if the only advice was to encourage churn? We’d get nowhere as an industry or country.

“You should bring a conference to Ottawa”, I said. Innocently. Not understanding the significance of the gleam in her eye…

Within the year, we formed dStrategy Media, producers of the about-to-be-launched Digital Strategy Conference.

Introducing Digital Strategy Conference

In digital, not only are we challenged by the need to juggle multiple dimensions – our people resources, our technology resources, our data, our content and social strategies…but on top of it, there’s non-stop fragmentation: new platforms, new channels and new business models.

What do do? Join us at Digital Strategy Conference. It will be a deep dive into digital strategy, bringing together senior directors and managers with industry leaders to learn the essentials of planning, organizing, integrating and implementing digital initiatives.

Digital Strategy Conference is an instructor-led, three day educational event intended to explore the fundamentals of digital strategy. We’ve outlined the key areas of learning so you know what to expect. Learn more here:

The first Digital Strategy Conference will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia in April 2013 followed by Ottawa, Ontario in June 2013. In each city, we’ll be tackling the following topics:

Defining Digital Strategy
Establishing Your Digital Maturity
Data Strategy and Performance Measurement
Digging into Content Strategy
Mobile to Multiscreen Strategy
Social Strategy
Making Sense of Paid Media

The call for speakers for both Vancouver and Ottawa is now open, and we look forward to reviewing your submissions. We hope you can join us!

Deadliest Online Warrior: Marketing Tactics Battle for Budget

by Kelly Kubrick on September 21, 2011

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pulling together data and screen shots for a presentation to CMA Ottawa (the Canadian Marketing Association – Ottawa Chapter) on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at the Hampton Inn and Conference Centre.

I’m presenting “Deadliest Online Warrior: “Marketing Tactics in a Battle for Budget” to fellow marketers in the national capital region. My plan is to present online marketing campaign results in a case study format so that the audience can get a feel for how different tactics performed. Until then:

“Instead of a TV show that pits historic and modern warriors to battle to the death, how about a conversation that pits historic and modern online marketing tactics in a battle for budget?

As customers spend more time in social networks and less in their email boxes and traditional websites, how should organizations adjust their online acquisition strategies? Join Kelly Kubrick of Online Authority for insight into the effects of combining paid search and social advertising with the power of social media marketing. Kelly will take you through a head-to-head result comparison between tactical legends of the online battlefield:

•   Paid Keyword Search vs. Social Network Advertising’s Demographic / Psychographic Targeting?
•   Banners: Behavioural Targeting vs. Search Term Targeting?
•   Email Buy vs. Social Media Content Marketing?”

I’m very pleased to report that CMA Ottawa now has online registration available. Event details are:

When:    Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 from 11:45 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Where:    Hampton Inn and Conference Centre, 100 Coventry Road, Ottawa, K1K 4S3
Cost:        $ 40.00 for CMA members, $ 55.00 for non-members

As always, there’s plenty of free parking and the cost includes lunch, coffee, dessert, and a great opportunity to network with many other local marketing professionals.

For those of you who may not be familiar with CMA Ottawa, they “host monthly networking and educational luncheons and seminars throughout the year. CMA Ottawa is a place of dynamic exchange among direct, interactive and customer contact marketing users, creators, managers and suppliers.”

I hope to see you there!

Landing Page Lessons from Optimization Summit 2011

by Kelly Kubrick on June 20, 2011

Earlier this month, I attended MECLABS‘ inaugural Optimization Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. As MECLABS is the parent of MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments, I was curious as I’ve been a fan of the former for years. I have only recently come across the latter but have already found their “Best of” monthly emails very useful. I expected case studies to be at the core of the conference material and was not disappointed. As a side bonus, I was introduced to an unexpected and entertaining cast of characters including Dr Flint McGlaughlin and “the Pool Guy”, aka Marcus Sheridan, the Sales Lion.

Landing Pages Should Reflect the Rituals of Good Conversation

Dr McGlaughlin kicked off the pre-Summit Landing Page Optimization Workshop by suggesting that landing page optimization is akin to a successful conversation, whereby certain rituals and patterns need to respected before value can be exchanged. The geography of the landing page provides you with the opportunity to anticipate and manage the chronology and sequence of a conversation with your prospects. The entertainment value arose from the irresistible temptation to act out how a flawed landing page contains the same landmines encountered in a flawed pick up attempt at a bar…

My favourite comment related to marketers’ mistaken need to slam product or lifestyle ‘hero shots’ and aggressive calls to action front and centre on their landing pages (guess who’s making that mistake on the home page right now?). According to Dr McGlaughlin, those hero shots are like meeting someone at a bar and immediately asking them to move in with you. Who wouldn’t turn tail and bolt? At best, it’s overly enthusiastic and misguided, and at worst, predatory. Instead, as marketers, we need to take a step back to map the sequence of a successful conversation, and plan our landing pages accordingly.

Consider the Source: Understand Channel Relevance

Start by thinking through the traffic source or channel your prospect arrives by, whether it be via organic or paid search, advertising on social networking sites, or via your own email newsletter, etc. Depending on the source, your visitor may be completely new to your product or service or have already been sold on it, and may simply want you to get out of their way. If the former, assume more copy might be needed and if the latter, less is most definitely more.

Put yourself in your prospect’s frame of mind and remind yourself of the value proposition you implied in that source channel. MarketingExperiments defines your value proposition as “the primary reason why your ideal prospect should buy from you rather than your competitors” (expressed in 10 words or less).

Your Headline Should Keep the Promise You Implied

Ensure that you keep that promise by opening your landing page with a headline that initiates the conversation between the two of you. Your only task here is to intrigue the prospect enough to keep him or her from immediately clicking on the back button. You can do that by ensuring your headline provides the connection between the source channel and the landing page itself. Be sure the visitor is able to orient him / herself by providing clarity about where they are and what to do next. To illustrate, Dr McGlaughlin provided the following examples of original vs. alternate treatment headlines:

Original: Why Try BRAND Online?
Treatment: Get Unlimited Access to all 32 Volumes of BRAND during your FREE TRIAL..
Original: Searching for the Most Accurate Mailing Lists? Your Hunt is Over!
Treatment: We Make 26 Million Phone Calls a Year to Ensure You Get The Most Accurate Mailing Lists Available!

Next, draw your visitors’ eye further into the page by offering a few brief sentences that expand on your headline. Do that well, and you can entice the visitor to scan a sub-heading that leads into a handful of bullet points that reinforce the value proposition promise. The reinforcement comes from the provision of key quantitative data (in your bullets) that validates any claims you’ve made to date.

At this stage, the conversation should be rolling along well enough that you are now in a position to suggest a call to action. As you make the ask, you also need to provide an incentive to convince the visitor to actually take the action. Further, that incentive needs to be directly related to your value proposition, and you should include a visual to illustrate the incentive. As an example, include an image of the charts or tables from the report you’re asking the visitor to register to receive.

Avoid Landmines: Don’t Require Your Visitors To Submit

Be careful of the classic landmine, also known as the “submit” button. I wish I could play a recording so that you might hear Dr McGlaughlin’s booming southern preacher voice as he lacerated this bad habit of ours: “I SUBMIT TO THE GODS OF MARKETING!” Instead, the wording of your call to action needs to describe what is expected of the prospect. Some examples (besides “click here”!) include:

Help Me Choose
Become a Member
Get Instant Access
Download a Free Trial

Anticipate Anxiety and You Will Reduce Friction

MarketingExperiments‘ research identifies the call to action as a point of “friction”, or “the psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process”. Knowing that your ‘ask’ inevitably causes anxiety, anticipate that anxiety and counter the friction through reassurance. How?

Perhaps you might limit the length (number of) or difficulty of fields you require the prospect to complete. Or, you might use “seals” that illustrate policies such as “100% Satisfaction Guaranteed” or “No Hassle Returns”. You can also create a “backstop” by offering a single, powerful testimonial from a respected third party. Ensure these assurances are in close proximity to the source of anxiety.

Anticipating your prospect’s anxiety gives you an opportunity to “intensify the positives” in order to reduce friction. Do that well, and you’ve got yourself a conversion which results in a value exchange between you and your prospect.

The Value You Offer Must Outweigh the Cost to the Visitor

That value exchange might include critical credit card information or simply a valid email address. Regardless – you will have convinced your prospect that the your offer is worth the exchange of their valuable information. Nicely done!

In summary, we end up with a landing page layout that follows the conversation flow illustrated in the chart below:

Optimized Landing Page Flow – or “The Ritual Of Conversation”

As a web analyst, I was most intrigued with the idea that these conversational elements and related landing page layout recommendations are represented by MarketingExperiments Conversion Heuristic”*, which states C = 4m+ 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a© where:

c = conversion
m= (Your prospect’s) motivation
v = the clarity of your value proposition
i = incentive
f = friction and
a = anxiety

*Source: MECLABS Landing Page Optimization Summit Study Guide, Landing Page Certification Workshop

Using MarketingExperiments’ Conversion Heuristic, you immediately notice that the most important elements of your landing page are reflected in the relative value of the coefficients. Thus, at 4, the highest coefficient, your prospect’s motivation (4m) has the highest impact on the success of the conversion. MarketingExperiments defines motivation as the “magnitude and nature of of the customer’s demand for” your products / services.

By targeting motivated prospects by source, you have control over a key lever leading to your conversions. Translation – don’t bring prospects with low motivation to your landing page as you are setting yourself up for failure. This is, of course a core tenet of marketing — target your primary audience / market segments or suffer the wrath which results from a blown budget.

Next in importance is the clarity of your value proposition (+3v). The clarity comes from an articulation of the “appeal, exclusivity and credibility” of your offer. If well articulated, you can overcome, or subtract, possible friction your prospect might be feeling by “adding” an incentive appropriate to your value proposition [+2(i-f)].

Only then can you address the final issue that could deter the prospect from completing the conversion: anxiety (-2a). Notice that anxiety is a negative coefficient and that it is equal to the value garnered from your “incentive minus friction step”. To overcome your prospect’s anxiety, you must intensify the positives and reassure.

Avoid Symmetry

Dr McGlaughlin also made a point of reiterating that their research shows that easing the “eye path” in relation to landing page layout is also critical. Of utmost importance, don’t make the mistake of seeking balance by equalizing page components in your design. Avoid equally weighted columns which are another source of friction as they encourage indecision.

Instead, use a 2/3rd left hand column to contain all of the elements described above – headline, copy, subhead, bullets and calls to action. However, use the right hand column to support the content on the left. Examples of support content could include additional testimonials.

Be Clear About The Objective of Your Landing Page

If you’d like to try assessing your existing landing pages, use the framework offered by MarketingExperiments’ Conversion Heuristic, and then see how well your page performs in relation to the critical elements. Before you do so, however, ensure you have consensus on the goal of that page so you can be sure that you maintain your focus throughout the assessment. This offers the added benefit of helping you identify any conflicting objectives you may have inadvertently allowed on the page.

Just to make sure the audience was taking everything in, MECLABS hit us with an exam at the end of the day. Due to the amount of caffeine consumed, I am pleased to say that yours truly did make the grade:

Marketing Experiments Professional Certification Program

Evidence of my Membership in MarketingExperiments Certified Professional Members Directory

What do you think of MarketingExperiments proposed framework? Would you consider amending your landing pages to reflect the proposed approach?

Ottawa Web and Social Media Events

by Kelly Kubrick on May 13, 2011

Ottawa’s marketing community continues to impress me with its increasingly rich offering of web and social media related events. I’m sure I’ve missed several, but the month is flying by me and I wanted to get these one published:

“Better Leads. Richer Insights. Bridging the web analytics and CRM divide“, presented by Zone5ive, OCRI‘s Tech Marketing Forum on May 12th, 2011 at the Marshes Golf Course. Kudos to Alex Langhshur and Tyler Gibbs of PublicInsite who presented a valuable case study on exactly how they’ve helped Ottawa’s own Dragonwave Inc to convince their sales team of the worth of the web channel by integrating web analytics data into Dragonwave’s CRM
“Content Strategy from A Global Perspective”, presented by Content Strategy Ottawa Meetup. Billed as an informal night of networking, the group meets at Blue Cactus Bar & Grill in the Market on May 13, 2011 at 6pm
Now SOLD OUT – “People Before Pixels“, a one-day user experience workshop offered by Follow the UX Leader, on May 16, 2011 at the Courtyard Restaurant
“Between the Lines of Privacy“, a breakfast with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, presented by WXN. the Women’s Executive Network on May 17, 2011 at the Rideau Club
“Results, not more Reports“, a free web analytics seminar offered by Unilytics also on May 17th, 2011 at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier Hotel
“Designing for Humans“, a presentation by Martin Gomez of Sparkart from SMBOttawa (Social Media Breakfast Ottawa) at 7:30am on May 18, 2011 at the Great Canadian Theatre Company
“Stop Searching. Start Finding.” a full day of information architecture training provided by Follow the UX Leader at the Courtyard Restaurant on May18, 2011
“Creating Web Content that Clicks“, a one-day web writing course also from Follow the UX Leader on May 19, 2011, also at the Courtyard Restaurant
Ryan Short from Teknision will be the speaker at the next Web Analytics Wednesday at the Heart & Crown ByWard Market, hosted by PublicInsite on May 25, 2011 at 6pm
FUN for Tech Women event to be held at DiVino’s at 225 Preston Street on May 30th, 2011 from 6pm-8pm. To register, call DiVino’s at (613) 221-9760
Canada’s Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, or SEMPO Canada, is holding its first SEMPO Ottawa Members Only Meetup on May 30th, 2011 at 6pm at Johnny Farina on Elgin Street
“New Era Marketing Mosaika: A Spectacular Multimedia Creation” with Guy Laflamme from the National Capital Commission, presented by CMA Ottawa on May 31st, 2011 at 11:15am at the Hampton Inn and Conference Room

If I’ve missed any, comment away, and I’ll be sure to add it to the information.

Hope to see all of you at one or more of these events!