The Advertiser's Dilemma: AdWords or Facebook?

In January, Google disclosed that they earned $37.9 billion in revenues in 2011 (Kim, 2012). (Yes, that is a single year’s income and billion with a “b.”) Ninety-six percent of those earnings were from advertising (ibid., 2012)  Facebook, on the other hand, earned $3.7 billion and 85% of it came from selling advertising (Tsukayama, 2012). They are staggering numbers for two platforms that offer the same service, or do they?

What They Have in Common

With either platform there is no minimum budget. You can spend as little or as much as you like. Both offer cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) ad structures. You can also easily target audiences geographically, focusing on local consumers, people across the US or audiences across the globe. Both allow you to create your own ads and both give you analytics to measure your campaign results quickly. And either option makes it easy to stop and start any advertisement.

How They Are Different

What is more interesting is how these two ad platforms vary. It is their differences which will help the marketer decide when to use each platform.

The biggest distinction between the two is how each delivers the audience. Google Ad Words allows advertisers to target their ads according to specific key words that they choose. Anyone who performs a search for that keyword will see their advertisement. (Note, this is the wide theory. In practice, this is dependent upon how much you have bid for that keyword, how much others have bid, etc.) In Facebook, ads are selectively shown to audiences with the specific demographic and psychographic parameters chosen by the advertiser.

In the former, the consumer is actively seeking specific information related to a product or service, but this can be any consumer within the advertiser’s delineated geographic parameters. In the latter, the only consumers who will see the ad have already been determined to have the right demographic and psychographic distinctions, but they are most likely not actively searching for information about a product or service.

This is a notable distinction because in the Google environment the ads create options for which the consumer is looking. In the Facebook platform, the consumer is more often looking to engage with friends, not advertisers.

Which is more effective?

Well, that depends. Facebook allows advertisers to message an audience over time and build mailing lists (Mielach, 2012). Facebook also tells a consumer who of their friends is already a fan of an advertiser (ibid., 2012). If the marketer is looking to build a relationship, Facebook is a better choice than Google Adwords. When the advertiser is looking to compete directly with other providers and be included in the consideration phase of the sales funnel, Google Ad Words, is more suitable.

It is no wonder Google and Facebook are neck and neck in revenues in the ad biz. They function from two theories of advertising. Google’s success is built upon offering the right solution at the right time. Facebook’s success is based on influence and long term relationships. Both theories of advertising have proven to be valuable. There is a time and a place for both.

References

Kim, L. (2012, January 23) What [sic] industries contributed to Google's $37.9 billion in 2011 revenues? Wordstream.com. Retrieved from http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenues

Mielach, D. (2012, June 29) Should your small business advertise on Facebook? Business News Daily Retrieved from http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2771-facebook-ads-effectiveness.html

Tsukayama, H. (2012, February 1) Facebook IPO: How does Facebook make its money? The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-ipo-how-does-facebook-make-its-money/2012/02/01/gIQAL03yiQ_story.html

The Top 5 Metrics for Bloggers

In July, the The Wall Street Journal reported that Barnes & Noble is disseminating some of the data collected from its Nook e-readers to publishers “to help them create books that better hold people’s attention” (Alter, 2012, para. 6).

Bloggers have been able to make use of analytics to hone their content for years. The smart ones do that and more with their analytic data. Google Analytics is an inexpensive tool to use, but you can easily find yourself with more data than you know what to do with. SEO guru, Avinash Kaushik (2010) suggests, there are nice-to-know metrics and there are need-to-know metrics. Need-to-know metrics are measurements that are tied to your goals and knowing these statistics can help you achieve your objectives. A universal goal for all bloggers is to get more readers, so here is my list of the top 5 metrics you can use to increase readership.

1. Site Content – Page Views

Take a look at the number of views for each post. Was there one topic which spiked? It is a pretty good bet that if a topic received an elevated number of views, that it is a topic worth augmenting, developing or revisiting. Give the people what they want and they will return, comment, and perhaps tell their friends or post a link to your blog. As I discussed in an earlier post, content drives conversation and conversation builds an audience. So the more any blogger can fine tune their content to drive interest and discussion, the more readers they will attract.

On my blog, the topic that received both the most page views and the highest average time on page was the post comparing Google Adwords with Facebook advertising. This is an indication that the topic is of interest to many folks and merits deeper exploration.  

2. Traffic  - Daily & Hourly
It is important to know when people are reading your blog so that you can optimize your posting times and consolidate your efforts. For example, if you see a drop in readership on weekends, then stick to posting during the week. For even more focus, take a look at the times in which they are reading. Are there more readers at lunch hour, after 5 pm, or in the early morning? Whatever the time, make sure you post an hour or so before traffic generally peaks. Subscribers are going to visit when they receive your notice of a new post; for everyone else, try to let them find new content when they arrive.

For my blog, the traffic peaked with 9 visits at 11:00 pm. I summate from this that my readers are late night readers, so posting new content after 8 pm would be optimal.

As a side note, if you see traffic at odd hours, in the middle of the night and such, your site could be attracting night owls, or you could have overseas readers. In GA, check in the Audience Overview / demographics/ location metric. You can see which locations are driving traffic to your blog. With this information, you can further target your content and your posting hours.

(This location analytics image was taken from a blog with lots of readers in India.) (Eatmoreoats.com, n.d.)

3. Time on Site

How long are people viewing your pages? Are they reading for 20 seconds and leaving? Are they spending more than a few minutes? If we go back to our goal of increasing readership, then this metric will help us to understand how interested people are in what you have to say. Looking at the average time on page metric will also hone in on the topics they are most engaged with. While some posts may have high page views, they could have low average time, which could mean the title or topic attracted a reader to the post, but the material was not compelling enough to keep them there.

Conversely, a topic may have low page views, but high average times, which could mean the post’s title is not doing a good job of attracting readers, or it is a subject with a niche audience hungry for similar content.

4. Traffic Sources – Referral and Search

Since our goal is to increase readership, it would be logical to understand where our readers are coming from. For example, if we discover that 1% of the traffic is coming from Facebook and 5% is coming from Twitter, it would stand to reason that putting more time into tweeting will garner more readers.

Perhaps you discover from looking at the referral sources that there is another blogger who has included a link to your blog in one of their posts. Knowing that gives you an opportunity to link back to that blogger or just to send them a note of appreciation. Either way, strengthening that relationship will help drive more traffic to your site. Most importantly, you may not know even to do so, unless you review your referral sources, so check them often.

Likewise, if we are getting visitors from particular keyword searches, it would be helpful to know what those search terms are so that you can either write more posts that are pertinent to those topics, or include more of those keywords in your titles and text.

5. Returning Visitors versus New Visitors

The last metric in my top 5 is new versus returning visitors. The “bread and butter” of any blog is subscribers and return visitors. If a blog had to rely solely on new visitors for traffic, the effort would outweigh the returns. It is the return visitor who is more likely to subscribe, comment, and share your links--all actions which contribute to the goal of increasing traffic.

Combining this metric with the referral sources and average time on site will give you an indication of where the quality traffic is coming from.

For example, you can see in my blog metrics that Facebook delivered 7 visits, 100% of which are new visitors. However, the average time on the site from this source is 24 seconds. There is less traffic coming from Blogger.com, however it consists entirely of return visitors. Visitors from blogger.com look at more pages and they stay an average of 27 minutes. Because they are return visitors, they are more likely to help build the blog’s overall audience. Blogger.com provides low quantity of visitors, but they are high quality traffic.

In Summary

You don’t have to be Barnes & Noble or a big publisher to make use of analytics. By reviewing these 5 metrics on a weekly basis, you can gather insights that will help you build your audience. But remember to do more than just examine the data. Take action. Write new posts on topics where you received the highest number of page views and the longest average time on page. Post new content an hour or so before your highest traffic volume occurs. Be aware of your referral sources so you can put effort into the keywords and sources that are paying off. Lastly, mind where your return visitors are coming from and what is interesting them. Cater to them and you will be on your way to building a loyal following.

References

Alter, A. (2012, July 19) Your e-book is reading you. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.html

Eat more oats. (n.d.) Eatmoreoats.com. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/c5zjrhr

Kaushik, A. (2010) Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Making Goals, Funnels & Filters Actionable

Google Analytics (GA) makes advancing your business easier by giving you the tools to quickly see where improvements can be made in your web site that will make a difference to your bottom line. Whether your bottom line is dollars or traffic, GA has solutions. Three of these tools are called goals, funnels and filters. I will briefly outline the uses for each of these and how they can provide actionable insights that will sharpen your business’ performance.

Goals

In setting up any analytics program your first priority should be to determine your goals. Beware, it is easier said than done because they cannot just be any goals. Goals have to tie the data you are collecting to your desired business outcomes. Without goals, the metrics you collect will not yield actionable insights. It is lovely to know that you got 1,000 visitors on your site today, but how do those visits impact your business, really? That is where setting up clearly defined goals comes in.

For example, let us say that you have a business goal of getting a publishing deal to write a book on how to de-clutter your home. One strategy you determine for yourself is to become a recognized expert in home organization. The tactic you employ to achieve your strategy is to write a blog where you share tips on home organization. You do some research and discover that publishers sit up and take notice of a blogger when in addition to getting an average of 50,000 visitors per day, the average time on the site is 12 minutes. You set a goal of achieving an average site visit time of 12 minutes. (See how we must first have clear business goals in order to know what our analysis goals should be?)

Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik (2008) says it well:

At the end of the day every analysis needs to solve for the business outcomes. So you have to have some understanding of the goals going in (this is much harder than you imagine).

 Many people just jump into the data, find interesting trends and patterns, convert those into "insights" and off it goes. The problem? You are sending things out you think matter, rather than what the business actually cares about (paras. 25 & 26).

Perhaps you decide that a goal of a 12 minute average visit is too overwhelming to start with. So you set up four smaller goals in GA. The first goal is a visit duration of greater than 3 minutes. It looks like this:

The second goal is for visits greater than 5 minutes. It looks like this on the GA site:

Set the visit duration goals at any intervals you think make sense for your overall targets.

There are other goals that can be set, such as URL Destination, Pages per visit, and Events. The same logic applies. By clearly defining your desired business outcomes you can drill down to the specific metric you need to measure in order to track your progress towards your overall business goals.

Funnels

Now, let us suppose that another benchmark that gets publishers’ attention is a large mailing list. You decide to add a monthly newsletter opt-in page to your blog, so you can begin to capture names and email addresses. Again, with some research you determine that 100,000 is the magic number of regular subscribers that you need to get publishers interested in your book. It is easy enough to keep count of how many new addresses you collect, but that is not actionable data in terms of site improvement. What is actionable information is the pathway that people use to complete the sign up process. By watching their actions in this funnel, you can figure out where people abandon the course. You can then optimize your site to insure more people make it all the way through to complete the sign up procedure.

In order to set up a funnel, we go back to our goals tab and select the second goal set, and choose the goal type, URL destination. We plug in the address of the page that subscribers will see once they have successfully completed signing up for the newsletter. In this case, it is a thank you page.

By checking the “Use Funnel” box at the bottom, you can then add the steps in the funnel that bring visitors to the ultimate destination of the “thank you” page. Once you have added each of the steps the visitor must complete in order to successfully sign up for the newsletter, you then have the ability to see where people abandon the process. You can then look at the pages where they bail out fix any issues. Anyone can count new sign ups, but only someone deeply invested in their goals will think to add a funnel to their clearly defined goal in order to determine site obstructions to their goals.

Filters

Filters are another tool designed to help you get down to actionable data.

Google Profile Filters allow you to define rules that permanently modify your data as it flows into your account profile. If you want to screen, suppress, or shape the data that enters your profile so it doesn’t clutter the picture of your ecommerce business, then Profile Filters are an important feature to implement (Stearns, 2010, para.6).

There are advanced filters you can set up for doing things like segmenting out organic search traffic from paid search traffic, but for our purposes here, I will relate just the basic filtering options.

One important note about filters is that once you apply a filter, you cannot retroactively “un-apply” it. Once the data is filtered, you cannot get the entire data set back again, so keep one profile that is completely unfiltered that includes all the data compiled from your site. If any issues arise, you can always refer to the data in the unfiltered profile.

An easy and useful filter to turn on is one that separates out traffic coming from your own ISP domain or IP address. So, going back to our goal of an average of 50,000 visitors per day, if you are visiting your site 100 times per day, your visitor count is going to be inaccurate every day because of your own visits. With filters, you can tell Google Analytics not to count traffic coming from your own domain or IP address. You can designate it to exclude traffic from certain sources or include traffic to particular subdirectories or hostnames. Filtering lets you see the only data you want to see.  

Below is an example of how to set up a filter for your own IP address.

Using goals, funnels and filters, you can make your web site’s analytic data more actionable—as long as you have tied each back to your business goals. Because, in the end, actionable data is the only data worth having. 

References

Kaushik, A. (2008, July 21) Consultants, analysts: Present impactful analysis, insightful reports. Kauskik.net. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/consultants-analysts-present-impactful-analysis-insightful-reports/

Stearns, M. (2010, February 4) Google Analytics: Use profile filters, advanced segmentation to understand your visitors. Practicalecommerce.com. Retrieved from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1623-Google-Analytics-Use-Profile-Filters-Advanced-Segmentation-to-Understand-Your-Visitors

How a Web Retailer Can Use Analytic Applications to Improve Their Sales 

AutopartsWarehouse.com Case Study

AutopartsWarehouse.com (USAP) is an online retailer that utilizes web analytics to boost their sales and website’s performance. I will explain a few tools they have already implemented with great results and then make some suggestions of other tools they might use for further success.

In 2012, USAP hired Experian CheetahMail and Omniture to combine their technologies in order to implement a “ReMarketing program.” This entailed taking the behavioral data collected from user visits and creating targeted e-mail messaging that reflected users’ browsing habits (Experian.com, 2012, para. 1). 

So, for example, if during a session a user scrolled through fenders,  

 then moved over to garage tools and clicked on a couple of products, but ultimately did not purchase, an email would automatically be generated and sent to the visitor. The email would contain photos and links to the fenders they looked at and the garage tools they clicked on. To further entice a sale, the email might offer a discount or free shipping.  (It should be noted that if the user did not register or log in, then an email could not be sent. However, behaviorally targeted ads featuring the specific items they clicked on could be generated on other websites the user visits, as seen below.) 

Similarly, if the user put items into a shopping cart, but then abandoned the cart, the data would trigger a message like this one to be sent to the customer:

The ReMarketing campaign brought “significant lifts to the transaction rates, clickthroughs, and most importantly, revenue per email” (Experian.com, 2012, para. 1). 

Further Analytic Solutions

While the targeted emails and cart abandonment initiatives are powerful solutions, there are three more applications I would include in the Autopartswarehouse.com analytics mix. Each one adds further illumination into the user experience that will boost the ROI on marketing initiatives.

Phone Call Tracking

First, I would add phone call tracking. Because this is a retailer which sells technical and specialized items, a fair amount of customers are going to need to talk to an actual person to have specific questions answered. If the customer picks up the phone, a call tracking application can provide the trail of breadcrumbs between the digital marketing efforts of the company and how the customer finds the company. Closing this loop is essential for this retailer because without thorough knowledge of which efforts are working, and how well, the marketing department cannot accurately allocate resources.

How Call Tracking Works

Call tracking is rather ingenious. The telephone number displayed on the website is actually dynamic and changes depending on the referring site or particular keyword used that brings the visitor to the site. These dynamic phone numbers act as tracking tags and when the user dials the number it is collected as part of the site’s analytic data. This data on the keywords and referring websites is valuable because it will provide a more complete and reliable picture of the robustness of the marketing efforts.

Infinity Call Tracking and Easy Call Tracker are just two of many phone call tracking providers that work seamlessly with Google Analytics.

Video Recording & Tracking

Another solution I would employ into Auto Parts Warehouse analytics program is a video recording application, like Session Cam or Mouse Flow.  This would provide the ability to record and replay individual users’ website sessions which would allow analysts to gain deeper, more actionable insights by correlating actual visits with the data collected. I will explain by example.

When a new visitor goes to the Auto Parts Warehouse site, they have to fill in the type of vehicle they are looking for parts for. They can then click on any number of departments from the drop down menu beneath it.

Until I registered with the site, I had to keep re-entering the vehicle type every time I went to a new page. It was frustrating and time consuming. If I was a busy Auto Parts Store Manager looking to buy from a new retailer, I may not keep entering the data. I may just find another site to shop. An application like Session Cam would be invaluable in this kind of situation where the data is showing new visitors staying a few minutes on the site, viewing a couple of pages, but then consistently, inexplicably exiting. The video playback would clearly demonstrate the poor functionality and the reason for all the new visitor exits. The functionality could be fixed and results could be clearly measured. 

Social Media Management

The last tool I would add to Auto Parts Warehouse analytics mix is a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social, Argyle Social or Campalyst. Auto Parts Warehouse maintains pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. Updating content, managing conversations, tracking mentions across the web are time consuming initiatives. In order to streamline efforts and put time and money into the content and channels that garner the greatest results, the company needs to closely analyze the impact of their social media strategies. With a social media management application, they can integrate their social media efforts and gain insights into how their social media efforts are affecting their ROI.

Most social media applications allow a company to manage all of their social accounts from one dashboard as well as see their website traffic in comparison to their social media activity.  Campalyst goes so far as to boast that it can “track fans and followers from a like or a tweet on the social network up to a purchase on the company's website” (Campalyst Inc., 2012, para. 1).

Regardless of the social media analytics application you choose, it has to integrate seamlessly with your analytics provider, and more importantly, be easy for you to use and understand.  

Adding the Right Solutions

While this post focused on Auto Parts Warehouse, the implications for other online retailers should be clear. Getting the right tools to capture the right data to provide actionable insights is what analytics is all about. It is truly amazing what collecting and analyzing data can tell you about your customers and your website functionality. While there are hundreds of worthwhile applications out there to explore, choosing the right ones for your needs is essential. As remarkable as this new data intelligence is, it does not magically boost your bottom line. To get dividends from your data, you need to apply the right solutions.

References:

Campalyst Inc. (2012, March 22) Campalyst. Google.com. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/about?app_id=1626001.

U.S. Auto Parts combines online analytics with email marketing to boost campaign performance. (n.d.) Experian.com. Retrieved from http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/case-studies-us-auto-parts.html