In episode one we discuss whether it's possible for passion to transfer from one person to another, and whether online and offline interactions can lead to similar emotional connections.
You can listen to the podcast, learn more and subscribe via iTunes, Tumblr or RSS at attentionsurplus.ca.
I hope you will check it out and leave us a comment on what you think!
I recently stumbled across a great article by Griffin Farley at BBH Labs. He was reframing advertising as little more than co-presenting. He used Skins as an example and spoke of how brands were pulling their ads due to complaints about the show's content. They couldn't be seen as co-presenting this show.
Griffin identified an emerging opportunity for brands to be co-viewers together with their audiences.
He raised some great points. As brands shift to engaging in social media, one of the key opportunities is in identifying the role of the team responsible for engaging in these new channels.
Are they just there to publish content?
Can they have opinions?
What if more social media teams took to participating together with us (everyday folks) in events?
All to often, co-creation is treated as a brand initiated event.
Doritos will give someone a big bag of crunchy money if we make a commercial for them. Pick the brand. They all want us to create something for them - be it a video, a photo or a social media mention to our friends.
Is there not an opportunity to co-participate (oy... there's a bad new word) with our fans in the things they love creating?
What about embracing and supporting someone who loves your brand so much they create a commercial about it of their own volition?
And if this commercial pokes good natured fun of your brand, what then?
In hindsight, Eric and I set out to test this theory this past Saturday.
We made a parody video of a brand we enjoy and respect - Marketing Profs.
What would you do if this video was about your brand?
This is an ongoing series titled, "Google Analytics Magic." This is part one where I will explore my favorite custom report - a customized keywords bounce report. In part two, I will go on to answer some of the questions sent in from this post and then explore how to use the Advanced Segmentation feature in Google Analytics.
I've been having a lot of fun in Sparked. I recently offered to share some of my favorite Google Analytics tips and reports with an organization there. I then figured this might be useful to a wider audience, so this crazy blog post was born.
BloomingBetty has agreed to let me use their data as an example. BloomingBetty is a new blog focused on defining success for women. I highly recommend checking it out. Full disclosure: Lori is a good friend and I have been advising her pro bono.
What I love about Google Analytics, beyond being free in most cases, is that advanced insights can be found without having to be a programmer or even an analytics expert.
My Favorite Report
Anyone using Google Analytics is likely familiar with the dashboard. It's the default view.
The key to Google Analytics is to always go at least a little bit deeper than the default view. But where to go can be daunting.
In this post, I'm going to share one of my favorite reports.
Every expert tells us that the reports we choose need to be based on the objectives and key measures that matter to us. I totally agree and I shouldn't have a favorite report, but I do.
It is one of my first "go to" reports when I start working with any new client.
It is a customized Keywords report. I'll show how to create a customized keywords report at the end of this article. First I will start by exploring the standard "Keywords" report already available to everyone in Google Analytics.
I get to the standard Keywords report by clicking on "Traffic Sources" in the left hand nav and then selecting "Keywords".
A report much like the following one should appear.
(click to enlarge any screenshot)
The Keywords report shows the top search terms being used to get people to my site and what happens, in aggregate, once they get there.
I can see, for example, that people typing "blooming betty pike" into a search engine to get to this blog spent significantly more time on the site than people who typed in "anna kinworthy". I can also get a feel for how many pages of the site our visitors are averaging and the percent of new visits versus returning traffic.
But what I often look at is the bounce rate on this report. It is in the final column.
Google says the bounce rate is "the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors."
This is actually misleading. The first part is correct. It is the percentage of single-page visits. A bounce rate or 93% means that 93% of people looked at only the one page before leaving the site.
A lot of people, Google help included, think this is a bad thing. But what if they found what they were looking for?
Just because someone came to the site, found what they were looking for, and then left the site is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, you could argue that in many cases this was a successful engagement!
Let's say that my friend Janet wants to know the hours of a local small business. She searches for the business in Google and then clicks through to the page with the information she wanted. She jots down the information and closes the browser. She will show up as a bounce in the report but she is happy. The business should also be happy.
Before getting back to the Keywords report, I want to look at my least favorite report for looking at bounce rates. It is titled the "Top Landing Pages" report. I get to this report by clicking on "Content" in the left hand nav and then clicking on "Top Landing Pages."
In the screenshot above it would look like there are a number of pages with very high bounce rates. And most firms would focus on fixing these pages.
But what if all these people found what they were looking for and then left happy?
What's missing is the context around the visit. If I only knew why they came to the site in the first place, I could then make a strong educated guess as to whether or not the page they visited had the information they were looking for.
This is where my favorite report comes in. Let's head on back over to the Keywords report.
On the left I can see all the search terms people typed into a search engine that brought them to the website. This is the context I was searching for! On the right, I see the average number of pages visited, the time on site and the Bounce Rate.
I now have significant insight into know why they came here (search term they used to get to the site on the left). But did they get to the page with the information they were looking for? If they did, then a high bounce rate may not be an overly bad thing.
This is where the standard Keywords report fails us.
Sadly, clicking on the search term on the left will not drill down and show the pages they were brought to.
This is where my custom Keywords report differs. It lets me drill down. Other than that, it looks almost identical.
The only addition is the first item "(not set)" which means there was no keyword - it is reporing on site activity that did not originate from a search engine. So we can ignore this line for the most part.
The drilldown is the missing link. If I click on any of the search terms on the left, I can now drill down to find out what pages these people visited as a result of their search engine query.
In the graph above, I highlighted the third item ("sheryl sandberg...") because I noticed it had a bounce rate of over 90%.
If I click on this search term, I can see the pages on the site these people were sent to.
Look at that. They were searching for "sheryl sandberg" and were sent to our article on Sheryl Sandberg. They all got the information they needed and were looking for. And so 93% of them then went on about their day.
So I would check this search term off my list and continue looking. I would look for pages where I have higher bounce rates and I am sending people to a page that does NOT answer the search terms used.
This report will identify some of the big, easy fixes that can have significant positive impacts on traffic and visitors. Someone not finding what they were looking for and leaving the site is a big time missed opportunity if I truly did offer what they wanted. I had them but they were on the wrong page.
I'm sure there are some questions so please fire away in the comments. Ot's really hard to present this in blog format.
Here is a video that shows how to build your own custom Keywords report.
(You will want to watch this full screen in hi def)
For those of you proficient with Google Analytics, here is a link to my my drilldown keywords report: http://bit.ly/fM9Dh0
In my next post I will look at real-time segmentation. But let me know if there's another area people are interested in!
"it represents an evolution of the very blog form that has transformed online media over the last eight years"
I was quite impressed. There are so many things anyone with a website (individual or brand) can learn from this redesign effort.
Most notably:
Page redesigned to give 2/3 of the real-estate to each story
Every page of the site is treated like every other page. They are embracing the idea that every page of your site is the landing page. Home pages are gone. They are optimizing every page to deliver value and drive a visitor to go deeper.
Short featured story links in the right bar that are always present on every page. They once had to stop publishing so as to keep the iphone scoop story on the homepage. Scoops drive growth (great graph of their traffic to highlight this.)
Better integration of curated videos
Stronger support for social media aggregation platforms like Facebook and Twitter
Integration with an editorial calendar or pre-planned stories and themes
Here is a video of the redesign but again I recommend checking out the Lifehacker article as it outlines the reasons behind the changes and goes into depth on what drove the changes.
Campaign planning, by it's structure and nature, lulls us into finding the next "ownable" big idea.
With so many tools, communities and networks already forming around a desire to do something good in the world, is there not an opportunity for the brands we work on to support things that already exist?
Here are two awesome initiatives I've recently come across. Where are the brands?
Sparked
I really liked Sparked. The design and approach is clean and very well thought out. I select a few areas of expertise, identify the issues that interest me, and the system presents some challenges for me to peruse.
The idea is simple. We all have the ability to help and if we all pitch in, even just a little bit, we can accomplish amazing things together. Smart use of deadlines and rewards. Participation builds your profile and gives a sense of accomplishment.
An open call for participation to help solve one of the key challenges of our century - the education system. Click on "What the plan is" and take a look at the Slideshare. On February 7'th, teams from around the world will work to solve a wicked problem that will benefit everyone in the long run.
I've spoken quite a bit in the past about the role of passion and how I see passion tied directly to purpose and participation.
Finding the overlap of these three forces enables brands to shift from incenting engagement in the form of contests, discounts and promotions to enabling real impact and building stronger relationships with communities of people that share a passionate interest with the brand.
I won't hold it against them that they changed passion to populism. After all, they are an advertising agency still at heart. ;)
I will hold it against them that they didn't allow people to easily embed and share this video from their webpage. But again, they are an advertising agency...
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