My nephew and I were going for a bike ride recently when he asked me what I did for work.
Working in Digital Marketing, we’re used to the challenge of explaining our jobs to our friends and family (what, do you run the Google?). I usually find that telling a real life story helps get the message across…
So, I asked my nephew (who is 11), “What would you do if your toilet got blocked?”.
The conversation went like this:
Me: What would you do if your toilet got blocked?
Nephew: Well I’d find a plumber of course!
Me: Where would you find the plumber?
Nephew: I’d go into town.
Me: Into town? What, like all the plumbers are just lining up on a side street waiting for people to come and give them work?
Nephew: Ooohh… Well, maybe I could look them up on the computer?
Good thing we can help all those plumbers (& other businesses) lined up in town waiting for people to come find them…
Everywhere we look, we’re bombarded by advertisements — targeted posts that seem to read our minds, businesses offering similar products or services, sponsored features that receive top billing when we perform a simple Google search.
It’s an oversaturated, relentlessly competitive market, which means it’s essential for business survival that you maximise your exposure and place your services or offerings in front of the right audience. But how exactly do you do this? And for smaller businesses, how do you do it without breaking the bank?
A strong digital marketing framework using the power of Google Analytics will go a long way toward helping you stand out amongst your competition. And the best part? It’s easy once you understand the basics. Keep reading to learn how you can use Google Analytics to boost your digital marketing strategy and grow your business.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a data collection and insights service that enables you to track statistics (such as how many people visit a given product page on your website) and to fine-tune and optimise your website and online presence for performance and conversions.
Essentially, it tells you who’s visiting your website and tracks their behaviour within your digital ecosystem. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for businesses of every size and industry.
What does Google Analytics track?
Google Analytics tracks a slew of information regarding your website visitors, including location, age, gender, interests, purchase preferences, and device type (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.).
Outside of this basic demographic data, it tells you which of your website pages they visit, how they navigate there (do they come from a Google search? a Facebook ad? a different page within your site?), how long they stay on a particular page and on your website as a whole, whether or not they click any links, and which actions they take (product purchase, newsletter subscription, etc.).
Why should you use Google Analytics?
First off: it’s free. And second? It’s a truly valuable tool in your digital marketing kit that can help you better understand your audience — what they like, what they dislike, what compels them to stay, what loses their interest — and subsequently refine your website (messaging, imagery, user journey and experience) in order to drive sales and traffic.
With Google Analytics, you can tell what’s working (social media posts and campaigns, keyword targeting, word-of-mouth) and allocate more resources to those channels and platforms — and you can stop wasting time, energy, and money on strategies that aren’t providing you with solid returns.
Getting started with Google Analytics: a breakdown
Click ‘Set up for free’, and choose a name for your account. Customise your data sharing settings, and click ‘Next’.
Analytics gives you the option to measure data on your website, app, or both. Choose the option that’s best for you, and click ‘Next’.
Here’s where you enter the website URL or app information you’d like Analytics to pull data from. Google calls these entities ‘properties’.
Accept the terms and conditions, and create your account.
You’ll see an ‘email communications’ pop-up; select your preferred option(s), and hit ‘Save’.
Analytics will then take you to the tracking code page. This code enables Google Analytics to track your data, and it needs to be added to each of your webpages. The method by which you do this depends on your hosting platform (WordPress, Shopify, etc.), and a quick Google search should give you the step-by-step instructions you need.
Once you’ve added the code to your webpages, you should immediately see data in the ‘Realtime’ section of the left-hand sidebar (marked by the clock icon).
Next, you’ll want to set your business goals. Goals are the critical actions you’d like users to take on your website, whether that’s purchasing a product, signing up for your email newsletter, reading a piece of your content, or anything of the sort.
To set a goal, click the ‘Admin’ button at the top of the dashboard, and hit ‘Goals’ underneath the ‘View’ column on the right-hand side.
Click the red ‘New Goal’ button, and either choose from one of the template options (things like ‘Place an order’, ‘Make a payment’, and ‘Create an account’) or create your own custom goal. You’ll add a goal description and details (follow Google’s instructions), and click ‘Save’.
You can have up to 20 active goals at any one time, and goal conversion data is stored in the ‘Conversions’ section of the ‘Realtime’ tab in the left sidebar.
Using your data and insights
Once you’ve got your account and goals set up, you can start using Google Analytics to refine and optimise your online presence and performance through digital marketing.
Analytics offers several different reporting categories, all easily accessed via the sidebar on the left of the dashboard.
The Audience category tracks basic demographic information such as age, gender, interests, and location. Change the date range at the top to view time-specific data (useful if you’re tracking the success of a particular campaign, messaging around a new product launch or content piece, etc.).
The Acquisition category tells you how visitors landed on your website or webpage (social network, organic Google search, etc.). If you have a Google Ads account, you can link it to your Google Analytics account (in the ‘Admin’ section) to measure the success of ads and keywords and to incorporate that into your analytics.
The Behaviour category offers insights into your website performance and content — such as how quickly your site loads, which pages are the best-performing, and which pages are the worst-performing. It’s highly useful in determining which pages or sections of your website you might need to spruce up in order to keep people within your ecosystem.
And finally: the Conversions category tracks the success of the business goals you’ve set up.
Each report comes complete with layers of detail, so you can go as in-depth on your performance and analytics as you want.
Want some help tracking your digital performance and implementing Google Analytics? Book a strategy session with Harper!
Google Analytics can be a bit daunting — but we can help make it easy. At Harper, we specialise in helping businesses develop digital marketing strategies specifically tailored to their needs.
If you’d like some help setting up Google Analytics for your business and understanding how you can use the data and insights it collects to improve awareness, increase sales, and grow your business, then book a free digital strategy session with us here.
Voice search is no longer the work of science fiction. It’s real, it’s here and it stands poised to transform the search game as we know it. What’s driving this trend? What does the future have in store for voice search? And how can businesses and marketers prepare themselves for the revolution?
The Rise of Voice
Voice recognition technology might seem like a modern innovation, but it’s actually been around in one form or another for more than 60 years. Back in 1952, Bell Laboratories designed a system known as Audrey, which could recognise spoken numbers. A decade later, IBM introduced Shoebox, a computer that could understand 16 basic words. And in 2008, the technology finally went mobile, when Google released the Voice Search app for iPhone.
Fast forward to today, and consumer adoption of voice search is skyrocketing. Between 2008 and 2016, the volume of voice searches increased 35-fold, according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report. In 2016, about 20 percent of Google app searches were voice searches. And in 2018, 91 million people in the U.S used voice technology at least once a month, according to figures from eMarketer.
Looking at the timeline, it’s clear that voice search didn’t arrive overnight. So why are consumers only now starting to get interested in voice search? There are two main reasons:
1. It’s Everywhere
The explosive growth of voice search mostly comes down to the fact that the technology is now supremely accessible. Voice search has been successfully integrated into a huge range of mainstream consumer products, with smart speakers (such as Google Home and Amazon Echo) leading the charge. In fact, smart speakers sales grew 300 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to figures from Strategy Analytics.
Of course, it’s not only smart speaker manufacturers who are getting in on the action. Just about every major tech company is leveraging the power of digital personal assistants and voice search. You can ask Siri to send a text message for you while you’re driving, tell Google Assistant to read you the news, use Cortana to update your calendar and command your Xbox to start streaming Netflix. Voice search is no longer about the novelty factor; it’s a useful, efficient and convenient feature that is quickly becoming a normal part of everyday life.
2. It’s Getting Better at Understanding Us
The way we communicate verbally is very different from the way we write and type. We’re less formal, less specific and more verbose, which stands in stark contrast to the keyword-laden, ultra-concise queries we’d usually type into a search engine. This has been a bit of a sticking point for voice search, as the technology has traditionally struggled to separate meaningless human chit chat from user intent (i.e. what we’re actually searching for).
Thankfully, this is (mostly) a thing of the past. The AI that powers voice search has become exponentially smarter in recent years and is constantly getting better at understanding context and user intent. In 2017, Microsoft’s voice recognition software achieved an error rate of just 5.1 percent, which put it on par with human error rate. Consumers are feeling more inclined to use voice search because they can use natural, conversational language and still get accurate results.
How Can Businesses Prepare for the Revolution?
Use schema markup: Schema is a type of on-page data markup that helps search engines better understand your website and content, and therefore the services your company offers. This type of structured data can be used to increase the chances of your business being found for local voice search queries.
Focus on long-tail keywords: Short-tail keywords fell out of favour a long time ago, and voice search may well be the final nail in the coffin. As we’ve learned, users are more likely to ask long, complex search strings when using voice search. With this in mind, focus on using long-tail keywords that are very specific to your business.
Incorporate FAQS into your content: Voice search is conversational. An easy way to naturally replicate this style is to use FAQs to answer common questions that your audience might have about your business, services or industry.
Rethink your SEO strategy: The world of SEO is constantly changing. This might be the perfect time to audit your current strategy and rethink your current digital marketing spend.
Curious about what you need to do to optimise your business for voice search? Book your free strategy session to get a better understanding of how the voice search revolution is going to affect you.
You do blogs. Ads. Google ads. Facebook ads. You attend various networking groups and wax lyrical about your company’s services to anyone who will listen. No rock is left unturned in your pursuit of marketing excellence.
Yes, it’s time consuming, and yes, there’s a fair amount of spend involved, but it is driving traffic to your site, and that has to be considered a success… right?
Maybe.
Obviously, increased traffic is a good thing, but whether or not it is a true indicator of performance really comes down to how you define success as a business.
Defining success
In recent years, marketing has become less of an art and more of a science. The days of vague measurements of brand sentiment are long gone, replaced by an endless string of ones and zeroes that allow businesses of all sizes to calculate performance at an incredibly granular level.
Of course, being able to harvest this information is more or less pointless if you’re not applying it any meaningful way (i.e. using it to track performance and make business decisions), which means that marketers need to be mindful of their marketing goals now more than ever. Without clearly defined objectives, there’s ultimately no way of knowing whether or not your marketing is working. And the benefits are clear – marketers who set goals are more than four times more likely to report success than those who don’t!
So, what does marketing success look like for you? The answer to this question will naturally vary from company to company but, generally speaking, most businesses will have four major marketing goals:
Building a brand
Generating leads
Converting leads into sales
Establishing customer loyalty
After defining your specific goals, it’s a matter of setting KPIs to gauge performance and tracking whether your marketing efforts are moving your business toward your own unique definition of marketing success. This brings us to our next point…
Tracking performance
You might be surprised to learn that only 1 in 4 marketers are able to measure and report their contributions to the business. While there are probably a few factors at play here, one of the main reasons why so many businesses still struggle to gauge marketing performance is because they’re simply keeping track of the wrong things (or not tracking them altogether!). Here are a few tips to help you avoid becoming part of this statistic:
1. Track everything that can be tracked
For marketing analytics to be useful, they need to be tracked and analysed over the course of months and years. A snapshot of data from a specific point in time can be useful, but it may not be an accurate representation of long-term trends.
With this in mind, it’s important to start tracking and monitoring everything that pertains to your marketing goals. Google Analytics is one of the simplest (and most affordable!) ways to track website and app analytics, and Google offers a variety of tools to help get you started. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feature their own analytics tools, but there are also third-party tools that provide greater functionality.
At Harper Digital, we offer our clients a live reporting dashboard that combines data from all sources and gives a snapshot of activity, allowing visibility into what’s being generated by each medium.
2. Assign a value to each step of the funnel
As you are probably aware, the purchase funnel is a model that illustrates the customer journey toward purchasing a product. Something that is less widely known is that each step in this journey can be translated into a dollar amount, and should ideally be assigned a monetary value based on the conversion rate of each individual step.
For example, let’s say your company sells a product worth $100. Thanks to your analytics (remember step #1!), you know that your sales team can close 10 percent of people who download your e-book, which means you can assign the action of downloading an ebook the value of $10 (i.e. 10 percent of $100). Similarly, if you know that 2 percent of people who opt in to your newsletter will buy your product, you can assign that action the value of $2. Monetising each step provides crucial insight into which parts of the funnel are working, and where you should be concentrating your efforts.
3. Compare attribution models
An attribution model is a set of rules that determine how credit for conversions are attributed to different marketing channels. Credit is usually given to the Last Interaction (the last action a customer takes before converting), but that may not necessarily be the right model for you.
For example, if your company is relatively new and your marketing efforts are primarily focused around brand awareness, you may find that the First Interaction attribution model is more suitable. Alternatively, if you believe that your marketing efforts become less valuable as time goes on, you may find that the Time Decay attribution model is a better fit. It’s important to take the time to assess different models to see which one is most applicable to your business.
Using data to achieve defined goals
Successful digital is attainable for companies of all sizes and budgets. Essentially, it boils down to defining your marketing objectives, setting KPIs to achieve those goals, and using data to measure your progress. Marketing with intent and taming the power of big data are key for every business that wishes to make the most of its marketing efforts.
If you’d like to explore this further, hit us up for a complimentary digital strategy session where we’ll work with you to come up with the best approach to measuring your business’s marketing activity.
An age-old question in the world of digital marketing is “Which is better: PPC or SEO?” And our response is almost always “It depends, but usually both.” While this may sound like a bit of a cop out, there really is no one-size-fits-all answer – it all comes down to what will work best given the unique factors that make up your industry, company and product or service.
What we can say is that a two-pronged approach will offer the best results most of the time for most businesses.
Why?
Well, SEO and PPC are complementary marketing models, each with their own pros and cons. When used in conjunction, they can effectively bolster the other’s weak points, maximising your chances of hitting all your business goals in the short as well as the long term. Read on for a quick primer on the basics principles of SEO and PPC and find out how you integrate them into your marketing strategy.
What are the benefits of SEO?
SEO is the practice of raising the visibility of your website via organic (unpaid) search engine results. About 67 percent of all clicks on search engine result pages go to the top five listings, while the first page receives around 95 percent of web traffic. To get in on this action, you need your brand to appear as high up the results page as possible when a prospect types a business-related query into a search engine.
Long-term visibility
Perhaps the great advantage of SEO is its longevity. Unlike PPC, there’s no expiry date on SEO content, making is sustainable and – if executed correctly – very profitable over the long term.
Strengthen brand
Smart SEO content not only helps clients find your company on search engines but can also play a key role in positioning your brand as an authority in your space. Blog posts, FAQs, and how-to guides all lend credibility to your brand, which can increase your chances of conversion.
Cost effective
It does take a while to start seeing results with SEO, but after the initial groundwork has been laid the clicks are more or less free. SEO traffic is organic, meaning there’s no direct cost per click or lead as there is with PPC, which makes SEO more financially sustainable over the long term.
What are the benefits of PPC?
Whereas SEO is more of a long-term investment, PPC is geared toward getting results in the here and now. PPC allows you to immediately get eyeballs on your product or service, and highly customisable targeting options ensure your efforts are focused in all the right places.
Instant visibility
Launching a new product? Need instant feedback? Running a flash sale? Sometimes you simply don’t have the time to build up a marketing campaign. PPC excels in these situations, giving your brand an instantly visible platform.
Better analytics
Search engines do a pretty good job of concealing organic search metrics in the name of user privacy. However, the same rules don’t apply when it comes to PPC, giving analytically savvy marketers deep insight into which keywords are converting, ROI and more.
Budgeting consistency
While the leads generated by PPC do come at a cost, the ability to cap daily spend ensures the marketing budget doesn’t get out of hand. Combined with smart, localised keywords, PPC really can deliver fantastic ROI.
A case for using both SEO and PPC
As you can see, SEO and PPC have their own strengths and weaknesses and work best when used in synergy. PPC offers instant results and the information you gain from PPC campaigns (whether it’s A/B testing, analytics information or keyword data) can be used to fuel deeper SEO strategy. Using a combination of SEO and PPC also strengthens your contact points, allowing you to more effectively guide prospects through the funnel from initial awareness all the way to conversion.
So, SEO and PPC should be used in tandem. But how can you start applying them to your business?
While SEO is a pretty deep field, the good news is that there are many things you can do yourself to start optimising your website. Applying the fundamentals of on-page SEO (keywords, meta tags, SEO-friendly headlines and more) are critical for helping search engines understand what your website is about, which in turn can help you climb the results ladder.
In addition, creating a Google My Business listing, maintaining a Facebook business page and establishing your company in local online directories can add more authenticity to your brand, which can further boost visibility. Finally, working toward developing a backlink strategy (that is, links on other websites that point to your website) can also do wonders for your search engine rankings.
Curious about how SEO-friendly your website currently is and how you could improve? Register for a free SEO site audit and we’ll give you a comprehensive report revealing how you can better optimise your website, as well as a free 30 minute strategy session.
Facebook was once little more than a junkpile of pointless memes, poorly framed selfies and needy updates from your attention-starved friends. Okay, so if your feed’s anything like mine, Facebook is definitely still home to all those things, but it has also evolved to become one of – if not the – most powerful digital marketing tool for New Zealand businesses.
Regardless of which industry your company operates in, there are very real benefits to leveraging the power of the most popular social media platform on the planet. Here are three of the most important:
Highly targeted audiences
With almost 2 billion users (and 2.5 million users in New Zealand alone), there’s no denying Facebook’s potential for getting eyeballs onto your brand. However, while these figures are impressive in their own right, I think it’s important to note that the real power of Facebook advertising lies in its ability to segment audiences right down to the nitty gritty – and I do mean nitty gritty!
For example, Facebook advertising enables you to target your campaigns by:
Location: Ensure your messages are reaching relevant markets by targeting your audience by country, city and post code. You can also choose to exclude certain locations.
Demographic:Further refine your audience by age, gender, relationship status, education, career and income.
Interests:This is where Facebook advertising really starts to get good. Define your ideal audience according to their hobbies, interests and pages they engage with on Facebook.
Behaviours:Get a more complete picture of your customers by diving deep into their buying habits, travel preferences and more.
These segmenting options allow you to really drill into your market base and create tailored campaigns that are targeted towards a very, very specific audience. For instance, a jewellery company could target Auckland women aged 18-54 who are in a relationship, earn $40,000-$100,000, have an interest in beauty and fashion, and have recently shopped for fine jewellery. When executed correctly, this type of highly targeted advertising can drastically boost your chances of conversion.
Enhanced brand influence
Social media has democratised marketing in many ways. In years gone by, building strong brand influence was often only possible with million dollar marketing budgets, but thanks to Facebook and other social channels, businesses big and small can now cultivate long-lasting, meaningful relationships with their audiences.
How?
Well, Facebook advertising removes many of the layers of traditional marketing, allowing you to connect with customers in a way that is transparent, honest and human. With some strategic planning and a healthy dose of empathy, Facebook advertising allows you to establish your company not only as a thought leader in your niche, but as a brand that customers actually like and want to engage with.
In this regard, Facebook advertising is less about cramming your product down people’s throats and more about fostering trust and loyalty through honest communication.
Visual nature creates demand
Humans are highly visual creatures, and few things resonate with our sense of desire as much as a well-placed image or video. Consequently, visual content is very much the name of the game in the modern marketing world. In fact, 95 percent of marketers say their visual content is at least twice as effective as their text content, while almost 1 in 10 report it be 10 times more effective, according to figures collated by Chute and Digiday.
Simply put, bang for buck, there is no better platform for your visual content than Facebook. More than 350 million images are uploaded to Facebook daily, while 100 million hours of video are watched every single day.
How can you get in on the visual action?
Images: Create demand and strengthen your company’s brand. Image carousels can be used to showcase new products, while infographics are an effective way of condensing data-heavy reports into easily digestible tidbits.
Videos: Take your storytelling to the next level. Educate your audience with how-tos and demonstration videos, create excitement for new products or take your customers behind the scenes. Facebook’s algorithms tend to favour video content, so a well crafted video can have excellent results.
Live videos: Candid and spontaneous, Facebook Live gives customers a transparent window into your business that can further build trust.
Proof!
I’ve worked with a number of Kiwi businesses across a variety of niches, all of which have seen fantastic results from Facebook advertising. Get in touch today to discuss how targeted Facebook advertising could work for your business.
