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Digital Marketing Made Simple
The document discusses the importance of digital marketing and Google Analytics for businesses, highlighting how to optimize websites and track visitor engagement. It covers key strategies such as search engine optimization, conversion tracking, and targeted advertising, emphasizing the need for businesses to understand their audience and competing effectively. Additionally, the document offers insights into setting up Google Analytics and linking it with AdWords for better marketing outcomes.
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Digital Marketing Made Simple
- 1. What You Don’tKnow Helps Your Competition. Digital Marketing Made Simple Sponsored by …
- 2. About Us. Dennis J.Sheely Director of Sales & Marketing NorCal Community Media • 30+ years in the media business at more than a dozen U.S. Markets • Former owner of “Skin In The Game Marketing” a pay-per-call ad agency • Former writer, radio disc jockey • Google Certified Monterey Herald / .com • Daily newspaper with 31,000 + adult readers • 230,000+ unique website users monthly viewing 643,000 + pages • Part of the NorCal Community cluster, owned by San Jose-based Digital First Media adtaxi • Digital Agency offering custom, performance-driven solutions. • Platform-agnostic and audience – centric. • Driven by insight and innovation. • Expertise for every business. Santa Cruz Sentinel / .com • Daily newspaper with 50,000 + adult readers • 294,000+ unique website users monthly viewing 2 million + pages • Part of the NorCal Community cluster, owned by San Jose-based Digital First Media
- 3. Agenda Overview • Howyou reached people pre-internet. • How you reached people in the early internet years. • Searching for customers. • Everybody loves cookies. • If you’re not doing this and your competitors are … yikes! • How you can learn about your website visitors with Google Analytics. • Beyond the basics. • Analytics + AdWords. • Other items of interest. • How to get your free Google Analytics audit.
- 4. How you reachedpeople early internet. • Banner advertising • “Click through rate” • Optimized websites for tablet and mobile Timeline graphic from Malone Media Group
- 5. Is Your WebsiteOptimized For Mobile? Is it “responsive” meaning that your website responds to the device that is accessing it?
- 6. Searching for customers. •Search words • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) • Search Engine Marketing (SEM) • Maps … now limited to 4 due to mobile – must scroll to get more • Relevance to what is being searched • Distance • Prominence (how well known you are) All of these investments are made with a blindfold if you do not use Google Analytics.
- 7. Everybody loves cookies Aconcern over privacy is eclipsed by easy access
- 8. If you’re notdoing this and your competitors are … yikes! • The Ghostery Plug-in
- 9. Home address nolonger needed. Whatismyipaddress.com Your IP Profile
- 10. What is analyticsoverview • Tells you the size of your audience visiting your site • Where they are located • Performance of your digital marketing • What they do when they visit your website • What device they are using • How much time they spend at your site • Whether they buy anything or take other actions you want tracked • Shows you the data in real time • Allows you to do more sophisticated marketing such as retargeting
- 11. How Google Analyticsworks
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- 13. Basics of GoogleAnalytics • Create a gmail account. • Go to the products page and click get started. • Type in the website url. • You’ll get a code to use. Tracking overall website traffic.
- 14. Basics of GoogleAnalytics If you use a website builder program such as Go Daddy, there is a field that you put the code in. Done. Then you track the web traffic at the Google Analytics dashboard.
- 15. Basics of GoogleAnalytics For some businesses in the room this might be good enough. You can see the overall statistics. Knowing your website’s stats will provide you with an overall sense of whether what you are doing to get people to visit is actually working.
- 16. Basics of GoogleAnalytics If you have a website built using html code, you add the tracking code (in the form of javascript) in a box that is invisible when the page shows online.
- 17. Beyond the basics Settinggoals to track specific actions that are closely tied to “conversion”
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- 19. “That’s one smallstep for man ...” • Macro conversion … you sell them something • Micro conversion … you get them to take some small step towards your goal of selling them something like signing up for an email. The strength of using Google Analytics is that it helps you track what Micro conversion led to the Macro conversion.
- 20. Why track conversions?Who really brought them to your site? • Attribution is assigning credit for a conversion • Last-click attribution … use to get all the credit, whatever brought them there that generated that last click of a conversion • But now we can look at all marketing activity that helped generate that conversion …. Customers will likely interact with you many times before they convert • “Assists” … like a basketball player that passes the ball to someone who then scores. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” John Wannamaker
- 21. Setting up agoal and tracking conversions • I want to know how many people went to this particular page at this website.
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- 25. Conversions Tracking whether ornot your site visitors are clicking on links or doing other actions that you desire helps you determine what is working.
- 26. Analytics + AdWords Linkingyour AdWords account to boost your potential
- 27. Creating An AdWordsAccount • Login to your gmail account • Answer a few questions about time zone, etc. • Verify the account through email Tracking overall website traffic.
- 28. We’ll use ourcompany website as an example for how to set up an AdWords campaign.
- 29. Creating An AdWordsCampaign • Set up your budget • Select geography • Type in ad copy • Select products or services to advertise
- 35. This detailed information provides whoeveris handling your AdWords accounts insight to make your dollars work harder.
- 36. Filters • For companieswith lots of employees accessing the website, you can block their visits and other actions from being included in your data.
- 37. Putting it alltogether Today we reviewed the five steps of how you can implement Google Analytics and link AdWords to make your marketing dollars work harder!!
- 38. Other items ofinterest Other digital marketing tools to help you dollars work harder.
- 39. Schonfeld & Associates Weoften get asked “How much should a business spend on advertising?” • Largest aggregator of marketing spending in the U.S. • We can tell you what your category of business spends (your peer group).
- 40. AdMall Another question weget asked is “How should we spend our advertising budget?” • We lease a market tool called “AdMall Pro” that will tell us how much of a business category’s budget is spent in digital.
- 41. Targeting Digital Display– Our Website Use what you learn about your website visitors to better target them online. • We use Doubleclick For Publishers to manage the advertising placement on our websites. We have the ability to target our website visitors by: • Time of day • Geography • Device they are using • Content
- 42. Targeting Digital Display– National Sites • We lease a sales tool called “Thunder” that will scrape your website, build different digital ad sizes, then present them on how they will look. We can do this for you in less than 5 minutes. • We can then target local adults who are visiting national websites, buy impressions through an “Ad Exchange” and place your ad in front of them.
- 43. Programmatic – RealTime Bidding (RTB) • How did Big O Tires get their ad here? They bid on it similar to how you bid in AdWords but with some key differences.
- 44. Programmatic – RealTime Bidding (RTB) • Every fraction of a second as people click on a webpage to go to several pieces of information is sent to an “Exchange” just like Wall Street to buy and sell stocks. But what is sent is the content on the page, the ad unit that is available, and then any other relevant information the publisher has gathered about people who visit their site.
- 45. Programmatic – RealTime Bidding (RTB) • If you are the winning bidder, your ad impression serves to the targeted user. • You must have access to the Exchange in order to take advantage of this service.
- 46. 4646 Utilize pixel trackingto capture site visit information for effective audience development and retargeting. Visit on your site: Visitor learns about your product, but leaves before purchasing. Tracking pixel captures visitor’s data. Data is captured: Data is used to identify audiences that are most likely to be interested in your business. Your ad is retargeted: Ads are retargeted to original website visitor, look alike audiences or other custom audiences. Re-targeting people who visit your website
- 47. 4747 Stage 1: • Consumervisits ESPN.com. • Best Buy display ad seen, but not clicked. • Influence occurs consciously or unconsciously. Stage 2: • Consumer goes directly to BestBuy.com. • View-through metrics are captured. • Banner ad did its job. Using View-through for accuracy. Our view-through service allows you to track people who were served your ad, didn’t click on it, but eventually went to your website.
- 48. 4848 About Adtaxi Adtaxi isa client-centric digital marketing organization that brings scale, precision, and sophistication to digital marketing. Leveraging the belief that people matter as much as technology, Adtaxi helps advertisers solve complex marketing challenges with custom, performance-driven solutions. 4,000 Monthly Advertising Campaigns 12 Regional Offices 230 Employees and Growing Digital Marketing Experts Platform Agnostic Audience Centric Data Driven
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- 52. Questions you shouldask … Whoever built your website … • Are all web pages tagged with your UA code or javascript? • Is your site optimized for mobile? Google has made major changes to their landing page due to the rise of access on smaller, mobile devices instead of desktops? • Is your website organically being ranked on page one of search results for relevant search words? Whoever manages your digital marketing dollars … • Is your marketing spending in line with your peer group? • What tools are you using to insure you are getting the best ROI on your AdWords investment? • How are you targeting your digital display ads? • Have you tried remarketing?
- 53. Free Audit ofyour Google Analytics! We’ll be glad to analyze your website activity from your Google Analytics dashboard to help you with your Search Engine Marketing (SEM)!! Here are some things we’ll take a look at and provide recommendations … • Audience analysis • Geographic analysis • Behavior summary for site traffic • Goal setup, completion and conversion analysis and recommendations • Channel summary • Paid search in depth analysis – if AdWords is linked to Google analytics • Also if you have any questions about Google Analytics
- 54. Granting read accessto us. Here’s how to grant us read access … • Click on the Admin gear icon at the Google Analytics dashboard • Click on User Management • In the Add permissions for area type in adtaxisfbay1@gmail.com, click “Read & Analyze”, click Notify this user by email, and then click the Add button.
- 55. Complete Our BriefSurvey! Please let us help you … A brief survey that will help us provide specific, actionable items when we deliver the results of your Google Analytics audit. • Tell us about you • About your ideal customer • What your marketing objectives are • How you currently market your products & services
- 56. Book Your AuditAppointment • Google Analytics audits will be done within 5 business days. We can begin booking appointments with openings starting next Monday, April 3rd.
- 57. We will alsobring a free audit of your digital marketing! Free Digital Marketing Audit!
- 58. We simplify digitalmarketing for businesses everywhere.
- 59. Contact information. Dennis J.Sheely Director of NorCal Community Media Email: dsheely@bayareanewsgroup.com Website: www.norcalaudiencesolutions.com Personal website: www.dennisjsheely.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dennisjsheely Twitter: @djsheely Phone: 707-330-7528 Q & A View this presentation at: http://www.norcalaudiencesolutions.com/faq/presentations/
Editor's Notes
- #5 In the early days of internet advertising on it was primarily display ads – like the ones you would run in print – only less information. Along the way images could be clicked and take you to your business website. And then those who clicked could be counted. The “click through rate” because the early barometer of whether your campaign was successful. And then in the past few years websites were rebuilt to be optimized so it would scale down to the screen size of a table or mobile phone.
- #6 I won’t talk much about the importance of this today but your website needs to be responsive – so that it detects what device is accessing it and then reshapes and moves the content so the user has a pleasant experience. Mobile sites started out as separate web addresses but that is not good – have your site changed to be responsive.
- #7 While what was presented on the screen and how it was presented was evolving, so were the types of advertising with search being the core product. Search engines such as Google made it real easy to find a business or content about any topic in the world. And if your product was tied to that topic then you could buy an ad to appear next to the search results, called Search Engine Marketing. Many early digital ad agencies promised shortcuts to jump your website to the organic results area referred to as Search Engine Optimization. Claiming your spot on a map became more important as folks use their phone to get directions. Each of these topics could be a separate workshop.
- #8 Few people probably remember the public debate over internet privacy concerns. When was the last time you heard about that topic? Basically, when you visit or now even if you are served any digital component, what happens next can be tracked. A cookie – a small snippet of code – is stored onto your computer and will stay there until you “clear your cookies”. There are ways to use the internet “in cognito” or anonymously but few do it. The attention shifted away from being tracked online to being hacked online which is a much more serious concern for us all. Many products and ways to minimize this have been born. Still, the mainstream digital marketing solutions are built upon being able to track users with cookies. So just how prevalent is this?
- #9 The invitations to this workshop said you’d get a few tips and so here is tip #1. Ghostery is a free plug-in for your Chrome browser that will show you what third party codes are at that website tracking your visit. Here at ESPN this plug-in detected 15 trackers. These trackers are invisible computer code that ESPN allowed to place on their website. By tracking what a visitor to your site does, you can then make adjustments to your marketing to improve the results you want. While there are many tracking programs, the big one is Google. That’s the one we’ll focus on because it’s the one that you can use immediately if you are not already, and perhaps do a few other items that you might learn about today. So to see if you are ahead or behind what your competition is doing, install the Ghostery plug-in to your Chrome browser then go to your competitor’s website and see what tracking programs they are using.
- #10 And the most important address is no longer your home address. It’s your “IP Address”. That stands for Internet Protocall and is a summary of another layer of numbers called a Subnet mask which defines how you are getting onto the internet – what host – and what network you are connected too. IP is a summary of all those numbers that basically does one thing -- defines where the computer you are on is located in the world. That is the most important address to digital marketers. Your IP Address can be detected and saved. And then as other characteristics of that IP address are obtained it is stored and you are basically being profiled.
- #11 And that brings us to the focus of our attention today, Google Analytics. This is a huge, powerful tool that maybe local businesses are not taking advantage of. Many local businesses are now buying AdWords, but they’ve jumped over a significant and FREE way to track their customers and to tie-in their AdWords campaigns. By linking a Google Analytics tracking ID to your web address or javascript code to each page of your website, here are the kinds of things you can learn about people who visit your website … [read list].
- #12 A graphical way of understanding how Google Analytics works is that they collect the data using a tracking code, configure the data so that it can be viewed in an understandable dashboard, and those reports can be customized by the user to show the information in a way that is most meaningful for them.
- #13 Our adtaxi agency has a mantra, Metrics that matter. What we mean by that is that digital marketing should focus on what matters. This graphic from Google illustrates that – audience metrics, behavior metrics and conversion metrics. We’ll cover these in detail.
- #14 So to get started, here are the basics. Create a gmail account. Go to the Google products page and click get started. Type in your website url, answer a few other questions and viola you’ve got your Tracking ID and also the javascript version. You use the Tracking ID to link your entire website, the javascript version is for multiple page websites so you can track visitors to each page.
- #15 I have a personal website. I used Go Daddy to build it. It’s just a one page website. So I typed in my Google Analytics Tracking ID in the space provided. So now I can get basic information on those visiting my site. So for local businesses who have even the most basic of websites built with wizard driven programs such as Go Daddy, you can still get good statistics just like other companies that pay to have their websites scratch made using html coding.
- #16 Here’s the overview dashboard of Google Analytics. You can see it the upper left that it is for my personal website. If you have multiple websites you can add them to the same analytics dashboard to make it easier to toggle from one to another. On the overview page you can see a few stats. When you mouse over the headings a definition of what that stat is measuring appears in a callout window. Sessions, for example, is the amount of time a person spends at the site. Google’s default is that a session is 30 minutes. That can be changed. The usefulness of this will depend on the type of business you are in. Users are the number of people who had at least one session during the date range. Pageviews are the number of different pages at your site that were visited. So of course if you only have a one-page website then that will affect this number. Every time a page is viewed even if it is by the same person it will get counted. The Pages / Session is just that, how many pages did a person visit during a session – this helps you measure ENGAGEMENT. We will talk a bit more about that in the coming minutes but ENGAGEMENT helps you so much in getting your website high in organic search results and really is the viewer’s score of how useful and interested they are in what you are presenting at your website. Another stat showing usefulness is the Bounce Rate, which is the number of sessions where the visitor went to your website, did nothing, and left. Why a high bounce rate? Not setting the right expectation Not providing a good experience And finally you can see the average amount of time of a session.
- #17 I mentioned another way of installing Google Analytics is by adding the javascript version of your Tracking ID to each page. You would do this by going to the html view of each of your pages and adding the code. We use Google sites for some of our internal communications at our company, so the way to do it here is the add an html widget box.
- #19 These two charts are from Google. In order to use Google Analytics beyond the basics we just looked at, you need to determine your business objective for your website. That will guide you to a better understanding of the sales funnel that has been around for decades that we all learned about in marketing classes. So what is the point of your website? What is your objective? What is it that you are trying to achieve? Consider the outcome column to help answer that. Based on that, it will help guide you to what should be on your website and what to track. For example, if you are an air conditioning company then your website very likely isn’t trying to sell a product, but rather acquire the visitor as a lead. So you should have content on your site that moves the visitor from the awareness stage – such as the brand names of air conditioners you have and some of the features – to filling out a form online to get more information or be helped.
- #20 The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, said those famous words, “that’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind”. A large portion of your digital marketing should be focused on the small step. That is called a micro conversion. Most of us want to jump to the macro conversion which usually is we sell them something. But with digital marketing, in the age where consumers can research you, your product, your service for weeks, you need to develop your website and strategies for your visitors to take small steps that will lead to the big one – the macro conversion and whatever that is for your type of business. In this illustration from Google, a micro conversion would be successfully get someone to sign up for email coupons. The macro step would be when they actually buy one of the products using the coupon.
- #21 The quote is from a late 1800’s early 1900’s owner of a large department store group based in Philadelphia that was an early proponent of advertising and considered a pioneer in large scale marketing. This is an often cited quote from people like me. Why do you want to track conversions? Because it will help clarify who brought that consumer to your website and generated the sale! In the old internet days we discussed click through rate and typically the ad provider with the click that led to a sale got all the credit. But with tracking through Google Analytics you can look at all of the micro steps that led to a macro conversion – and that allows you to move your advertising investments to where they work best. Think of the basketball analogy, usually the player who scores a lot of points gets most of the credit but those who follow the game know that “assists” -- the person who passed the ball to the person who scored is vital to putting the basket in the hoop. The same applies to digital marketing.
- #22 So let’s say I want to see how many people who visited my website went to a specific page. Let’s say that was my goal, to get visitors to go to the Digital Solutions page – or it could be who played the Simple Solution video or who downloaded a pdf or who filled out a form or if I sold products on line who went to the shopping cart.
- #23 To set a goal to track you click on the admin button in the lower left then click on Goals on the right.
- #24 Google Analytics is very intuitive – easy to set up what page you are interested in tracking and so on. So you can set a destination goal to that url. There are also templates that you can select then modify to meet your needs.
- #25 Google Analytics is very intuitive – easy to set up what page you are interested in tracking and so on. You can have up to 20 goals on your account.
- #26 Back on your dashboard there is a section that shows “conversions” with many ways to track how many people did what you were hoping they would do.
- #28 In case you don’t have an AdWords account yet, you can set one up yourself or we can do it for you. After you get through the set up you will be asked specific questions about your business type, and a monthly budget.
- #29 So let’s use our company website to set up an AdWords campaign.
- #30 Here are the basic steps to setting up an AdWords campaign
- #31 This is the AdWords Express dashboard that provides the overview of how your AdWords campaigns are doing. Basic easy to understand statistics. But you can link your AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics dashboard where you will be able to drill down on details of the visitors that went to your website by responding to your AdWords campaigns.
- #32 In the admin area of Google Analytics, select AdWords linking.
- #33 Analytics will detect what AdWords account is associated with the website you have connected to Google Analytics. If you don’t have an AdWords account set up, you’ll be prompted to do that first then return to this page and refresh.
- #34 You then give the configuration a name, and make sure you to on all website data to be tracked – if someone clicks on an AdWords ad, you want to track each page they go to when they move from the ad to your site. Also note that this linking will allow you to use remarketing services, also called “retargeting”.
- #35 Remarketing or retargeting is when someone who has clicked on your ad returns to the internet. Google offers to allow you to place your dynamically created display ads based on your past site visitors when these visitors go to other websites that are a part of the Google Display Network or Google Search Ad campaigns. Google has partnerships with other websites in order to provide this and they share a portion of the revenue that they charge you, the advertiser, with the websites. You can’t remarket with the Google Search engine. That is because their search results are based on relevancy and bidding. So if one of your past website visitors goes to the Google landing page to conduct a search, you can’t buy an ad to target their past actions online. The only way you can get your ad in front of them there is to have a relevant message and be the highest bidder.
- #37 Filters will help you improve the accuracy of your data. For example, if you have a lot of employees working at your website, updating content, etc., you may want to exclude them from showing up in your data. So Google Analytics has a filter area to remove their visits from your reports.
- #38 Today we learned about how to set up your Analytics and get your ID or javascript so you can “tag” your website and pages. We looked at how to establish goals. We reviewed how to set up campaigns and monitor the activity in the Google Analytics dashboard, using those dashboards to look at reports, and how to make sure your data is clean.
- #40 We often get asked the question of how much should a business spend on advertising. Well there is research to answer this question and we have it. Schonfeld & Associates is the largest aggregator and often quoted source of marketing expenditures in the U.S. Here’s just one example, furniture stores. They spend 6.8 % of their annual sales – called an Ad to sales ratio – on marketing. So we advise starting with that, and then increase or decrease depending on competitive and other factors.
- #41 Another question we get is how to spend the advertising budget – on what media or services. We lease a tool call AdMall that provides us with reports that shows how business categories invest their advertising budget. For furniture, about 22% of the total ad budget goes to digital advertising.
- #42 Once you have Google Analytics set up, you can use what you learn about your site visitors and those who convert to then improve your digital advertising. For our local website, we can use what your Google Analytics activity shows to target by time of day, geography, if one device is dominate over another such as desktop versus mobile, and content – what pages or types of stories your prospects are interested in. My colleagues here at the Santa Cruz Sentinel can do that for you.
- #43 Some clients want to target even more specifically. We lease a marketing tool called “Thunder” that will scrape your website, build various digital display ads in all shapes and sizes and then we select demographics such as gender, age and lifestyle interests, and through the Thunder tool we purchase ad units on national websites that are visited by IP addresses of residents in the geography you want.
- #44 The Ad Exchange is a bidding process. Here’s how it works … how did Big O Tires get their ad here on a national site like CNN? The bidding works similar to how you use AdWords but with some key differences.
- #47 Retargeting is simple to understand. Have you ever searched for a product or service maybe at Google, then later you start seeing ads for the product you were searching for on any website you visited later? That’s called retargeting. And we provide that service through our digital agency, Adtaxi.
- #48 In the early internet marketing years, the last click always got the credit for the conversion. But with Adtaxi’s view through service, we can track and follow people who visit a website that was served your ad, but they don’t click on it, but later they go to your site. This allows you to see accurately who is bring your site traffic and conversions to you and you’ll be amazed that it’s not always the last click.
- #50 Because Adtaxi is a Google Premier Partner – one of only 31 partners in North America, we have access to search tools that other people and companies don’t have. One of them is a search intelligence tool that allows us to provide sharper recommendations to advertisers who use us to manage their AdWords campaigns.
- #55 If you want us to analyze your website using your Google Analytics traffic, you will need to give our email address a “Read & Analyze” access so we can look at your statistics and make some recommendations to you. There are flyers on how to do this available when you leave.
- #58 Our Ad Mall tool also does a 90 second scrape of your url and shows your digital marketing footprint online. Basically red x’s are bad, meaning your presence is light, while green checkmarks are good. We’ll bring this audit along with us when we meet to share your Google Analytics results.