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Social media marketing essentials are our weekly round-up of what’s new if you’re looking to apply social media in your   marketing. We select the best posts from the many we scan each week so you don’t have to.

We include updates about new services from the main forms of social presence, i.e. Facebook, Linked In and Twitter and also best practice articles advising how to develop and implement social media marketing strategies.

Do let us know any developments that you think we’re missing by tweeting @SMARTinsights. Sign-up to our enewsletter if you’d like a reminder through the updates each Friday.

Latest social media marketing updates from this week starting 1st March 2010

• Trick question: are you a publisher or a media owner – my post for The Marketer

Value: ★★★

Commentary: A summary of one of my main points from my Keynote last week at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference

Implication: To engage your audience in the short-term (to convert) and to engage in the longer term (to develop brand engagement) all organisations need to think like a publisher to create quality content to help them compete.

• The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor – Social media today
  

Value: ★★★

Commentary: A straightforward introduction of what you could or should be measuring through an analytics tool such as Google Analytics.

Implication: Although it’s not explained in the article you need to setup a custom segment or filter in Google Analytics as explained in our post on how to setup Google Analytics for your business.
Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Branding
Digital marketing tactic: Online PR, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Facebook marketing, Linked In marketing, Twitter marketing
Advice type: Best Practice, Latest developments
Expertise level: Essentials, Expert, Intermediate

In my interview with SEO specialist Kevin Morley of Internet marketing agency Search Path we discuss an interesting perspective on link-building.

For SEO success is competitive markets (aren’t they all?) your approach to linkbuilding simply has to be better than the competitors. To review how you successful you are, I recommend using one of the two most established link-building tools Majestic SEO or Linkscape which I covered in my interview with on how to compare link analysis tools.

Of course quality of links is more important than quantity when it comes to links, but as a starting point to benchmark against competitors, try this backlink history comparison tool.

Q1. What is value added link building?

The techniques used to increase the number of inbound links pointing to a given site can be broadly organised into two groups: on one hand, there are traditional, basic techniques, many of which have been used by SEOs for many years, but have been seen to have a decreasing effect on a site’s ranking, especially for competitive keywords. On the other hand, there are the newer, more innovative value added techniques that gain freely given, editorial links, links which stand the test of time, and can really positively affect a site’s ranking for competitive keywords. I’m calling these two approaches “Old” and “New” link building.

Q2. Can you give me some examples of “Old”, traditional techniques?

Traditional techniques include such things as submitting articles to article sites; writing press releases and submitting it to low quality free PR sites; submitting ads to classified sites; or arranging mass link swaps. Because these techniques are so well understood and practiced, their effectiveness has decreased in recent years. In the early days of the web, all it took to get a page one ranking was well optimised keywords meta tag. In the years after Google came online in 1997, this was no longer sufficient. In the late 90’s and early noughties, the techniques familiar to the average link builder became established (see above for examples), and these were all that were needed to get to the top spots for competitive keywords. However, in the last couple of years, these techniques have declined in importance due to familiarity in the SEO community and Google improving its algorithm, and new methods needed to be found.

Q3. Can you give examples of innovative value added link building?

If “Old” link building was about gaming search engines, and manipulating the PageRank algorithm to one’s own advantage, then the “New” link building sees a return back to traditional marketing principles of brand building, user engagement and customer loyalty. “New” link building sees its primary function as marketing; its maxim is the marketing slogan of “make a great product, and tell people about it.” Links will naturally follow on from the web-based brand building activity, if done correctly.

So the first and most powerful value added technique is to make a great product i.e. a great website, with outstanding content. To be fair, I’m not the only one to hold this opinion: building great content is Google’s Matt Cutts’ favourite link building technique. This technique holds onto two slogans: “Build it and they will come”, and “Content is King.” On the web, this last one is doubly true: if you write informative, interesting, engaging content on whatever your niche is, then people will want to link to you. Make your content catchy, funny, shocking, useful; anything that differentiates you from your competitors and makes you stand out, and that encourages people to link to you.

A great example of top content leading to links is Wikipedia. This user edited encyclopaedia is the King of content on the web; it is seen as being authoritative on a wide range of topics, and often ranks highly in Google because people have seen the various topic pages on the site as useful informative and worth linking to. The links that the site has gained as a whole has boosted the individual pages ranking.

Q4. Can you give us any more examples of value added “New” link building?

The number of techniques that can be employed by a “new” link builder is virtually limitless. The main aim of “new” link building is to establish and engage a community of loyal customers and fans that will hopefully see linking to you as a natural outgrowth of their engagement with your brand. Anything that establishes a relationship between your brand and the customer will go some way to achieving this.

Places you can do this include Facebook. Forget the image of Facebook groups as just where people show their interest for a cause; instead check out what big brands such as Vodafone and Marks and Spencer are doing on the site. They have established comprehensive groups with blogs, content, user engagement and special offers in a interesting way that is undoubtedly going to attract links for the main sites.

Twitter is another social site where great strides are being made on the value added link building front. The upcoming social site is a great place to brand build and engage customer and prospects not only with news and views about your organisation, but also as a chance to get your personality across. This is a fundamental part of building a brand; you need to have a voice, an identity, and hopefully something to say. Its all about getting noticed, and rising up the “hubbub” of noise on the web to be distinct and valuable. If you can achieve this identity, people will start to take notice of what you say, and what you represent. This increases the likelihood of people linking to you and boosting your site’s ranking in Google.

Q5. So what is the main benefit of “New” link building techniques over “Old”?

The main difference between the “New” link building and the “Old” is that the “New” link building treats the gaining of inbound links to a site as a side effect of other marketing activity, whereas traditional link builders sees the gaining of links as a direct result of the work they do. This difference signals the change in approach, and results: the links gained by value added link building are generally better quality, freely given, editorial links as opposed to the low grade, contrived, easily achieved links by the traditional link builders.

Because the “New” approach is long term and value added, the ranking results it will achieve will be longer lasting and more profound. If done correctly, the results achieved with a value added, “New” link building campaign will be even better than what the “Old” techniques achieved in their heyday. Try it for yourself. See how the linking landscape is changing, and take advantage of the new opportunities that are presenting themselves everyday.
Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: Link-building
Advice type: Emarketing Essentials Interview
Expertise level: Expert

My keynote at the 2010 Technology for Marketing and Advertising event covered these topics:

1. The UK Digital Landscape in 2010
2. Do we REALLY understand our customers?
3. How much budget should we invest in digital?
4. What should our online mix look like?
5. What’s hot? What does everyone want to do?
6. What’s not? But should be?!
7. Key campaign ingredients
8. Summary

Optimising Your Digital Marketing Mix

View more presentations from Dave Chaffey. Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Digital media planning, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Google marketing, Web analytics
Advice type: Latest developments
Expertise level: Essentials

In this talk I look at the opportunities for combining one of the newest digital marketing techniques with one of the most established. It’s structured around 5 key questions to make your email more engaging:

• Q1. How engaged are our email subscribers? Suggestions for measuring and goal-setting for engagement
• Q2. How can we increase relevance? Recommendations on email engagement strategy
• Q3. What will make our campaign more engaging? 5 ingredients of an engaging campaign
• Q4. How can we make our email templates more effective? Practical tips for an engaging template
• Q5. How can we integrate email and social media? Examples of email and social media integration

I was asked to deliver this talk by Smart Focus who I have worked with for over 5 years as an adviser and to collaborate on developing whitepapers on email marketing best practice.

Integrating email and social media

View more presentations from Dave Chaffey.

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Loyalty
Digital marketing tactic: Customer engagement, Email marketing, Social media marketing
Digital marketing technique: Event-triggered email marketing, Personalisation
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Intermediate

Dave Chaffey’s summary of the most significant postings and developments giving guidance on Google Analytics Setup and configuration which I think all digital marketers need to be aware of. I have given a star rating of the importance ★★★★★ of the updates based on their importance to the average small-business business installation of Google analytics. Analytics Ninjas or power users may well rate more highly.

As well as my take on the major updates, you will also want to check out the Google Analytics Update page if you don’t know about – it’s tough to find. I also track the Google Analytics Blog which is great for analytics folk, but not most general marketers.

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Major developments in Google Analytics Setup and new features

• Google Analytics Annotations now available in all Accounts (Importance: ★★) Updated January 29th 2010. This featured was announced in December – see below, but frustratingly only available in some accounts.

Google Analytics Annotations Launched (Importance: ★★) Add text annotations for campaign launches, landing page redesigns, etc on your trendlines – a handy tool for businesses of all sizes, but especially where several people are involved. Update added 7th December 2009.This announcement also includes:

• • Facility to use custom variables as Advanced segments
  • Launch of setup Wizard for multidomain tracking

• New Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code (Importance: ★★★★) A new method (1st December 2009) for tagging with Google Analytics designed to reduce page load times and page view volume accuracy since it is included within the top <head> section of an HTML page rather than the more conventional foot of page.

Note, a side effect of this new tracking method is that site engagement will appear to decrease since more shorter visits to the site will be included, i.e. bounce rates will increase.Detailed technical instructions on setting up Asynchronous Tracking – it still use ga.js tracking but requires new code in a new position in the HTML page.

• Setting up Google Analytics Accounts and Profiles for a marketing team Update November 2009 – This is one of the best explanations I have seen for how to give different levels of access for different members of a sales & marketing team concentrating on different products and markets

• Setup for Multiple domains By eNor for Google Analytics Blog Posted 30th September 2009

• 12 step guide to Google Analytics setup Last update August 2009 I have developed this as a summary and gradually update / add the additional links below

• New custom variables (Importance: ★★★) October 2009 feature – useful for applying content groups idea through Page Level Custom Variables” – here they give the example of a newspaper site section

Conversion Goal and Event Tracking

• Significant GA feature update (Importance: ★★★★★) October 2009 – - my summary on new Google conversion goals and Intelligence features

• Google Analytics announce final release of Event tracking (Importance: ★★★★) June 2009 – Event tracking often uses the example of Flash and video events, but can used for other events shown below

• 10 Must Track Google Analytics Goals March 2009 – Ran Nir’s posting has great ideas for tracking customer participation and engagement on a site

• Event tracking in Google Analytics Jan 2009 – This recipe uses Event tracking to assess conversion goals such as PDF downloads and Outbound links

Using Google Analytics Intelligence

• Review of Google Intelligence feature November 2009

Custom variables in Google Analytics – example of applications (New Feb 2010)

These are probably the least used feature, but offer the ability to segment according to customer / non customer and even by profile using cookies.

• Google Analytics Custom variables –  Google Conversion Room Blog explanation and examples of using custom analytics – Updated 18th February 2010

• Using custom variables in Google Analytics – Examples of applications of custom variable

Tracking search engines in different countries with Google Analytics

• Method 1. Tracking different Google country versions with a filter

• Method 2. Brian Clifton Javascript added to page Uses _addOrganic Javascript function

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Evaluation
Digital marketing technique: Web analytics
Advice type: Latest developments
Expertise level: Expert

Learning from how other companies have adopted and managed Ebusiness and digital marketing is a must for students and professional E-business experts.

This is a compilation of case studies to act as an update to Dave Chaffey’s books.

New case studies added since last edition of books

• Crowdsourcing example Penguin Books Spinebreakers

Intranet case studies

• Example Intranet case studies 2009 From .au company Step Two Design Awards

Ecommerce strategy case studies for large organisations

• Ecommerce strategy case studies – My collection of Ecommerce case studies including Amazon, Dell, eBay Facebook, Google

• The Times business case studies These are general business case studies but for some Ebusinesses such as ASOS. A Search on “Internet” will narrow them down.

Social Media Case Studies

• UK retail brand using Facebook and Twitter

• Facebook case studies Ten examples of different types of Facebook usage

Web analytics maturity models and measurement approaches

• Toyota Case Web analytics study Excellent description of how Web analytics is used to support business strategy

• Interesting review of NPS – Net Promoter Score at Lego Including online application of NPS that is relatively rare

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Advice type: Case study
Expertise level: Essentials

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool from the moment you arrange to have the tracking code installed and you experience the thrill or anxst of your first reports appearing showing how real people are interacting with your business.

Every business now needs a Google Analytics customisation strategy

You can certainly get a lot of value from reporting and analysis using the standard setup, but to really drive results for your business, you’re better off spending some time on customisation.

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With each passing month there are more customisation options available in Google Analytics, so I believe you really need a strategy of what to customise, particularly if there are several team members using the account. This post gives my ideas on a customisation strategy based on consulting work I have done and typical usage of Google Analytics by attendees on  Econsultancy training Site  Optimization with Google Analytics – the length of the post shows that there are lots of customisation options available.

I’ve published it as the pre-read for marketers attending the training course and hope it’s useful for others who pass this way. I plan to update it as the need for new customisations appear.

If you’re on my next course, “Hi and I look forward to meeting”. Don’t worry if you don’t have time to go through all the links(!), it’s just intended to give you a flavour of some of the main concepts we cover so you can ‘hit the ground running’. It will also provide a reference after the course.

We’ll cover each of these concepts on the course, but  we spend most time on using analysis of reports to get better results rather than configuration and setup – that’s what I find interests people most!

Customisation options for Google Analytics

From several years experience of using GA, I recommend reviewing these six types of setup or configuration for Google Analytics to customise the reports you view. Some may need some tech assistance, but most can be completed by any business user, if you know where to look!

From easiest to hardest, the six customisation options are:

1. Working with reports in a smarter way

2. Segmenting your audience by setting up advanced segments

3. Creating custom reports and dashboards within Google Analytics

4. Setting up marketing campaign tracking

5. Modifying profile setup within “Google Analytics Settings”

6. Customisations that require server modifications

Resources for finding out more about Google Analytics customisation

Most Google Analytics users will have used the Google Analytics Help System which is functional, but I find that many don’t know about the excellent “Google Conversion University” which as the name suggests is a much better way to learn.

The Google Conversion University is designed to help analytics specialists take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification.  I worked my way through the GAIQ back in September 2009 and I can recommend it if analytics is a big part of what you do. But even if they’re not, I can recommend some of these lessons as a great way to learn about Google Analytics. I’ve highlighted the most useful ones here. Here’s an example:

I’ve also linked to relevant posts within Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor blog. Avinash is analytics evangelist for Google and thinks deeply about how GA can be best applied to benefit businesses. As well as his recommendations, suggestions of other users about customisations make this an excellent place to learn.

There will naturally be future updates as Google enhances it’s Analytics services. To help here, I’ve created a Google Analytics update wiki where I add a short note on the latest, most significant, changes as they happen.

1. Working with reports in a smarter way

The most basic customisation you can do is to change the way default reports are displayed. For example, changing or comparing time periods or variables or the number of results displayed. Most readers will be doing this already because the system is intuitive and you have to use it for basic analysis.

But it’s worth checking out this lesson on Interface Navigation in the Conversion University since it also shows how to compare different metrics to review correlation and how to do a quick segmentation within a report to drill down to the detail.

There are also some newer features in Google Analytics to help with report analysis which aren’t included yet in the Conversion University, so here’s the low-down on these:

Google Analytics Intelligence

What is it?

The Intelligence feature of Google Analytics currently gives you automated or custom alerts of changes in visitors from different sources like an individual country, search engine or another site.

• Read more about Google Analytics Intelligence (GA Blog)

Annotations?

Ideal for overlaying a reminder of the start of new marketing activities to jog your memory or to share with colleagues. Annotations are overlaid on the graph on each report. For instance, you can show new campaigns, new content or new publicity and relate it to changes in traffic or conversion.

• Read more about Annotations (GA Blog).

2. Setting up advanced segments

Using Advanced segments is one of the most powerful features of Google Analytics which is used routinely by analytics ninjas. But when training, I find that many marketers haven’t tried clicking the magic “Advanced Segments” button you will see at the top of right of the Google Analytics screens or in the section on the left.

Using Advanced Segments is essential if you want to find how different groups of visitors behave and then work out how well your content, messaging, offers and navigation is appealing to them.

The most useful standard segments to apply are:

• Paid and natural search traffic
• First time visitors or returning visitors

I’ll write more about custom segments in a later post, but for me, the most useful are:

• Visits from brand and non-brand searches
• Visits from social media
• Visits from key markets or country
• Visits involving different conversion types
• Engaged visits, etc

Read more Advanced segments:

• Advanced Segment lesson from Conversion University
• Advanced segments from Google Analytics help
• Introduction to Advanced Segments from Avinash Kaushik

3. Creating dashboards and custom reports within Google Analytics

When you first log-in to Google Analytics, you start with the dashboard screen for your selected profile. This is arguably less easy to configure than dashboards in other analytics systems. You can move, add or subtract reports. You add additional standard report widgets through using the “Add to Dashboard” option.

With the addition of custom reports, these can now also be incorporated in the dashboard through clicking the “Add to Dashboard option” button at the top of the screen.

Motion charts can be customsied in reports where the “Visualisation” option is available at the top of the screen.

Tip: Add additional standard or custom reports to your dashboard and then add then schedule a daily, weekly or monthly email.

Read more on custom reports:

• Quick Start Guide to Custom Reports from Google Analytics Help
• Avinash Kaushik ideas on custom reports

Read more about Bubble charts and motion charts

• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=16275

4. Setting up marketing campaign tracking

These changes are different to the other setup changes mentioned in this post in that changes aren’t made within Google Analytics, rather they are made through Google AdWords or when placing advertising or sponsorship on third-party sites.

Many companies will track AdWords because of it’s automated integration enabled from Google AdWords, but they may not track other codes or have a standard notation which needs to be defined and then added to all links involving media placements.

Google Analytics uses 5 standard dimensions for a campaign which need to be incorporated into the query string of the URL for each ad placement as this example shows:

http://www.domain.com/landing_page.php?utm_campaign=spring-sale&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=handbag.com

The campaigns report in Google Analytics will then enable you to compare media.

The table explains each of these 5 dimensions which refers to this example:

Variable Explanation utm_campaign
Recommended The name of the marketing campaign, e.g. Spring Campaign. utm_medium
Required Media channel (i.e. email, banner, CPC, etc).

What is the ‘distribution method’ that is used to get our message out to our clients? utm_source
Required Who are you partnering with to push your message. A publisher such as handbag.com, or for paid search, Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc utm_content
Optional The version of the ad (used for A/B testing) or in AdWords. You can identify two versions of the same ad using this variable. This is not always used and is NOT included in the above example. utm_term
Optional The search term purchased (if the link refers to keywords).
This is not always used and is NOT included in the above example.

The Google URL builder can help with creating these links.

Note that in the major Fall 2008 upgrade to Google Analytics, Advanced segmentation provides some standard source codes for campaign types such as paid search.

• Google Analytics Help on Campaign Tracking

Tip: Defining a standard set of online marketing source codes is essential to determining the value of different referral sources such as ad campaigns or email campaigns.

Tracking offline campaign referrals

Many companies will reference promotional URLs or so-called vanity URLs (we hate that term) in offline Print ad, Direct Mail and TV campaigns to make it easy for the customers to fulfil the offer.

Of course, they also want to track the effectiveness of different promotions.

Best practice in such offline or multichannel tracking has been explained well by Avinash in his post: Multichannel Analytics: Tracking Online Impact Of Offline Campaigns.

The core technique is to use a 301 redirect which appends a campaign code. He gives the example of http://www.dell.com/tv which redirects and appends a (non Google Analytics) tracking code referencing TV:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/tv?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&keycode=6Vc94&DGVCode=TV&dgc=TV&cid=11510&lid=985367

As with digital campaign tracking, offline campaign tracking should use standard codes for medium, source and campaign name.

5. Modifying profile setup within “Google Analytics Settings”.

The Google Analytics settings section is more likely to be used by analytics specialists who have experience of previous setup, but some of the changes are quite straightforward. We we will cover the 4 main types of settings changes most businesses will need to make:

A. Setting up conversion goals.

Visitors to a site do not have equal value to a company, they engage to different degrees as indicated by the types of pages they visit.

A visitor who has visited a product page, registered for an e-newsletter, bought a product or visited the contact page is clearly more engaged – in web analytics we call these “value events”.

Within Google Analytics these value events are known as “conversion goals” and they can be setup for an individual page such as the thank you page for an enquiry form or for a folder such as product pages or downloads. 20 goals are available, which is only a limitation if you have many lead types or want to track individual PDFs. You can apply Ecommerce tracking to non-e-commerce sites to monitor additional value events through tagging individual pages with a call to the Javascript function getOrderID().

Tip: Setting up $Index Value

This is another really powerful option I find isn’t used much. But it has great value since you can compare how successful different pages and referrers are in influencing conversion goals and generating value.

In Ecommerce sites, value from sales are used to automatically populate $Index values.

Even for non-transactional sites, you should set a nominal value on each value event such as a newsletter signup or lead-generation form since you can then see which traffic sources or pages influence success.

Many non-transactional sites which use the web for brand or relationship-building struggle to identify relevant goals beyond email signups or leads. With engagement goals you can now set thresholds for time on site and number of pages viewed.

The Breeze Learning example has been updated for the October 2009 introduction of site engagement goals which are here called Threshold Goals: http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/goals/index.html

Arguably the best use for this is to exclude visitors who are not engaged at all i.e. poor quality traffic which isn’t well targeted. I suggest greater than 10 seconds  and greater than one or two pages per visit.

Avinash Kaushik has a great post on the rationale and examples of conversion goals.

B. Setting up conversion funnels

Funnels representing the different steps in a checkout process are an essential piece of configuration for retailers. After these have been setup up you can then visualise the drop-off or attrition at each stage. But you can set up funnels for most types of site.

Tip: Setup Higher-level conversion funnels. They can also be setup for sites showing how many people engage with different parts of the site such as browsing or searching for products, viewing product content which then contribute to a lead or a sale.

• Google Analytics Help on Goals and Funnels

C. Setting up on-site search

On site search is not setup as often as you would expect  in my experience, but is usually easy – you simply specify the search parameter which is a text string used to tell the search engine what the query term is. For example, my sites use the Google custom search engine which like Google.com uses the search parameter ‘q’.

Analysing the volume and types of searches completed by site visitors can pay dividends to find the type of content visitors are looking for and whether they can actually find it or leave the site frustrated!

These types of insights are available:

Google Analytics Search

If you are using a Google appliance for search or Google custom search for providing on-site search configuration is straightforward. But other search engines can be integrated through specifying the query string parameters to Google Analytics.

• Google Analytics Help on-site search setup.

D. Setting up Filters and profiles

The granularity with which you collect and report data should be consistent with the way the organisation is structured since different people in the organisation will likely NOT want to review the results for the entire site, but instead you will want to separate out data for part of the company or a particular product, service or audience they are responsible for. Common options which you should consider to report separately on include:

• Distinct domains – Many larger companies will use different domains for different services or audiences, for example using a different Country code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .nl or .de as well as .com or .co.uk.
• Sub-domains – For example, you may have a blog on a subdomain, for example fashion retailer ASOS has http://blog.asos.com.
• Sub-folders – Alternately you may want to report separately on content in a subfolder, for example if your blog is configured this way,http://www.domain.com/blog.

To report separately on domains, sub-domains or sub-folders you need to apply the concepts of profiles and filters within Google Analytics. You may even want to have different accounts with different unique tracking codes for different countries, particularly if they operate as separate entities and you want to apply different currency and time zones to the report. Each account will use a different unique tracking code, but you will need to remember to include an aggregrate tracking code to report all the sites together.

A Google Analytics profile will typically be used to produce reports for different sites , subdomains or subfolders. Google Analytics Help on Profiles.

So, on my site I have a master profile that is unmodified for the entire site other than a filter for excluding my IP address together with other profiles for particular types of content such as blog content or visitor segments such as returning visitors. You should specify your default page for the profile, e.g. index.html.

Google Analytics Profile

A Google Analytics filter is applied to modify data from a particular profile so that it shows a subset of data within the profile. A filter will often be used to show visitor interactions with product information stored in a sub-domain or subfolder. Google Analytics Help on Filters.

In this example I have a filter which is applied to my Right Touching blog which only includes visitors who go to that sub-folder.

Google Analytics Filter

For example, a filter could restrict results to first time time visitors or returning visitors. With the Advanced Segmentation feature in Google Analytics you are effectively provided with several default filters, such as all visitors from

So you can see this is complex! You need to get this right from the outset of collecting data since profiles and filters cannot be applied retrospectively, applying filters incorrectly will introduece errors and introducing new profiles will lead to employee confusion.

• Google Help on Domains and Sub-domains
• Google help on tracking across/links between separate domains

Excluding employees from report.

This configuration is relatively simple! You don’t want visitors from a company skewing the results, so these should be excluded unless you want to artificially boost your visitor numbers and have difficultly understanding visitor behaviour.

A filter should be created to exclude a range of IP addresses for company employees and contractors working in different offices.

Alternatively, if staff have a range of IP addressses or dynamic IP addresses then using the _setVar function call on a page used by staff only (e.g. Intranet home page) to update a cookie to filter staff out. Both strategies are explained below:

• Google Analytics Help – Excluding internal traffic / Employees

6. Customisations that require server modifications

There are 5 main types of customisation that may be required which involve changes to the tracking code that will need to be configured or coded within the content management or Ecommerce system.

A. Ecommerce Tracking

E-retailers will need to enable E-commerce tracking for their Profiles since this isn’t enabled by default. Ticking the tick-box will be straightforward.

The reports summarising E-commerce transactions and revenue within require inclusion of additional tracking code on the checkout completion page specifying order and product information.

Including the transaction information about the order and product(s) will be less straightforward, but many popular E-commerce systems will support this.

If you are coding this or inserting manually (e.g. for event tracking), in addition to the standard tracking code, the _addTrans() and _addItem() Javascript functions need to be included as in this example from Google:

<script type="text/javascript">   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1");    pageTracker._trackPageview();   pageTracker._addTrans( "1234",                                     // Order ID "Mountain View",                          // Affiliation     "11.99",                                    // Total     "1.29",                                     // Tax     "5",                                        // Shipping     "San Jose",                               // City    "California",                               // State    "USA"                                       // Country);    pageTracker._addItem(     "1234",                                     // Order ID     "DD44",                                     // SKU     "T-Shirt",                                  // Product Name     "Green Medium",                  // Category     "11.99",                                    // Price     "1"                                         // Quantity  );  pageTracker._trackTrans();

Google Analytics E-commerce Help Documentation

B. Event Tracking

In Google Analytics, Events apply to interactions with content made by visitors, so if they are setup, they are found within the Content reports section of Google Analytics.

Event tracking allows you to track additional types of events other than page views. The most important are:

• Video or rich media interactions
• PDF downloads or emails from mailto: links on pages
• Outbound or external links.

Usually an additional script is required for tracking downloads and outbound links. This was originally implemented through generating additional or “virtual” page views, but care has to be taken that these don’t contribute to the overall event title.

This is a good example of a link/downloading tracking script:

• http://blog.immeria.net/2009/01/google-analytics-script-to-track.html

For video tracking an additional script isn’t required, see Google announcement of final rollout of Event tracking June 2009:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/06/event-tracking-now-available-in-all.html and this technical description from Google code: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

This shows that Event Tracking can be specified with these parameters to the _trackEvent() method values of which then appear in the Analytics Reports interface under content:

• categories
• actions
• labels
• values
• implicit count

This is an example from Google help:

• <a href=”#” onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Videos’, ‘Play’, ‘Baby\’s First Birthday’);”>Play</a>

In this scenario, the reports for Events would display Videos as the Category, Play as the Action, and Baby’s First Birthday as the Label. The rest of this document describes these components in detail. Bear in mind that when you implement Event Tracking, you can use this data model as a guide, or you can simply use the _trackEvent() method to segment user interaction in any way that works for your data.

C. Custom variables for visitor segmentation.

Custom variables apply to Visitors, so they are found within the Visitor reports section if specified.

Custom variables were originally specified through a call to _setVar, but are set through _setCustomVar. They are most often used for defining specific segments based on the profile detail identified through a form or consuming particular content.

Options for setting custom variables including:

• Customer vs non-customer
• Different customer segment (or demographic profile variables like male or female). For example, Econsultancy has Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum member segments
• Segmenting visitors according to landing page
• Recording referral source attribution
• Categorising different content types

Read more: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html – this example shows how different content groups can be reported on through the example of an online newspaper and explains the difference between Visitor, Session and Page based custom-segments.
Related Posts:

• Best marketing book for 2010?

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing technique: Google Analytics Setup, Web analytics
Advice type: Best Practice, Tutorial
Expertise level: Intermediate

This in-depth case study of Boo.com features in Dave Chaffey’s book Internet marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice text book is based on coverage in the excellent book “Boo Hoo – a dotcom story”

// //

Boo hoo – Learning from the largest European dot-com failure Context

“Unless we raise $20 million by midnight, boo.com is dead”. So said boo.com CEO Ernst Malmsten, on May 18th 2000. Half the investment was raised, but this was too little, too late, and at midnight, less than a year after its launch, Boo.com closed. The headlines in the Financial Times, the next day read: “Boo.com collapses as Investors refuse funds. Online Sports retailer becomes Europe’s first big Internet casualty”.

The boo.com case remains a valuable case study for all types of businesses, since it doesn’t only illustrate the challenges of managing E-commerce for a clothes retailer, but rather highlights failings in E-commerce strategy and management that can be made in any type or organization.

Company background

Boo.com was a European company founded in 1998 and operating out of a London head office, which was founded by three Swedish entrepreneurs, Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin. Malmsten and Leander had previous business experience in publishing where they created a specialist publisher and had also created an online bookstore, bokus.com, which in 1997 became the world’s third largest book e-retailer behind Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

They became millionaires when they sold the company in 1998. At boo.com, they were joined by Patrik Hedelin who was also the financial director at bokus, and at the time they were perceived as experienced European Internet entrepreneurs by the investors who backed them in their new venture.

Company vision

The vision for Boo.com was for it to become the worlds first online global sports retail site. It would be a European brand, but with a global appeal. Think of it as a sports and fashion retail version of Amazon. At launch it would open its virtual doors in both Europe and America with a view to ‘amazoning the sector’. Note though that in contrast, Amazon did not launch simultaneously in all markets. Rather it became established in the US before providing local European distribution through acquisition and re-branding of other e-retailers in the United Kingdom and England for example.

The boo.com brand name

According to Malmsten (2001), the boo brand name originated from filmstar ‘Bo Derek’, best known for her role in the movie ‘10’. The domain name ‘bo.com’ was unavailable, but adding an ‘o’, they managed to procure the domain ‘boo.com’ for $2,500 from a domain name dealer.

According to Rob Talbot, director of marketing for Boo.com, Boo were “looking for a name that was easy to spell across all the different countries and easy to remember … something that didn’t have a particular meaning”.

Target market

The audience targeted by boo.com can be characterized ‘young, well-off and fashion-conscious’ 18 to 24 year olds. The concept was that globally the target market would be interested in sports and fashion brands stocked by Boo.com.

The market for clothing in this area was viewed as very large, so the thought was that capture of only a small part of this market was required for boo.com to be successful.

The view at this time on the scale of this market and the basis for success is indicated by New Media Age (1999) where it was described as “The $60b USD industry is dominated by Gen X’ers who are online and according to market research in need of knowing what is in, what is not and a way to receive such goods quickly. If boo.com becomes known as the place to keep up with fashion and can supply the latest trends then there is no doubt that there is a market, a highly profitable one at that for profits to grow from.”

The growth in market was also supported by retail analysts, with Verdict predicting online shopping in the United Kingdom to grow from £600 million in 1999 to £12.5 billion in 2005.

However, New Media Age (2005) does note some reservations about this market, saying “Clothes and trainers have a high rate of return in the mail order/home shopping world. Twenty year olds may be online and may have disposable income but they are not the main market associated with mail order. To date there is no one else doing anything similar to boo.com”.

The Boo.com proposition

In their proposal to investors, the company stated that ‘their business idea is to become the world-leading Internet-based retailer of prestigious brand leisure and sportswear names’. They listed brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Fila, Lacoste and Adidas. The proposition involved sports and fashion goods alongside each other. The thinking was that sports clothing has more standardized sizes with less need for a precise fit that designer clothing.

The owners of boo.com wanted to develop an easy to use experience which re-created the offline shopping experience as far as possible. As part of the branding strategy, an idea was developed of a virtual salesperson, initially named Jenny and later Miss Boo. She would guide users through the site and give helpful tips. When selecting products, users could drag them on to models, zoom in and rotate them in 3D to visualize them from different angles. The technology to achieve this was built from scratch along with the stock control and distribution software. A large investment was required in technology with several suppliers being replaced before launch which was 6 months later than promised to investors, largely due to problems with implementing the technology.

Clothing the mannequin and populating the catalogue was also an expensive challenge. For 2000, about $6million was spent on content about spring/summer fashion ware. It cost $200 to photograph each product, representing a monthly cost of more than $500,000.

Although the user experience of boo.com is often criticized for its speed, it does seem to have had that wow factor that influenced investors.

Analyst Nik Margolis writing in New Media Age (1999) illustrates this by saying: “What I saw at boo.com is simply the most clever web experience I have seen in quite a while. The presentation of products and content are both imaginative and offer an experience. Sure everything loads up fast in an office but I was assured by those at boo.com that they will keep to a limit of 8 seconds for a page to download. Eight seconds is not great but the question is will it be worth waiting for?”

Of course, today, the majority of European users have broadband, but in the late 1990s the majority were on dial-up and had to download the software to view products.

Communicating the boo.com proposition

Early plans referred to extensive “high impact” marketing campaigns on TV and newspapers. Public relations were important in leveraging the novelty of the concept and human side of the business – Leander was previously a professional model and had formerly been Malmsten’s partner.

This PR was initially focused within the fashion and sportswear trade and then rolled out to publications likely to be read by the target audience. The success of this PR initiative can be judged by the 350,000 e-mail pre-registrations who wanted to be notified of launch. For the launch Malmsten (2001) explains that “with a marketing and PR spend of only $22.4 million we had managed to create a worldwide brand”.

To help create the values of the Boo.com brand, Boom a lavish online fashion magazine was created which required substantial staff for different language versions. The magazine wasn’t a catalogue which directly supported sales, rather it was a publishing venture competing with established fashion titles. For existing customers the Look Book, a 44 page print catalogue was produced which showcased different products each month.

The challenges of building a global brand in months

The challenges of creating a global brand in months are illustrated well by Malmsten et al. (2001). After an initial round of funding, including investment from the JP Morgan, LMVH Investment and the Benetton family, which generated around $9 million, the founders planned towards launch by identifying thousands of individual tasks, many of which needed to be completed by staff yet to be recruited. These tasks were divided into twenty-seven areas of responsibility familiar to many organizations including office infrastructure, logistics, product information, pricing, front-end applications, call centres, packaging, suppliers, designing logos, advertising//PR, legal issues, and recruitment.

At its zenith, boo.com had 350 staff, with over one hundred in London and new offices in, Munich, New York, Paris and Stockholm. Initially boo.com was available in UK English, US English, German, Swedish, Danish and Finnish with localized versions for France, Spain and Italy added after launch. The web site was tailored for individual countries using the local language and currency and also local prices. Orders were fulfilled and shipped out of one of two warehouses: one in Louisville, Kentucky and the other in Cologne, Germany. This side of the business was relatively successful with on-time delivery rates approaching 100% achieved.

Boo possessed classic channel conflicts. Initially, it was difficult getting fashion and sports brands to offer their products through boo.com. Manufacturers already had a well-established distribution network through large high street sports and fashion retailers and many smaller retailers.

If clothing brands permitted boo.com to sell their clothes online at discounted prices, then this would conflict with retailers interests and would also portray the brands in a negative light if their goods were in an online ‘bargain bucket’. A further pricing issue is where local or zone pricing in different markets exists, for example lower prices often exist in the US than Europe and there are variations in different European countries.

Making the business case to investors

Today it seems incredible that investors were confident enough to invest $130 million in the company and at the high point, the company was valued at $390 million. Yet much of this investment was based on the vision of the founders to be a global brand and achieve ‘first mover advantage’. Although there were naturally revenue projections, these were not always based on an accurate detailed analysis of market potential.

Immediately before launch, Malmsten (2001) explains a meeting with would be investor Pequot Capital, represented by Larry Lenihan who had made successful investments in AOL and Yahoo!

The boo.com management team were able to provide revenue forecasts, but when unable to answer fundamental questions for modeling the potential of the business, such as “How many visitors are you aiming for?” “What kind of conversion rate are you aiming for? How much does each customer have to spend? What’s your customer acquisition cost. And what’s your payback time on customer acquisition cost?” When these figures were obtained, the analyst found them to be ‘far fetched’ and reputedly ended the meeting with the words. “I’m not interested. Sorry for my bluntness, but I think you’re going to be out of business by Christmas.”

When the site launched on 3rd November 1999, around 50,000 unique visitors were achieved on the first day, but there were only 4 in 1000 placed orders (a 0.25% conversion rate). Showing the importance of modeling conversion rate accurately in modeling business potential. This low conversion rate was also symptomatic of problems with technology. It also gave rise to negative PR. One reviewer explained how he waited: “Eighty-one minutes to pay too much money for a pair of shoes that I still going to have to wait a week to get?” These rates did improve as problems were ironed out – by the of the week 228,848 visits had resulted in 609 orders with a value of $64,000.

In the 6 weeks from launch, sales of $353,000 were made and conversion rates had more than doubled to 0.98% before Christmas. However a relaunch was required within 6 months to cut download times by 6 months and to introduce a ‘low-bandwidth version’ for users using dial-up connections. This led to conversion rates of nearly 3% on sales promotion.

Sales results were disappointing in some regions with US sales accounting for 20% compared to the planned 40%.

The management team felt that further substantial investment was required to grow the business from a presence in 18 countries and 22 brands in November to 31 countries and 40 brands the following spring. Turnover was forecast to rise from $100 million in 2000/01 to $1350 million by 2003/4 which would be driven by $102.3 million in marketing in 2003/4. Profit was forecast to be $51.9 million by 2003/4.

The end of boo.com

The end of boo.com came on May 18th 2000, when investor funds could not be raised to meet the spiraling marketing, technology and wage bills.

Source: Prepared by Dave Chaffey from original sources including Malmsten et al (2001) and New Media Age (1999).

Malmsten, E., Portanger, E. and Drazin, C. (2001) boo hoo. A dot.com story from concept to catastrophe. Random House, London, UK.

New Media Age (1999) Will boo.com scare off the competition? Author Budd Margolis. New Media Age. July 22 1999. Online only.

Questions 1. Which strategic marketing assumptions and decisions arguably made boo.com’s failure inevitable? Contrast these with other dot-com era survivors who are still in business, for example, Lastminute.com, Egg.com and Firebox.com

1. Using the framework of the marketing mix, appraise the marketing tactics of boo.com in the areas of Product, Pricing, Place, Promotion, Process, People and Physical Evidence.
2. In many ways, the vision of Boo’s founders were “ideas before their time”. Give examples of e-retail techniques used to create an engaging online customer experience which Boo adopted that are now becoming commonplace.

Related Posts:

Digital marketing strategy topic: Digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing tactic: Value generation
Digital marketing technique: Business models, Revenue models
Advice type: Business-to-consumer (B2C), Case study, Examples of failed digital strategies, Startup business
Expertise level: Intermediate

Tools to determine target keywords are well-established. But new tools – see Market Potential / Market Demand Tools – provide a lot more analysis of market potential or customer demand for products than the established software/systems. Many of these query the excellent Google research database available direct from Google as the Googlr Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search.

This list is an update to my established SEO keyphrase analysis tools list.

Most popular keyphrase analysis tools

The three best known and longest established keyword tools are:

• Google Keyword Tool – comprehensive with filtering by country

• Word Tracker US and UK versions available

• Keyword Discovery US and UK versions available

Market Potential / Market Demand Tools

These are the newcomers to the field and often offer more sophistication in estimating the customer demand in terms of volume and types of searches.

• Market Samurai Integrates data from several sources including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to find out potential market size. Impressive.

• Keyword Examiner Windows-only Tool using Google Keywords database. Useful in that finds true competition based on quotes, title, backlinks.

Keyphrase behaviour visualisation

• Concentrate Good for analysis analysis of search behaviour including long-tail keyphrases. Juice Analytics also have an excellent free tool if you log-in to Google Analytics – theKeyword Tree for visualising search behaviour – combinations of keyphrases. Description of two analytics visualisations.

• Wordstream Another new tool for Keyphrase analysis brought to my attention by Bill Hunt. I’m not clear what it’s differentiating features are?

Rank tracking tools for SEO

• SEO Rank Monitor Ranking Tool launched in November 2009. Combines rank tracking of your keyword groups against competitors combined with access to your Google Analytics with the Google API. Read good review at Yoast.com

• 5 SEO focused webanalytics tools 2 of these tools listed by Blogstorm are also useful for rank tracking

Other Google Tools

Google has a series of other tools which show seasonality in demand. Market Samurai uses many of these:

• Google Insights for Search Great for regional analysis and particularly useful for “Hot Trends”

• Google Trends Seasonal Trends

• Google Search-based Keyword Tool Good for gap analysis against advertised keywords in Google AdWords

• Google Adplanner

• Full compilation of Google Tools for Agencies The Agency Toolkit

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Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Digital marketing technique: Customer demand analysis, Keyphrase analysis
Expertise level: Intermediate

Question.

So, we know title tags and alt attributes are good to have for keyword density etc … but are they as good as body text? Is it still better for SEO to provide some actual body text that uses the words – and include image based keywords as well? Any thoughts … ?

Answer.

Success in SEO is down to knowing the ranking factors that matter most to the search engines and then implementing in a way that the site is still usable for human audiences – we need to avoid SEOO – search engine over-optimization.

Of the factors you mention, their order of importance is <title> tag (keep them them focused on 2 or 3 keyphrases only); then body copy (particularly towards the top of the document), then image tag alt attributes (these are most important when it is an image that links elsewhere).

For the other on-page factors, I would also recommend including keyphrases in headings <h1> and <h2>. Finally remember that off-page factors, in particular the link anchor text and content of pages linking to the page you are optimizing, are most important of all.

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Digital marketing strategy topic: Traffic-building
Digital marketing tactic: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Digital marketing technique: On-page optimisation
Advice type: Best Practice
Expertise level: Essentials