If you go to Wikipedia the answer you will get is this:

“Digital strategy is the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits, digital investments and efforts provide to the organization.”

While this definition may seem very abstract it contains a few key points which allows us to greatly simplify it into something much more digestible:

At the core of this definition is the fundamental assumption that every organisation and digital investment has a goal. Moreover, that the goal of a digital investment is inextricably linked to the goals of the organisation.

THE PROCESS

Despite focusing on the digital assets of an organisation, at the end of the day digital strategy is still just a strategy. As such the process thereof can be broken up into four steps of strategy development:

One mustn’t however forget the fundamental building block of measurement, which is critical for each step of the way. This is especially relevant due to the measurable nature of the digital world, which is also one of its key strengths.

You might think this a very broad theoretical outline, which is hard to keep focused of in day to day activities. That may be true, especially since each phase will have its own sub processes which more often than not, incorporates elements from other phases. That said, I still think it is very important to have an ongoing and structured strategic outlook which incorporates these different phases, and most importantly the relation between them.

This means for instance, making sure that in the planning phase, a framework is properly outlined, to be effectively developed in the implementation phase, so that when the organisation has to react (possibly months or even years from now), it has a solid framework which allows it to be agile. A classic example would be how Amazon was able to completely change their ‘store front’ only hours after Steve Job passed away to accommodate the expected surge in interest in Steve and Apple in general.

At the end of the day my point is: Agility is arguably one of the most common elements which distinguish industry leaders. Moreover, it is only with a holistic and ongoing view of the strategic process that this agility can be achieved, especially in the digital space where things are moving so quickly.

In order to have a successful landing page, it’s important to provide your visitors with sufficient scent. This will lure them to complete the desired action.

Think about a mouse trap: the cheese provides scent, while the mouse performs the desired action. In this case, the mouse is trapped (not the best example). You don’t want to harm your potential customers, but you do want to provide them with strong scent to increase the possibility of completing an action – an action that you identify as a conversion.

What is scent?

Scent is made up of the parts of your website that attract visitors; the parts that stand out for them. These could be images, links or headings that “speak” to the visitor and quickly reassure them that they are browsing a relevant webpage.

It’s important to remember that all website visitors are different and have unique needs. Marketers create groups of visitors and define personas.

Wikipedia defines persona (marketing) as: (In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional    characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior            set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.)

When designing or optimising your landing page, think about the type of visitors (personas) visiting your landing page. What will your visitors be looking for? Does your landing page immediately address their needs? Are there sufficient links for the visitor to continue their session? Including sufficient links ensures that the visitor remains in a state of belief – belief that your website will provide them with an answer. Visitors need to believe that they will find this answer, even if they don’t find exactly what they’re looking for on the initial landing page.

A simple example:

You own a jewellery store that’s been operating for 75 years, specialising in the finest engagement rings.

You have a website, and the search phrase providing the majority of visitors is “diamond engagement rings”.

A gentleman may be doing research in order to find the perfect engagement ring. Alternatively, a lady may be trying to find her ultimate engagement ring, so that she can indicate to her boyfriend the ring she desires.

Ideally, the scent you want to include on your landing page should appeal to both personas.

By including the below content on your landing page, you will address the requirements of both personas.

This may appeal to men browsing your site:

“Give her the perfect engagement ring”

“Ensure she is thrilled with this worthy and precious engagement ring”

While this may appeal to women browsing your site:

“Show him your ultimate engagement ring”

The following may speak to both ladies and gents:

“How our diamonds are crafted”

“View our state-of-the-art Range”

“Over 75 years’ experience in jewellery”

“Our Store History”

This copy may also appeal to people who are meticulous or require a lot of reassurance – people who like to make decisions based on facts.

Checklist

Included below is a simple checklist you can use to evaluate your landing page content and/or relevancy.

*While going through this checklist to evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page content, it is extremely important to remember the top search phrases that are driving visitors to your landing page.

1. Is the content (answer to search phrase) immediately available to your website visitors?
2. How much related and persuasive content is provided to entice your visitor?
3. Do your links contain trigger words that prompt visitors to obtain more information?
4. Does the landing page address the following:
   1. Why the visitor should take further action;
   2. What the offer is;
   3. How to get started / what to do next.

Of course, there are also many design-related components that contribute to a successful landing page. Such components might include: navigation structure; headers and sub-headers call-to-action; search facility and more.

So next time you evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page, ask yourself – “Is there sufficient scent for the different types of persona that enter my landing page via my top keywords?”

Optimising the content of your landing page, and gearing it towards your visitors’ interests – based on the top search phrases – will have a positive impact.

The goal of this post is to focus on one of the most overlooked and beneficial areas to invest in: Conversion Optimisation. More specifically, the cost benefit of budgeting for and executing Conversion Optimisation projects.

You may ask what Conversion Optimisation is. The broad answer would be “anything which could increases conversion rates”. For the purpose of this post let’s just focus on site changes, where examples would include testing different landing page layouts, testing different call to action copy or even just testing the colour of a button.

Now before we continue, I would like to highlight the underlying principle for this post: Successful Optimisation projects have ongoing benefits. While increasing conversions purely through increasing traffic is an ongoing cost increase and with little effect on ROI. In other words: successful optimisation project = once off cost = extended benefit.

Let’s use a practical example to really show the principle:

- You have a website.

- It sells widgets at R100 each.

- For every 1000 visits to your site you sell 20 widgets. In other words your conversion rate is 2%.

- You get an average of 40000 visits to your site every month.

- You’re paid traffic brings in 30000 of your monthly visits and costs R60 000. That’s R2 for every visit.

So assuming you don’t invest in conversion optimisation and all other things held constant your forecast over the next four quarters will look something like this:

Now let’s say you take 10% of your traffic budget in the first 2 Quarters and invest in conversion optimisation testing. The first quarter you start with a landing page test and increase your conversion rate to 2.1% the second quarter you hit it ‘big’ and increase it again to 2.30% with more effective copy. Then in the final quarters you put all your budget back into just traffic generation. Your forecast will look like this:

Through no budget increases you have managed to increase your ROI and yearly revenue by R80 400.

This is of course a huge simplification, but the principle I am trying to drive home is not that conversion optimisation will always produce rewards (the first quarter actually had less ROI and revenue) or in what ratios you should allocate budget. Rather what I want to drive home it that optimisation efforts do cost money and require an ongoing commitment of testing and implementing to really reap the extended benefits.

So if need be, start small, but make sure to start at all. The chances are the more you practice and test the better your organization will become at running and implementing successful tests, which means even lower marginal costs for optimisation and more potential wins.

If you have a search facility on your website, you should setup “Site Search”.  Site search will allow you to view the search terms that visitors are entering into your search facility.

Some Site Search outcomes you may wish to check:

1. Are there any relatively high-volume search phrases that bounce? I.e. Visitors use your search facility, enter a particular search phrase and thereafter immediately leave your website, perhaps due to irrelevant results?

(This metric is called % Exit) These high volume search terms will require better search results, to improve the user experience and retain the visitor.

1. You may want to promote high volume search terms, especially in the case where these search terms result in revenue – which Google Analytics also measures.
2. Do visits to your website that include the search functionality have a higher conversion rate? If so, this could mean that your search facility is working well and you may want to lead more visitors down this path.
3. What Percentage of visitors utilise the search facility on your website? There is no clear “right” or “wrong” here, but if you are making changes to your navigation or website structure, this is certainly a metric you would like to check, especially in the case where visits that include site search, yield a better conversion rate.

Revenue & Transactions

1. Which marketing channels do most of your high value transactions come from? Transactions with a high sales value might originate from a particular campaign. By promoting these campaigns further you will increase the likelihood of receiving more high value transactions. You will also be able to segment the products that provide the biggest net profit and thereafter, look to see which campaigns contributed to these product sales.
2. Other obvious metrics include Revenue and Conversion Rate per Marketing Channel (Paid Search, Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic and Email Marketing)

Where do visitors exit your site?

1. “% Exit” is the metric that you need to observe to find this information. “% Exit” will indicate the percentage of site exits that occurred from a particular page, or set of pages. If there is a high % exit on your Store Locator page, this is understandable, as the visitors may have “found” what they are looking for – your physical location. If there are pages that have an “odd” high % Exit, these pages may need to be optimised. Of course, visitors have to end their session sometime and eventually leave your website, so interpreting this metric in context is very important.

Top Landing Page Bounce Rate

1. Your Top Landing pages (the first page a visitor sees) and Bounce Rate (Single page visits) are a great combination. Usually only a few pages make up the bulk (> 50%) of top landing pages. Monitoring their bounce rate is important. Also, these pages could be considered ‘low hanging fruit’, as improving their efficiency would have a positive effect on the bulk of visitors.

Segmenting your data

Segmenting your data is very important and helps you understand how different “types” of visitors interact with your website. Here are some Segments you may wish to create in Google Analytics:

International Visitors

This will show you how visits from international countries interact with your website. Perhaps there are some good organic keywords with high conversion rates and sales. You can then start a Paid Search campaign targeting these keywords and location to maximise revenue.

Social Media and Email Marketing

Segment all your Marketing Channels. In order to segment Social Media and Email marketing campaigns, you will need to ensure that these channels are properly tagged. This post will help you do this. With proper tagging of these marketing channels, you can view how visits from these channels perform. (Perhaps average page views is a lot less for these marketing channels, prompting you to create more specific landing pages for these channels) Also, with Email marketing correctly tagged, you will be able to see, with Multi-Channel Funnels how Email Marketing ‘fits’ into your Conversion paths.

Brand and Non-Brand Keywords

Segmenting your Non-Brand keywords is always a good idea, it will depict your conversion rate for the more competitive and generic search phrases. Also, you can understand what sort of keyword diversity constitutes to the Non-Brand keyword mix.

Other segments you may want to experiment with include:

Visits that started checkout process;

Store Locator Visits – What Percent of Traffic is looking for your offline stores?;

New vs. Returning Visitors – How do they interact differently; how do conversion rates differ?

With the “new” version of Google Analytics, your custom reports can include Filters, where you can segment your data. In other words, you can extract only the metrics you want, based on specific marketing channels or types of visitors!

Once you have a web analytics tool setup, you will need an effective dashboard.

Included below are a few notes on dashboards.

Measuring and Reporting:

Defining the KPIs that point towards your business and website goals is extremely important and, by creating a dashboard that contains marketing channel and Site Optimisation KPIs, it will clearly show you how performance is trending. This is something you need to watch closely.

Your KPIs will be dependent on your business objectives and thus will be different from business to business. The key is to ensure that they point towards your business goals and enable you to take action to improve performance.

Some example KPIs might include:

Visitor Conversion Rate

Paid Search Conversion Rate

Checkout Completion Rate

Other KPIs may include “Percentage of High Recency visitors”, where recency is defined as visitors that visited your site within the last 5 days, in this case: the higher the percentage the better. In other cases, like “Home Page Bounce Rate” the key is to keep the percentage as low as possible.

Standardised Reporting – Once you have an effective Dashboard, you are able to view all your critical KPIs at a glance. Perhaps you require a weekly dashboard, a monthly dashboard, or both.

Make faster and smarter decisions – An effective Dashboard will enable you to make quicker decisions. You will clearly know whether the critical few KPIs are trending up or down. If there’s a large performance change for the reporting period, you should investigate why the metric is yielding the performance, and in turn it should give you great insight.

Communication and Accountability – With standardised reporting on one dashboard, internal teams and agencies will be more accountable on measured performance. This will have a direct impact on your bottom line. Setting realistic goals and milestones becomes easier too.

Greater Profits – Once you start entrenching a sound web analytics strategy, you will improve your decision making, which should ultimately have a positive effect on your bottom line. Ensuring you have an effective dashboard to measure the critical KPIs is just the beginning.

What is often overlooked however is making sure campaigns are being properly tagged and tracked. Without proper campaign tracking, it becomes very difficult, and sometimes impossible to effectively measure ROI (even on a high level).

A classic example would be email campaigns: Did you know that if links are not properly tagged in your email communications all clicks from email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird (the most common method of viewing mails) will be attributed to Direct traffic, while webmail clicks will be attributed to referral? The implications of this are huge especially if you are investing a lot of time and money into your email channel.

Fortunately to get around this Google has made it extremely simple to tag your campaign links. How it works is that you simply have to append your links with three (minimum) tags called utm tags. In fact Google even provides a tool call URL Builder to create these links.

Here is an example of a tagged link with the tag parameters in different colours:

http://www.exampledomain.com/sub/directory?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=special_offer&utm_term=sale&utm_content=footer_banner

UTM Tags, What They Mean:

Utm_source (required)

This tag tells Google Analytics the site/source which directed the traffic to your site. For example this can be “april_newsletter_list22”, “twitter”, “our_blog”, “myspace” etc. In fact you can call it whatever, but the key is that you use the same name for the same source and also that the name is relevant to the source. Best practice though is to just name the unique site where the link is placed. If you have the same email going to multiple lists remember to indicate this on your source.

Utm_medium (required)

This tag defines what type of channel sent the traffic. You can potentially name this medium whatever you want (banner, postcard, listing) but there are some naming conventions which are recommended to be used for certain channels. Yet again consistency is key:

Email:                                email

Social media sites:          social

Pay per click search:       cpc

News/RSS feeds:             feed

Website banners:            banner

Offline ads:                       offline

Utm_campaign (required)

This is to name the campaign the link is in aid of. Yet again you can name this tag whatever you want, but be sure to be consistent in your naming conventions and which links you tag.

Utm_term (optional)

This tag is optional and is generally used for paid search campaigns to track the keyword which generated a click. It can be used for a manner of other uses like a blog author name or a page category on a site.

Utm_content (optional)

This optional tag is generally used to distinguish between different variations of an ad or link. For example you could have two ad banners running on a website, one with an image of a cat and another with the dog. Using the utm_content tag you can see which ad variation works best for you.

UTM Tags The Bigger Picture

As an example, let’s look at a Christmas Promotional campaign targeting bicycle sales. The campaign utilises 3 channels over 5 different sites and mailers to increase sales. The diagram below shows how the structure of this campaign’s tags fit together. For all links the campaign tag will be the same, the medium tag however will be one of the three channels used. The only unique tag will be the source which indicates where the link is located. With a structure like this you can easily view the return of your campaign, as well as drill down to see which channels and sites/mailers gave you the most return within the campaign.

REMEMBER all campaign tags are CasE SensiTive eg: tag ≠TAG

Automatic UTM Tagging

Unfortunately tagging often has to be done manually, there are two big exceptions though: Google Adwords and Email. Since Adwords can be integrated with Google Analytics it’s no surprise that Adwords has the function for Auto Tagging to track your campaigns. A little less known fact is that most Email Service Providers offer the functionality to also auto tag all links in your emails. That said you should always check the tools you are currently using if they do offer auto tagging. Also make sure the automatic tagging is working in the most optimal format for you.

Our Gift To You: Bulk UTM Tagging Tool

*This workbook has been extensively tested but the responsibility to make sure the built links work rests on the user. If you do however find any fault with the workbook, please let us know.

Google’s URL builder is definitely useful, but only doing one tag at a time can be a bit of a drag. So to help you tag and manage your campaigns more efficiently we have created a special Bulk URL Tagging Excel sheet for free download. All you have to do is paste in the required parameters into the sheet and your tagged link will be generated. You will find two sheets in the workbook, for simplicity the first sheet only covers the 3 required tags, but if you want to include the optional utm_term and utm_content tags you can find these options on the second sheet.

*This workbook has been extensively tested but the responsibility to make sure the built links work rests on the user. If you do however find any fault with the workbook, please let us know.

SMART Tip: UTM Tags and Link Shorteners

With all these tags, you find that your links are getting a bit too long for your liking. This is particularly relevant for social media sharing especially with services like Twitter. Good news though, if you do use a link shortener your tags will be still be preserved when the visitor is directed to your site.

That’s all for this post, stay tuned for the next post where we look at some more advanced methods for tracking offline campaigns and overriding conversion attribution settings.

Data represents peoples actions. *Image sourced from The Matrix.

All too often web analysis is confused with online analytics tools and data they measure. For example, it will surprise many that Google Analytics is not in fact Web Analysis! Nor are website hits and time on site the bedrock of Web Analysis.

How has this happened? Well, one just has to look at the dashboard reports of any online analytics tool to get an idea. There you’ll find loads of data and ‘interesting’ indicators and graphs all available at the click of a button. In fact there is so much data available presented in such an appealing way that it must mean something and must be important. And not knowing what it means or why it’s important, makes it easy to put the data and the tools in the same box as analysis itself.

The fact of the matter though, is that the whole of “web analysis” is not that new, just the “web” part is. As an example let’s take an ecommerce site. The purpose or goal of this site is fundamentally to sell goods, and increase revenue. In fact its goal is essentially the same as an offline store.

Now let’s look a little closer at the task of product positioning in an offline store, in particular the task of arranging goods on a shelf. Over the years, much time and effort has been invested into optimising this seemingly simple task. Now imagine if instead of running expensive real world tests marketers could measure exactly what goods consumers are looking at, picking up and not/purchasing as they are shopping (and re-arrange the shelves in real time!).

Now let’s look at an online store.  The end goal is exactly the same (sell goods). The shelf is now a screen. And guess what, all those key points of interaction can be recorded: where the consumer is looking at (heatmaps), what they’re picking up (clicks) and finally what they purchase (ecommerce tracking). Just like the offline store data still has to be tracked interpreted, which is often more tricky than it seems. But the point is at the end of day it’s not the “analysis” part which is new, just the “web” part and the data sets and methods of data collection it brings with it. This is a great simplification of course, but the principle is there. A web presence exists to accomplish goals and web analysis is a just a methodology for optimising online activities to achieve those goals.

So next time you look at web metrics do try remember, ultimately the data is just a (rough) etching of what real people did when their worlds interacted with yours, just like before the internet. And the task at hand has remained the same (albeit new data is now more readily available): to make sense of the data available to improve your world and subsequently your visitors’ worlds as well.

1. Errors passing e-commerce values into your tracking script.

When passing product names and sales values into the e-commerce script, always ensure you closely follow the strict technical requirements. Some examples: You should never include any currency symbols in the data you pass into the script and always “escape” special characters that will break the JavaScript code. For example: If your product names contain an apostrophe, ensure that they are “escaped” so that the apostrophe within the product name does not “break” the script and avoid the transaction from being successfully captured.

2. You are using different versions of Google Analytics code.

Although this is not a common error, I have experienced this. Most webmasters have migrated to the asynchronous version of Google Analytics code which was released in December 2009. You will also need to update your e-commerce tracking to the asynchronous tracking. Herewith some more information on the e-commerce asynchronous tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingEcommerce.html

3. You are using a different domain name or sub-domain to record the transactions.

Although you may be successfully tracking sales, if you do not correctly implement cross domain tracking, you will lose the original traffic source that provided the sale. Ensuring end to end tracking is critical for measuring and optimising marketing campaigns. Herewith some more information on Google Analytics multiple domain tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html

There may also be other reasons for not successfully recording all transactions. It is always good to check what percent of transactions is being tracked in Google Analytics against your actual number of transactions.

If there is a significant difference between the recorded conversions in Google Analytics and your actual number of conversions, we highly recommend doing some end to end testing to ensure your Google Analytics implementation is correctly setup. For some simple debugging, we recommend the Google Chrome extension, debug.js which can be found here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jnkmfdileelhofjcijamephohjechhna

Some of our clients who monitor their sites with GA have seen large changes to their metrics, and inevitably questions  regarding the perceived change in the performance of our marketing campaigns, land on our desks.

The size of the effect depends on the typical user behaviour on the site, and the type of campaign strategy. We see the greatest change in sites where there is short interaction time and low page-depth interaction. The effects are also greater where the campaign is deep-linked to the site. This arises because the person searching is sent immediately to the most relevant page so his interaction in terms of navigation and time is lower.

We have observed some secondary effects of the change which affect the actual value of parameters, not just the average value per visit, etc. As an example, consider the time-on-site  metric for sites where a significant number of interactions are one page deep

A typical scenario could be the following: a person  comes to page A on the site after searching for the term “Dog”; he then goes back to the search engine and searches for the term “Cat” and lands on page B sixty  seconds later and then leaves the site.  Previously this would be considered one session (as the browser was not closed) and time-on-page A would be sixty seconds (page B would be zero seconds). With the new method of counting sessions, a new session starts as the person comes back on the search term “Cat” and you end up with two  visits,both with zero time-on-site. When you add all the time-on-site metrics and divide by visit numbers, not only do you get a smaller number (because of the larger number of sessions), but the actual total will be smaller as well. To illustrate, in one site we observed a 25% increase in session count, but a 50% drop in time-per-session.  A similar effect can be seen if you use goal values to monitor some events. Only one goal is recorded per session, so if you have goals which can be achieved more than once in a session you might find that the actual number of reported goal completions has increased – as you now have more sessions.

In the initial chart setup I label the five African countries that obtained the five highest rankings according to the index. They are Mauritius, Seychelles, Botswana, Cape Verde and South Africa in decreasing order. The overall ranking is plotted against the Infrastructure Index, while the Public Management and Accountability & Corruption Indexes are represented by the colour and size of the pots, respectively. When the chart is dynamically played of the period 2002 to 2010 the following trends become clear for these 5 countries:

• Seychelles and Mauritius have made great strides in improving infrastructure over the last decade
• Botswana has lost considerable ground in terms of public management
• South Africa has made good gains in infrastructure in the initial part of the period, but lost some momentum thereafter; the effect of the Fifa world cup on infrastructure development in the 2011 index will be interesting to monitor
• It is also interesting to note that Gambia made good strides in the overall index rising to a position as high as 9th; a deterioration in accountability and corruption seem to reverse that progress in the later part of the period.

Enjoy spotting some of your own trends on African governance. Hans Rosling eat your heart out! Note that the chart may not display correctly on all mobile devices.

Below is the R code I used to generate the above chart.

library(ggplot2)
library(googleVis)
library(Hmisc)
# Data can be downloaded from www.moibrahimfoundation.org
MoIbrahim <- read.csv("MO Ibrahim Trends Summary.csv") # read data
 
# Generate Motion Chart
# Specify initial chart set-up via options parameter
# Setting initial state via state string obtained from Settings panel of the initialised chart
MoIbrahimMotion <- gvisMotionChart(MoIbrahim, idvar="COUNTRY", timevar="YEAR",options=
list(state='{"orderedByX":false,"sizeOption":"6","dimensions":{"iconDimensions":["dim0"]},
"orderedByY":false,"xAxisOption":"13","time":"2002","yZoomedDataMax":53,"iconType":"BUBBLE",
"xLambda":1,"yZoomedDataMin":1,"xZoomedDataMin":0.26,"yZoomedIn":false,"xZoomedIn":false,
"iconKeySettings":[{"LabelY":-173,"LabelX":22,"key":{"dim0":"Mauritius"}},{"LabelY":-169,
"LabelX":-129,"key":{"dim0":"South Africa"}},{"key":{"dim0":"Seychelles"}},{"LabelY":-84,
"LabelX":-165,"key":{"dim0":"Cape Verde"}},{"LabelY":-241,"LabelX":-18,"key":{"dim0":"Botswana"}}],
"showTrails":false,"nonSelectedAlpha":0.4,"duration":{"multiplier":1,"timeUnit":"Y"},"yLambda":1,
"yAxisOption":"3","xZoomedDataMax":78.01,"uniColorForNonSelected":false,"colorOption":"11",
"playDuration":15000}'))
plot(MoIbrahimMotion)
 
# Create chart to imbed in WordPress
# Copy the Source Code in this file to your web page/WordPress etc.
cat(MoIbrahimMotion$html$chart, file="temp.html")