четверг, 30 ноября 2017 г.

The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Congratulations! You have a brilliant idea that will change the lives of millions. All you need now is the proper funding.

That should be easy right? All you need to do is start a Kickstarter campaign!

WRONG!

Kickstarter is one of the most daunting platforms you can take on. The process for creating a successful Kickstarter campaign is elaborate and vast. It can be hard to know who to trust or follow to ensure your Kickstarter is an actual success.

Don’t worry though, I’m here to give you a no-nonsense briefing that will ensure your Kickstarter gets you where you want to be.

Here are the first things you should know

  • You should have at least 20 people you personally know that would buy your product. If you don’t, you can’t say you have a product the majority will want. The only exception to this is if you somehow have a huge following and people will buy from you purely due to your influence.
  • You need to pick a date and stick with it! This will force you to work your ass off and increase your likelihood of success. If you have no pressure to perform and you keep pushing deadlines back, you will set yourself up to fail.
  • You don’t want a failed Kickstarter! A failed Kickstarter is a big stain on your reputation. Inviting somebody to support a failed Kickstarter looks really bad, and you can’t delete a Kickstarter once it’s made.

Here are the three fundamentals to a successful Kickstarter campaign

  • A solid product
  • A landing page that converts well
  • Good web traffic

Now let’s break those down.

First, a solid product!

So how do you figure out if you have a solid product? Well…

  • Read ‘The Mom Test’. People will always tell you what you want to hear, not whether the product is actually viable. Read this book and you will know how to tell if there is a real demand for your product or if it needs improvement.
  • Create a pre sign-up form. If nobody signs up or shares the form, that’s a bad sign.
  • Look for a social reaction when you announce your product. If nobody cares, that’s a red flag.
  • See if you can identify at least 20 people (actual people!) who would definitely buy your product.

Next, a landing page that converts well!

How do you create a landing page that converts well, you ask? Well…

  • Try Unbounce, Leadpages, or Clickfunnels, to create your landing pages. Each product will allow you build, publish, and A/B test landing pages. Any of them will work, so just choose the one that appeals to you most.
  • Keep your site clean and simple – you want it to do one thing. So wherever possible, avoid extra sections/offsite links e.g. Twitter, Facebook. Just create a sign-up page with as few fields to fill in as possible.
  • Your site should be fast, easy to use, and mobile-friendly. It should include as many payment options as possible. Your product must be simple to buy.

You will also need a killer video. Hire a good team to create a video for you. You can look into Raw Shorts for explainer video software and Premium Beat for high-quality royalty-free music.

Last, good web traffic!

Your internet community should be jumping with excitement when your Kickstarter is about to start. You will need to do a big pre-launch campaign and everybody should be acting like it’s Christmas.

So track your links!

  1. Setup Google Analytics on your website
  2. Read this resource. You want it to be easy to see which vendor is sending you the good traffic.

Next, send your Kickstarter viral by utilizing a contest. You can use the platform Queue to create a contest. Users get ranked by how much they share and spread your content. Create enticing prizes for your top three to make your content well-known pre-launch.

For example, if you offer an underwear subscription box: first prize could be free underwear for life; second prize could be free underwear for one year; and third prize could be two pairs of underwear delivered in a gift basket.

Or, if you were launching an online coaching program: first prize could be free coaching for a year; second prize could be one month of power coaching; and third prize could be a one-hour ‘deep dive’ coaching session.

Remember, you need to go all out or walk away

You can’t just send out a single tweet and expect your campaign to take off. You need to constantly message, tweet, set talks, meetups, connect with influencers and reach out to magazines while working on a Kickstarter. You can’t be meek or sit on your ass. If you’re not ready to work yourself to death, it’s better to stop now.

Take some time and figure out what activities will get you the biggest returns on traffic.

  • Build relationships, seek mentorship, give and seek advice and grow value.
  • Seek press coverage or offer guest posts to publications.
  • Build relationships with journalists/get contributor accounts.
  • Create your own Facebook group and email marketing list, and set growth goals. How big do you want to be in one month, two months, and more? How do you plan to engage and expand that community?

You want things to be as predictable as possible. No ‘silver bullets’, just lots of consistent shots. Have your dream shots (e.g., P.R/Influencers). They will get you more immediate traffic than your own networks, but you can’t rely on them.

Wrapping up

Now that you know the three fundamentals of running a successful Kickstarter campaign, you have all the basic building blocks you need to get going. You will be working long and hard, but if you put the time in, you can become a big success.

All good things in life come to those who invest time and sweat. Good luck!

Guest Author: Vin Clancy is the Author of “Secret Sauce: A step-by-step guide to growth hacking”. Founder of Magnific, Planet Ivy, Screen Robot.

The post The Three Fundamentals Of A Successful Kickstarter Campaign appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Manager, Global Affiliate Marketing

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European Poker Conference Addresses the State of Online Poker

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Marijuana Company of America Partners With HoneyB Healthy Living to Launch the BeniHemp ...

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CashKaro Uses CAKE by Accelerize to Manage and Measure Performance of Affiliate Campaigns ...

… digital marketing software division CAKE today announced that CashKaro, one of India’s largest cashback and coupon websites, is using CAKE’s SaaS Marketing Intelligence platform to manage and measure the affiliate campaigns that it runs on behalf of an expanding e-commerce partner network.

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CashKaro Uses CAKE by Accelerize to Manage and Measure Performance of Affiliate Campaigns ...

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Berets Are Next Season's Hat Trend, Here's 6 to Cop Right Now

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Indian Food Bloggers Earn as Much as 20 Lakhs. A Month.

CPC ads (cost per click) and CPM ads (cost per 1000 impressions) are the most common ways – Google AdSense appears to be the most popular program for bloggers to promote the brands they struck deals with; affiliate marketing is another way to generate money from a blog. Nowadays all the top …

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BENEFIT, Singapore founded Marketing and Advertising Start-up Acquires Panama-Based Direct ...

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BENEFIT, a Singapore founded Marketing and Advertising Start-up Acquires Panama-based Direct ...

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Innovation Centre to celebrate impressive 15 years

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среда, 29 ноября 2017 г.

BENEFIT, a Singapore founded Marketing and Advertising Start-up Acquires Panama-based Direct ...

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Dan Singleton Appointed Chief Operating Officer of Harland Clarke Holdings®; Jana Schmidt ...

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6 Tips to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn

6 Ways to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn

In February last year, LinkedIn gave every member in the U.S. the ability to publish posts on LinkedIn – and the response was swift and enthusiastic. In fact just recently, LinkedIn reached more than one million posts.

Now since LinkedIn wants each one of more than 330 million members to be able to share their insights with other professionals across the globe, they’ve taken another big step toward that goal as they expand the ability to publish on LinkedIn to all members in English-speaking countries.

That’s 230 million users around the globe who can now tell their stories, show their expertise, and express their ideas on LinkedIn.

In the USA the statistics are compelling.

  • 212 million business leads generated
  • 8 out of 10 LinkedIn members drive business decisions
  • LinkedIn member’s average income is $86,000 (which is 23% higher than the US general population)

LinkedIn publishing

Infographic source: Designinfographics.com

Becoming a publisher on LinkedIn can be a powerful way to reach your target market and generate new leads. The new platform promises to match the blog’s topic with users who share an interest in that particular vertical.

It also gives you greater exposure to your current network given every blog you post is distributed to their news feed and displayed within their notification settings located at the very top of their LinkedIn profile.

If your contacts like the article and decide to share that on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, this will not only create greater exposure but those who aren’t connected with you; may like your work that much that they end up “FOLLOWING” you to receive future posts helping you create a following of raving fans for years to come!!

My blog post results so far:

  • Appeared on the homepage of LinkedIn 4 times now
  • Reached over 128,000 blog views and 1000 comments
  • Shared more than 20,193 times
  • Generated over 430 leads
  • Increased my following by an extra 2,300

Here’s a screenshot of a few articles I’ve written:

LinkedIn articles

How to know if you’ve been approved to publish

To know whether or not you’ve been approved to start publishing content, simply go into your LinkedIn account. If you’ve been approved there will be a grey pencil icon on the status box at the top of your home page as illustrated within the image to your right.

pencil icon on linkedin

If this pencil icon is not displayed, it means that they have not rolled out the publishing feature to your account. Not to worry, simply email their customer service team and request an upgrade to your profile so you can start publishing on LinkedIn.

Publishing your blog is real easy

Simply go to the home page of your account, hover over the pencil icon I showed you earlier. When you do this it will reveal the text “create a post”.

Once you’ve clicked on the link, it will then direct you to a page where you will see a blank blog post ready for you to populate with your headline and main copy.

Start by thinking about your headline! Make sure it’s short, sharp and compelling. Once you have your headline figured out, go ahead and write your copy. I find generally anywhere between 500-700 words is a good length.

LinkedIn publishing platform

Given that any content you publish on LinkedIn is going to be associated with your profile (and be visible to your network), you will want to ensure that the content you publish on LinkedIn is of the highest quality. Your LinkedIn profile, after all, is your professional online identity. That means your reputation is at stake. Don’t publish anything that could jeopardize or harm your reputation.

Plus the better the content and the more compelling your headline, LinkedIn may end up featuring your article on one of the categories within the “Pulse” network or better yet feature it on the home page giving you visibility to over 300 million members worldwide.

6 tips to implement before publishing

Here are the top tips to create and publish a killer article on LinkedIn.

1. Best dates and times: Generally I have found Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning between 8am-9am is the best times to post. I should note that these times are based on AEST, you may want to test out your own time zone to see what works well for you.

2. Importance of quality content: I touched on this briefly before but the better and more valuable your content the greater impact you will make on your existing and new followers.

3. Preview your content: Before publishing your post always make sure to preview your work. This will allow you to see whether or not your text are aligned with any pictures or videos you have inserted, if heading are properly spaced out, and if your article is properly laid out, etc.

4. Include videos & images: Break up your text with images and videos so that people don’t get information overwhelm when they first visit your blog. Always make it a habit of listing a few tips or provide a how to guide within a section of the blog. Most people will skim through your article, so this is a great way to provide quick rich content.

5. Ask questions: Doing this demonstrates your genuine interest in feedback. It also makes it an interactive opportunity that encourages participation. Simple questions like “do you agree?” or “how have you seen this done?” are a call to action that can start the ball rolling.

6. Check the analytics: LinkedIn gives you great analytics to show you the success of your articles. This gives you a great opportunity to pay attention to which types of articles are getting the most views, comments, and social shares.

Following the same suggestions listed above, below is a screenshot of a blog I wrote on LinkedIn. Within 1 hour, it was featured on the home page and stayed as the top story within the “Entrepreneurship & Small Business” category of LinkedIn’s Pulse network for an entire day helping me reach over 9,000 views and over 100 comments.

LinkedIn article that made it on the homepage

Now that you know what steps are required to start blogging on LinkedIn, hopefully its inspired you to get your next article out there for the whole world to read.

You never know, you’re post may start that conversation with your next investor or business partner; it may get you noticed by others in your company or industry and help enhance your reputation as a thought leader. But most of all, it may simply help others.

Whether you’ve just written your first post or have a few under your belt. I’d be interested to know what strategies you’ve implemented on LinkedIn to grow your following and engagement with that audience.

Author: Alex is an entrepreneur and founder of Linkfluencer, the world’s leading online community for LinkedIn training. He loves playing basketball, travelling and covering the latest stories on entrepreneurship. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Facebook

“FREE” Webinar – Discover the 3 Steps To LinkedIn Mastery

Over the past couple of months I’ve received a ton of emails from readers asking me to share more insight in and around LinkedIn so I’ve decided to hold another webinar with Alex Pirouz, founder of Linkfluencer.

The first one I held a few months back was well received with over 3000 people registering for the session. Click here to register

Free Webinar On LinkedIn

The post 6 Tips to Create and Publish a Killer Article on LinkedIn appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Account Manager - Affiliate Marketing

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BENEFIT, a Singapore founded Marketing and Advertising Start-up Acquires Panama-based Direct ...

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Job opportunities in social media

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Spectrum Gaming Group Identifies Top 10 Gaming Industry Trends For 2018

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The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by tombennet

When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions.

The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing, not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it.

In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis and segmentation can unlock the mysteries of direct traffic and shed light on what might actually be your most valuable users.

What is direct traffic?

In short, Google Analytics will report a traffic source of “direct” when it has no data on how the session arrived at your website, or when the referring source has been configured to be ignored. You can think of direct as GA’s fall-back option for when its processing logic has failed to attribute a session to a particular source.

To properly understand the causes and fixes for direct traffic, it’s important to understand exactly how GA processes traffic sources. The following flow-chart illustrates how sessions are bucketed — note that direct sits right at the end as a final “catch-all” group.

Broadly speaking, and disregarding user-configured overrides, GA’s processing follows this sequence of checks:

AdWords parameters > Campaign overrides > UTM campaign parameters > Referred by a search engine > Referred by another website > Previous campaign within timeout period > Direct

Note the penultimate processing step (previous campaign within timeout), which has a significant impact on the direct channel. Consider a user who discovers your site via organic search, then returns via direct a week later. Both sessions would be attributed to organic search. In fact, campaign data persists for up to six months by default. The key point here is that Google Analytics is already trying to minimize the impact of direct traffic for you.

What causes direct traffic?

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many reasons why a session might be missing campaign and traffic source data. Here we will run through some of the most common.

1. Manual address entry and bookmarks

The classic direct-traffic scenario, this one is largely unavoidable. If a user types a URL into their browser’s address bar or clicks on a browser bookmark, that session will appear as direct traffic.

Simple as that.

2. HTTPS > HTTP

When a user follows a link on a secure (HTTPS) page to a non-secure (HTTP) page, no referrer data is passed, meaning the session appears as direct traffic instead of as a referral. Note that this is intended behavior. It’s part of how the secure protocol was designed, and it does not affect other scenarios: HTTP to HTTP, HTTPS to HTTPS, and even HTTP to HTTPS all pass referrer data.

So, if your referral traffic has tanked but direct has spiked, it could be that one of your major referrers has migrated to HTTPS. The inverse is also true: If you’ve migrated to HTTPS and are linking to HTTP websites, the traffic you’re driving to them will appear in their Analytics as direct.

If your referrers have moved to HTTPS and you’re stuck on HTTP, you really ought to consider migrating to HTTPS. Doing so (and updating your backlinks to point to HTTPS URLs) will bring back any referrer data which is being stripped from cross-protocol traffic. SSL certificates can now be obtained for free thanks to automated authorities like LetsEncrypt, but that’s not to say you should neglect to explore the potentially-significant SEO implications of site migrations. Remember, HTTPS and HTTP/2 are the future of the web.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already migrated to HTTPS and are concerned about your users appearing to partner websites as direct traffic, you can implement the meta referrer tag. Cyrus Shepard has written about this on Moz before, so I won’t delve into it now. Suffice to say, it’s a way of telling browsers to pass some referrer data to non-secure sites, and can be implemented as a <meta> element or HTTP header.

3. Missing or broken tracking code

Let’s say you’ve launched a new landing page template and forgotten to include the GA tracking code. Or, to use a scenario I’m encountering more and more frequently, imagine your GTM container is a horrible mess of poorly configured triggers, and your tracking code is simply failing to fire.

Users land on this page without tracking code. They click on a link to a deeper page which does have tracking code. From GA’s perspective, the first hit of the session is the second page visited, meaning that the referrer appears as your own website (i.e. a self-referral). If your domain is on the referral exclusion list (as per default configuration), the session is bucketed as direct. This will happen even if the first URL is tagged with UTM campaign parameters.

As a short-term fix, you can try to repair the damage by simply adding the missing tracking code. To prevent it happening again, carry out a thorough Analytics audit, move to a GTM-based tracking implementation, and promote a culture of data-driven marketing.

4. Improper redirection

This is an easy one. Don’t use meta refreshes or JavaScript-based redirects — these can wipe or replace referrer data, leading to direct traffic in Analytics. You should also be meticulous with your server-side redirects, and — as is often recommended by SEOs — audit your redirect file frequently. Complex chains are more likely to result in a loss of referrer data, and you run the risk of UTM parameters getting stripped out.

Once again, control what you can: use carefully mapped (i.e. non-chained) code 301 server-side redirects to preserve referrer data wherever possible.

5. Non-web documents

Links in Microsoft Word documents, slide decks, or PDFs do not pass referrer information. By default, users who click these links will appear in your reports as direct traffic. Clicks from native mobile apps (particularly those with embedded “in-app” browsers) are similarly prone to stripping out referrer data.

To a degree, this is unavoidable. Much like so-called “dark social” visits (discussed in detail below), non-web links will inevitably result in some quantity of direct traffic. However, you also have an opportunity here to control the controllables.

If you publish whitepapers or offer downloadable PDF guides, for example, you should be tagging the embedded hyperlinks with UTM campaign parameters. You’d never even contemplate launching an email marketing campaign without campaign tracking (I hope), so why would you distribute any other kind of freebie without similarly tracking its success? In some ways this is even more important, since these kinds of downloadables often have a longevity not seen in a single email campaign. Here’s an example of a properly tagged URL which we would embed as a link:

http://ift.tt/2ifQkVi?…_medium=offline_document&utm_campaign=201711_utm_whitepaper

The same goes for URLs in your offline marketing materials. For major campaigns it’s common practice to select a short, memorable URL (e.g. moz.com/tv/) and design an entirely new landing page. It’s possible to bypass page creation altogether: simply redirect the vanity URL to an existing page URL which is properly tagged with UTM parameters.

So, whether you tag your URLs directly, use redirected vanity URLs, or — if you think UTM parameters are ugly — opt for some crazy-ass hash-fragment solution with GTM (read more here), the takeaway is the same: use campaign parameters wherever it’s appropriate to do so.

6. “Dark social”

This is a big one, and probably the least well understood by marketers.

The term “dark social” was first coined back in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal in an article for The Atlantic. Essentially it refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source, like email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 80% of consumers’ outbound sharing from publishers’ and marketers’ websites now occurs via these private channels. In terms of numbers of active users, messaging apps are outpacing social networking apps. All the activity driven by these thriving platforms is typically bucketed as direct traffic by web analytics software.

People who use the ambiguous phrase “social media marketing” are typically referring to advertising: you broadcast your message and hope people will listen. Even if you overcome consumer indifference with a well-targeted campaign, any subsequent interactions are affected by their very public nature. The privacy of dark social, by contrast, represents a potential goldmine of intimate, targeted, and relevant interactions with high conversion potential. Nebulous and difficult-to-track though it may be, dark social has the potential to let marketers tap into elusive power of word of mouth.

So, how can we minimize the amount of dark social traffic which is bucketed under direct? The unfortunate truth is that there is no magic bullet: proper attribution of dark social requires rigorous campaign tracking. The optimal approach will vary greatly based on your industry, audience, proposition, and so on. For many websites, however, a good first step is to provide convenient and properly configured sharing buttons for private platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Slack, thereby ensuring that users share URLs appended with UTM parameters (or vanity/shortened URLs which redirect to the same). This will go some way towards shining a light on part of your dark social traffic.

Checklist: Minimizing direct traffic

To summarize what we’ve already discussed, here are the steps you can take to minimize the level of unnecessary direct traffic in your reports:

  1. Migrate to HTTPS: Not only is the secure protocol your gateway to HTTP/2 and the future of the web, it will also have an enormously positive effect on your ability to track referral traffic.
  2. Manage your use of redirects: Avoid chains and eliminate client-side redirection in favour of carefully-mapped, single-hop, server-side 301s. If you use vanity URLs to redirect to pages with UTM parameters, be meticulous.
  3. Get really good at campaign tagging: Even amongst data-driven marketers I encounter the belief that UTM begins and ends with switching on automatic tagging in your email marketing software. Others go to the other extreme, doing silly things like tagging internal links. Control what you can, and your ability to carry out meaningful attribution will markedly improve.
  4. Conduct an Analytics audit: Data integrity is vital, so consider this essential when assessing the success of your marketing. It’s not simply a case of checking for missing track code: good audits involve a review of your measurement plan and rigorous testing at page and property-level.

Adhere to these principles, and it’s often possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in the level of direct traffic reported in Analytics. The following example involved an HTTPS migration, GTM migration (as part of an Analytics review), and an overhaul of internal campaign tracking processes over the course of about 6 months:

But the saga of direct traffic doesn’t end there! Once this channel is “clean” — that is, once you’ve minimized the number of avoidable pollutants — what remains might actually be one of your most valuable traffic segments.

Analyze! Or: why direct traffic can actually be pretty cool

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

The number of potential avenues to explore is infinite, but here are some good starting points:

  • Build meaningful custom segments, defining a subset of your direct traffic based on their landing page, location, device, repeat visit or purchase behavior, or even enhanced e-commerce interactions.
  • Track meaningful engagement metrics using modern GTM triggers such as element visibility and native scroll tracking. Measure how your direct users are using and viewing your content.
  • Watch for correlations with your other marketing activities, and use it as an opportunity to refine your tagging practices and segment definitions. Create a custom alert which watches for spikes in direct traffic.
  • Familiarize yourself with flow reports to get an understanding of how your direct traffic is converting. By using Goal Flow and Behavior Flow reports with segmentation, it’s often possible to glean actionable insights which can be applied to the site as a whole.
  • Ask your users for help! If you’ve isolated a valuable segment of traffic which eludes deeper analysis, add a button to the page offering visitors a free downloadable ebook if they tell you how they discovered your page.
  • Start thinking about lifetime value, if you haven’t already — overhauling your attribution model or implementing User ID are good steps towards overcoming the indifference or frustration felt by marketers towards direct traffic.

I hope this guide has been useful. With any luck, you arrived looking for ways to reduce the level of direct traffic in your reports, and left with some new ideas for how to better analyze this valuable segment of users.

Thanks for reading!


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6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics

6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable resource. It offers a wealth of information that content marketers can use to build and refine their strategies. Whether it is detailed visitor demographic information or deep insights into campaign performance, it can get seriously granular regarding user behavior.

The only problem is, it doesn’t do this automatically – you have to know how to set it up right to get the most out of its capabilities. The default settings don’t support the activities listed above and the tool unfortunately isn’t that intuitive.

If you find the Google Analytics interface slightly overwhelming or are concerned that you are not getting the most value when analyzing reports, you may need to take a step back and make sure you have your system set up properly.

Here are six steps to set up Google Analytics in a way that enables accurate, data-driven decision-making.

1. Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Before you connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console, most keywords show in Google Analytics as ‘not provided’.

If part of your job as a content marketer is to optimize content for SEO using keywords and evaluating how those keywords are performing, this might mean you’re stuck using two separate systems for reports, gathering traffic data from Analytics and keyword data from Search Console.

But by connecting Search Console and Analytics, you can access keyword data directly in Analytics alongside all of your other reports.

To connect the two systems:

  1. From your site’s Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Admin’ tab.
  2. Next, click ‘Property Settings’, which is located in the ‘Property’ column.
  3. Scroll down the page until you find the ‘Search Console’ header. Click the ‘Adjust Search Console’ button.
  4. Scroll up the page slightly, looking for the ‘Search Console Settings’ section. Click the ‘Edit’ link below the descriptive text.
  5. Click the radio button next to the Search Console property that’s associated with the Analytics account and click ‘Save’.

You can now access all keyword data directly in Analytics!

From your Google Analytics Dashboard, click ‘Acquisition’, and then expand the ‘Search Console’ section. The ‘Queries’ report displays all of the data you’re used to pulling from Search Console, such as keywords, clicks, impressions, and average rankings.

You can also use this functionality to connect keywords to landing pages. From the dashboard, click ‘Acquisition’, expand ‘Search Console’ and select ‘Landing Pages’. Then, click the URL for any landing page to see a report of organic search keywords that led to clicks and/or impressions for that page.

2. Enable Audience Tracking

The default Google Analytics dashboard makes it simple to find some data about your audience – what devices they’re using and where they’re located – but those details are only a very small percentage of the detailed demographic information Analytics can provide.

Google Analytics allows you to collect details like average visitor ages, genders, lifestyle and purchase interests – however, to access these details, you have to enable audience tracking:

  1. From the Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Audience’ tab, expand ‘Demographics’ and click ‘Overview’.
  2. Click the ‘Enable’ button to activate audience tracking.

The data may take some time to propagate, but after a week or so, you can return to this report to uncover unique demographic information about your site visitors.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Audience’ and expand ‘Demographics’ to pull reports that show the average ages of your site visitors and see a breakdown of male versus female visitors.

Next, expand the ‘Interests’ tab to view lifestyle and purchase interests of site visitors. The ‘Affinity Category’ report shows lifestyle interests, and the ‘In-Market Segment’ report shows purchase interests.

Using this information, you can make sure you’re creating content for the right audience. Additionally, you can also use the interest information to brainstorm new content ideas that cater to the varied interests of the audience that is already engaging with you online!

3. Block spam bots

Spammers love to find new ways to drive traffic to sites, and one of the more common tactics they use is Google Analytics spam. They send fake data to Google Analytics that appears in your report as keywords or referral traffic. The problem is, none of that data represents real traffic or website visits.

The goal of Google Analytics spam is usually to get curious webmasters to visit these referring sites, thereby increasing their web traffic and advertising revenue.

Spam bots can riddle your reports with inaccurate data, causing you to make decisions based on faulty information. To ensure accuracy in your reporting, it’s crucial that you take steps to prevent spam bot hits from appearing in your reports.

The simplest way to do this is to let Google take care of it for you, but again, this doesn’t happen automatically. You have to enable automatic spam bot filtering.

From your Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Admin’.

  1. Click ‘View Settings’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  2. Scroll down the page until you see the ‘Bot Filtering’ header. Click the checkbox next to ‘Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders’. Save your changes.

This won’t prevent 100% of spam bot data because it does take Google some time to recognize and block new spammers, but it will prevent the majority of it from hitting your site, allowing you to make decisions based on more accurate data.

4. Set up goals

Site traffic and social shares are important metrics in content marketing, but what senior leaders really want to know is how their investment in content marketing is helping the company meet its goals.

An easy way to collect and provide that information is by setting up goals in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics goals can track many different types of visitor behaviors, but the simplest place to get started with goals is for actions that lead to a specific destination page.

Destination goals are triggered when a user lands on a specific page, such as a ‘thank you’ page that appears after a purchase is completed.

To track and report on these actions, you must first define and set up your goals:

  1. From the Google Analytics dashboard, click the ‘Admin’ tab.
  2. Click ‘Goals’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  3. Click the ‘+ New Goal’ button.
  4. Select the ‘Custom’ radio button and click ‘Continue’.
  5. Give your goal a descriptive name, select the ‘Destination’ goal type, and click ‘Continue’.
  6. Enter the destination URL of the specific ‘thank you’ or other page you wish to track, and click ‘Save’.

This is the most basic goal you can create, but it will track every single instance of a visitor landing on a page that only appears after the user completes the desired action.

Once you get the hang of Google Analytic goals, you can refine them to track much more detail:

  • For purchase-based goals, you can assign a monetary value to the goal completion, allowing you to populate a specific amount of revenue generated by content marketing.
  • You can also specify a funnel – aka a specific sequence of pages a user must follow – in order for an action to trigger a goal completion.

Other available goals track interactions like playing a video, engaging with a chatbot, viewing a specific number of pages per session, or spending a specific amount of time on a single piece of content.

If, after trying out a simple destination goal, you want to explore the functionality further, Google provides very detailed documentation on all of the different options and capabilities.

5. Create custom dashboards

Navigating through Google Analytics can be time-consuming and confusing. Reports take time to load, and you need data from multiple reports to gather all of the information you need for decision-making.

Instead of following a series of steps every time you want to collect data in Google Analytics, set up custom dashboards to access everything you need on a single page.

  1. From your Google Analytics dashboard, click ‘Customization’, and then select ‘Dashboards’.
  2. Click the ‘Create’ button.
  3. Select ‘Starter Dashboard’, give your dashboard a title, and click ‘Create Dashboard’

By default, the starter dashboard will contain important reports that you’ll likely want to keep, such as the user report, new user report, revenue report and goal completions report.

If there are reports displaying that aren’t useful to you, you can delete them by clicking the X in the top righthand corner of the report.

You can also change the layout of your dashboard by clicking the ‘Customize Dashboard’ link at the top right of the dashboard, and you can move items around by dragging and dropping them into the desired containers.

Once you’ve deleted the default reports that you don’t want to see and updated the layout to match your preferences, you can add other important reports you use regularly by clicking the ‘Add Widget’ button at the top left of the dashboard.

Next, you need to select how you want the data to display on your dashboard: as a basic metric, timeline, map, table, pie chart, or bar graph. For this example, select table.

Now, select which data sets should appear in the table, and how many rows should display.

If you want to display your highest-traffic pages, the amount of traffic they receive, and the average time on page, you would select the following values for your columns: ‘Page’, ‘Unique Pageviews’, and ‘Avg. Time on Page’.

Once you’re ready to see the report, click the ‘Save’ button, and you’ll be able to view the report on your dashboard. If it isn’t exactly what you wanted, you can click the pencil icon in the top right corner of the widget to edit the report.

There is nearly an unlimited number of ways to customize your dashboard, so the best thing to do is spend some time playing with the options to discover what works best for your processes and needs.

It takes time to set up, but once you have all of the data you need on a single page, you can access that data with just a few clicks instead of navigating through multiple reports to collect needed information.

6. Filter your IP addresses from reports

Another way to preserve the accuracy of Google Analytics data is to filter your own IP address from your reports. This ensures that the dozens of times you view a specific piece of content isn’t reflected in your metrics.

To filter your IP address from Google Analytics reports:

  1. Collect your IP address by googling ‘What is my IP address?’ The result will populate directly in the search results.
  2. Open a new tab and navigate to Google Analytics. From the dashboard, click ‘Admin’.
  3. Click ‘Filters’, which is located in the ‘View’ column.
  4. Click the ‘+ Add Filter’ button.
  5. Select the ‘Create New Filter’ radio button, give your filter a descriptive name, click ‘Predefined’, and select the following sub-options: ‘Exclude,’ ‘traffic from the IP addresses’, and ‘that are equal to’.
  6. Return to the tab with your IP address and copy it. Paste it into the ‘IP Address’ field in Google Analytics and click the ‘Save’ button.

Once this filter is in place, you can view your site pages and content as much as you need to without worrying that your views and visits are distorting your overall traffic and visitor reports.

In conclusion

Google Analytics should be a content marketer’s best friend. By taking these steps to set up your Google Analytics account, you will gain greater value from it. To recap, it will allow you to:

  • Use audience tracking to refine your buyer personas and formulate new content ideas.
  • Use custom dashboards to track which content and pages are – and aren’t – engaging visitors.
  • Export goal completion reports that prove exactly how your team is supporting company goals.

While the platform may seem overwhelming at first glance, if you’re willing to set aside some time to get it set up properly, it will soon become one of your most valued content strategy tools.

Good luck!

Guest Author: Jessica Greene is a freelance marketing and business writer. A former writing instructor and corporate marketer, she uses her subject matter expertise and passion for educating others as motivation for developing actionable, in-depth, user-focused content.

The post 6 Ways Content Marketers Can Get More Value From Google Analytics appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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