In this episode I’m giving you the process that’s used in my agency’s work to get B2B companies onto Google’s full analytics stack. This episode is split into two parts.
Installing GA4 (from 1:30 to 10:45) – For the first third of this episode, I go through the steps that companies should follow to install GA4, including setting up streams, conversions and links to Google Ads accounts.
Installing Google and third party components for consolidated analysis and visualization of your marketing data (listen for melody at 10:45 to end) – the remaining time roams through the rest of the tools that give a complete picture of your B2B funnel.
Another path for completing this process is to implement them together with peers in a workshop environment. By the end of the session, you leave ready to make reports leveraging all your company’s marketing data. I am leading several two-day workshops in several Eastern states and provinces. To find out more, visit https://gafast4ward.com
If every part of your customer acquisition can be measured, you’ll figure out how to do it profitably. That premise has driven why digital marketing, and especially Pay-per-click (PPC) is managed by experienced humans. These professionals scour through data for the relationship between a company’s ads and the buyers actions; once found, budgets get shifted to achieve that optimal effect.
A wrench has been thrown into our acquisition dreams by the ad platform titans: Google, Facebook and Microsoft (who own LinkedIn). Thanks to major AI investments they have made in the last five years, they’ve been able to automate much of the work that marketing professionals have done. In tandem with implementing their ‘smart’ software that runs autonomously, they have been restricting a marketer’s ability to manually control campaigns.
The platforms believe their AI is smart enough to run marketing, so we can either be passive, letting them spend our money as they see fit, or we can choose to give them navigational assistance while they drive. The point is, you should have a game plan that works with the platforms’ AI. One that, over time, will generate the leads you need at the best possible acquisition cost.
I believe listening to this episode will give you that plan. It covers:
How marketing has become more computationally complex than humans can handle
What was in it for the platforms to automate PPC marketing
Stages of maturity for dealing with data, ending with predictive analytics
Why you shouldn’t fight ad platform automation, but instead use your business data to train algorithms how to market you more effectively
How you should integrate your in-house systems and apply data science to uncover insights
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Paper estimating how much data optimized advertising requires, authored by Randall A. Lewis of Google; Justin M. Rao of Microsoft: “A calibrated statistical argument shows that the required sample size for an experiment to generate informative confidence intervals is typically in excess of ten million person-weeks”
Quote by Chuck Heamann & Ken Burbary in “Digital Marketing Analytics”: “If you think about all the tools we have talked about…you see that there is one common denominator: You do not own any of the data. Herein lies what we think is the biggest revolution coming to digital analytics..companies will be building internal repositories for this data.”
A lot of changes have happened with Data Privacy lately, as people have grown more aware of information that companies have on them. Cookies were introduced to allow sites to improve the visitor experience. But their usage has mushroomed so much, we now need pop-ups on sites just to say how many cookies are being used.
With privacy regulations passed and more looming, big tech players like Apple and Google are pre-emptively changing data tracking. Google’s taking away the individual targeting on which they have sold ads for the last 20 years.
There will be more episodes on this topic, because it is changing and we won’t know how it fully impacts marketers for another year or two. But for now, let’s explore all that’s happened and look at tactical alternatives we as site owners and marketers can take to react to this.
Ensure your site complies with opt-in provisions and limited data collection policies.
Collect first-party data on your leads/buyers, including which advertisements they saw. Form inferences on which ads your entire potential-buyer population should see, based on this statistical sample.
Encourage visitors to provide their email early, so you can track them as they go from visitor to lead to customer. You will be better prepared when Google Ads switches to selling cohorts of users based on interest.
Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career.
To help, the first part of the episode goes through how uncertainty affects everyone’s mindset. I share what some authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Kurt Vonnegut have observed about these reactions change over time. By understanding them, we’ll hopefully cycle through these emotions more quickly.
Peter Drucker said we shouldn’t scale back at times like this, but to make investments that “enable a business to make its future. That, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.” So having dealt with how we respond to uncertainty as humans, I devote the rest of this episode to how we can respond as marketers.
I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.
People/Products/Ideas Mentioned:
Mr. Micawber from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”
This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We’ll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why it’s still good business to advertise, in spite of problems with ad fraud.
This is part of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. Fifty years ago, Author and Ad Age writer Bob Stone gave a framework for direct marketing funnels: list, offer, creative. Today, we will focus on the ‘Offer,’ otherwise known as the call-to-action.
In this episode, we look at both sides of website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common call-to-action offers used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics:
Why do we have conversions?
How to optimize your conversion offers
How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage
How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc
Enjoy this list of Conversions/Calls-to-Action from “You Should Test That” (reprinted with permission)
Lead-Generation Goals
If lead generation is your overall purpose, the goals might include any of the following specific user actions:
Request a quote
Create an online quote
Request an in-person demo
View an overview video
Request a phone call
Take a quiz or poll
Request a situation analysis
in a contest
Request market information
Fill out a needs-analysis
Book a meeting
questionnaire
Use a needs-analysis wizard
Ask a question
Use an interactive savings or RO
Complete a contact form inquiry
calculator
Download software
Click to call
Sign up for trial offer
Click to chat
Request a printed brochure
Make a phone call
Request a catalogue
Register for a webinar
Download an online brochure
Register for a conference
Download a whitepaper
Sign up for a newsletter
Download an ebook
Sign up for a blog subscription
Download a worksheet
Sign up for an RSS feed Subscription
Download a case study
E-Commerce Goals
For e-commerce, your goals might be based on any of these common metrics:
e-commerce purchase conversion rate
Average order value
Return on ad spend
Revenue per visitor
Or they might include any of the following user actions:
Sign up for an RSS feed
Request a catalog
Subscription
Ask a question
Add to cart
Click to cali
Save to a wish list
Click to chat
Sign up for auto-reordering
Sign up for a newsletter
Add accessories (up-sell)
Sign up for a blog subscription
Affiliate Marketing Goals
For affiliate marketing, your goals might include a specific revenue-per-visitor value, along with any of the following actions:
Click through to an affiliate site
Sign up for a newsletter
Sign up for a blog subscription
Fill out a needs-analysis questionnaire
Sign up for an RSS feed subscription
Use a needs-analysis wizard
Find a service provider
Use an interactive savings or ROI calculator
Find savings in your area
Create an online quote
Subscription Goals
Subscription goals might include any of the following actions and metrics:
Sign up for a free trial subscription
Upgrade subscription
Paid subscription signups
Average subscription signup value
There are many more goals you can track, depending on your business model. For each test, choose the one that drives the most revenue. Once you have identified the goals for your test, you’ll be ready to set up your conversion-optimization experiment and get testing.
This is part of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. Today’s focus is the infrastructure that needs to be in place to know everything about people’s interactions with your website.
This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people’s interactions with your website.
Listen in for answers to these topics:
What are the main pieces of a funnel infrastructure
What are the skills you need to set up and maintain your infrastructure?
How to track what’s happening in your site through Google Analytics, everything from a video view to use of a chatbot
Which tools manage the tags behind these conversions
What you need to run A/B testing
You’ll also hear how Mother Hubbard, Gas Tanks and the game of Plinko all relate to tracking on your website.
This is the first of a series on Elements of Every Funnel. The graphic here shows how they all work together to generate a conversion.
Though it’s not an outwardly facing element, something that’s always part of the mix is the management metrics (top-right). Today’s episode focuses on how to make the dashboards that contain those metrics work for you.
Here is the 7-step process described for building a marketing dashboard:
This episode covers the way we work in digital. As the pace of work has sped up, we’re using more agile methods to plan our resources. As automation and artificial intelligence enter, we’re deciding how it gets used in our marketing stack. We are also figuring out how our organizational culture fits with this, so everyone can focus on a funnel that efficiently converts visitors into buyers.
