With tools as powerful as Google Analytics at our fingertips, surely every business is measuring the results from their marketing activities? Well, in our experience, even large and well established companies find it difficult to track marketing activities accurately.
What this means is that marketing budgets are often not spent as effectively as they could be. This would be fine if all businesses had an unlimited marketing budget, but this isn’t the case. Marketing budgets are always limited, which means that businesses need to be investing in marketing channels that are performing well for their business.
Throughout this blog post we will talk through the different ways you can track your marketing activities effectively which will mean you can make smarter data driven business decisions. Tracking marketing activities accurately means you can invest further in activities that are working well for your business and stop spending money on activities that aren’t generating a return.
All of the items we are going to talk about within this blog post are possible to track with ease through Google Analytics.
Set up Goals
What is the main goal you want website visitors to do? It is to purchase a product, enquire about the services or solutions you provide, or do you want them to download a guide from your website? Within Google Analytics you can set up a maximum of 20 goals within Google Analytics, which means that you can track an awful lot of data;
Set up Goals within Google Analytics
To track your marketing activities accurately this is absolutely essential to set up useful goals for your website. This can vary hugely between different websites based on what you are trying to achieve. Although have a think about both macro and micro goals on your website. What are the key things you want your website visitors to do?
Contact us
Request a call back
Follow you on social media channels
Purchase a product
Download a resource or guide
Find a local branch or store
Click and collect
Once you fully understand what you would like your website visitors to do, then you can start to track your marketing activities accurately. Quite simply, if you are paying for website visitors that aren’t working towards your key goals then maybe it is worth spending the marketing budget in areas that are working towards those goals instead.
Within Google Analytics, setting up goals couldn’t be easier with the many templates that are already available for you to customise for your individual website;
Goal Templates within Google Analytics
Use Goal Funnels
When you are setting up your goals above then you will be asked if you would like to use Goal Funnels. These are the specific steps that customers must go through before completing a goal. For example, if you are selling products online, then you will have multiple steps in the checkout process.
It is essential to set up the correct tracking for your purchasing funnel so you can understand how customers are behaving when they are completing this process. Below you can see an example for how this can be set up;
Goal Funnel Options within Google Analytics
Once you have configured this correctly you can easily visualise this information within Google Analytics. This will show you exactly how your website visitors are behaving and most importantly, where they are dropping out of the purchasing funnel. This is invaluable data that can provide insights into where improvements can be made to increase the number of people who complete their purchases.
Funnel Visualisation in Google Analytics
This data shows you the number of people who move on to the next step in the purchasing funnel and it will also show you the number of people who leave the purchasing funnel. More importantly, it will tell you where they went. Did they go to another page on the website for further information, or did they leave the website completely? This information can really help to understand your customer behaviours and look for ways of improving the user experience.
Ecommerce Tracking
If you are selling any products or services through your website, then setting up ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics is absolutely essential. The data that this provides means that you can easily see which products and services are the most popular, and most importantly, which traffic sources are leading to customers purchasing.
Understanding which traffic sources are working best for your business means that you can then readjust your marketing budgets towards the most profitable areas. Only through correct tracking is this possible. Below you can see some of the useful data that you will start to receive once you implement ecommerce tracking on your website and in Google Analytics;
Ecommerce Tracking within Google Analytics
Just as with goal tracking, the important point here is that once you fully understand which traffic sources and marketing activities are working towards increasing sales through your website, then you can start doing more of this. All of which is essential to fully understand how your marketing activities are performing.
Implementing ecommerce tracking is a little more involved than setting up goal tracking. Firstly you have to enable ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics then also implement additional tracking codes on your checkout completion page;
Ecommerce Setup within Google Analytics
To learn more about how ecommerce tracking can be set up, it is recommended that your website developer reads through the following guidelines from Google. To summarise the requirements, there needs to be additional information on the checkout complete page that contains all of the following information so that Google Analytics can pick this up and fire the data into the reporting platform;
Ecommerce Settings for Checkout Complete Page for Google Analytics
Call Tracking
One area that most businesses don’t realise is available is advanced call tracking tools which are designed to bridge the gap between your website analytics data and customers who call your office number. The reason why this is so important for a lot of businesses is because website visitors will often call the number on the website instead of completing a contact form.
What this means is that if you don’t have a call tracking solution in place, then you will be under reporting on the results. For example, if you ran a large pay per click advertising campaign and you started to receive a lot more phone enquiries, then this would be a challenge to monitor using only traditional website analytics. If this was the case, you would go back to monitor the performance of your recent campaign within Google Analytics and see that you received a lot of traffic to your website but very few people enquired using the contact form. You would likely mark this campaign as a poorly performing one and one that would guide your future investments in marketing activities down a different path. Where in fact, what has actually happened is that the campaign was a roaring success and generated a large amount of revenue, although it was all completed over the phone opposed to through the website.
Advanced call tracking solutions like this aren’t right for every business. Although if your business does do a lot of sales over the phone, then this really is something that you should be looking at. Purely to track all of your marketing activities accurately so you can calculate a true return on your marketing spend.
Assisted Conversions
Traditionally most businesses look at the results achieved from a marketing campaign on the basis of a ‘Last Click Attribution Model’, which simply means that the last traffic source that the website visitor used to arrive at your website is attributed to the success of that goal completion. For example, if a user visited your website first from organic search, then revisited a few days later through a link they found on another website, then revisited a few days after that via a pay per click advert on Google and made a purchase, this would mean that the pay per click advert is deemed to have been the traffic source that drove the sale.
Although what if this isn’t quite a true picture? What if the other two touch points were critical points within the purchasing journey and if they didn’t see these items, then they would have been less likely to purchase when they clicked on a pay per click advert?
Understanding the full customer purchasing journey is possible through the use of Assisted Conversions within Google Analytics. This powerful tool means that you can get a full and true picture of how your customers behave prior to purchasing your products and services.
For example, if you saw that people who read one of your travel guides or blog posts, then also read a review on a review website, were then more likely to purchase when they saw a pay per click advert, then you would be much more willing to invest in those other areas as you can attribute a value to these customers.
Let’s say those customers converted 20% higher than those who just arrived on a pay per click advert. This allows you to fully understand the key touch points that are contributing towards the customer enquiry or purchase. Knowing this means that
For example, take a look at the following information;
Assisted Conversion Summary Data within Google Analytics
It is clear to see that the Assisted Conversion Value is actually a significant amount, meaning that if you weren’t active in other areas then you would likely not have received this revenue or amount of enquiries. Most importantly you can then break this down into the various traffic sources so you can understand how they are contributing towards sales through your website.
Assisted Conversion Data within Google Analytics
Summary
Overall, there are a variety of ways you can use the features within Google Analytics to calculate a true return on your marketing spend. If you aren’t tracking your marketing activities, then quite simply you are spending aimlessly and are likely to be spending money without generating a return.
The key message to take away is that it is essential to be tracking all of your marketing activities to be able to make smarter data driven business decisions. Focus on marketing activities that are generating a return for your business and drop the areas that aren’t contributing.
Once you fully understand how your marketing activities are contributing towards increased enquiries and increased sales for your business this will transform the way you invest in marketing activities. All of this data allows you to calculate a true return on all of your marketing activities.
Within our daily work we use Excel an awful lot, so naturally we like to use Excel to its full potential using lots of exciting formulas. One of the major challenges within Excel is trying to use a VLOOKUP function within a VLOOKUP function. In summary, this isn’t possible. The reason this isn’t possible is due to the way the VLOOKUP function works. Let’s remind ourselves what the VLOOKUP function actually does;
What this means in basic terms is “find me a specific cell within a table of data where a certain criteria is met”. This is such a powerful function that can be used to speed up work in so many different ways. But we aren’t going to look at why this is so great here, we are going to look at the main limitation and most importantly how to get around this with more clever magical Excel formulas.
Solutions
The solution to this is quite a complex one and one that involves many different Excel formulas including;
=ROW()
=INDEX()
=SUMPRODUCT()
=MAX()
=ADDRESS()
=SUBSTITUTE()
=MATCH()
=CONCATENATE()
Throughout this blog post we’ll look at what each of these mean and how they can all be used in conjunction to perform a function what is essentially equivalent to a VLOOKUP within a VLOOKUP.
The Data
Before we jump into how to solve the problem of performing a VLOOKUP within a VLOOKUP, here is the data that we will be working with. Let’s assume that we have a large list of products which are associated with multiple different categories as can be seen below;
Data Sheet – Prices
You may be wondering why apples and bananas are classed as snacks in the data. Don’t worry about that. Just go with it. There are many different situations whereby you may be presented with this type of data so this is purely to illustrate the example in a simple way.
Now let’s say that you want to visualise this information a little easier. The above table of only 8 entries is reasonably straight forward. Although one example we’ve been recently working with had over 35,000 rows of data which was a little more challenging to view in this format and we wanted a simpler way of looking at this information within Excel. So let’s say we want to look at the data in the following way;
Data Sheet – Summary Prices
This is the data that we will be working with so you can clearly see how this technique can be implemented. To keep things easier to understand, these two pieces of data are kept on two separate sheets within the Excel worksheet.
Quick Answer
Looking for the quick answer to this complex formula? Then here is the answer;
You may be a little confused with the above, so this post will explain exactly what each part of this means and why it is contained within the rather large and complex formula above. Most importantly, you will be able to understand how to perform the equivalent of a VLOOKUP inside a VLOOKUP.
Steps
The individual steps within the above formula can be broken down into much smaller and easier to understand steps as can be seen below;
Steps for how to perform a VLOOKUP inside a VLOOKUP
Below we will talk through each of the above steps so you can understand why it is important.
Find the Sub-Table
Firstly if you are wanting to perform a VLOOKUP within a VLOOKUP then you need to find where the sub-table starts and ends. While you could manually enter this in for very small data sets, this is simply not practical for large data sets.
To perform this action we need to define search for the first and last occurrence of when ‘something’ is found. A note on this point, you will need to ensure that your lookup data, in this case the ‘Prices’ sheet, is ordered by the column you are looking up, in this case the ‘Category’ column. Since if this isn’t the case, then data will be included within this sub-table which shouldn’t be.
To do this, we need to find both the first occurrence and the last occurrence. What we are looking to achieve is identify the sub-table for ‘Fruit’ which can be seen below;
The sub-table we are looking for
Once this has been identified, then we can use the standard =VLOOKUP() function on this sub-table to find the data we would like.
Find the First Occurrence
There are a few different formulas included to find the first occurrence of data within a column which are outlined below.
=MATCH()
To find the first occurrence of ‘something’ within a range of data then we use the =MATCH() function. To remind ourselves of what the MATCH() function is, here is the official description from Microsoft;
The MATCH function searches for a specified item in a range of cells, and then returns the relative position of that item in the range. For example, if the range A1:A3 contains the values 5, 25, and 38, then the formula
=MATCH(25,A1:A3,0)
returns the number 2, because 25 is the second item in the range.
Use MATCH instead of one of the LOOKUP functions when you need the position of an item in a range instead of the item itself. For example, you might use the MATCH function to provide a value for the row_num argument of the INDEX function.
Looking back at our example, this translates into the formula;
=MATCH(B1, Prices!$A$1:$A$100, 0)
What this means is;
Find the contents of B1, which is ‘Fruit’ in our example
Within the range of data Prices!$A$1:$A$100
And make sure it matches exactly (0)
This has now found the first occurrence of this information within the column of data. Now we need to translate this into something that a VLOOKUP formula can use.
=ADDRESS()
The next bit we need to look at is turning the row & column numbers into an ‘Address’ which Excel can understand. To do this we simple create the formula;
=ADDRESS(E2, E3)
The =ADDRESS() function takes a Row Number and a Column Number and turns that into an Address. In this case, the row number is generated from the previous function, =MATCH() and the value of E3 in the example above is 1. We use 1 because for this we are only interested in starting on the first column of data. Once we know we are starting here we can always move the cells along accordingly.
In our example, this address at this point in the large formula is set to $A$2.
=SUBSTITUTE()
Now we know we have created an Address in the previous step which was within column 1, this is also the same as column A. This makes life easy for us as we know where this is. The next step is to nudge the sub-table over so the =VLOOKUP() function can easily lookup the data in the later step.
To do this, we simply nudge the starting Address over to the right by one column using the following formula;
=SUBSTITUTE(E4, “A”, “B”)
Where E4 is the cell which contains the Address from the previous step.
The cell that has been identified as part of this step is the first occurrence as can be seen below;
Find the first occurrence of data within the column
Now we want to nudge this over using the above function which will mean this item is now set to $B$2 which is the starting point of our sub-table.
Ok, so we now have the starting point for the sub-table for the VLOOKUP to use. We now need to calculate the end point so the sub-table can be used within the VLOOKUP.
Find the Last Occurrence
Finding the first occurrence of data in column is a lot easier than finding the last occurrence as you can see from the formula below that we need to do this;
=ROW() – Which takes a reference and calculates which row number this is on
=INDEX() – Which returns a value or the reference to a value from within a table or range.
=SUMPRODUCT() – This is used to tell Excel the calculations are an array and not an actual number
=MAX() – This is used to find the largest row number in the array where the lookup value occurs
=ROW() – This, as before, is pulling out the Row Number from the data retrieved
Unlike previously, it is not simple to break this out into sub-sections to explain the different points as the formulas don’t work when breaking them our separately due to the way the =SUMPRODUCT() function works. As such, I’ll talk through what each of the different parts of the formula mean and what they do.
This formula is identifying the last occurrence of the data that is in cell B1 within the range of data $A$2:$A$100, which in our example is ‘Fruit’. We then wrap this in the =INDEX() function to get the cell reference then wrapping this in the =ROW() function which will identify the row number where this data is found;
You may have spotted the -1 in the formula above. This is to ensure that the data is pulling back the correct row number. If this isn’t there, then you will notice that the data that is pulled back is a row below where you would expect.
To get a good understanding of the above part of the formula, then I’d recommend reading the fantastic guide over at Excel User.
What we have achieved using the above combination of formulas can be seen below as the last occurrence of data in the column;
Find the last occurrence of data in the column
Once we have this data we then wrap this in an =ADDRESS() function then a =SUBSTITUTE() formula which first turns the result into an Address that Excel can understand, opposed to standard text, then moves the data over several columns from column A to column D. This is needed, since we will be creating a sub-table that includes several columns. In this case, 3 columns which are column B, C and D. If you are working with data with more columns, then you will need to replace the D with a higher column.
Move the column to the end so we can create a sub-table that contains all the required data
So now the end of the sub-table is set to $D$4 which means that we have a starting point and an end point for our sub-table which can be used in the =VLOOKUP() function as outlined below.
Lookup Data in the Sub-Table
Now we have the sub-table defined using all of the above formulas, we can use the standard =VLOOKUP() function once we have joined all of the above data together.
Create the lookup table
Now we have all of the above points, we need to create the lookup data using the standard =CONCATENATE() formula as can be seen below;
=CONCATENATE(“‘Prices’!”, E5, “:”, E11)
The data within E5 is the starting point of the sub-table, and the data within E11 is the end point within the sub-table. In our example, this gives us the answer of ‘Prices’!$B$2:$D$4.
Lookup data
Now we have the sub-table to lookup the data we want, we can simple use the standard =VLOOKUP() function to find the data that we require as follows;
=VLOOKUP(A2, INDIRECT(E13), 2, FALSE)
We wrap the concatenate function within the =INDIRECT() function so that the data is treated as a reference, opposed to text. The data within E13 is the result of all of the work previously in this post, I’ve just left this in here to make this easier to read and understand. For the full formula, this would be replaced with the individual parts. Now the data that is brought back is exactly what we want.
Sub-table of data based on initial criteria
What this final =VLOOKUP() function is doing is saying “find the value in A2 within the sub-table we have identified, then bring back the second column of data. So in our example, the long formula in column B1 is bringing back the data £1.50 as can be seen below;
Result of a VLOOKUP inside a VLOOKUP
Summary
So there you have it, how to perform the equivalent of a VLOOKUP within a VLOOKUP using a few different formulas within Excel. You may be a little scared of such a huge formula at first, but you will see that when you do need to use this, I would always recommend breaking this out into the different parts before trying to create one monolithic formula as you will be able to put this together much easier.
Also, in the formula below, you will notice that it is all wrapped in an =IFERROR() function which simply sets the data to 0 if nothing can be found. You can set this to whatever you like, I just chose 0 since this was about prices.
Ok, so this isn’t for the faint hearted. But for those advanced Excel users around I’m sure you will have come across times when you really needed to perform a VLOOKUP inside a VLOOKUP and found that after a long time researching how to do this online that it isn’t a simple task. So hopefully you can see the clear steps included above and this will help in the future. The beauty of the above formula is that you can now drag this into new rows and new columns without having to update anything, all thanks to the $ signs throughout the formula.
Ok, we’ve all been there, jumped on social media channels for 5 minutes then looked at the clock and wondered where the last hour went. What we’re going to talk about in this blog post is about the importance of UTM tracking parameters and how they can be used to accurately track social media activities.
What are UTM Tracking Parameters?
Unless you are quite a savvy digital marketer you may not have come across UTM tracking parameters previously, so before we look at how they link in with social media we will run through a short history and technical lesson. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Monitor. Urchin was the predecessor to what is now known as Google Analytics which we all know and love.
One of the core pieces of technology underlying both Urchin, and now Google Analytics, is the ability to clearly track information about where a website visitor came from when they landed on your website. This core functionality was extended to allow business, brands and marketing managers to customise this information as they please. What all of this means is that UTM tracking parameters allow traffic to your website to be tracked accurately.
The UTM tracking parameters are the additional bits of information that you may have seen in website addresses as can be seen in the example below;
What you will see in the website address above is three additional pieces of information, the UTM tracking parameters;
utm_source: i.e. where did this user come from
utm_medium: i.e. what type of traffic is this – direct, referral, social, organic or paid
utm_campaign: i.e. was this from a specific marketing campaign that you ran
In addition to the required parameters above, you can also further customise the information by adding additional information such as;
utm_term: i.e. if this was from a paid advertising campaign where you bid on specific keywords, such as with Google AdWords
utm_content: i.e. if you wanted to test different Ad Variations for your paid advertising campaigns, you can track this back with this parameter
Ok, so you may be wondering what this has to do with social media. Before we go onto that, just a bit more important technical background information that you need to understand before we look at how this links in with social.
How referral traffic is tracked within Google Analytics
By default, Google Analytics handles all of the magical UTM tracking parameters in the background (and much more) automatically if a URL doesn’t have anything specified. For example, if a user visits www.contradodigital.com without any UTM tracking parameters in the URL, then Google will see what information they have available about where this person came from and use this to feed into the correct buckets of information within Google Analytics automatically.
For example, if a user came from organic search, then Google knows this and that is why you see website traffic classed as ‘Organic’ and from ‘Google’ within Google Analytics. Likewise, if a user clicks on a link on an external website and lands on your website, then this would be classed as referral traffic within Google Analytics.
The reason why Google Analytics is able to understand this is due to the way web browsers work. When you browse the internet, web browsers pass basic information between websites such as the domain name where you came from.
For example, you can see a page we shared on our Twitter account recently;
Webpage we shared on our Twitter account
The shortened website address con.tra.do/TPz3K9 is actually the following website address https://www.contradodigital.com/resources/social-media-tracking-tool/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Our-Social-Updates and as you will notice, this has included the UTM tracking parameters in the URL.
This isn’t what I want to talk about here though. Hidden away in the browser when a user actually clicks on this link is additional information within the HTTP Header which contains information for the website where the user is going to, i.e. in this example our website. Below is a screenshot of the HTTP Header information when a user clicks on the link;
HTTP Header Referer Information Example
What you will notice in the highlighted line is the Referer information. Yes, you will notice that is actually spelt incorrectly and there is a rather interesting story behind this if you are interested and wondering why this is still widely used.
The referrer information is telling the website that you are landing on the full website address where the user came from. So in this case, this is http://t.co/euI7Tjaime which is the automatically shortened URL that Twitter now uses.
What this means is that within your Google Analytics account, if you didn’t use UTM tracking parameters, then the traffic would be listed as from t.co, opposed to twitter.com. This is due to the automatic shortened URL that Twitter uses.
You may be wondering why this is a problem. Traffic from twitter is coming from t.co, which we know to be Twitter. So why is this a problem for us? Well, glad you asked.
Optional Referrer Information
The reason why this is a problem is that the referrer header information is optional, meaning that it may not always be present depending on where and what ‘thing’ the user came from. This generally isn’t too much of a problem for modern browsers as they do support this by default. The problem lies with the range of technologies people are using to access information on the internet.
What this means is that the referrer header information often isn’t passed along when a user clicks on a link. So when a user is flicking through their Twitter feed over coffee in the morning and they see a link to some amazing content you have on your website, then this traffic will be potentially be classed as direct traffic within Google Analytics. Wait. What? This isn’t right. This is the key point to take away from the blog post.
Direct traffic within Google Analytics isn’t people who typed in www.your-website.com into their browser. No. Direct traffic is actually Google’s way of saying ‘we have no idea where this traffic came from’.
This may be difficult to grasp just reading through this quite technical blog post, so let’s illustrate this for clarify. We have been focusing on Twitter throughout this blog post, although this isn’t just Twitter where this problem lies. This is a large scale tracking problem that can only be solved with using correct UTM tracking parameters on your URLs.
Missing Referrer Information
To illustrate the point above, I picked up my phone (Samsung Galaxy S4), opened the Facebook application that I have installed and navigated to the Contrado Digital Facebook page as can be seen below;
Contrado Digital Facebook page as viewed from a native mobile application on phone
I then clicked on the ‘Visit Website’ link. Now imagine this was a normal status update that you shared a link to your website, this is the same thing. Then I headed over to Google Analytics to view the Real Time Analytics report which shows who is on the website right now, and most importantly where they came from;
Google Analytics Real Time traffic report no referral data from Facebook native mobile application
What you will notice here is that the medium is set to ‘Direct’ and the source is ‘(not set)’. This isn’t good. This should be set to ‘Social’ and ‘Facebook’ respectively. What this means is that you will be receiving traffic from your social media channels, although you won’t know that it is from your social media channels if you don’t tag your URLs up with UTM tracking parameters correctly.
If you are spending a reasonable amount of time implementing your social media strategy, then you want to know that it is delivering results. I repeated the same process, although on our Twitter account and this traffic is actually coming through correctly from the mobile application that I am using as can be seen below;
Google Analytics Real Time traffic report shows referral data from Twitter native mobile application
What this does highlight is the inherent discrepancy between different native mobile applications and that some will and some won’t pass on the referrer header information for the website to pick up on. If I was to repeat this experiment using a different mobile application that was pulling in Tweets or social media updates, then the response will likely be different again. Likewise, if I was to repeat the experiment on an Apple iPhone then again the results would likely differ.
The Solution
What you will hopefully have picked up on throughout this blog post is that unless you are using UTM tracking parameters on all URLs that you share on social media channels then you will not be getting a full picture about how your social media marketing efforts are performing.
Thankfully, you’ll be glad to know that there is a simple and effective solution. That is to use our Social Media Tracking Tool which will automatically add on the relevant UTM tracking parameters for the main social media channels you will be using.
Social Media Tracking Tool
What this means is that when you share correctly tagged up URLs on your social media channels, you will be able to see within Google Analytics exactly where the user has come from. I.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Pinterest. No longer will you have to guess where traffic is coming from. Tag your URLs and track the data accurately.
While UTM tracking parameters are very simple in their nature, the underlying technology behind them can get quite technical. If you have any questions or comments on the above then leave a comment below.
Have fun tracking all of your social media updates accurately from now on!
Social media is an extremely powerful medium that allows you to connect with your audience even easier than ever. While this is true, most businesses are still unsure about how to use social media effectively and how to track social media activities. It is easy to spend a lot of time on social media without knowing what your business is getting back from the time invested.
Here we will talk you through a few tools that we use, and one that we have built, which are all designed to help you manage your social media work effectively. No longer will you have to use guess work to measure performance, instead you can use these selection of tools to track all social media activities effectively.
Ok, so you’ve just created some awesome content on your website or blog and now you want to share this with the world on your various social media channels. Firstly, it is important to tag all of your links up that you are sharing so that you can easily see how many people have clicked on these links from the various social media channels.
Social Media Tracking Tool
To tag up your URLs that you are sharing you can use the Google URL Builder if you have custom and individual requirements, or alternatively you can use our new Social Media Tracking Tool. This tool is designed to speed up the process for updating social media channels and tracking the number of clicks received from the different channels.
By default, links that aren’t tagged will not be tracked accurately within your web analytics tool such as Google Analytics. The reason behind this is due to the ‘referrer’ information not always being passed from the source through to your website when a user clicks on the link from various sources including native applications, i.e. a Twitter App on your followers’ smartphones. When this happens, it will appear that traffic to your website from social media channels is ‘Direct’ traffic, which isn’t the case.
Our new tool will tag all of your links up automatically, saving you time manually updating each link with the correct campaign tracking tags. Have a go and see how easy the tool is to use.
Bit.ly
Another tool that you will find useful for tracking your social media activities is Bit.ly which is an additional link tracking tool that sits between users clicking on a link that you have shared on social media and when they arrive on your website. This is a great tool to use as this means you can track the number of clicks the links you are sharing on social media, regardless if these links are to your website or another website. Below shows the daily clicks for our social media activities over the last month;
As can be seen above, this is great data to understand what your fans and followers are most interested in reading about. Knowing this information will allow you to tailor your social media updates to content that is most interesting for your audience.
Buffer
Now you have your list of links that you want to share on social media, you can easily schedule these updates to save you having to spend all day on social media. Simply schedule posts to be sent out automatically throughout the week and save yourself hours of time, allowing you to continue running your businesses.
As you can see above, here are a few of the scheduled posts we have. With this tool you can easily set custom schedules for each of the social media accounts that you connect to Buffer. The simplicity of this tool is brilliant and really does all you to save an enormous amount of time managing your social media activities.
HootSuite
Now you have all of your content scheduled to your social media channels, you need an easy way of managing engagement from your fans and followers. While you can simply hand out your login details to several members of staff to manage social media for you, this will inevitably lead to challenges. For example if a member of staff leaves your business, you will have to change the passwords. In addition, you may have an external party like ourselves managing your social media channels and you would prefer we didn’t have your passwords.
Tools such as HootSuite get around these issues by being able to manage social media channels without logging in/out of each social media account through the day. This really helps to reduce the management time along with increase the response time when responding to fans and followers on social media.
As you may already know, we are an official HootSuite Solutions Partner so we are confident in the tool and its abilities. Being able to manage multiple social media channels from a single dashboard is ideal and there is also the flexibility to allow members of staff to do this from their own HootSuite account too. Meaning that you can easily manage a team of people working on the social media activities. Below shows you how simple the tool is to use;
Google Analytics
Now you have all of your social media activities working well, tracking is the essential part of this. Tracking is available within all of the tools mentioned above so it is always recommended to monitor each of the individual tools. Social media can be a great way to drive additional traffic to your website and as mentioned earlier, our new Social Media Tracking Tool allows you to easily track this data within tools such as Google Analytics.
Below shows a graph from our Google Analytics account for the traffic our website has received over the past few months as a direct result of talking about our blog posts we have promoted;
This traffic is broken down in Google Analytics based on the way that you tagged your campaigns. Thankfully with our new Social Media Tracking Tool, you don’t have to worry about this as the tool will automatically tag all of your campaigns quickly and easily for you.
Once you start to use this approach with your social media activities you will be able to quickly see which channels are driving the most traffic to your website. Most importantly, this traffic data will now be accurate since if campaign tracking tags aren’t used, then this is likely to be under-reporting on the results the social media activities are generating.
Summary
Overall, social media management doesn’t have to be an extremely time consuming task. Instead, using the right tools for the job can save a huge amount of time and allow you to focus on other areas within your business. To summarise the tools and steps below;
1) Social Media Tracking Tool: Use to automatically tag all your links up correctly when posting updates to your various social media channels
2) Bit.ly: Use to see how many people are clicking on the links you are sharing, whether these links are to your website or to an external website
3) Buffer: Use to easily schedule social media updates throughout the week without having to continually post throughout the day
4) HootSuite: User to easily manage engagement from your fans and followers by joining the conversation when the time is right
5) Google Analytics: Use to accurately track which social media platforms are driving the most traffic to your website. Ensure campaign tracking tags have been set up using our Social Media Tracking Tool so you aren’t under-reporting on results achieved
Hopefully this has given you a good selection of tools and explained clearly how these various tools can be used to manage your social media activities effectively. Save yourself a huge amount of time using the above tools.
These tools are our preference when managing social media channels, if you have any other tools that you like to use, then leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.
It seems like the fun never ends! After recently being shortlisted in the finals for the Lancashire Red Rose Awards 2014, the Prolific North Awards 2014 and The Bibas 2014, we have now also been shortlisted in the finals in the Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards 2014 in two categories! The two categories we are through to the finals for are, Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year along with Northern Agency of the Year.
The category for Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year recognises the work from an outstanding digital campaign that has successfully met objectives and delivered excellent results. The Northern Agency of the Year category is an award to celebrate the best marketing agency in the North of England.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards recognise and reward the creativity and success of companies participating in digital marketing in the North of England. The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the leading international body for marketing and business development with over 40,000 members. CIM provides marketing qualifications, training for marketing professionals.
Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year award we had to clearly demonstrate a successful campaign we have worked on. Thankfully, we have several of these which we can choose from. As part of the entry we outlined the clear objectives set for the campaign including the target audience for the campaign.
This allowed us to create a strategy that would meet those objectives. Talking through the implementation of the campaign and the creative elements that went into the campaign clearly showed how every action was linking back to the main objectives.
The campaign we ran led to a huge increase in traffic and sales which far exceeded the targets we had.
Within this category we are up against the likes of the University of Huddersfield, one of the UK’s leading PR agencies along with a large agency with over 170 members of staff and revenues in excess of £155,000,000 in 2013. Getting through to the finals against such large and well established companies within our first year of trading is something we are extremely proud of.
Northern Agency of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Northern Agency of the Year award we had to outline how amazing we are. We’ve always got a lot to talk about, so this was our opportunity to do exactly that. As part of the entry we had to talk through our objectives for the previous year, or for us this was since we launched back in August.
We then talked through what we have been doing over the past year for our clients and in the community. As you may imagine, our recent campaign work was also included in this area. In addition, we talked through our recent achievements as a business, which since launching has been quite a few including the other awards we have been shortlisted in recently too.
Following on from this, we talked through the key challenges we have faced as a business in the past year which have been around external factors with the digital industry moving at such as phenomenal speed. This meant continual innovation was essential to stay ahead as a business.
Within this category we are up against other digital marketing agencies with over 60 members of staff, which again highlights the achievement getting shortlisted in the finals against such large and well established companies.
Judges
The judges for the awards this year are from senior marketing positions ranging from local universities, marketing companies, local councils and the Recommended Agency Register. The judges who decided that we have what it takes to get through to the finals are; Steve Antononwicz, Managing Director at Recommended Agency Register; Giovanna Battiston, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University and Chair CIM Yorkshire; Yvonne Dixon, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Sunderland and North East Regional Board Member at the CIM; Diane Earles, Network Manager at the CIM; Dave Edmundson-Bird, Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing & Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School; Duncan Frazer, Visitor Economy Marketing Manager at Marketing Liverpool; Scott Hadden, Marketing Manager, Aaron & Partners and Vice Chair CIM North West; Sarah-Jane Howitt, Director of Marketing at Weightmans; Sandy Lindsay, Group MD at Tangerine PR; Charlie Nettle, Head of Marketing at North East Chamber and Vice Chair CIM North East of England; Ian Ratcliffe, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Involvement at Stockport Council; Dawn Southgate, Head of Knowledge at the CIM; David Teale, Chief Executive at North of England Excellence; Graham Webb, Managing Director at Yorkshire Sales & Marketing Developments.
You may think we have gone mad, as links are still a key factor that Google uses to determine authority of websites and hence increased visibility in the search engines. So hear us out and you will see why we are taking the stance that we are no longer building any links for our current and future clients.
This post is designed to be an open & honest discussion with businesses who will have likely heard about ‘Link building’ and want to focus on this activity to increase traffic to their website through Search Engine Optimisation work. A lot has changed over the recent years and below we will run through how outreach & promotion needs to run in the modern age.
What we’ve been noticing
As you can imagine with working on a lot of Search Engine Optimisation campaigns, we naturally look at a lot of different websites and what websites are mentioning other websites online. This certainly does make you realise just how many weird and wonderful websites there are on the internet.
Approaches often taken for link building included identifying relevant websites, drop the webmaster an email to see if they would be interested in linking to ‘Website X’. This, as you can imagine, has an extremely low response rate as people simply hit the ‘Delete’ button as they receive hundreds of requests like this every month.
For any website owners who do respond, they are often clued up about the real reason why they are being contacted. For a link, for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Different industries are savvier than others, with the travel industry being extremely savvy to this. The general response would be along the lines of “That’s nice, here is what we charge to place a link on our website” – which isn’t a good approach to take. This falls into the paid links category which is against Google’s guidelines and can lead to your website being penalised and removed from the search results.
It is clear that in a lot of industries the websites that are linking out to other websites are in the main, well…horrible. They aren’t going to be driving any referral traffic and they are purely there for Search Engine Optimisation reasons only. The more websites we review the more we have been seeing this trend over the last couple of years. It has reached the point now whereby the quality websites are few and far between and simply aren’t interested in just linking to a website because they have received an email from the website owner.
In summary, the more traditional competitor link analysis and link building approaches that we do, the more challenging it is becoming to achieve good results. Too many websites simply aren’t good enough quality nor are they on-brand. This is not a good way to be spending time as the results to come from this work take far too long to come through.
On the client/business side, it is clear that there is a huge gap in knowledge about outreach & promotion and how it relates to Search Engine Optimisation. Hence the reason for this blog post to help to bridge that knowledge gap and educate businesses as to what is needed to compete in a modern age. Hopefully this blog post can be a resource for businesses to look at to understand in more detail about why traditional ‘link building’ isn’t a future proof strategy and how content marketing, outreach & promotion is going to benefit the business.
Why are links important
Firstly, let’s take a look at why links are important, how search engines analyse links and what role this plays in modern Search Engine Optimisation work. As a business looking to increase visibility in the search engines you will more than likely have heard about how important links are when it comes to increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your website.
Let’s get one thing straight, links are important to both users and search engines. They can drive referral traffic to your website from popular websites which can also lead to a direct increase in revenue as customer purchase your product and services.
Search engines analyse links and want the link to be a genuine endorsement from ‘website A’ about ‘website Bs’ products and services. Whether this is talking about said business in the form of press coverage (non-advertorial), a review of the product or service or even official membership from somewhere.
Links impact the visibility of your website in the search engines. Various studies have been completed over the years that show how there is a correlation (not causation) between how visible a website is on Google and how many high quality backlinks the website has.
This brings us onto the issue we have with ‘link building’. Correlation does not equal causation. Businesses and website owners should not be chasing links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Stop doing this, immediately! Start building relationships with your customers, peers and industry websites so that you earn links.
Link building
The phrase ‘link building’ has spread throughout the Search Engine Optimisation industry and picked up by businesses across the world over recent years. This phrase is misleading businesses into thinking there is a magic box of tricks that allows someone (generally a digital agency or a junior level person within a company) to go out onto the internet and tell other website owners that they must link to ‘website A’ because it is amazing. Hence why you see so many companies offering to ‘build links’ for your business;
Surely the services at $27.99 are going to be a good investment aren’t they, right? If it seems too good to be true….then it probably is. Businesses paying for ‘link building’ activities that is not integrated with the rest of their businesses are leading to only one thing…a Google penalty for unnatural links. Businesses in highly competitive industries are notorious within digital circles for going down this route and several multi-national well-known brands have received penalties from Google for their activities. This should be a lesson to businesses.
Simply ‘building links’ isn’t a good approach to be taking. Websites are owned by real people running real businesses, and they too have the age old question running through their mind WIIFM – What’s in it for me. No-one, no matter how good they claim to be cannot simply go out and ‘build links’ for any business. Sure, it is possible to place links on low quality websites around the web that no-one is ever viewing, but this approach is going to get you penalised by Google, leading to reduced traffic from the search engines. As mentioned earlier, Google continues to crack down on these activities and if your business is relying on Google for a significant part of your revenue, then you have to ask yourself, is this a risk you are willing to take if you get caught out?
As a business and website owner, to generate more high quality links to your website, then you need to be doing something worthy of other websites talking about you. It really is as simple as that. Stop trying to manipulate things. We believe so strongly that going out and trying to ‘build links’ for clients is not the best approach to take, that we have taken the stance that we simply aren’t going to help with this. Instead, we are helping businesses to take digital seriously and build a strong brand online through the range of digital marketing services.
The evidence and industry changes
Let’s take a look at the evidence about how the industry has been moving over the last few years. Not from hearsay, gossip and proposed ‘experts’, but straight from the horse’s mouth.
Will backlinks lose their importance in ranking?
Answer: Yes, backlinks will become less important in the future. Google currently uses links to assess the basic reputation of websites
What could the webspam team have done better?
Answer: We probably waited too long to penalise websites who use paid links to manipulate search algorithms
Should I build links using article directories?
Answer: No. No, you should not be doing this
What should I be aware of if I’m considering guest blogging?
Answer: Don’t use guest blogging for SEO purposes.
Does Google take action on spammy guest blogging activities?
Answer: Google is willing to take action if they see spammy guest blogging activities for link acquisition
How does Google consider site-wide backlinks?
Answer: There are some genuine cases for this, although often these are spammy
Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy?
Answer: Not a good approach to be taking
What are some effective techniques for building links?
Answer: You do want to build great content, and often great content is what earns links
Other
Looking at Matt Cutts’ (Head of Web Spam at Google) personal blog titled, the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO highlights this point even further. Looking around the web, there are always blog posts titled “10 ways to build links” etc. and quite frankly, these are often rather generic and not very useful. Don’t get me wrong here, there can be some interesting tips when looking at the points made, when adapting this to your businesses in the sense of earning links.
Why we have taken this stance
The reason we have put this blog post together and taken this stance is because we speak with a lot of businesses about Search Engine Optimisation work, and most businesses are still living in the past, 5 years ago, when this type of practice was acceptable. Digital moves fast and as a businesses, to stay ahead you also need to move fast. This includes keeping up with the large shifts in how to market your business online for sustainable growth.
Results can be achieved by genuinely making your products and services better along with connecting with your audience and customers. This post is designed to be a wake-up call for businesses to highlight what is needed in the modern era to compete online and to increase traffic from search engines.
How we move forward
To reiterate, we aren’t saying we aren’t going to be increasing mentions of client brands and websites online. This is not the case. This is still extremely important for brands to be focusing on, although it is the method of working towards this goal that is changing.
A change of mind set is needed;
From: Building links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes
To: Earning links and natural mentions because you are doing awesome things as a business that people want to talk about
Integrated Online Marketing
If your business isn’t integrating digital into every aspect of work, then you are missing an opportunity to build your brand further online. Find the expertise, knowledge and stories within your business and look to showcase this digitally. Whether this is through blog posts, digital resources or video content for your customers and audience.
Building a strong brand online will earn your business links which will help to increase the authority of your website and hence traffic levels. All our focus for clients is on building a strong brand online and linking digital marketing activities together to earn links. No longer can we look at a departmentalised or segmented approach to digital marketing with the aim of increasing popularity on the web.
An integrated approach is the way businesses need to be looking at their digital marketing activities to compete online in competitive markets. To give an indication of the type of content your business could be producing to earn links;
Product / service content: You would be surprised how many websites simply don’t have enough detail about this. Why are your products/services so amazing? Why are they better than competitors? What awards have you won for your work? What are the features and benefits for your customers? How can the product / service fulfil your customers’ needs?
Blog content: Talk to your customers about what is happening throughout the business. New member of staff joined? Then talk about what they are there to do. What events have you recently attended? What services have you just launched? How are you making a difference in your local community? How can your customers use your product / service in innovative ways? Don’t just think about the product / service, but think about how customers will use it.
Resources: What resources and information will help your customers? Are there any specific files, drawings, guides, calculators, etc. that your customers will find useful? Start to genuinely help customers online by providing resources to help them with what they need. Anyone can sell ‘product x’ – all of the above is what makes your business different to others and hence increase authority on the web.
Summary
The one thing to take away from this blog post is that we are helping businesses to develop their brand digitally. Quite simply, the industry has moved on very fast and this is what is needed for businesses to compete online today. Some may think this is a strong stance to take, yet we believe strongly that this is the right approach and will ultimately lead to better results.
What you may also be interested in heading about is some of the content focused work our staff have completed during their careers that has achieved phenomenal results, without ‘building’ one single link;
Building industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +97% within 6 months
Building industry: Brand new business, driving +14,000 visits to the website within 12 months
Travel industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +25% within 3 months
All of the above has been achieved through by expanding relevant and useful content on the website. Not through ‘building links’, but by making the website better for customers by providing additional information that is useful for them. We know this works and we would like to reiterate to businesses that content, along with relevant promotion, needs to be the key focus for building your brand online.
