Struggling to meet your targets in Adwords?

Loosing out to competition in your adword campaign? Plotted in the infographic are a few simple but effective things to know before you start your campaign in Google Adwords.

How Personal is Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in Google & Facebook

My wife is a sci-fi fanatic and strongly believes teleportation and AI will be at our disposal in the years to come. She is in fact looking forward to the day when aliens or the machines will take over and she will throw a party for every one who's never agreed with her. Ok! now what’s that got to do with facebook & Google? Its all about data eventually... if Decepticons can find Dr. Witwicky's broken spectacles on eBay and catch hold of his grandson, anything seems possible with the amount of data you are uploading/sharing on facebook & Google. Its time you ensure your grandchild’s safety, if ever Decepticons had to look for your flowered shorts to track their power source in Google maps and locate your grandson instead.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a growing concern in social media and without a governing authority/regulatory body to restrain SM, don't leave it on assumptions. Sharing is not emailing; it is not even close to that. Social Media likes your daily life a lot and they are competing to get more out of you, they are enabling you every day to share more, to watch more shared stuff and share it further. The growth of these websites have got a lot more to hide than it seems.

Link Building & Link Baiting guide to SEO

This is my first one on SEO and there is no specific reason to start with the link building topic. Its old and over abused but it works. Google Webmasters reports this number and for all SEO professionals its a key metric they will never miss. Since the advent of the social web phenomena inbound linking has got a big weight in the Google algorithm and has the capacity to impact your SE rankings.
 

Trademark violations in Google ad's clarified

Brand names are the easiest target to get the maximum number of impressions in a PPC campaign. Its easy to get carried away and you can end up crossing the line. Here are a few things which you should know when you plan to target your competition brand visitors.

Google Remarketing fully released :)

Source: Google Ad Innovations


Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who've previously visited your website as they browse the Web.

What it looks like

When you use remarketing, you'll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a “TV” tag on all of the pages where you sell televisions. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on TVs) to people who've visted these pages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network

Dealing with cart abandonments

Do you have a cart abandonment strategy for your Website? and it was surprising to see the survey that close to 70% of the Indian Retail sites didn't have one. They assume that the customer just decided to drop off on his own and never consider the fact that they could have had a connection failure ( which is a very common thing here in India). Websites also assume that they would have remembered their URL and will start the transaction all over again. Webmasters usually end-up thinking they need to increase the size of their buttons or change the color or reduce the number of steps, hence the ball goes to the UX team.

Do you have the right Inbound & Outbound Marketing mix

As days pass by, the consumer is starting to hate intrusive marketing & outbound is intrusive to an extent. I hate it when I receive marketing calls on my phone even when my number is registered with the DNC list, I hate spam emails, I think pop-ups on websites are old school. I have opted-out from most of my subscriptions because they just turned too intrusive and salesy.

facebook finds solution to tackle ''compromised logins'' threat

Haven't seen any spam recently, nor have i seen updates from my close friends? did they just compromise my social stream in the name of security.

Having recently learnt that facebook faces 6oo,ooo security threats a day in the form of ''compromised logins'' I was starting to think this will turn out to be another spam magnet like my yahoo & gmail mailbox. I couldnt have been more relieved after reading this Infographic on facebook security announced by facebook team recently.

Tracking Social: Do you know your +1 Impact

Google Plus & then the +1 both were launched in quick succession and nobody knew how to track the impact +1 will have on your organic traffic. +1 does affect organic results and you will know it when you see your analyze your data in GA or Google Webmasters. Google has launched it with the intention of merging Social & Organic to give socially accurate organic listings. With that carrot people went on a frenzy and started adding +1 to their website, blogs, White Papers, pictures, case studies, Press Releases & so on. So what now, when polled in a Marketing forum people responded with a positive for being Social however responded they were clueless in how to track Social. I will take up Social Analytics in detail later in a blog in this blog i plan to focus on whats easy and readily available and you are not using it probably.

Facebook's worst mistakes

Dont get me wrong here, everybody has their bad times and so did facebook. Ever wondered what happened to Facebook Deals, Facebook Gifts and Facebook Places...

Wondering how to make a mobile-friendly email

Mobile traffic has been on the rise and so are people who check emails from mobile devices. Infact most of my database which were targeting age group 30+ were blackberry's and iPhones and the below 30 audience were on Android devices & iPhone. With confidence i can say the probability of my email being viewed on a mobile device would be close to 30%. CTR's from email campaigns were always in the range of 0.5-5% and you can expect it to go down further if your email is not mobile-friendly.  
 

Smartphones or Tablets- Who will buy from you this holiday season?

Its a debatable one and will be for sometime until we all have evidence from our own analytics to know what works for each one of us. A lot of those eCommerce sites are gearing up for this holiday season already... if you haven't received 'The Best Deal this Season' email yet... consider yourself lucky to have been saved from all the spam.

Coming back to the point, have we really figured out what our marketing strategy should be for different devices Dktops, Tabs, Mobs etc. Have we looked at devices as clusters of common personality traits or affinity towards certain symbolic products, do you think people with the same devices are related in someway, have some common behavior patterns and tend to spend on similar products. Are you aware of products which will sell more from a tab or a Smart-Phone compared to other devices. If you agree, then you should have a plan to identify these  and target them with suitable products. If you haven't you are loosing out because some of them are already doing it. Here is an infographic from ThreatMetrix which comes close to explaining this

GA will help you distinguish your traffic, that aint enough. You have to use Custom Variables or Sync your GA data with the CRM to identify device to product to revenue to volume to repeat-vsitor co-relations.
Here are 5 things you shouldn't miss out on if you know your visitor has a Tab or a Smart Phone.

1. Make your Website Mobile-Ready 

If you don't have this you should gear-up and get one before the season sale picks up. Most people will be using their Tab or their Smart Phone to buy. If you are done and going to launch your m/website soon here are some Best Practices for m/website which will help you to build it better and then get the most out of your investment. The w3c guidelines  for mobile-websites are the best i have run into so far.

If you are noticing a huge surge in repeat visitors from your m-traffic its time to build apps to enable these vistors to transact online, make online reservations in your physical stores from their device, Personalize their products and what have you.

2. Identify top 5 m-devices who buy from your website (Volume & Revenue)

With the help of custom variables in GA syncing your Analytics with your CRM will help you find this metric. Once you have found this you will have to strategize around this. are you going to lauch specific campaigns to market products to visitors having similar devices, targeted coupon code e-mailers, Download our app campaigns.

3.Use the Page Revenue Participation metric to identify hidden opportunities when visitors use mobile devices
If you are not already aware of this you can Google this term to know more. Simply put PRP will help you identify opportunities which funnel visualizations or Top Conversion pages will not reveal. Here is a sweet blog from the all time Super Hero of analytics Mr.Mortensen on using a Page Revenue Participation Metric for conversion optimization

4. Targeted Drip Mail Campaigns
Target your communication around what are your visitors with similar devices most likely to buy. You can automate this by either using a marketing automation product or just by manually scrubbing your data and making clusters.

5. Conduct Surveys
Some websites wait as they have planned a revamp of their page before they conduct surveys. Its imperative you get real time feedback and incorporate changes in your apps or m/sites to suit specific needs of certain devices.

Is it fair to hide search results

A few days back i wrote about Google's announcement on improving security by not sharing search results, I was not very sure about the ripple effect of the announcement but I'm getting a feeling now that the move will upset a few.

I'm completely in for whatever makes me feel secure when I'm transacting online, but i don't really consider capturing search phrases as intrusive. I look at Google as a middle man who will take me to what i need. In the process if the landing page figures out that i was looking for something and i stayed on their page or just bounced away, is a more constructive way of indicating whether i liked their website or not. By having this security i am not at all feeling more secured than usual about transacting on the landing website. Organic or Inorganic i dont think search data should be hidden from merchandisers.
 

Use your browser to test your mobile website

Mobile Traffic has become a quintessential part of traffic for most of the projects i have worked on and the traffic has blown out of proportion in the last couple of years. A few years back this traffic could have been ignored as they represented only a small percentage of the traffic and they were mere visitors and never enjoyed transcating using their devices. In the recent past we have witnessed a breakthrough performance of this traffic, they are not just checking you out on their Smart Phones...they are also interacting, sharing & transacting.


Capturing Custom Variables will help you get more actionable insights

Google captures a lot of data which you can see and use in the GA interface, however there is a lot of information which the websites capture which is not passed to GA. Google introduced custom variables to keep track of data beyond the data which it already knows.

GA already has data on which search phrases got your visits, which sites reffered the most, geographies which show the maximum hits during your sales campaign and the general stuff which GA normally captures. Have you ever tried mapping  your Forms & CRM data with GA. Wouldn't you be interested in knowing which products have the shortest sales cycle, how many males are interested in the baby wear category, what led to delighted customers & hence reorders.

There is a separate line of products called Marketing Automation Products which does this at an exorbitant cost however you can do some of it with the help of Custom Variables with-in your GA account.

Your order forms will be capturing Demographic information which when mapped to your GA data will help you build advanced segments and thus let dwelve deep into the behavior of each segment.

If you are already using User Defined Segment you will fall in love with Custom Variables, infact Custom Variables have made UDS obsolete.

User Defined Segment in GA

This post is a supportive to my forthcoming posts on Custom Variables.

The User Defined Segment (UDS) in GA helps you tag your visitor with a distinctive label. It helps you identify 'Registered User' vs 'Non Registered User','\Industry Type=Manufacturing' vs '\Industry type=Agriculture' however please note its 'Segment' .. unlike 'Custom Variables' (singular & plural) UDS has a lot of drawbacks and can be tedious to manage.

The value assigned by the UDS is stored in a utm_v cookie in the visitors computer and is checked everytime the visitor returns. The value is ideally reset unless you cusotmize your .js.

Google Announcement on making search more secure

Google has recently announced that it would no longer be sharing search keyword data for signed in Google users. According to them the impact will be a minimum and the masked search data will be shown in GA as ‘Not Provided’ under Organic search data. This announcement was posted in The Official Google Blog and the Analytics Impact on the GA Blog. Below is the actual announcement from The Official Google Blog. Read further..

Tag Management: Saves a lot of your critical marketing time

I have seen websites grow from a few thousand visitors a month to huge mass of millions a month and the problems remain the same every where. For the Marketing- web master who understand Tags and have implemented it on their website, they can understand the pain of managing a huge set of tags to segment & track those unique visitors. The more products, campaigns, tracking, features you role out... the more tags you would need and each tag you add will drastically hit your page load time. if you haven't yet considered a TMS (Tag Management System) this is your time to do it.