Chart of the Day: How good is your use of campaign tracking codes?

As this post on campaign tracking in Google Analytics shows, Google's UTM tracking codes provide an excellent way to see which of your marketing channels and content is influencing site visits, leads and sales. This week we have launched a simple tracking code generator for Google Analytics marketing source codes to make it quicker for members to generate these. Yet, when consulting or training I find that many businesses don't fully track their inbound marketing activities, especially their content marketing where content is shared by email or social. This chart, from joint research by Smart Insights and HubSpot of content marketers in Europe also suggests room for improvement in tracking of content marketing. You can see that fewer than half of businesses are able to track ROI or track links to content from other…

Social Media Essentials: Facebook hit a new milestone, Instagram lets you reply live streams and Messenger just got more fun

Firstly, Happy Social Media Day! This day, launched by Mashable eight years ago to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. The way social networks impact our personal and professional lives is far greater than many would have anticipated. Each week there are new updates and developments in social media, opening up new opportunities for businesses. To celebrate all things social, here are 6 updates we saw happen this week that could help inform your social media strategy and help keep you up-to-date with what's happened in the world of social media.

1. Facebook community-building tools

Facebook has rolled out some great new tools for group admins that will help them manage their groups more effectively. The aim of rolling out theses changes are to help group admins…

Optimize the forms on your website to maximize your revenue opportunities

Usability Testing forms a massive part of the User Experience Research we carry out, so naturally, we observe a lot of forms being filled out! With the amount of time we all spend form filling online you'd think that creating an easy-to-use form would be a 'piece of cake'. Sadly, it's not and there are plenty of substandard forms out there preventing users from getting what they want. Here are six mistakes that you can avoid to ensure your forms contribute to a positive experience for your customer’s, rather than hindering them from making a purchase (let’s be honest, no one wants that!).

1. Think before you ask

Customers see the data they enter online as an exchange - they give you information and you give them what they want. But if that balance is off and it's not clear why you need the…

A short tutorial and example showing how to track your email marketing campaigns by tagging links in your email with Google Analytics

I was prompted to write this how-to post since some email marketers I speak to during Email Marketing training courses, use Google Analytics, but weren't aware it can be used for email tracking "beyond the click". This means that as well as getting reporting in your email marketing system on opens and clicks for your sends, you can also isolate visits from email in your Google Analytics to see which pages are viewed and whether visitors convert.To set this up email tracking you will need to tag your email with 'Google Analytics campaign tracking codes as explained later with the example in this article. Once you're using tracking, Google Analytics segments can be used to isolate visitors referred from email to understand their preferences and behaviours. This really helps prove the value of…

Localization means more than just translation, you must adapt to meet your audience's needs

Selling to a worldwide audience at first might seem like the ideal way to increase your profits, but if you don’t get your messaging right you could end up talking your way out of increased revenue. Retail E-commerce sales reached 7.4% of all retail sales in 2016, and is set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. It is predicted to  increase to over $4 trillion by 2020, making up 15% of all retail spending globally; much of this percentage comes from international sales. Currently the UK holds the highest percentage of online shoppers at 15.4% of all retail sales, followed by China (13.8%), Norway (11.5%) and Finland (10.8%), and the leading destination for those sales is the United States, followed by China, the UK and Germany. By 2020, nearly…

Chart of the day: How long do you spend on social media networks each day?

This chart looks at average daily time spent online and what we are actually doing with that time. It was reported that the most common reasons for using social networks are to “fill up spare time”.  Users are now spending around 2 hours per day on social networks and messaging, that adds up to 5 years and 4 months spent over an average lifetime. This figure is up 15 minutes from 2012. It's perhaps no surprise as our infographic of the social media activity every minute shows. The increase we see here will be due to how social media platforms themselves are evolving their tools and options to further attract and engage new audiences. As they evolve the more time we will spend there. What does this mean for marketers? Start researching when your followers are most…

A how-to guide for campaign reporting with examples

One of the most important (but often overlooked) aspects of digital marketing is setting up your analytics properly. It’s a little bit technical but easy to do once you understand a few simple steps and see why it’s so important. Being able to track where your visitors are coming from is a valuable opportunity to improve your engagement and your ROI during the campaign. Additionally, when you benchmark your campaign performance you will be able to improve your campaigns in the future, and budget more effectively. It’s worth investing a little time in analytics! In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or landing page. This is the critical first step in being able to understand how your campaign is performing. Once you can accurately see where your visitors are coming from, you’ll be able to build more…

How to make your landing pages generate more revenue

Do you want to sell more? Or capture relevant targeted leads? Then you need to work on your landing pages to ensure they are working hard enough for you. Today we are going to talk about landing page optimization tips. More specifically we are going to talk about the steps we can take to improve conversions after a visitor has landed on your target page. We want to get him to take the step we have identified as the goal for that particular landing page. To be able to measure conversion, we first need to identify what conversion is in the first place. According to this Google AdWords page: Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad clicks that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period. For example, if you…

Chart of the Day: Understanding subscriber loyalty - Part 2 of 2

This is the last of a two-part blog, covering subscriber loyalty and unsubscribing following on from - What is a good Unsubscribe Rate? We all know about click-to-open (CTO) metrics and even click-through-rate (CTR), but what the heck is unsubscribe-to-open (UTO)? UTO, is a good indication of how unsatisfied a customer is with your email. They are the customers, who open your email but promptly unsubscribe. If your Email Service Provider (ESP) doesn't offer this statistic in your reporting, you can calculate it yourself. (Total Unsubscribe/Opt-Outs ÷ Unique Opens) × 100 Eg: (20 ÷ 359) × 100 = 5.57% Is this UTO rate good or bad? In today's chart, it shows that the average UTO is 2.59%. So the above example is performing rather poorly. The sector with the highest UTO rates is Sales/Marketing/Design at 4.89%. While the best performing is Public Relations at…

6 steps to getting more from your meetings

Meetings are a necessity for most business operations, especially marketing, where independent campaigns are running simultaneously under the same broad goals. You’ll need to gather your team to brainstorm new ideas, update each other on individual progress, come together for mutual tasks, and follow up after a campaign’s end to review and evaluate what comes next. In an ideal world, every meeting would instantly bring each team member up to speed and give them the resources they need to continue their work. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world. Most marketing meetings end up wasting time in at least one dimension, whether that’s by straying off topic, disrupting people from work, hosting too many people, or lacking any actionable conclusion. David Grady explains some of the mechanics in this TED Talk, and in recent years, meetings have come under the microscope of other…