Email Deliverability and the Holidays

It’s that time of year when retailers are gearing up for the holidays. Black Friday is less than a month away, and then the rush to the holidays is on at full blast. Deliverability is always a hot topic during this time of the year. The amount of support tickets and queries we get shoots up every holiday season. It’s like all of a sudden, everybody in the organization decided to study their deliverability metrics at the same time.

The truth is that marketers, who are the most successful during the holidays, don’t just wake up on Nov 23rd and start thinking about Black Friday sales. We know for some retailers these few days can make or break a whole year of effort. No, the examples to learn from don’t start a week before, they start today. Senders who start their email ramp-up 3-4 weeks before the holiday season make complete sense, and it’s one of the best ways to see great results in November and December.

First, let’s set the rules of the road for most receiving ISP’s. In an ideal world, they would like to see you send exactly the same amount of traffic every single day, with the exact same engagement rates on every send. Consistency is one of the most tried and true methods to great inbox placement. That gets tossed out the window when it comes to the holidays.

We see senders who have sent once a week all year long, suddenly decide to send 3, 4, 5 or more messages in a day. The predictable thing usually happens. We start to see throttling on the ISP side as they slow messages down. An executive doesn’t get an email right away, and they start asking questions. What’s wrong with our email? Fix It!

The prepared marketer has started the holiday push already. They have begun gradually increasing the frequency and the relevance of the offers and messaging. A 5% to 10% increase in traffic every couple of days (while closely managing engagement and deliverability metrics along the way), can get you to a point where sending that second or third message on Black Friday won’t be the end of the world. You’ve established a consistency with the ISP’s, and they don’t see a big jump that puts list origin into question. In other words, you can feel confident doing the things you need to get done through email without getting shut out the biggest day of the year.

There are some important technical points to be aware of for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. ISP’s see substantially more traffic on these days than any other time of the year. They do and will see technical issues, backlogs, and have to sometimes throttle traffic. This is the reality of systems, sometimes all the planning in the world underestimates these factors. We see and hear of more deferrals in this short period of time, than the rest of the year combined. Senders who are deferred are just about always ones who have ramped up suddenly, and in big volumes.

Don’t get caught planning for Black Friday on Thanksgiving Day. Start ramping now to have the needed consistency to be more aggressive on those most important of shopping days!

Want more help for the holidays?

You came to the right place.

Download Turning 2014's Holiday Trends into 2015 Revenue and see how you can learn from what consumers did last year to help you have the happiest of holidays this year.

Why Should You be Tracking Your Metrics?

Why Should You be Tracking Your Metrics? written by Alex Boyer read more at Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been asked all the time why I track metrics. My response is always the same: I ask them “Why don’t you track your metrics?” Their answer doesn’t surprise me. It’s always something like “It takes too much time,” or “Numbers are boring.” While I can sympathize with a dislike of math, I was never one to get excited for calculus class, tracking your metrics is the only way to check the health of your marketing strategy.

No scientist would execute an experiment without recording results. No championship baseball team (Congrats Royals!) would finish a game or season without reviewing their stats. So why would you work so hard on your marketing without reviewing your metrics?

Check-Up

For the most part, you know when you’re healthy. Every day you wake up, you feel fine, go to work and come home. Our bodies tell us when we’re unhealthy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get regular check-ups. These checkups help you identify things you may not be feeling on a daily basis that may be hurting your health. If you’re healthy, these check-ups serve as an opportunity to reaffirm everything you’re doing to stay healthy. Besides, don’t you always get a bit excited when you get a good test result?

As a business owner, you may view your business the same way. You know your bottom line and when business is booming. You know when things slow down and business may be hard to come by. You can feel it.

Much like your check up with your doctor, checking your metrics can show you why your business is healthy, and may bring your attention to something that you may not be able to “feel.” And the best thing is that you don’t have to see a professional to diagnose the problem. You just have to know what you’re looking for.

What to Look For

Metrics may look like numbers, but really they tell a story. All you have to do is learn the language to understand the story your metrics tell.

Recently, I wrote a post outlining the top 4 content marketing metrics, what they mean and how to fix it. Once you have an idea of what each of those metrics mean, you can begin to read the story of your website. Be sure to look for any spikes in activity and compare that to any blog posts you’ve made live or any other marketing activity that coincides with the activity.

How often to look for it

I always check metrics weekly, but I’m in the business of digital marketing, and this doesn’t make sense for most business owners. I’d suggest at least recording your metrics once a month. This way you’ll have enough data to see trends over a longer period of time. Content marketing takes time to work correctly; these long-term trends will give you the best picture of your plans’ effectiveness.

What are you waiting for?

It doesn’t take a big time commitment to track your metrics, but it does take some time to learn what to look for. Take the time, learn all you can about metrics and it will help you save time and energy with your marketing efforts.

Alex Boyer is a Community Manager and Content Ninja for Duct Tape Marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter @AlexBoyerKC

Email Marketing: 4 data points to help you build the case for a bigger budget in 2016

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As we get towards the end of the year, it’s time for B2C marketers to make last-minute tweaks to drive holiday sales and B2B marketers to get those last few, really high-quality leads that will hopefully close in fiscal year 2015.

But don’t overlook another important date that is coming up on the calendar as well — January 1, 2016. The day that 2016 budgets kick in for many marketers.

To help you win the email marketing budget you need to be successful in 2016, here are a few key data points that you can drop into your proposal or presentation.

Data Point #1: Customers want email

According to a 2015 study of 2,057 American consumers by MarketingSherpa (MarketingExperiments’ sister publishing brand), customers want email. When asked In which of the following ways, if any, would you prefer companies to communicate with you?, 72% of consumers chose email, by far the most popular response. Postal mail was a distant second with 48% of respondents.

Not only do customers want email, but this was true for all age groups we surveyed. Email was the most frequent response in every age group (for Americans 65 and older, postal mail tied email for the top spot).

Data Point #2: Your competitors are using email

At the MarketingSherpa Media Center at &THEN, the DMA’s annual event, I asked Thorin McGee, Editor-in-Chief, Target Marketing magazine, about the state of email marketing.

I am presenting one of the sessions during Target Marketing’s 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo about the strategic formula for email conversion success and using testing to optimize your email program (more on testing in Data Point #4), so I knew Thorin would have some key takeaways about email marketing at the ready for an off-the-cuff conversation.

The most interesting piece of data Thorin shared in our conversation came from Target Marketing’s Media Usage Survey 2015.

“We do our own media usage survey every year. And I’ve written it personally for the last five years. And every year I’ve done it, email has been the most used marketing channel among our readers,” Thorin said.

“It’s also been the one seeing the highest level of spending growth. Which is a little strange when you think about it because for five consecutive years, how could the same channel, one, be used by 96% of our readers, and two, still be seeing higher budgets year over year?”

Near universal usage of email marketing paired with ever-increasing budgets? To see why I think this is possible, let’s take a look at Data Point #3.

Data Point #3: Email generates an ROI

Marketers continue to win more budget for email marketing because it has a pretty impressive ROI.

The exact number varies based on where you look. The DMA has one of the most-quoted numbers I’ve seen about email marketing ROI — that it generated $43.52 for every dollar invested. But this well-known number is from 2009.

In 2011, the DMA found email bringing in $40.56 for every dollar invested. And more recently marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn found email (in the UK) to have an average ROI of $38 for every dollar spent, up from $24.93 in 2013, as reported in the National Client Email Report for the DMA UK and Email Hub.

Vendors have their own data as well. In 2014, Experian reported that the average ROI for a dollar invested in email was $44.25. Perhaps the most ambitious number I’ve seen is from Epsilon, which claimed, back in 2009, the DMA’s number was actually low if you take into consideration “the action that email drives offline and directly to Web sites, email marketing’s ROI is probably closer to $130 — about three times the DMA’s estimate.”

While these numbers can be a starting point when making the case for your budget, don’t focus too closely on them. In fact, the sagest data I’ve seen about email ROI comes with a very vague data point. Chad White, Research Director, Litmus, said,

“The Direct Marketing Association says email marketing returns $43 for every dollar invested in it. While that’s incredibly impressive, it’s even more impressive when you realize that figure averages in a lot of low-performing programs. I know brands that are generating email marketing ROIs of $80, which they’re achieving with aggressive, smart spending on technology and services.”

To provide some context and help you be an informed consumer of information, Chad does work for an email vendor, so “aggressive, smart spending on technology and services” is to his company’s benefit.

That said, Chad does have an excellent point that is backed up by MarketingSherpa data. Email marketing was only producing an ROI for 60% of marketers when we last asked about this topic in December 2012.

This means, that in all of those average email marketing ROI numbers above, the “have nots” are pulling down the even better numbers generated by the “haves.”

It’s not enough to just send email to potential customers. As they increasingly demand more personal, more relevant, more helpful emails that provide a true utility in their life, it will likely take “aggressive, smart spending on technology and services” to be in the upper echelon of email marketing ROI. So remember Chad’s point when setting, and making the case, for your own budget.

You need the technology to be able to get relevant messages to the right people, and then services (or internal resources) to actually create the messages to send through that technology.

“Email, no matter what you’re trying to do, is content. People are getting it in the same sense that they used to get newspapers. And you need to make an interesting newspaper in order for them to keep opening it and for you to have a chance to sell them something,” Thorin told me.

Data Point #4: Budget for testing to improve that ROI

Of course, it takes more than technology and content to achieve ROI from email marketing. As any loyal reader of the MarketingExperiments blog well knows, it also takes wisdom about the customer. Testing is an excellent way to gain that wisdom about your customers.

But it’s bigger than email. So the data point I’ll share about testing is not even about testing; it’s about data — 90% of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I found that data point in an article by Scott McCorkle, CEO, SalesForce Marketing Cloud, in which he says “Email is the perfect petri dish for data testing.” He also shared this example:

“With email, marketers can bring in their data and test campaigns, offers and messaging on a scientific basis. Data also allows for highly personalized emails, like those recently sent by DonorsChoose.org in a campaign to aid teachers who had never been funded. These personalized emails were sent exclusively to donors within a close ZIP code range to encourage localized giving, and they generated $450,000 from approximately 4,500 donors, or about 1.9 percent of DonorsChoose.org’s revenue for the first half of their 2015 fiscal year.”

But it’s not just about the data

When setting your budget, also consider the reason we collect all of this data — the customer.

The point of collecting all this data and testing with it is to serve a customer with relevant value. As conversion consultant Jeremy Smith said, “Manipulating your visitor into making a decision that is wrong for them is no way to build a business. Doing that is the same as making false claims or otherwise misrepresenting a product. You may get a conversion, but it will be your last from that customer.”

And according to my interview with Thorin, the truly successful email marketers follow this advice. The brands that look past an overall conversion and focus on the relationship have the most successful email programs.

“The subject line is the most important thing for me to get our media audience, our Target Marketing audience, to open an email,” Thorin said.

“When you talk to really good email marketers, though, they’re using oftentimes the same subject line over and over again because they have reached a level of customer loyalty and brand recognition that their customers, their email list subscribers, are going to open the email every day just to see what they’re doing in it. And they treasure that, and they never mark that as spam, because of that.”

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, @DanielBurstein.

You might also like

The Strategic Formula for Email Conversion Success — November 12, 2015, 2:45-3:15 p.m. EST, during the free 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo

Watch full sessions from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015

Email Marketing: Using A/B tests to challenge your assumptions

Email Messaging Online Course — from MarketingExperiments’ parent research organization, MECLABS Institute

Weekend Favs October Thirty One

Weekend Favs October Thirty One written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.

Good stuff I found this week:

ONTRApages – Create, publish and track landing pages – free!

Focus – Productivity timer for your Mac based loosely on the Pomodoro approach

Salestools.io – Prospecting and automation tools for LinkedIn

Bring Your AdWords Campaigns Back from the Dead with Keyword Insertion

If you want to be successful with PPC ads, you need to demonstrate that you understand what prospects are looking for and serve up a relevant ad experience to match.

If you fail to communicate a cohesive message or fulfill the promise you make with your ad, you could face some nightmarish consequences. (Even scarier than that time you accidentally sent out a marketing email with the intro “Hey <FIRST_NAME>.”)

*Screams of terror.* Image by d.loop via Flickr.

We’re talkin’ consequences including:

• Poor Quality Score
• High bounce rates
• Pricy cost-per-click (CPC)
• Low clickthrough rates

To avoid an ad spend disaster, you want your PPC ads to be hyper relevant.

Relevance ensures you get the clicks you deserve, people find what they need, Google trusts your page (because you deliver what you say you do), and you earn a high Quality Score. Your ads could also cost less and  earn better placement.

Fortunately – as we learned in a recent Unwebinar with Bloom Search Marketing’s Martin Perron and Andrew Alkhouri – you can convey relevance from ad to landing page by using AdWords Keyword Insertion. Even better? You can use this AdWords feature in combination with Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) in Unbounce to extend the same relevance through to your landing page.

Brush up on Bloom Search Marketing’s PPC takeaways by watching the webinar recording here, or read on for some distilled wisdom.

First thing’s first…

Keyword Insertion: Serving up relevant ads

Keyword Insertion (the feature formerly known as Dynamic Keyword Insertion) is an advanced AdWords feature that allows you to create an ad that responds to search queries and updates based on Keywords in a specific ad group.

In other words, you can swap out your ads’ headline or description text based on the keywords prospects actually search for.

This feature is helpful because it takes less time to set up than creating separate ads for each possible query, but also because everyone searches Google differently. While one person might search for “Halloween house,” another might search for “Halloween castle”; still another might look for “ Halloween activities.”

If you set up Keyword Insertion correctly, you can appear as an exact match for each of these terms (your headline or description text keywords will swap) and more searchers will see your offer as especially relevant to their needs.

Selecting especially relevant keywords

As Martin pointed out in the webinar, the first step in setting up Keyword Insertion correctly is to decide on the most worthwhile keywords for your business, with the help of Google’s Keyword Planner.

As an example, let’s say you just published a landing page offering 15% off tickets to your annual Halloween attraction, the “ACME Haunted Castle,” and now you need to drive some traffic to your new page.

Ideally, you want some PPC ads to appear when someone searches Google for keywords like “Halloween House,” “Haunted Mansion,” and “ACME Castle,” for example, because people actively searching for these terms are demonstrating high purchase intent (they already know what they’re looking for), and are far more likely to click through from your ad to landing page and convert.

To get started, you’d navigate to the planner from the tools menu in your AdWords account:

Then, type in search terms relevant to your campaign.

Here Google will indicate the popularity of the suggested keywords. You’ll see the average monthly search numbers, how competitive a keyword is, and even suggested bids.

As Martin warns, not all of the suggested keywords will be a perfect match for what you offer, so be selective and ask yourself if each term is truly connected to your business.

Select the type of keywords that’ll work for Keyword Insertion

When setting up your ad, you can choose from four different types of keywords: exact match, phrase match, broad match, and modified broad match. In the webinar, Martin focused on exact and phrase match (but you can read about all four types here):

• Exact match, as it sounds, ensures that your ad is only displayed when the user’s query matches your keyword exactly (i.e. “Haunted Castle”)
• Phrase match applies to search queries with extra words either before or after the keyword. Phrase match would allow your ad to appear when someone searches “Best Haunted Castle,” or “Haunted Castle in Montreal,” for example.

When using Keyword Insertion, it’s best to stick with exact and phrase match as these types of keywords provide precise targeting and can help you attract those with a clearer idea of what they are searching for (i.e. quality leads more likely to convert). These types of keywords also prevent you from having misspelled or misplaced words in your ads.

Using broad or modified broad match can make your keywords appear out of intended order in your final ads, leading to some wonky headlines like this.

Once you’ve selected some exact and phrase match keywords to use, you’ll add the keywords to your ad group. At Bloom Search Marketing, Martin noted that he tends to use ad groups containing about 15-20 keywords per group.

As a rule of thumb, if you can swap out one keyword for another in the same ad and still have it make sense, then you’ve got a good group of keywords for a single ad group.

Bonus tip:

Pay close attention to the search terms used in conjunction with keywords related to your business, because they can say a lot about the searcher’s intent.

For example, someone searching for “Halloween costume ideas” is likely to be in the research phase, whereas someone searching for, “Halloween vampire costume” could be ready to buy.

Different sets of keywords with different intent will require their own ad group, ad, landing page and offer to match.

Adding Keyword Insertion to your text ad

Once you’ve selected the keywords you want to target and have added them to an ad group, it’s time to build your ads.

In your ad group, click the big red “+AD” button to get started writing a new text ad.

From there, you can enter your copy.

Add the Keyword Insertion feature by adjusting the headline using the syntax Google recognizes: “{KeyWord: Default Text}.” (Make sure to replace “Default Text” with something generic that will appear if none of the other keywords do).

Dynamic Text Replacement: Serve up a relevant landing page

Finally, you’ll add the URL for the landing page your ad will direct to.

This is where the second indispensable PPC tool comes in: an Unbounce feature called Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR).

DTR allows you to swap out the text on your landing page – so that your ads and landing page will present exactly what visitors searched for.

Clicked an ad about a Haunted House? That’s what you’ll find in the landing page headline! This allows you to ensure that your prospect is seeing an exact match to their query, from the ad all the way to the landing page headline.

Maintaining this sort of message match increases conversions because it reassures people they’ve come to the right place.

If you’re using a landing page with DTR, make sure you update with the URL containing the DTR parameter, like this:

In this screenshot, “Haunted+Castle” corresponds to the name of the list of keywords in that ad group. “Haunted House” corresponds to the default text that would be swapped out if none of the other keywords in that ad group appear.

From there, you’ll simply set up a dynamic piece of text on your Unbounce landing page (for where you’d like the keyword swap to take effect). Your headline, metadata title, page description and call to action are all great options for this.

Relevance is key

Great marketing is about creating seamless experiences for prospects.

When you match your ad and landing page headline to the keyword that your prospect is searching for, you demonstrate that you understand what they want and are ready to offer it to them.

But you also demonstrate to Google that you’re putting your money where your mouth is — which ultimately increases your Quality Score and CTR, while lowering your CPC.

How’s that for a win-win?

5 Google Analytics Features You Probably Don’t Use Enough (Or Haven’t Even Heard Of)

There’s no question that Google Analytics is an essential tool to understanding your digital audience. It allows you to dig deeper into the types of content they interact with, the platforms they engage on, and the path that leads to a conversion. Businesses large and small can take advantage of these benefits, giving them the data to adjust their marketing plan as needed and make the best use of their budget.

In 2014 over two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies utilized Google Analytics as part of their data collection and marketing strategies, a 6% increase from 2013. Across companies of all sizes, over half of businesses utilizing web analytics software rely solely on Google Analytics. Despite competition from Adobe, Webtrends, and many others, it’s hard for these data providers to stack up to all that Google Analytics offers (let alone for free at the basic level).

It’s hard to believe, but Google Analytics has already been around for 10 years! Despite the fact that we’ve had access to such valuable data for all these years, there are constantly new or updated features and reports hitting the platform.

While regular Google Analytics users are probably well-versed in the “Audience” and “Acquisition” reporting tools, there are so many other features that tend to go untouched or unnoticed. These are tools that could completely transform how you manage your digital presence moving forward. Even if you’re among the most avid of users, here are five Google Analytics features that you may not be as familiar with.

1. Weighted Sort

When analyzing how your web pages are performing, it’s easy to sort the table by bounce rate or by the number of pageviews. You simply have to click that attribute’s heading and you’re good to go. However, just sorting by one factor or another doesn’t give you the whole picture. Organizing the pages by bounce rate won’t necessarily put your pages in order by traffic volume, but sorting by pageviews won’t take bounce rates into account.

This is where the Weighted Sort option can help. This feature allows you to see which pages have both a high traffic volume and high bounce rate, identifying where a good majority of your missed conversion opportunities may lie. To do this is really simple. On any table, click the “Bounce Rate” column header to sort the rows. Then, click the dropdown next to “Sort Type” and choose “Weighted.” The first web page you see in the list is likely the first place you should start when evaluating both design and content elements of your site, as it has one of the highest bounce rates as well as pageviews.

Figuring out why users are leaving your site from this place is crucial. Are they unsure about next steps for contacting you or making a purchase? Are they turned off by the layout or design of your website? Or have they simply found all of the information they need at this time? Utilizing the Weighted Sort option is an important first step to making these discoveries.

2. Site Search

Practically every website nowadays has a search bar for users to narrow down what they are looking for and expedite the search process. Not only is having this feature available to visitors important, but acknowledging exactly what they’re looking for and why is equally valuable. The Site Search feature in Google Analytics can help you understand all of that. Through this tool, you can see which products or services are most important to your audience as well as whether or not your website is easy to navigate.

To start using Site Search, go to the Admin section of your account and click on “View Settings” under the website you would like to begin tracking.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

Search parameters are the letters or words that precede a query in the URL. For example, a search for Google Analytics-themed blog posts in Kissmetrics’ search bar brings you to https://blog.kissmetrics.com/?s=google+analytics, so the search parameter would be the portion that is highlighted. All you have to do is enter those characters into the Query Parameter section, and everything but the specific search terms will be filtered out when you go to view the report.

Once the tool is turned on and tracking, you’ll find your data under the Site Search segment of the Behavior section. You can filter the data by unique search terms, time spent on the site after a search, and the number of pages viewed following the search.

This will help give you greater insight into the typical paths your visitors take once they’ve searched for a particular product or service, helping you better organize your website’s content and personalize future marketing efforts by understanding what a user is looking for.

3. Remarketing Lists

Remarketing is a valuable tactic in a marketer’s arsenal, allowing you to reach back out to potential customers that didn’t convert the first time around. Whether your initial marketing message was off, they didn’t gather enough information to make a decision, another company was recommended to them, or they weren’t in a buyer frame of mind yet, remarketing is your second chance at converting them into a customer. It’s a great way to make the most of the audience you have, without having to invest more into your marketing budget to attract an even wider pool of consumers.

The Remarketing Lists feature in Google Analytics works together with your AdWords account to help you build lists of prospects that you can target with future campaigns. That being said, you cannot utilize this feature without having an active AdWords account.

To get started, go to the Admin section of Analytics and click on “Remarketing” under the Property column.

Then click “Audiences” in the dropdown that appears to begin creating your own custom audiences. You can either let Google select your audience through a Smart List, or you can create your own based on new or returning users to your site, as well as those who visited a particular page, completed a goal, or made a purchase.

Once you’ve created one or more audiences, you can then add them to future ad campaigns in AdWords. Google Analytics does limit you to 2,000 remarketing audiences per account, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll reach this threshold.

4. Funnel Visualization

Within the “Flow Visualization” section of Google Analytics, there are several reports that shed light on the specific path each user takes through your website to ultimately end up at their final destination. You can see where visitors may have abandoned their original path to pursue something else, went back to a previous page to get more information, and where they bounced from your site (and most importantly, if a conversion was recorded).

The Funnel Visualization report focuses on how your Goals perform overall, measuring conversion rate over time. This feedback allows you to further analyze the Goals that you’ve set for your company in Google Analytics, and determine whether they meet the mark or should be reevaluated. To find this tool, go to the Conversions dropdown and click on “Goals.”

You can view each Goal’s conversion rate over the course of a day, week, or month, allowing you to zoom in on the impact of a particular campaign or see how your efforts have worked throughout the month. Looking at the sample graph above, you can see that the goal of “Request Consultation” peaked towards the end of the 7-day period on September 27th.

You should compare this to your marketing efforts on that specific day to dig into why you saw this spike. Did you promote a new blog post or product offering on social media? Did you send out an email to your subscriber list? What was it about that day that stood apart from the rest of the week? Since the 27th fell on a Sunday this year, maybe that was the best time for consumers or business owners to take the time and fill out your contact form. The Funnel Visualization report is a great way to get your marketing team talking to see what strategies have the greatest impact on that particular goal.

This feature also helps you see which Goals are working well and which ones may need to be reconsidered. From this point, it’s helpful to make a pit stop at the Goal Flow report to dig deeper into why certain goals are more effective than others. You can choose items from six categories: Acquisition, Advertising, Behavior, Custom Variables, Social, and Users. This helps you laser in on user behavior broken down by traffic type, actions completed on your site, social network, or even custom factors that you identify.

In this example, you can see that the majority of the “Request Consultation” goal completions can be attributed to organic traffic, and email had almost no impact. This is a clear indication that your website content and SEO strategies are proving to be effective, while you may want to take a look at how you’re approaching email marketing. Starting off with the Funnel Visualization report to get an initial look at your Goals and then digging deeper with Goal Flow will allow you to ensure that your priorities are in line to convert visitors into customers.

5. Trackbacks

It’s so easy to get caught up in the search and website elements of Google Analytics that you might forget that there’s an extremely valuable section dedicated to social media and its impact on SEO. The Social segment can be found within the Acquisition dropdown, allowing you to see how your social media presence drives web traffic and ultimately conversions. The Trackbacks feature takes a look at everyone who has linked to your site’s content, whether it’s a blog post, piece of downloadable content, or even one of your services pages.

What’s most helpful here is that you can see how many sessions on your website resulted from that particular link or how many times the same URL has linked to you, separating more passive users from those that are truly engaged with your content and message. For example, if you see that an industry publication has linked to one of your ebooks multiple times, that could indicate the potential for a future partnership. Maybe they would be interested in having you contribute a guest post to their blog, or they have a tool or piece of content that would be useful to you.

Regardless of the industry you operate in, partnerships are vital to making a name for your business and standing out as a thought leader. Whether it’s an opportunity to share content, services, or to co-sponsor an industry-related event, link building continues to prove its importance in both SEO and business in general. Don’t miss out on these individuals or companies who are taking note of what you have to offer; they could lead to valuable business propositions.

Keep Up With What’s New

Google Analytics is constantly adding new features and enhancing old ones, making it difficult for even the most experienced of users to keep up. It’s important that you take some time to look around your account every so often and see what’s new. You’ll likely stumble upon a feature that you never knew existed, perhaps even some of the examples above. From simply sorting current data in new ways to setting custom goals and analyzing sources of web traffic, there’s a seemingly endless number of ways to put Google Analytics to work for your business. And don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all to gain the insight you’re looking for. If you’re able to zoom in on a specific target market or goal that is top priority, you can cater your approach accordingly.

Are there some new or lesser-known Google Analytics features that you’ve recently discovered? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

About the Author: Kim Speier is an inbound marketing specialist at Mainstreethost, a digital marketing agency in Buffalo, New York. She frequently writes about social media, content marketing, user experience, and web design for the Mainstreethost blog. Connect with Kim on Twitter at @krspeier.