Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

How to Optimize Your Marketing Spend

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The word “marketing” isn’t usually one that’s synonymous with “accountability”. Now granted it definitely can’t be blamed on many marketers out there as many channels are either impossible to track accurately or would require overhead costs that would likely exceed their benefits. But marketing online is a different animal from anything that you’ll do in what may, by today’s terms, be deemed as traditional channels.

For instance, free tools now like Google Analytics can let you know that the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign you’re running not only brought this many people to your site, but it also was responsible for 25% of sales or 10% of newsletter sign ups. In my opinion, not enough people give this kind of information the credit that it really deserves. As stated above, many marketers have to continually operate in the dark in their channels. If I run a television ad for a new product or service my company is offering and I see a modest increase in sales, of course I’ll go as far to assume that my ad did its job, but I don’t actually know how many people came due to my ad. With a website however, I can track almost anything and this article is dedicated to showing you how.

In some recent conversations with colleagues at work, I realized that people may not be aware of all the types of marketing activities you could potentially use a web analytics tool to evaluate so let me first provide a few ideas:

• Any (and I mean any) offline channel: TV, radio, print, direct mail, outdoor
• Online search engine marketing (cost-per-click) campaigns
• Online e-mail campaigns
• Nifty Web 2.0 features like RSS feeds, social networking sites and so on

From my Principles of Marketing book I have in front of me from undergrad, that actually covers just about everything (they list newspapers, television, direct mail, radio, magazines, outdoor, internet). What I hope this illustrates so far is that you potentially could be measuring the impact of virtually every activity you are currently devoting towards driving people to do something online. Why is this important? Because measuring the impact of every activity is the first step towards deciding how to better spend your marketing dollars to achieve the online outcomes that you want.

Determine Your Outcomes

It makes sense to first ask yourself why you’re even spending money to bring people to your site if you don’t know what you want them to do when they get there. Most of you out there already have at least some idea in your head of what you want people to do, but few people are aware that, for most analytics tools, you can actually tailor your tool to report your success metrics against your marketing efforts.

Just in case you need a bit of help getting started on what should be a success metric for your site or are curious to know if there are other metrics to add to your currently running list, I’d encourage you to check out Eric T. Peterson’s e-book as well as my previous post for content-based sites).

For the sake of an example, a successful visit on my blog would be (if it helps below, think of a visit as a person below, I’m just trying to stay consistent with the terminology your tool may use):

• Any visit / session that views more than 3 page views per visit (a measure of engagement)
• Any visit / session where a visitor prints off one of my articles (a measure of engagement)
• Any visit / session where a visitor posts a comment (a measure of engagement)
• Any visit / session that results in that visitor returning to the site (a measure of loyalty)

Additionally however my site is content-driven and as such I want to tell the same story as any other content-driven site. I want to bring more visitors in consistently, keep them coming back, and truly have them be engaged and satisfied with the content I have provided. So in addition to my defined success events above, I’ll include the standard success metrics for content-driven sites.

Although I’m just focusing on content-driven goals and metrics, I’ll encourage you to try to let your imagination run wild with other types of goals for different site types (purchases for e-commerce sites, lead generation, etc.).

Track Your Outcomes

Now that we know what we want to have happen, you may need to add some special tracking to events that aren’t already out of the box tracked by your tool. Most tools will allow you to configure what’s known as a conversion event in their interface which is quite simply any event on your site that you deem to be of importance to yourself. A conversion rate is defined by most tools as the number of visits who performed a specific conversion event within their visit, divided by the total number of visits. Typically a conversion event is related to a page view such as viewing the confirmation page of an e-commerce transaction but enterprise class tools have gotten very fancy with defining these kinds of success metrics.

I’ll note here that when I last checked, WebTrends was the only tool I was aware of that seemed to have a bit of trouble with tracking non-e-commerce types of conversion events against campaign sources (someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). The campaign report tends to only show everything relative to visits and revenue along with some other fancy metrics, but none of which are related to custom events you may wish to be tracking. You’ll have to work with your onDemand team or technical support in order to configure a custom report that shows how your campaigns are performing against custom events.

I currently track this site with Google Analytics and for me to track my outcomes I simply set up two goals (conversion events are goals in Google Analytics terminology).

The first is a measure of how satisfied or interested I feel you are with my content and is based on the logic of the statement, “If you really liked what you read, you’ll be inclined to print it”. When you view the “printer friendly” version of any of my pages or posts you get sent to an address that matches the post exactly except has /print/ slapped on the end. In Google Analytics then, I configure a goal with only one step who’s address is .*/print (which essentially says, “give me any address where you see a /print in it) and voila! I have my first goal (which doesn’t seem to be performing too hot!).

The second is another measure more of how interested (or ticked off) you are with my post, the number of comments received. This one was a bit more tricky to track as using WordPress as the technological backbone of this blog, I had to get a bit inventive with how to track when a comment is posted. You’ll notice you can only make a comment on a post by going to the bottom of the post and submitting the necessary information there. What I’ve done then is modified the code of that comment portion so that when someone hits that “Submit Comment” button, Google Analytics receives a page view letting me know that the post has been commented on.

From there, I setup another goal in Google Analytics that looks for any address with /commentPosted/ somewhere in it as letting me know that a comment was posted on one of the posts to get goal two. Cool, huh?

Track Your Campaigns

Believe it or not, that was actually the hard part! Now that we are tracking what we want our marketing efforts to help us accomplish, the next step is to track every single campaign that you spend a single dime on or drop an ounce of effort into. The methodology of tracking campaigns online can really be split into two main groups: online and offline.

Online (SEM, Email, RSS / Atom Feeds, and everything else) Campaigns

Tracking online campaigns / activities is usually a synch! The methodology used is make sure that you direct users to a page with some unique information tied to it (usually something like a campaign tracking ID) so that your analytics tool can drop a campaign tracking cookie on that visitors browser.

Many analytics tools (Coremetrics for example) have tools you can use in order to create this unique address. Google Analytics has a URL Builder where you provide:

• The address of the page where you want a user to eventually land when the click on that Google Ad or ad within your e-mail
• The source of your campaign (i.e. Yahoo!, Google, Newsletter, RSS, Atom)
• The online medium of your marketing message (i.e. Email, CPC, Feed)
• The campaign term (i.e. the paid keywords if you’re doing a CPC campaign)
• The content of your campaign used to differentiate different creatives you may be running (i.e. 300×60 Banner, Bugs Bunny Banner)
• And finally, the name of the entire campaign you’re running

Remember a campaign usually has many promotions it’s running for one product / service / event. When I launched this blog for example, I sent out separate e-mails to friends, family and co-workers. I wanted both to link to my homepage (http://analytics.mikesukmanowsky.com/analytics/), but I was curious to know the response I got from both e-mails. So I used Google’s URL Builder and supplied the following parameters:

After I put these into the URL builder I get two resultant URLs and I provided these in my two e-mails:

• Friends and Family e-mail:
  http://analytics.mikesukmanowsky.com/analytics/ ?utm_source=Friends+and+Family&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Site+Startup
• Co-workers e-mail:
  http://analytics.mikesukmanowsky.com/analytics/ ?utm_source=Rogers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Site+Startup

And that’s all it takes! Don’t worry about your users not being able to remember these URLs afterwards. Once the campaign tracking cookie is set, Google Analytics will remember where they came from no matter where they enter your site from next time (for up to a period of six months)! Also, you can always hide these URLs and display a bit more of a friendly URL to your public with the following HTML technique:

<a href="http://thesite.com/?utm_source=Source&utm_medium=email&">
theSite.com
</a>

The above HTML displays a link that looks like theSite.com, but actually links to the homepage of that site with the special campaign tracking parameters on it. Sneaky huh?

After directing users to those two links and having my goals already configured I am now able to find out not only how many people came to my site from those two e-mails, but also know how well those mediums perform against my goals and (some of) my KPIs.

Tracking site usage of the two campaigns (KPIs I evaluate are Pages / Visit, Time on Site and Bounce Rate)	Tracking conversion rates of the two campaigns (Printing a Post or Commenting on a Post)

In Google Analytics, I found this information out by viewing my “All Traffic Sources” report and searching for “Rogers|Friends” (Rogers or Friends).

Apparently my Rogers co-workers are a lot more interested in my blog than my friends and family are!

So now with a little bit of forethought (setting up the goals of what I am hoping users do when they come to the site) as well as a bit of planning before sending out e-mails or campaigns, I’m now able to know who I should really be sending out e-mails to in the future to be more successful! Although at my level this isn’t as important, if you’re paying an agency to do massive e-mail campaigns to huge distribution lists, this kind of data is critical towards knowing where to invest your direct marketing dollars.

I hope the above has illustrated that tracking online campaigns with Google Analytics or most other tools out there on the market, is just a matter of providing your users the right link. Your tool will take care of the rest.

Note for you RSS / Atom Users out there: Did you know that programs like Google Analytics will by default interpret people who arrived at your site via RSS / Atom feeds as “direct traffic”? If you were curious to know how many people are arrived to your site via RSS, then you can tag your RSS links with campaign landing tags as well or just a unique parameter in the URL for every link in the feed. Work with your developers to add something like “utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed” to the links in your RSS feeds. I’ve included a screenshot of this kind of tracking in action below:

An example of tracking RSS feeds using campaign specific URLs

Offline (Print, Television, Radio, Direct mail) Campaigns

It’s completely possible to track the success of your offline campaigns that are intended to drive users online. The entire idea behind tracking offline campaigns is trying to make sure you give your offline users a unique place to start their experience with your site. The cool thing is that analytics tools these days are smart enough to see that you started on this one unique page, and then drop a cookie onto your computer to make sure anything that you go off and do on the site is attributed to that initial landing location you came in on. Now that is cool!

The unique landing page I’m referring to is often called a vanity URL (or vanity address if you prefer). As stated above, you specify an address on your site that’s specific only to the offline campaign you’re promoting. If I have a contest I’m promoting for instance, I might create a vanity URL at http://mikesukmanowsky.com/contest/ or better yet http://contest.mikesukmanowsky.com/ (better only because contest.mikesukmanowsky.com is easier for me to remember).

Depending on your analytics tool, it may allow you to place some tracking code within the page itself or you may be required to redirect the user to a page that has some extra stuff in the address for the tool to assign that aforementioned campaign tracking cookie. In the case of Google Analytics you’ll have to do the latter.

As mentioned above, the trick with tracking offline campaigns with Google Analytics is to direct the user to a page like http://www.thesite.com/contest/. The key thing is a URL that’s easy for them to remember and that’s unique! From there though, the page that resides at http://www.thesite.com/contest/ has no real content, it just redirects the user to an actual campaign landing page that does have real content (say for example http://www.thesite.com/contest/contest.html).

Using this as an example, I first use the Google Campaign Tracker (or URL Builder as they call it) to create the campaign URL that will be used for the redirect page (in this case the redirect page is http://www.thesite.com/contest/contest.html). I pop in the following parameters into the Campaign Tracker:

• Website URL: http://www.thesite.com/contest/contest.html
• Source: newspaper ad
• Medium: print
• Campaign Name: contest

And Google’s tool provides me with this new URL: http://www.thesite.com/contest/contest.html? utm_source=newspaper%2Bad&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=contest

Now this isn’t something we want our users to remember, but keep in mind that they’ll only be typing in http://www.thesite.com/contest/ and we’ll take care of the rest for them.

If you don’t have a development team handy (or maybe they’re just overworked!), here’s a sample of code you can use as the redirect page that would be placed at http://www.thesite.com/contest/.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.location.replace("http://www.thesite.com/contest/contest.html"
+ "?utm_source=newspaper%2Bad&utm_medium=print"
+ "&utm_campaign=contest");
</script>
</body>
</html>
</pre>

You just have to replace the part inside the brackets of document.location.replace with the URL you grabbed after using Google’s Campaign Tracker (make sure to wrap the URL in quotes).

So using this method now, my users type in http://www.thesite.com/contest/ and Google Analytics eventually thinks of these users as people that have seen a newspaper ad and come to the site. Obviously, the only downfall with this method is that you’ll need a separate unique URL for every offline medium that you’re using for your campaign (otherwise Google Analytics won’t know how to attribute traffic to the right medium!).

Although I’ve taken a bit of time to go into a Google Analytics specific example, I hope that the basic idea has been pretty easy to follow and you now have some ideas to ask your support personnel from your analytics vendor (or go right ahead and start using this on your site if you’re a Google Analytics user already!).

As always, if anyone has any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me at mikesukmanowsky@oddinteractive.com or leave a comment below.

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