First, where is the pivot table feature?  It is the last button on the tool bar below the graph.

After clicking on it, you will notice your report gets a couple extra columns.  How does this help you exactly?  Let me first show you how the standard Queries report looks like.

This is a pretty good overview of what query is getting good impression, clicks, and average position.  But the impression, clicks, and average position is calculated by combining all of the Google Properties (web, image, mobile, and video).  This vanilla report does not show me how my SEO effort is helping or hurting my website’s performance in relation to each of the Google Properties.  

With the Pivot Table feature, we can organize the report into something like this.

This pivot table shows the impression and average ranking for the queries across all the Google Properties.  (Web Search, Image Search, Mobile Search, and Video Search)

And this pivot table shows the impression and clicks for the queries across all the Google Properties.  (Web Search, Image Search, Mobile Search, and Video Search)

To setup the Pivot Table –

1. Open the report you want to pivot (in this case the Queries report)
2. Click on the Pivot button on the tool bar

3. Set Pivot by Google Properties

4. Then select from one of the pivot metrics

This is extremely useful for cross channel optimization strategies and cross channel focused marketers.  We can quickly access what channel / keywords is doing well and which one needs more effort, we can also pull this report by month and track the changes over time.  Looking at the example we can see that we have no present in the video search, so putting together videos campaign and optimizing a Youtube channels could be a strategies we focus on for the next quarter!

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Contributed by Chad Tsang, Sr. eStrategist

1. Tool for auditing your website: Screaming Frog
2. Tool for keyword research: Ubersuggest
3. Tool for data sourcing: Blekko
4. Tool for competitive analysis: Link Detective
5. Tool for transferring data or content to graphics: Piktochart
6. Tool for social monitoring: SocialMention

One key point to note is that before deciding which tool is a best fit for you: define your social goals. When defining goals, take into account how you measure key performance indicators, circles, degrees of separation, conversations, exposure, types of content that receive interest, engagement, and more. These differences in ‘successes’ and measurement will help you decide which tool may be a best fit for you.

As Rhea Drysdale of Outspoken Media has made clear, after deciding upon your tool of choice, you must make the business-case for acquiring this tool. Essentially, you must aggregate the true cost and risk of the product, accounting for switching and opportunity costs moving to the tool, and compare this to the tool’s value to the company. Simply:

Tool value – (true cost + risk) = business case

Once you have made this business case, make sure that you leverage the tool to easily access the figures that you consider your key performance indicators. Finally, and most importantly, it is vital that the information gathered from this tool is used to develop new strategies. Put these figures in a think tank and churn out strategies that are strategic, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.

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Contributed by Brittany Bingham

SMX West 2012: How to Conduct a Formal Case Study

Experts at SMX West 2012 shared tips in the session, “Best Practices for Paid Search Testing – Case Study Panel” Learn the best methods to conduct a formal case study and how to apply the methods to create the optimal landing page.

When conducting a case study for paid search there are some best practices and steps you should follow. Each agency’s testing cycle slightly differs but follows the same key steps. For the purpose of this article, we will take a closer look at the testing cycle of the company WiderFunnel when applied to testing the conversion success of landing pages. Chris Goward outlined the seven steps below that will help you complete a successful case study.

• Step1: Evaluate Your Landing Page and Conduct a LIFT Analysis:

What is driving or bringing down your value proposition? Analyze and focus on the elements that increase the relevance and clarity of the website. Is your call to action clear or is the eye-flow intuitive? Determine what distracts and makes the consumer anxious. Are you asking too many questions or providing too much irrelevant information? Lastly, are you providing urgency to the consumer such as a limited time offer?

A representation of the LIFT model

• Step 2: Form Your Hypothesis. Using the findings from your L.I.F.T. analysis, form your hypothesis. What do you think will improve conversions?
• Step 3: Design Your Experiment Map. Lay out the groundwork for your test. How will you test? How many different versions will you test? How long will you test? Determine what you will measure. Identify external factors and how to best control them.
• Step 4: Create your new landing page with the features under the test.
• Step 5: Set up your test campaign using test optimization tools such as Google’s Website Optimizer
• Step 6: Launch the experiment
• Step 7: Collect and analyze your results. Don’t just look at before and after results as there are too many factors that play into those results.

Chris Goward from WiderFunnel did not include an 8^th step, but I will. Once you have analyzed your results, if the results prove your hypothesis, you need to then implement it across the board. If the results disprove the hypothesis, start from step one again.

Case studies should be a crucial element of all search marketers strategies as there is always room for improvement, but remember these key tips: make sure you have set up your test in a controlled environment and are able to measure the results. Also don’t forget there are plenty of tools to help you including the Google Website Optimizer for landing pages and Google’s A.C.E. tool for testing ad copy in Adwords. Finally, remember to always be testing.

Speakers:

• Matt Van Wagner, Find Me Faster (Moderator)
• Mia Brennan, Rimm-Kaufman Group
• Chris Goward, WiderFunnel
• Siddarth Shad, PhD, Efficient Frontier

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Contributed by Ara Quick, eStrategist

• Dashboard – ability to create up to 20 different role-specific dashboards

• Real-time – real-time data for your web site can now been seen, with only a few ms delay. You can use this data to find out if your efforts are becoming fruitful or not

• Intelligence events – it’s a machine-learning algorithm that analyses your data for baseline and then calls out positive or negative anomalies. You can also set text or email alerts when certain preset conditions defined by you are met

• Goal Funnel – you can now define your own goal funnel

• Flow visualization – you can easily visualize your traffic and conversion paths

• Visits flow – shows you all possible paths through your website where people are going. It takes all your data and makes it visual for you

Some of the things to keep in mind:

• Implementation is King – you need to ensure that your analytics account is setup correctly. If you see your own site show up as referrals, you can be rest assured that your implementation is not done right and you need to get it fixed.

• Take the time to understand what it is you want to measure

• Tag relevant stuff.  Make sure you have implemented the correct tag on your web site. Tag banner ads, images, etc by using Google’s URL Builder. If you do not tag your Bing PPC campaigns, GA will report that data as Bing Organic. Therefore, it’s important to tag.

• Use Top Exit Pages report to figure out where to start testing

• Implement Site Search to see if you’re missing content

New items that are going to be added to Google Analytics:

• Forced migration into GA V5

• Google + Pages integration

• You can submit top 3 feedback on how GA can be made better for publishers. Feedback form can be found here.

Speaker:

Ashish Vij, Google

Important things to always keep in mind:

1. Sales
2. Volume
3. Cost (Marketing spent and overhead cost)
4. ROI

Top 4 things a marketer should focus on:

1. Link the marketing effort to financials: always link marketing efforts to a financial objective. For marketing, finance is coming from somewhere. This step makes a marketer answerable. This will also ensure overspending and under spending issues.
2. Track Marketing: always know all the different marketing promotions running for a client and measure them separately. This strategy helps us figure out which marketing promotion works for a client. Budgeting is based on the results of each marketing effort. For example, if email marketing is not producing much ROI then distribute the budget of email between other marketing campaigns like paid search, linkbuilding etc. In the image below, analyze the ROI from each channel and distribute the spending to increase ROI.
3. Attribution Modeling: attribution modeling is an important metric to analyze. We often won’t be able to see the direct impact of individual promotions. For example, running a Facebook promotion might not bring in direct revenue but might have some impact on a user at some point in time. Using attribution modeling we will be able to give credit to all the media and marketing efforts which somehow helped in lead or revenue generation. If we don’t analyze this information, we might stop promotion of all marketing efforts where we don’t see direct revenue and lead generation.
4. Advanced Web Analytics: A lot of marketers still use the old analytics technology. Some of the tools are outdated and don’t have the capability to measure some of these important analytics. Use a cost effective analytics tool that has the capability to track these advanced metric and also help in attribution modeling. Some of the advanced analytics tools can also help in estimating clicks and visits based on season, historical data.

It is very important to measure all the marketing efforts and promotions separately and see which is driving ROI and adjust budget accordingly. Use advanced analytics software to know the attribution model and assign weight for all the assisted channels in driving ROI.

SES San Francisco 2011 Session: “Measuring Profit & ROI Across Channels” speaker:
Wes Nichols, CEO & Cofounder, MarketShare

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Contributed by: Justin Varghese, ROI Manager, Milestone Internet Marketing

1. How do Multi-Channel Funnels work?
   
   • Figure 1: Multi-Channel Funnels work by tracking the movement of a user across various online sources over a 30 day period. This movement is also referred to as “the conversion path”.
   • These online sources can include Search Engines, Referral Sites, Paid Search, and Social Media Marketing.
   • Using Multi-Channel funnels, it is possible to see what additional channels have assisted in the conversion.
2. Assisted Converstions
   
   • Assisted conversions refer to the number of sales and conversions directly associated with a specific channel (i.e. the number of times a channel has initiated, assisted, or completed a conversion).
   • Figure 2: Nearly $70,000 of revenue can be directly attributed to referring domains. However it is important to note that an additional 214 conversions (nearly $26,000 of revenue) included direct involvement with at least one referring domain. These channel groupings can be broken down all the way to the specific referral source.
   • Knowing the total conversion value (assisted conversion + last conversion) of each of your channels can help you allocate your own budget to the channels that have shown to generate the highest ROI.
3. Top Conversion Paths
   
   • Top Conversion Paths outline the sources a customer used on their way to a conversion, the total number of times a different user has interacted on the same source, as well as the total conversion value of that source.
   • Figure 3: In this example, the user performed 4 different organic searches, with their first interaction involving an organic search for “Bethesda MD hotels near NIH”. It was only after performing this non branded keyword search that the user discovered and remembered the brand name, leading to a conversion.
4. Path Length
   
   • Path Length Displays the number of times a user clicked on your site (from various channels) before finally converting.
   • Figure 4: In this example, 45% of customers entered the site more than once before converting.
   • It is important to regularly monitor each online channel because, in our case, almost half of all conversions were due to multiple path interactions.
5. Social ROI
   
   • We can help measure the ROI of our Social Media efforts by tracking conversions back to their original source within Social Media campaigns.
   • Figure 5: Measuring Social ROI: With 3 assisted conversions, we can see that users coming from Facebook remembered the brand name and came back to the website later, and converted.

For marketers, understanding cross channel optimization is integral to allocating budget across their marketing channels. While it is still in the early beta phases, Multi Channel Funnels has proven to be a highly valuable analytics tool in helping track the interaction between marketing channels online.

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Contributed by: David Addison and Marc St. Pierre, Milestone Internet Marketing

One of the most frequently asked questions asked in social media marketing is how to measure if the campaign is “working.” Or maybe more importantly, how to prove to executives and decision makers within the company that social media is measurable and worthy of participation. To start, all stakeholders involved in social media for small or large businesses need a clear set of goals, which can be benchmarked overtime, and which include specific actions and analytics to track results. In today’s social media world, the elements which we can track on social channels go far deeper than mere fan count or pageviews. Between the intangible measurements of success and the specific analytical data that many channels or tools now provide, we actually have a lot of information at our fingertips to measure our performance and achievements to hit specific goals.

Before you begin determine your objectives. Before any successful social media campaign begins, you need to first what your objectives are by participating in social media channels. What do you hope to gain? Do you want to reach out to your audience and create long-term brand loyalty? Do you want to hard-sell packages or special offers? Do you want to gain a larger member database for email marketing campaigns? Create a report of your current brand identity and where you’re starting from in regards to customer sentiment, retention, guest review keywords, and even online revenue and website traffic.

• Brand identity – setup Google alerts, search Google real time, or Twitter search – what are people saying currently about brand?
• Destination identity – what are audiences talking about in relation to travel to your destination? What are popular attractions, news, events, or reasons to visit that you’re seeing online chatter about?
• Competitors – check on your competitors on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Which of your top competitors is the most active? How many followers do they have on each channel? What are they talking about? Create a list of your top “social media competitors” for your location; even if they are strong competitors off-line in your market, they are still viable measures on social media channels to track success.

The qualitative measure of success. The most intangible but meaningful way to measure social media is by the qualitative results of your target audience. Based on the objectives before you began, you should be able to measure your brand engagement or awareness of your online community. Some qualitative criteria to consider after 3-6 months of actively engagement with your followers on social channels include:

• What are some of the keywords used when social users are talking about your brand or company? What about the local area or destination where your hotel is located?
• What positive and negative sentiments are shared about your hotel or brand experiences?
• Can you name any brand-loyal positive fans on each channel? How influential are they and how often have they mentioned your name?
• Do you know any users which are negative towards your brand? Have you reconciled any negative experiences or users by reaching out and making things right?
• How does your brand reputation currently measure against your competitors? How has that changed in the last 3-6 months since you started social media engagement?
• Have your travel reviews changed at all since you’ve been actively engaging with your customers online?

The quantitative measure of success. As time goes on, there are more and more ways to track actual numbers in social media campaigns and channel activity. Here are a few specific ways Milestone can quantify performance successes through social media tracking:

• Urchin UTM analytic tracking on Facebook and Twitter channels – setup goals to determine traffic coming in from social media channels to the website and CTR % of users going to booking engine.
• Booking widget on Facebook – setup a unique Facebook rate code and only use it on the Facebook page. At the end of the month, all reservations that fall under this rate code can be attributed to the Facebook campaign traffic.
• Channel Insights – all of the major social channels have their own analytics dashboard or unique ways to track activity. Using the specific insight analytics reports, you can benchmark performance indicators month-over-month to gauge improvement. The metrics tracked through these in-channel reports include “like” users/followers, subscribers, pageviews, postviews, clicks, and more.
• eBuzz Connect – measure all of your guest reviews channels and not only the # of review overtime but the actual sentiment of what is being said about the company. Assign numeric variables to the positive or negative keywords that you want to track. Set a goal for yourself and against your top competitors.

Screenshot image of Facebook Insights analytics – track activity of users and likes on business page.

Social media success will never be as calculated as a PPC campaign, for example, but the industry will continue to provide us tools to track performance and brand engagement. The amount of insight into the brand messaging and our target audience’s perception is incomparable to any other online marketing effort. The intangibles are still amazing – one can measure brand awareness, customer sentiment, customer retention, and customer service or conflict resolutions. Even more, while doing so, social media can help establish the brand as a key-player in the industry by being easily approachable, knowledgeable, and available at any time to connect. In conclusion, the key to social media success is really about the journey to reach each benchmark goals, and the priceless brand interactions, awareness – and also – traffic, click-through rates, and bookings gained along the way.

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Contributed by: Natalie Evans, Director of Client Services, Milestone Internet Marketing

Recently, Velas Resorts ran a wedding contest on Facebook across 5 of its profile pages, the grand prize a dream wedding at one of their properties. The contest timeframe was set for February 14 – April 1, 2011, and allowed users to submit an entry for themselves or friends/family via an email address acquired after “Liking” the Facebook page (on any of their 5 profiles). The end goal for this contest was to increase their Facebook fan base and more importantly, drive traffic to their new niche wedding site & blog. At the end of the one-month submission period, the hotel had received 201 total entries – additional snapshot results listed below (total for all 5 profiles)

• 6,733 new Facebook “Likes” (203 new likes on the very first day of the contest)
• 1,649 posts/feedback to various status updates with contest updates
• 697 new Twitter followers (updates made on 4 property Twitter profiles during contest)
• 2,687 visits & 4,404 page views to the wedding site blog
• 3,762 visits & 12,401 page views to the wedding site itself

When frequent postings, responding to user comments and acting as the “voice” for a brand via social media channels/profiles are not enough to keep the Facebook fans increasing at a steady pace, a Facebook contest may be a good solution. It alerts new users to the brand profile with unique offerings and in this case for Velas Resorts, it not only brought in new traffic for their Facebook pages, but also much-desired traffic to their new niche wedding site.

When promoting a Facebook contest, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Determine end goal – this is important so you know how to approach the contest and so you can measure your level of success in the end
• Create an appealing offer/prize – while a contest prize doesn’t have to be as involved as a wedding, do make it appealing in some way to the users (free t-shirt or % off a stay) and make the entry/voting process easy to implement and user-friendly
• Post frequent updates throughout the contest – keep people in the know when it comes to approaching deadlines (“only 2 days left to enter!”) by posting frequent status updates and by being as transparent as possible – this will keep the buzz going
• Include contest details – make sure to visibly post (and follow) your official contest terms and conditions, so there are no questions about your brand’s integrity

Creating and running a Facebook contest with a “fan gate” option is a process that takes planning, organization, creativity and time. However, this is one way a brand can revive the number of “Likes” to their Facebook pages and can jump-start their social media profile across the board.

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Contributed by: Selin Maurice, eStrategist, Milestone Internet Marketing

Tracking your referral sources gives you a lot of insight into what is driving traffic and which of your marketing efforts are drawing visitors to the website.  I recently reviewed data for a hotel in San Diego that increased its marketing efforts on a local directory.  In the month of April, they had over 900 visitor referrals to the website and the directory was #3 in referrals to the site.  That is an average of 30 visitors per day, which seems like a great number.  In comparison, a directory geared towards the “pet friendly” niche drove fewer visitors to the site.

While the number of referred visitors is a great first step, it is important to review and determine how many of these referrals actually convert.  To get a more complete picture, you can cross referrence referral sources  with the visitors who actually went to the property’s booking engine to check rates.

The numbers were very interesting.  Google was the top referring source and had a 36% conversion rate.  Over one third of the visitors who came to the site from Google converted and checked rates.  SanDiego.com on the other hand, only had 20 visitors from the referring traffic funnel go to the booking engine… a mere 2.2% of total visitor traffic from that directory.  On the flip side, although dogfriendly.com had just 20 referrals that month, 9 people clicked through to the booking engine to check rates. That’s a 45% conversion rate!   This indicates that visitors from the niche site were more targeted to the site’s offerings.

Each hotel can use this data to match up average conversions and make some calculations of total revenue based on their ADR (average daily rate) and ALOS (average length of stay).  Even if one source has a lower conversion rate, it does not necessarily mean it is not the right strategy.  Having as many facts as possible will help the hotel make the best determination as to which of their efforts are working best.

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Contributed by: Tammie Carlisle, Regional Business Development Manager (West Coast), Milestone Internet Marketing, Inc.

Google Adwords is one of the largest pay per click marketing channels for businesses where website owners can create and run ads for their company quickly and simply. However, running an effective PPC (pay-per-click) campaign involves many aspects including constant monitoring and modification, testing, and analysis of the PPC campaign and its results. As a Google Adwords Qualified / Certified Company, Milestone has proven that it has the knowledge, experience, and expertise to achieve results for its clients.

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that allows website owners to track how visitors found their website, how they explored it, and how they can enhance their visitors’ experience. With this tool, website owners can create a more effective website, track and analyze search marketing campaigns, improve website performance, increase conversion, and drive online revenue. As a Google Analytics Certified company, Milestone demonstrates top-to-bottom expertise of Google Analytics and the ability to apply analytics data and make improvements to ongoing marketing campaigns for their travel and lodging industry clientele.