Topics, Trends and Techniques from Brooks Bell Interactive
Posts authored by: Naoshi Yamauchi
Above the fold or you’re dead?
There are certainly a lot of case studies that show having a strong call-to-action (CTA) above “The Fold” is a key component to higher conversion rates. BBI has many.
I learned this in MBA. If you’re not 100% sure, the correct answer is always – “It depends.” I really believe that the effectiveness of the CTA above the fold depends on the test you are running.
Here are the things to consider and I’ll walk through an example:
1) What is your overall goal (metric) for the email/landing page?
2) How did the users get to the landing page?
We just finished running a test for a newsletter. The end goal was to drive traffic from the email to either a landing page or a log-in page for users to log-in to their accounts. The overall goal was to drive more click-throughs and get users to log-in to their account.
Where are you getting the conversions?
I recently created a site to post about online marketing analytics stuff. I haven’t out right promoted it yet, so the traffic isn’t much. However, of the traffic I do get, 50% comes from Twiter– 41% specifically from the ones I tweet out. How do I know this? I put campaign tracking codes on all the tweets I send out that generate traffic to my site.
Anyway, let’s note that Twitter is the main driver of traffic to my site. It’s clearly working better than the other channels so far, so if my goal is to generate more traffic, I should focus on getting more followers. I had a Twitter button on the sidebar, so at least that’s a start.
So I thought about it some more and decided I should test to see if I added another Twitter button on the bottom of each post, that would generate more followers.
Tracking Internal & External Campaigns
Often times, your external marketing campaigns and internal campaigns on your site work together to deliver a success event or conversion. Hopefully that’s obvious– it’s important to understand how they work together.
Example:
So you gotta track this properly.
There are several ways to botch this up: 1) no tracking at all; 2) miss putting tracking codes on either the external or internal campaigns; or 3) not setting up the tracking codes correctly.
Botchness… is this a word? I’m going to coin it if not. Although the degree of botchness varies, the mistakes above will cause you to miss out on learning about the level of synergy between the external and internal efforts in driving conversions.
After all, the whole point of tracking is to get a better understanding of what the heck is working and what’s not. If there are no learnings and iterations to improve marketing campaigns, it’s costing the company or clients valuable conversions… and wasted labor costs.
SiteCatalyst Data Extract (Boo, Google Analytics)
One of the things that I love about the Data Extract tool in SiteCatalyst from Omniture that Google Analytics does not do is this– give me my data in an xls format that I can take and analyze and sort myself without hassle.
Let’s say I want the top 1,000 performing tracking codes that:
- contains “donkey” or “penguins” in it
- ranges for the 1st quarter and broken down by day
- paid search traffic
- visits, pageviews, and registrations
- unique visitor IDs
- xls format with all the above in clean columns and rows
Why? Maybe I want to create charts and graphs in Excel that are prettier instead of cutting and pasting charts made from GA. Maybe I need to link the tracking codes and traffic data captured in GA with the backend database through the IDs. What if I have over 50,000 rows of data that I need now? Is there a way to export all rows out at once GA?
Track Social Media Traffic Like White On Rice With Google Analytics
If you have a website that you’re marketing traffic to, social media traffic is probably becoming a major player. What I’m about to walk through is very simple. However, if I’m not making sense, you’ll be able to find many sources out there that can explain this as well.
There are a few ways to track social media traffic. One way is to create a social media traffic profile. This is great because it allows for an easy and clean analysis of social traffic activity on your site. The other is to create an advanced segment for social traffic within your main profile. Although this makes it harder to see just social traffic activity on your site, it allows you to easily compare social traffic with other traffic sources such as cpc, direct, etc. Read the rest of this post »
Thursday, February 25, 2010 AT 10:04 am
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