(I will assume that you know the basics of setting up your Google Analytics already, including goal tracking. It’s pretty well explained in the GA Getting Started section.)

1. Don’t get hijacked

When you add GATC to your website, anyone can come and copy that code, put it on their website and have their pageviews show up in your reports. Just what you need! You probably don’t want your data to be rendered useless by random pageviews. Avoid that trouble by only tracking pageview data from the domain(s) you wish to track. Setup the following filter in your profile:

2. Filter out internal IPs and known visitors

Your sales people and other internal team members are likely to be visiting your website on a frequent basis and browsing the website in a particular pattern. You don’t want their traffic to be diluting the patterns of the potential customers you’re trying to analyze on your website. One of the most effective ways of solving this issue is to filter out the office’s IP range. That can be accomplished in the following way:

Check out the Google Analytics tool that can help you write regular expressions to help cover an IP range.

Sometimes, though, you’ll have cases where people in your organization have dynamic IPs that change all the time. For those folks, you’ll want to create a unique page (say “/remove-from-ga.html”) for them to visit that places them in a Custom Variable that you can, in turn, filter out from your reports. You can go about this by adding the following line to your GATC (before _trackPageview) on the unique page to send to those you wish to exclude from  your reports:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Internal Team','Exclude',1]);

Then go into your filters and do this:

3. Track views of 404 pages

Although many tools can provide you with 404 errors by crawling your website, it’s a good idea to track how many error pages your visitors actually see. You can do this by adding the following GATC to your error page header template. What it does is appends a unique name to the beginning of the URL so that you can quickly filter those pages and figure out what the requested URL is in each case. To find the URLs that are being reached and giving a 404 error, simply run a table filter in your content section of Google Analytics.

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/404errorpage/' +document.location.pathname+document.location.search']);

Read this for more: How To Track 404 Errors in Google Analytics

4. Monetize your goals, even if you don’t sell anything

That’s right. Even if your goals include things like the filling out of a contact us form, the clicking of a mailto: link, or the download of a PDF, you should be adding a monetary value to each conversion in Google Analytics. Come up with a number based on roughly how much revenue is made per 100 converions of X and dividing by 100. At the least, give the lowest value goal the value of 1 and work up from there. To setup your goals with monetary values, simply go into your goals area in the Admin section and add in the values:

The reason this is so important is because it will give your visitors, traffic sources, and pages all a value (besides conversion %) that is far more granular than what you’ll have with no goal monetization.

Want to take it a bit further? Setup your non-ecommerce website as though it were an e-commerce website. The main benefit of this is to not be restrained by the 20 goals allotted for in GA and to be able to track many more different types of goals as products, each with varying monetary values.

5. Tag URLs with campaign parameters

Whenever you have the power to do so, add URL tags to your links so that your traffic sources are as accurate as possible. You should be tagging the following types of links with campaign parameters:

• Emails, Tweets (before links get shortened) and other social shares, RSS (can be done through Feedburner), links in digital documents (.docs, .pdfs), TV ads (using redirects from vanity URLs or custom subdirectories), QR codes, and anything else you can think of where someone might click a link to come to your website.

The best way to organize your campaign tags are to standardize them so that you do not have an overabundance of mediums. Those should be kept at a minimum: email, docs, social, etc.

To help with tagging your URLs, you can use the Google URL Builder.

6. Use profiles to protect and organize your data

Profiles can be used to create web propery subsections, such as to isolate the performance of a mobile website or a separate part of your website. Whether you want to segment data in more useful ways is up to you, but whatever you do, it’s good to have the following types of profiles setup in you GA account:

• A “Catch-All” that has no filters applied to it. That way you have a place to go in case you’ve lost some valuable data.
• A “Primary” profile that is your main source of actionable data. It should have all of your important filters (such as filtering out internal visits and ignoring URL parameters) applied to it.
• A “Test” profile where you can try out new things. Say you want to add a new filter and you’re not sure if it will end up tracking properly. Here’s where you can try it out, risk-free. Or perhaps you want to track form fields as pageviews and you don’t want that data mingling with your pristine “Primary” profile’s data.

7. Increase the sample rate of your site speed tracker

Google Analytics provides some nice, on-going data on page load time. To make the numbers more accurate – especially on low-traffic pages or websites – increase the size of the visitor sample that GA uses to report this metric. Here is the modification you have to make to your GATC:
_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 10]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

The sample rate parameter (in the example above “10”) determines the percentage of pageviews for which load time will be tracked. By default it is set to track 1% of pageviews. The sample rate can be increased to include up to 10,000 hits per day.

To figure out how high you can set your sample rate, simply divide 10,000 by your total daily pageviews. For example if you get 4,500 pageviews/day, you can set your sample rate at 100 (%). If you get 450,000 pageviews/day, you’ll want to set it at 2(%). Anything more and you should not worry about modifying this parameter at at all since GA will not track more than the 10K maximum of pageviews.

Note: make sure to use data from your “Catch All” profile to determine how many pageviews you get since that is what GA will be using to determine where they’ll put the cap on the sample size used for your page speed reports.

8. Connect your AdWords and Google Webmaster Tools accounts with GA

By connecting your AdWords with GA, you’ll have a complete view of your paid search keywords, placements and ads and the resulting visitor behavior. To connect your AdWords account:

• Go into AdWords, under Tools and Analysis Google Analytics Admin.
• Locate and click on the GA account that you want to send AdWords data to.
• Click on “Data Sources” and you should see something like this:

Link your account and select the profiles that AdWords data should be sent to.

With a Google Webmaster Tools integration you won’t gain quite as much insight, but you will be able to see query impressions, clicks (and CTRs) for various keywords. The information can be beneficial in some cases, such as spotting keyword opportunities. Having that data in GA allows you to use advanced filters to get to the info that really matters. To make the connection:

• In GA, go to Admin Property Settings.
• There, click “Edit” under Webmaster Tools settings.

9. Ignore some parameters

Your website might generate random parameters that get added on to URLs. The worst are session IDs. These include tracking parameters that don’t use the “utm_” syntax. It’s a good idea to keep your data clean to ignore those parameters from your pageview reports so you can get a consistent reading on pageview data. That way you’re not looking at a report that has “/productA.php” and “/productB.php?kk=234” listed as two separate pages when in fact they are the same page.

To ignore URL parameters, go to Admin Profiles Profile Setttings.

10. Setup custom alerts

Rather than obsessively checking your GA reports on a daily basis looking for one or two specific metrics, setup custom alerts to let you know when the significant event that you are waiting/hoping/fearing for occurs. For example, I’ve got a few setup for specific keywords. If we get a bunch of traffic for a specific keyword, it will indicate that we most likely moved up in search rankings. I also have one setup for 404 errors. If there is a high number of 404s then I’m alerted so that I can solve the issue.

Say you have a campaign that has a conversion rate threshold that it must stay above. A custom alert would be good to have in such a scenario as long as you’re not using that information to prematurely make changes without a significant sample size.

To setup custom alerts, go to Admin Assets Custom Alerts.

11. Track PDFs and external pages as page views

You might have links that open PDFs or that go to another website from which you expect users to return to yours. I’d recommend tracking these as page views rather than events. This way you can see user flows through these content pieces and can attribute value to pages.

For PDFs or other docs, you need to add the following to links that open them:

<a href="http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/uploads/2012/6/20/tech-specs.pdf" onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/pdfs/tech-specs.pdf']);"</a

For external websites, consider tracking page views as /external/myfriendssite.com.

12. Track views of your website videos

It’s great to see whether or not visitors are clicking on your videos, but are they watching them all the way? And if they are, does it help increase conversions? You can track whether visitors are watching some or all of your videos by using the YouTube API.

See this blog post for instructions on how to do it: How to Track YouTube Player Events in Google Analytics.

13. Re-attribute your traffic sources

It’s important to be able to properly attribute traffic to the right sources. That way you can give credit where it is due. This is especially crucial when working with multiple vendors all playing different roles in  your marketing campaigns.

To relabel incoming traffic, you can either modify your GATC or create filters. I prefer filters as they don’t alter data until it’s come into a profile. In other words, you can still have a profile that collects raw, unfiltered data while you have a profile that has many re-attribution filters applied to it. This is what a filter for one of the examples below looks like. You’ll need sound RegEx skills to ensure you don’t mess it up. This is again why you want to have separate profiles to test out your filters.

Here are modifications I’ve made to traffic source/medium attribution:

• Relabel organic, branded searches as “Direct”. The reason for this is so that conversions don’t get wrongly attributed to “Organic” or keywords like “Blue Fountain Media” when in fact there is an upstream medium that is responsible for that conversion. Labeling branded search terms as “Direct” will make GA attribute the conversion to the medium one prior to “Direct”. Also, it’s a well-known fact that many people use Google’s search bar as an address bar. Many branded searches are so navigational in nature that they may as well as be considered Direct.

• Track social referrers as “Social” rather than “Referrals”. Gather a list of social media websites that you are likely to get traffic from and relabel their medium as “Social”. This will separate them out from your list of referring websites. These sites and the users are probably very different from a typical website linking to yours. It comes down to personal preference on whether this seems like a useful medium to be tracking separately.

• Relabel mail client referrers as “Email”. This is a simple one. Go through and find all of the email clients that show up in your referrer list and create a regular expression that matches them all and change the medium to “email”. That way you know much more of what is really coming from email.

• Relabel common search websites as “Organic”. GA doesn’t recognize all search engines and will label visits from small search engines as referrals when they are in fact organic search visits.

Bonus: Track form fills

There is plenty of chatter about brand journalism these days. If this is the first time you’re hearing the term, listen up because you’re about to hear it a whole lot more. Big names are already capitalizing and practicing this new style of content marketing, often so effectively you may not have even noticed.

Done well brand journalism leverages social media to build influence, improve search results and spread ideas and excitement about a particular industry. At its most basic level, brand journalism involves storytelling that invites audiences to participate through digital and social media channels.

Essentially brand journalism is the practice of covering your business and your industry like a reporter. It also means transforming your marketing department (even if that’s only you!) into a publishing team that can produce content for readers and reporters.

The future belongs to businesses that become media. The key to your success is producing and hosting unique content designed to engage and attract a new audience. And how you leverage social media to drive this new style of journalism can mean the difference between success and failure.

Below are five tips on how to get started.

#1 This Isn’t Your Boss’ PR Program
For decades consumers have been bombarded with very “me” oriented messaging: My product, my service, my company, my plan. In order to thrive in the evolving digital landscape, you must get out of the “me” business so popular and common in public relations efforts. Instead, become a storyteller to attract, engage, entertain and inform your targeted audience.

Produce great content – articles, videos, infographics – and they’ll come to you.

This storytelling process is a fantastic inbound public relations approach that will pull consumers, competitors and media towards your business’s content hubs – company website, blog and important social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, wireless telecom-giant Qualcomm is leading the charge in brand journalism and its efforts are often followed with savvy social media strategies designed to pull in a larger audience.

They understand it’s not all about the “me” approach.

The company’s publication, QualcommSpark, often focuses on cool and interesting gadgets and games which their products “touch”, and it rarely speaks directly about any chipsets or processors they may have created for use in these platforms (see below). It’s about creating interest around subjects they are involved in.

While there aren’t many of us with the financial resources of Qualcomm, remember many people once also thought blogging was the prevue of the big players. If you follow Qualcomm’s storytelling lead and learn how to talk about your company without actually talking about it (or at least not talking about it too much), you’ll attract an audience you’d never reach with old-style press releases.

• Start small with one or two posts a week about things that interest people in your industry.
• Hone your storytelling efforts by requesting feedback (put a comment section at the bottom).
• Share your story using social media channels (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+) to pull your audience toward you. Add social buttons on each content page to make it easier for readers to share.
• Develop interesting content that will encourage readers to make an effort to learn more about you and your business.

#2 You Are the Media Now – Start Acting Like it!
Now that you’ve decided to become a storyteller in your space, you’re better off thinking like a newsperson.

The first step in this phase involves listening: learn the questions and concerns of your target audience. Instead of relying on “push” communications, such as e-mail marketing, direct mail and advertising, content is moving toward “pull” – pulling people to your business as opposed to pushing out information – which is a better long-term strategy.

“Our goal is to lead the conversation, to spark engagement, to identify trends relevant to our business and the industry,” Karen Snell, social media communications manager at Cisco, wrote on her blog recently.

Cisco Systems recently launched The Network, a technology news website tied very closely with its social media engagement program.

Because social media is intertwined with every aspect of digital – from commenting to social actions (Likes, Shares, Tweets, etc.) – Cisco encourages their audience to take content and republish it elsewhere, and share it through all social media channels.

Once you start treating content meetings like you’re in a newsroom, the editorial team will develop an eye for developing shareable content. Monitoring where it travels will also help hone your technique and overall voice.

• Invite team members to editorial meetings to pitch and produce good stories around topics you focus your business on.
• Create an editorial calendar and let readers know they can expect fresh content on a regular basis.
• Share and share some more. Social media is the engine that drives content engagement. Share and encourage everyone else to share your storytelling efforts.

#3 It’s a Story, Not a Campaign
Not since the invention of the printing press has publishing seen such a quantum leap in content accessibility for the masses. The continued advancement in publishing technologies is changing journalism to that point where anyone can now create it. However, developing campaign-style content won’t cut it. It has to have the look and feel of a real news story. And, in fact, it will be a real news story; the type that a reporter at a larger publication might see and run with. It happens every day.

If you are trying to create a campaign – content created based primarily on your products or services -forget it. They won’t go for it.

Today, the messages people see and hear are the messages they choose to see and hear. And this means you must share unique experiences, ideas and strategic thoughts instead of product launch dates and discounts.

• Content must be created with a view toward being reusable and re-purposed across multiple media platforms.
• No longer are you only a provider of goods and services, you’re aiming to show the world you are the expert in your field.
• No campaigns will make it far across social media. The content must have a life of its own away from your product, or service in order for it to move.

#4 Listen and Learn
As we’ve mentioned, listening to the conversation and learning the questions and concerns of your target audience is an extremely important first step. This will ultimately help you craft a more effective editorial calendar and lead to a greater understanding of what people are yearning to know. It’s the same process reporters undertake when studying their beats.

The best and most effective efforts are designed to engage a wide audience, and can be managed, monitored and continually tweaked based on the feedback and actions (or non-actions) of your target audience.

Let’s say you’re in the wedding dress business. It is a sensible approach to set up your listening posts in places such as the popular wedding website The Knot and its community page to learn more about what brides-to-be are talking about.

Knowing what your intended audience wants to talk about is a big part of learning your new “beat” and will help you craft relevant, engaging stories. Once you’ve rolled out your first edition, continue to focus on listening to what they are saying about your content through social media.

Consider this: 21.3 million people in 2011 discovered a new brand or company through social media, and another 22.5 million say they use platforms to learn more about brands and products, according to recent study from the Center for Media Research.

By setting up social media listening tools to filter out all that chatter on the internet, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what people are saying about you and your content. Try, a social media search and analysis platform designed to aggregate user generated comments into a single stream of information.

#5 Invite Others to Participate
For many aspiring brand journalists, the end-goal will be achieving earned content – others creating and publishing content on behalf of your business, which generates buzz and further dissemination. While this is a very significant goal it can be hard to achieve.

However, the more you share with others, and the more often you invite others to participate and share with you, and the more clearly your content is designed to interest rather then tell, the more visible your own content will become.

There are likely many websites in your business realm that would welcome quality content. Give it to them. Allow others to post your material across their channels, and invite high-quality columnists to contribute to yours.

Still, don’t be confused. We aren’t talking about your standard social media outreach here. We are talking about creating a seperate publishing entity that will enjoy a full news cycle directed by your and your team.

A continual challenge for smaller businesses is to achieve a resource balance that can also maintain growth. When it comes to content, especially for these smaller businesses, sharing content responsibilities with others is an extremely helpful method of brand journalism. At the same time, sharing the responsibility with others can exponentially increase the content’s visibility through social networks.

• Ask contributors to spread content on all of their social accounts.
• Encourage commenting and write articles people will want to comment on.
• Use calls to action like “tell us what you thought in the comments.”

And now get to work.

So, what do you think? Any ideas about the direction brand journalism is heading, or concerns about the practice may undermine traditional journalism? We’d love to hear more from you! Leave comments in the box below.

In the midst of all of this media activity, Twitter took time out during Internet Week New York recently to showcase ways that partnerships with them can not only help brands build community but also provide avenues for that community to purchase goods and services. The theme of the event was The Conversation is the Canvas which further illustrates that, especially in social media, effective campaigns begin best with regular dialogue.

Here are a few highlights.

Social Media is as American as American Express

The highlight of the #Twitter4Brands presentation was provided by Leslie Berland, senior vice president of Digital Partnerships and Development at American Express. The credit card company famous for digital initiatives with Foursquare and Small Business Saturday has fully embraced the digital nature of their community which has been reinforced by their new partnership with Twitter.

The idea itself was obviously born in the old marketing and general life adage of K.I.S.S. and illustrated with the launch of this program at SXSW:

1. Securely sync your credit card with Twitter.

• Awareness of the program and launch was done in conjunction with GoGo Inflight Internet – a very smart move to connect with all of the people traveling into Austin for the tech part of SXSW.

2. Tweet specialized hashtags from merchants to load the offer directly to your credit card.

• Create tweets with #JayZSyncShow.

3. You receive a tweet back from the American Express Sync Twitter account informing you that your discount has been loaded to your credit card;

• Which is clear; and
• Redeem your offer. The savings are already there.

American Express did not stop there. They also provided the hashtag #AmexAustin10 for use with any Austin-area merchant during the conference.

What AMEX did was very straightforward:

• They pinpointed the merchant’s need – creating an easy, seamless service for a customer; and
• Created a bridge between the merchant and customer so that an easy, seamless purchase can be made through an action the customer was very likely to already take.

By engaging in these two planning actions, they gave consumers no excuse or exit strategy to leave the offer. The consumer is (1) already active on Twitter; (2) engaged with the brand(s); and (3) doesn’t have to perform any “work” in saving. There’s no print coupon or print confirmation. There’s not even a coupon code which incidentally work pretty well. In this case, the consumer sees something they want to purchase, says they want to purchase the item(s) (which they would probably do due to FOMO) and makes the purchase: a truly organic user experience.

Please note:Twitter does not view community building with the help of hashtags and creating points of purchase as exclusive actions—there is a natural progression and purchasing is not forced. My colleagues in social media will appreciate that little disclaimer and you as a brand should surely appreciate and embrace this concept as well.

What do you think? Can you incorporate this type of community building in any of your campaigns? Let us know in the box below, we’d love to hear from you.

Google Analytics  can be an invaluable tool for busy marketers. It saves time, helps keep you on track and provides a peak into data that can be particularly relevant to your long term success.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a client that has a dozen domains that need to be monitored; each with its own unique analytics to measure. At this point, you’re talking about a lot data to check, verify and monitor. And all this must be done before you can even think about creating an action plan to improve performance. The ability to share this type of information – custom reports, advanced segments and dashboards –  would definitely go a long way in streamlining your efforts.

Google is obviously paying attention to marketers complaints. Last week the search giant upgraded Analytics’ existing custom report sharing and added the ability to share advanced segments and dashboards with other Analytics users, making life a bit easier and definitely more organized.

Here a a few tips to consider when looking for the Share button in these sections:

• Custom Report: In the Actions menu on the table that lists your reports.
• Dashboard: In the top-left corner over your dashboard.
• Advanced Segment: Visit the Admin tab in the top right corner of your account, then select Advanced Segments to enable sharing.

The button will bring up a URL that you can send to anyone, or even publish on your blog.

If you’re like the rest of us, you’re probably concerned with sharing traffic data with just anybody. No need to worry, however, because sharing this link will only share a template, not your site’s metrics. What it does provide a user is the dashboard name, widgets and data fields to be populated with data from their Analytics account.

When you or someone else opens the link, they will be prompted to choose a profile in which to import the custom report, advanced segment or dashboard. They will also have the option to change the name. After that is complete they will see the template populated with data from their account.

Below are five steps to help improve any of your analytics process.

It is important to note that links to shared templates are permanent snapshots that, once shared, allows you to change or delete a dashboard in your account. This will not change the experience for anyone using the previously shared link.

Basic blog dashboard: If you’re working on a blog you can use this dashboard to keep tabs on where readers come from and what they do once they arrive on the site.

Mobile ecommerce dashboard: If you’re getting into mobile commerce (and really, who isn’t these days?) use this dashboard to get an end-to-end view of your customer experience.

Site Performance dashboard:This dashboard contains various speed metrics to help identify issues with your pages or servers. The IT team will like this one.

Engaged Traffic advanced segment: This advanced segment measures traffic that views at least three pages AND spends more than three minutes on your site.

Daily Ecommerce report: Use this report to keep tabs on all parts of the ecommerce lifecycle: acquisition, engagement and conversion in one single table.

You’ve probably heard that placing trust seals like the VeriSign trust seal clearly visible on  your website helps with conversions. I wanted to know if this concept would hold true on our website. I decided to test it out on our Request a Quote form. Back in September, I found that redesigning the form increased form fills by 37 percent. I considered that to be a decent success….until I ran my latest a/b test using the Verisign trust seal. The results were not short of astonishing.

The current form:

Note the sidebar of the form. It does not have the VeriSign trust seal.

The “challenger” form:

Note the sidebar of the form. It has only the Verisign trust seal and nothing about privacy of information.

The difference between the two forms: 

The difference in the percentage of visitors to our RAQ form who filled it out was 42 percent, based on testing with Google Website Optimizer. What I found by looking at Google Analytics was even more shocking. The improvement in form fills from organic, non-branded search traffic was 81 percent! 

I have trouble believing the results, so I have relaunched the test in order to confirm these findings. What I will also do is figure out if it is necessarily the presence of the VeriSign seal or simply the absence of the note regarding privacy that caused such increases in form fills. Could it be that the note about “Your Privacy” is creating fears that would otherwise not be there, while the VeriSign seal only adds confidence? What about if there is nothing there?

I will be testing further and will share that info right here. Any suggestions? Drop a comment or tweet me.

Join us at NYC Conversion Optimization Showcase!

If you’d like to showcase some of your own conversion optimization examples and have a live discussion once a month in NYC, then join our new Meetup, Conversion Optimization Showcase. Our first Meetup is scheduled for February 15, at our Madison Ave offices.

Anyone who has embedded YouTube videos on their website knows how valuable it can be to find out whether visitors are actually watching those videos. You might want to track whether people are watching until the end or whether they stop short. Here’s how to find that out using the YouTube API and some Google Analytics ninja skills.

The original example for this came from Brian Clifton’s newly published Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, which we’ve been reading here at BFM. We realized that there were a few small omissions in the jscript provided on page 250 (in 2012 edition) so we have corrected those below.

Objective:

Track when a visitor clicks to play a video and whether they watch it until the end. You’ll be able to see this in your Google Analytics reports in your Events section:

Implementation:

1. Place your usual Google Analytics tracking code (asynchronous) in your header.

2. Create an empty div element within the body, with an id of “player”. This is where your YouTube video will be placed shortly.

<div id="player"</div

3. Make a script tag, and insert the YouTube iframe player API code. Don’t close the script tag, there’s still more to do.

<script 

var tag = document.createElement('script'); 

tag.src = "http://www.youtube.com/player_api"; 

var firstScriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; 

firstScriptTag.parentNode.insertBefore(tag, firstScriptTag);

4. Create the iframe and player. Replace the ‘zLQFkztsozw’ with your video ID tag and customize your video height and width requirements.

var player; 

function onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() { 

player = new YT.Player('player', { 

height: '390', 

width: '640', 

videoId: 'zLQFkztsozw', 

events: { 

'onReady': onPlayerReady, 

'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange 

} 

}); 

}

function onPlayerReady(event) { 

/// event.target.playVideo(); 

} 

5. Use the onPlayerStateChange method to look for events, such as the video starting or stopping. You can also close the script tag here.

function onPlayerStateChange(event) { 

if (event.data ==YT.PlayerState.PLAYING) 

{_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 

player.getVideoUrl() ]); } 

if (event.data ==YT.PlayerState.ENDED) 

{_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Watch to End', 

player.getVideoUrl() ]); } } 

</script

I hope that this helps you get a better insight into how users are interacting with your web video production embedded on your website. If you have any questions, please comment below!

This article was updated on 12/13/12.

Picture this: you’re tasked with increasing the percentage of visitors to a web form who fill it out. Or maybe, your job is to increase the percentage of visitors who get through a multi-step form such as an application or checkout process. What analytics data would you look at to identify areas of opportunity? (Where are your visitors dropping off in the process?)

If you have a one-page form, then all you have is the percentage of form fills to go by. And for the multi-page forms, you can take a look at your goal funnel report to find out what pages are causing abandons. But what about looking at each form field separately as a step in the funnel process, whether you have a one-page or multi-page form?

The tips below will give you the ability to track each form field as a virtual pageview and thus create either one or multiple conversion funnels.

Before we get started, let’s cover some precautions of using this technique. Tracking each form field as a pageview is likely to have the following effects on your overall analytics data:

• It will decrease time on page statistics.
• It will inflate pages/visit.
• It will influence your page depth reports.
• It will affect your goal flow reports.
• And more.

For these reasons, I advise doing two things when tracking form fields as pageviews:

• Use a separate profile to track your form field-generated pageviews and create your conversion funnels in there.
• Create a filter to exclude form field-generated pageviews from the profile(s) where you track site-wide numbers. A filter like this might do the trick for you:

Let’s get started.

Implementation:

1. Add the following code to your form fields. What this does is create a virtual pageview every time someone clicks out of a form field (using onBlur). You can also trigger the virtual pageviews when people click into fields using onFocus, but it has a tendency to mess up funnels on the last step where the visitor will click into your last field (trigger the last field pageview) then click out of that field to review their form (thus viewing your form page again). Whereas, with onBlur, that sequence of events is less likely to cause funnel reporting issues. You will want to edit what comes after _trackPageview to be what URL you want showing up in your reports for each field.

<form action="submitted.php" method="post" name="testform"

<input name="firstname" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.firstname.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/firstname'])"

<input name="lastname" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.lastname.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/lastname'])"

<input name="email" type="text" onBlur="if(document.testform.email.value != '');_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/form/email'])"

<input name="Send" type="submit" /

2. Setup your conversion funnels. Since Google Analytics limits you to 10 steps per funnel, when dealing with long forms, you have a few options:

• Only add some of your fields as funnel steps. For example, rather than adding First Name and Last Name, only add the Last Name field and call that funnel step “Name”. Then instead of tracking each field of an address section, count that as one step in the process. You get the idea. The caveat here is that this can defeat the whole purpose of doing this in the first place by providing generic data that isn’t as actionable, especially when dealing with really large forms. I would say use this in situations where one field really is not a major pain point and where it doesn’t make sense to create multiple funnels to track a form due to it’s small size (say 11-15 fields).
• The other approach is to create separate conversion funnels for separate parts of your form. This is especially practical when your form is broken-up into multiple pages that you want to see as separate funnels.

3. Look at your reports and start optimizing those form fields!

• For tricks to improve web form design and the likehood that visitors will fill them out, take a look at 10 Ideas to Design a Better Sign-Up Form and Web Form A/B Testing: How I Increased Form Fills by 37%.
• For more ideas on how to better track your website analytics, pick up a copy of Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. It’s a great read for anyone who’s just starting off with GA or looking to fill in gaps of knowledge.

Update (Dec 13, 2012): A great question from Renato Fuly on Twitter:

@alhankeser Hi there, I was wondering if the Form Field code you provided, will work with radio buttons and check boxes.

— Renato Fuly (@RBFuly61) December 6, 2012

Our resident Rubik’s Cube champion, Bryan Mytko, helped by providing me this answer:

No, it won’t work, at least not universally. There’s strange behavior with radio buttons in webkit, and some new versions of Firefox. The issue has to do with radio buttons not gaining focus, therefore never getting blurred. 

A clever work around is to add an onclick handler to radio inputs, which gives itself focus. Here’s a a quick example:

http://jsfiddle.net/54y69/213/

Google Analytics  can be an invaluable tool for busy marketers. It saves time, helps keep you on track and provides a peak into data that can be particularly relevant to your long term success.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a client that has a dozen domains that need to be monitored; each with its own unique analytics to measure. At this point, you’re talking about a lot data to check, verify and monitor. And all this must be done before you can even think about creating an action plan to improve performance. The ability to share this type of information – custom reports, advanced segments and dashboards –  would definitely go a long way in streamlining your efforts.

Google is obviously paying attention to marketers complaints. Last week the search giant upgraded Analytics’ existing custom report sharing and added the ability to share advanced segments and dashboards with other Analytics users, making life a bit easier and definitely more organized.

Here a a few tips to consider when looking for the Share button in these sections:

• Custom Report: In the Actions menu on the table that lists your reports.
• Dashboard: In the top-left corner over your dashboard.
• Advanced Segment: Visit the Admin tab in the top right corner of your account, then select Advanced Segments to enable sharing.

The button will bring up a URL that you can send to anyone, or even publish on your blog.

If you’re like the rest of us, you’re probably concerned with sharing traffic data with just anybody. No need to worry, however, because sharing this link will only share a template, not your site’s metrics. What it does provide a user is the dashboard name, widgets and data fields to be populated with data from their Analytics account.

When you or someone else opens the link, they will be prompted to choose a profile in which to import the custom report, advanced segment or dashboard. They will also have the option to change the name. After that is complete they will see the template populated with data from their account.

Below are five steps to help improve any of your analytics process.

It is important to note that links to shared templates are permanent snapshots that, once shared, allows you to change or delete a dashboard in your account. This will not change the experience for anyone using the previously shared link.

Basic blog dashboard: If you’re working on a blog you can use this dashboard to keep tabs on where readers come from and what they do once they arrive on the site.

Mobile ecommerce dashboard: If you’re getting into mobile commerce (and really, who isn’t these days?) use this dashboard to get an end-to-end view of your customer experience.

Site Performance dashboard:This dashboard contains various speed metrics to help identify issues with your pages or servers. The IT team will like this one.

Engaged Traffic advanced segment: This advanced segment measures traffic that views at least three pages AND spends more than three minutes on your site.

Daily Ecommerce report: Use this report to keep tabs on all parts of the ecommerce lifecycle: acquisition, engagement and conversion in one single table.

You may have noticed that your retargeting campaigns lose steam as time goes on. Without changing ad copy or the look of your banners, audiences get accustomed to your ads, click-through rates go down, and view-through conversions take longer to bare their fruit. This was happening to our BFM retargeting campaign about a month ago. We had been running the same ads for a quite a while and it was becoming difficult to squeeze more juice out of our non-converting audience. Our click-through rates (CTR) overall had dipped to an all-time low of 0.07%. Ouch. It was time to mix things up.

Enter the Owl

We don’t spend a lot on retargeting (it costs very little to target our audience), but it is a major area of opportunity. And I hate lost opportunities. I decided to use some humor and found the image of a small, inquisitive-looking owl, wearing a straw hat. To that, I added a few lines that a used car salesman would throw out, provided by fellow BFMers David Dweck, Matthew Smith, and Bill Ryan. In the end, the ads appeared to work, increasing average CTRs to over 0.3%, a relatively good number for our campaign. Here are the ads that I created, which got us immediately more responses, and ultimately, more conversions.

We created a number of ads that peaked the curiosity of our audience. Many clients called in saying how entertaining it was to be followed around by an owl. That was the first time we’d received such praise for ads.

There were multiple sizes created so that we could have two different messages sometimes show up on the same page.

The free leather upgrade really got people clicking.

We made light of the fact that we were “following” people around. The “I am not following you” banner had the highest click-through-rate.

We marked current events with the ads: after the earthquake on the East Coast, we created an ad referring to it, as well as during hurricane Irene.

All of these ads sent users to this landing page. Notice the continuity in the usage of the owl.

The results

As a result of our “owl” campaign, click-through rates increased dramatically, while conversion rates remained surprisingly steady. I was sure they would drop. What did drop were the percentage of view-through conversions. This could be attributed to audience saturation or the lack of strong branding on the owl ads.

As with our previous campaign, I’ll soon need to update our current owl campaign to feature more diversity. I will test something else out and write about it here. Last time I mentioned how I was able to increase form fills on our Request a Quote page.

If you could do only one thing today to dramatically improve your marketing ROI, adding  landing pages to your website would be a good bet.

All too often we see less Web-experienced companies pushing advertising, email and even social media traffic to their homepage – obviously this leads to many missed opportunities. Using a targeted landing page is a sure way to increase the odds of converting that hard-earned traffic into leads.

We’ve discussed landing pages in this space at length in the past, but after attending ION Interactive’s webinar titled, “Landing Pages 3.0: What’s new, What’s hot, What’s not”, I decided a refresher course was in order.

Below are 10 takeaways from the event presented by ION Interactive’s co-founder and Executive Vice President Anna Talerico.

1. Interactive
Using interactive content for landing pages is becoming more common. An interactive landing page – such as enhanced content, sliders, dynamic images and user controls – provides greater access to content on a single page.  These pages appear more website-like than non-interactive landing pages and have been shown to enhance landing page conversion rates.

Interactive pages allow you to keep a simple and clear landing page that can bring in supportive content with more information to the user.

For example, tabbed content allows users to select information they want but doesn’t distract from the landing page’s focus. It’s important to allow user’s discretion to interact with whatever content the chose.

Some ways to make pages interactive:

•  Accordions, rotators, swipes, pop ups, light boxes.
• “One page” content exploration.
• Uses page real estate efficiently.
• Conversion focused.
• High production resources.
• Dynamic  templates make it fast and easy to produce.

Keep page conversion focused. Interactive pages are a creative way to enhance content but make sure to keep focus on conversion.

2. Dynamic
Creating a landing page experience that is more relevant to users is a great way to increase conversions. Start by providing a data value on the first landing page: Ask how many employees their company has or ask what zip code they are in and then reiterate that information on the next page adding some additional information based on their answer.

For example, ask how many employees a company has. Use that information on the second landing page: “Here are insurance plans for companies with five employees.”

By serving up different images and content to different targeted audiences, you’re going to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Bonus tip: Dynamic keyword insertion
Let’s use insurance as our model. Have a page that says, “Really cheap health insurance” echoing back on landing page in specific way. Another landing page should be tailored to people who may have searched for “Affordable health insurance.”

Continually test these pages with different copy and change out imagery with different calls to action based to that. Test!

• Swap content on pages based on keywords, behaviors, etc.
• Increase relevancy and specificity.
• Increase odds of conversions.

And remember to always be testing.

3. Progressive
A multi-touch approach provide users coming to a lead generating landing page first with a very simple form to submit for some type of information. The next “touch” should be a progressive step that confirms basic contact information.

Asking additional questions helps to build a user profile over time.

A multi-step approach can really be a big boost for conversions. Numbers suggest the multi form approach increases conversions at a higher rate than single forms. The users are going to walk through a couple screens (above) to complete sign up and by using that dynamic information forms for each step, your odds increase that a visitor progressing to the next page.

Multi-step/Progressive profiling

• Reduces perceived barriers to conversion
• Allows each progressive step to be more relative
• Progressive conversion techniques can be particularly effective for complex conversions requiring  user to fill out multiple form fields.

4. Mobile Ready
According to research firm Gartner, there will be approximately 8 billion mobile devices on the planet by 2015. This is is causing a surge in demand for mobile landing pages as more traffic than ever moves across mobile devices.

There are two ways to best tactically execute landing pages for mobile for traffic.

a. The mobile template.  This page for is built for a standard browser with code to sense if visitors are arriving on mobile devices and serves up a mobile page.

b.  Another option is to make a second version only for mobile traffic. These hand crafted pages are best suited for mobile targeted campaigns– high traffic mobile campaigns like QR codes.

The more automated system serves landing pages for standard browsers and automatically makes mobile versions. It’s not hand crafted. This takes the most important content and displays it from top to bottom on a mobile device. This is good for when you might have some mobile but not a lot.

Mobile optimized pages

• Monitor mobile traffic to determine volume.
• Hand craft pages for mobile specific campaigns.
• Decide which content to place on page and how to position it.
• Automatic optimization to “catch” mobile traffic.
• Reduces effort to produce mobile.

5. Social
What does social mean for conversion focused landing pages? More than you might think. But if you’re planning on using social media on a landing page, make sure to ask visitors to share only after they convert.

While social beacons (buttons) provide assurances that you are a company alive and well, these buttons sometimes act as conversion inhibitors. Studies suggest that landing pages with social buttons experience slightly depressed conversion rates. I.e. people leave via those buttons. The Facebook page (above) is too enticing. Many visitors will prematurely bounce via this page before converting.

However, each company needs to make their own determination. Set up an A/B test and see which works best.

Advantage of using social on landing pages: fans, comments and videos can provide ‘social proof’ there are people that like a product and engage with it.

Social engagement itself is a form of conversion- – test, test, test.

To go further with social engagement after conversion, try pulling in a  blog feed on “Thank You” page.

 6. Relevant
Make localized versions for your landing pages. If you’re in Montreal and have local markets that use different languages, make one page in French and one in English. Global campaigns also should think about how to incorporate localizing for different audiences: If you have a campuses in Manhattan and Orlando create a template that can be easily interchanged for conversions wherever they are served.

Try keyword substitution. Make many different targeted versions of these pages. Use different pages for email traffic, social traffic, and search traffic ext.  Make it contextually relevant.

Optimized landing pages for keyword groups- product, brand need keywords….think conversions!

• Browser language detection.
• Geo-location.
• Hyper-local versions of pages (images, content, location).
• Make it relevant to them – increases specificity.

7. Integrated
The concept of integrated landing pages means taking advantage of multiple platforms used by sales and marketing such as CRM (customer relationship management) systems, marketing automation, lead scoring, demand generation systems and website analytics.

Integrate these efforts with all your marketing tools like Sales Force, Google, DoubleClick. Make sure all these things are talking to each other including mobile, social display, QR codes for all the different places you have traffic is key.

8. Disposable
Overinvesting time and energy and budget is a mistake. Your landing pages need to be disposable. Too often marketers approach landing pages like little mini Web projects. If you’ve got too much invested, the less likely you are to toss away a page that isn’t working.

These pages need to be disposable. Continually test and optimize.

Each page can’t be precious. Make them quickly, efficiently.

• Don’t over invest in creative that may not be effective.
• Use templates.
• Reusable images and content.
• Reduce reliance on tech and design resources.
• Allows you to scale efficiently – multi-versions and more dynamic.
• Enables agility – quick speed to market with your ideas.

 9. Data-mined
Have a system in place that pushes key conversion influences.

Here are the type of metrics to measure:

•  Bounce rate.
• Conversion rate.
• Conversion quality.

1. -lead engagement (pre-post convert).
2. -Lead quality.
3. -order value.

•  Visitor behavior on page.
• which action leads to conversions don’t.
• Results by traffic sources.

10. QR
By adding a QR code linked to a landing page, branding opportunities become a trackable lead generation opportunity.

Make sure the landing page is relevant and mobile

• It can be used everywhere.
• Engages visitors quickly.
• Make pages actionable.
• Easy to track and optimize.

As a digital marketing strategist, one of your core responsibilities is to identify opportunities that will benefit a client’s online presence. While this often involves a thorough analysis of the client’s business and a deep understanding of the competitive landscape, a full SEO audit with a broad analysis on keywords, links, and on-site optimization can take days to complete.

You don’t always have that kind of time. In fact, often you’ll be pulled into a client meeting at the last minute with barely any analytic information at hand.

I found my process for handling these types of situations to be very useful in quickly identifying marketing opportunities.  Essentially, I look for low hanging fruit. This  “quick audit” process can vary for each website as well as for each marketing channel. However, there are some some core methods to use for quickly identifying opportunities to improve SEO.

The trick is to know what to look for and what tools, other than analytics, are at your disposal.

1. Know the Site
What to look for: Traffic and Demographics
Free Tool:  AdPlanner

Learn a little about the website and how it is performing.  Doubleclick’s Ad Planner is great for this and all you need to access it is a free account with Google.  For sites that are established, it can generate a quick overview on traffic, demographics and user interest.  All great fodder that will help you speak intelligently about a website.

2. On-Site SEO
What to look for: Optimized Tagging and Page Speed
Free Tools: Mozbar and Google Page Speed

Take a few minutes to browse the site in Chrome or Firefox using SEOmoz’s Toolbar, named Mozbar.  Get a quick ‘Page Analysis’ for the homepage, category and/or product pages that seem important to the success of the website.

Ammo: Look to see if page titles, descriptions, and headers are optimized for search engines.  Simply click the Mozbar and make note of those that can be better optimized.

3. For Page Speed,  try Google’s chrome extension while browsing the site but Google also has an online version that works just the same.

Ammo: Drop in the URL of a landing page and look for a rating below 70.  The page speed tool will generate a prioritized list of technical suggestions for improving page speed.  You may discover some crucial flaws in the page that is ultimately hindering the pages ability to rank in search engines.

4.  Brief Keyword Analysis
What to look for: Keyword rankings and traffic from Search Engines
Free Tool: SEMRush

Just plug in a domain into SEMRush and get a free (but limited) view on all sorts of useful data.  I particularly like to reference the approximate number of keywords (this number shows keywords ranked in the top 20 of Google search results), the approximate amount of monthly visitors from Google, and competitors in organic search.

The competitor research can be especially useful for gauging a site’s performance in search.  I usually make a note of how many keywords competitors have in Google’s top 20 and show the comparison in a chart.  SEMRush can chart this for you with their ‘Competition Graph.’

Ammo:  Toggle the drop down menu and click on any of the data points to highlight areas you wish to call attention to (I mostly use ‘Num of Keywords’ and ‘SE Traffic’).  Take some quick screenshots or make a few notes and move on.

5. ProTip – literally – you have to subscribe to SEMRush’s pro plan ($69.95/mo) in order to unlock the data necessary for this process.  With this access, I like to export ‘Organic Keywords’ to a spreadsheet (the Pro subscription limits reports to 10,000 results).

Open the sheet and format the data in a table. Sort the position by smallest to largest. Scroll down and look for when the keywords start ranking at 11. This indicates keywords that rank on page two of Google search results. Make note of the row number (5,237) and compare this number to the total number of keywords in Google’s top 20 (158,406).

Ammo: With this data we can say that approximately 3 percent of MacWorld’s top 20 keywords are ranking on page one.  Furthermore, we can assume that by improving SEO efforts, we can increase the percentage of page one keywords and significantly increase the amount of targeted traffic to the Macworld domain.  To support this claim, I usually cite a variety of third-party case studies that show the difference in traffic between page 2 and page 1 search results.

6. Link Data
What to look for: Link Diversity
Free Tool(s): Open Site Explorer

When gathering link data for a website, there are a number of metrics one can use to evaluate the quality of a link building campaign.  Try focusing on link diversity.  It more accurately reflects a website’s link building efforts than sheer link volume.  It also helps to pit those metrics against industry competitors.  SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer can provide some good data and compelling visual aids to support your findings for this process.  This tool is free but limited to the number of reports generated.

Sticking with the Macworld versus MacRumors comparison, here’s how I would quickly gauge link diversity using Open Site Explorer. Compare Link Metrics by entering the two domains.  Scroll down to Root Domain Metrics.  Make a note of the Total Linking Root Domains and Linking C Blocks.

Ammo: The site with the higher number of Linking Root Domains generally has higher trust and ranking potential.  The site with the higher number of Linking C Blocks generally has greater link diversity – which means links are coming from many related site groups.

In the world of Email marketing, there is always room for improvement.  Sometimes, the biggest improvement can come from the smallest of edits.

The most minor adjustments to your email template have the potential to cause click-through (the % of people who actually click on a link) and open rates (the % of people who open and view an email instead of just ignoring or deleting it) to suddenly skyrocket, and in turn, drive large amounts of sales, traffic, sign ups, or conversions. However, the only way to truly learn from your template adjustments is to implement them one at a time utilizing classic scientific procedure. By isolating your adjustments, you can learn which varying factors improve your campaigns and which hurt them.

A/B Split Testing for Email

The best approach for this experimental improvement is commonly referred to as A/B Split Testing: a function available within most email marketing services.

The actual process for Newsletter A/B Split Testing  involves splitting a small, randomally selected subset of your mailing list subscribers into two groups. Then, each groups receivs an email that is nearly identical, save a small tweak that you are testing. For example, you might test different subject lines to see how that affects open rate. Once the results are measured, you then send out the “winning” variation to the all the users who didn’t receive  one of the original test emails.

To reiterate, the only difference between the two emails going to the two small test groups should be the single factor that you are testing.

An Example

Acme, Inc. would like find out which color link attracts the most clicks. In the current version of their newsletter, link is displayed in a big red font with no special decoration.

In order to find out if this is the optimal presentation for clicks, they up an A/B test that includes two identical newsletters except for this big red link. Email #1 would include the standard big red link link with no special decoration while Email #2 would include a blue link with no special decoration.  While it may tempting to experiment with decorating the link or creating a special button, that should be saved for the next test in order to keep the currently tested color variable completely isolated.  The reason for only testing one tweak at a time is so that there is no doubt about what caused the increase.  To continue testing ways to improve click-through rates, further A/B tests could be done.

But links are not the only thing that can be tested in newsletters.  Other potential variables include:

• Subject-Line: Test subject lines to increase open rates.
• From-Line: Test which “from” address results in the highest open rate.
• Landing Page: Find out which landing page to link to by seeing which one results in a higher conversion rate
• Time of Delivery: The time of day that email is sent could have a significant impact on open rates and recipient activity across all metrics.
• Presentation of Calls to Action: Not getting enough clicks? Try testing the color of and style of buttons.
• Just About Every Aspect of A Newsletter: Almost anything in a newsletters can be tested for improvement.

Remember: scientific testing is the only true path to improvement in your campaigns.  While there are many preachers of best practices out there, what works for most may not work for your list. The only way to be sure is to test test test.

Not all email delivery methods are created equal.

Everyone with an email account knows how to send an email. Most of us send out dozens every day. When it comes to sending out bulk emails, though, you are far wiser to rely on a professional email marketing service.

Using a consumer- or business-grade email account to send out your marketing emails can lead to big problems. Systems like Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are simply not equipped to send out bulk emails and lack the features necessary to execute a successful email marketing campaign.

Email Marketing Services

While there are many different email marketing Service Providers, they all tend to provide the same basic services:

Analytics & Statistics

When you send an email by yourself, you have no way of knowing how many people actually received your email, let alone how many actually opened it.

Email marketing services use special tools to separately track how many emails are received in inboxes and how many are actually opened. You can even see who opened and who clicked through and what was clicked. Furthermore, you’ll receive reports on unsubscribes, bounces, and formal spam complaints.

All this data will help you improve future mailings to increase response open and response rates.

A/B Testing

Most modern email marketing Services allow you to test out multiple subject lines to find the most successful one. For example, you can set two different subject lines on a randomly select sample (e.g. 10%) of your mailing list. The system will automatically compare the open rates and then send the email with the “winning” subject line to the rest of your list.

Pre-Approved To Send Bulk Email

Most email systems limit the number of emails that you can send at once. You probably won’t even know when you’ve reached the limit–your emails simply won’t go through. Furthermore, bulk emails from most normal email accounts will quickly get flagged as spam. Email marketing services have relationships and agreements with internet and email providers to send authorized bulk email through, without being flagged as spam.

(NOTE: Email marketing services still allow you to display your own email address in the “from” box–they simply change key “under-the-hood” settings that your customers won’t see.)

Professional Mailing Practices & Legal Requirements

Using your normal mailing system can result in privacy breaches, like exposing your entire list in the “To” or “CC:” line.  Separately, a failure to include unsubscribe instructions or an unsubscribe link is now against the law.

Handle Formatting

Email marketing Services verify that your email complies with standards and will display correctly across all modern computers, web browsers, and email systems. They also ensure that your email meets the size requirements enforced by many email systems without having to sacrifice the higher response rates that come with graphic-rich HTML emails.

List Management

An Email marketing service will host and manage your list. They will manage unsubscribe requests and “bounce-backs” from recipients whose email addresses are no longer active. You can even separate lists into multiple segments and groups.

While setting up and sending out mailing lists is manageable by anyone with intermediate computer and internet skills, the hard part is knowing how to structure and analyze the results of email marketing campaigns. Anyone can send out an email, but it takes experience and training to craft a headline that will get users to open your email instead of sending it straight to the trash. And once the email is open, what buttons and calls to action will convince users to click your links and convert into real sales?

Last month, I launched an A/B test of our Request a Quote form page to see if a new design would impact the percentage of form fills. I planned the design of a new version of the page to see if the some of the basic “best practices” really had an impact. The result was a 37% increase in form fills.

Here is what the current form looks like:

Here are the changes I made:

Fewer visual distractions. I got rid of the main navigation and all other content on the page. The only action to take was to fill out the form. I did leave a “Back” button, which currently points back to our home page. (I plan to change this to a simple “Back” button that takes the user one page back, like a browser button would.)

Form validation. I added form validation cues such as a green check mark or a red “X” that confirmed, in real-time, whether the form was being filled out correctly. For the “Phone” and “Company” name fields, I wasn’t too picky, in fact allowing those to remain blank, if need be.

Supporting content. I knew that there were questions that users were asking before requesting a quote. I wanted to answer those and add some value, as well as reassure that we do not use their data in any dubious ways. Most of the on-going testing will revolve around trying different things of this type: showing our list of clients again to re-enforce our credibility, including trust badges and certificates such as our AdWords Partner Status, BBB accreditation, and a Verisign-type security badge.

The new request a quote form

The new form is stripped of superfluous content and makes the form almost fun to fill out with immediate validation of input data. Another small, but nice feature is the default placement of the cursor within the first field to fill out.

The new form increased chances that a visitor to the form page would fill out the form by 37%.  Below are the Google Website Optimizer results:

This test came on the heels of a previous landing page test,which increased our overall conversion rate (all traffic) from 1.12% to 2.42% (a 217% increase). The increase in the form fill rate led to another increase in our overall conversion rate, this time to 3.36% (a 301% increase from our original 1.12%).

I will test out adding the following in the coming months:

• Trust symbols
• Testimonials
• Client list
• Value proposition

Changing the name of the form is also something I have considered, perhaps a “quote” is not what our best clients are looking for. To test this, I will create 3 identical forms with different names and different calls to action on the page going to them. I will try:

• “Request a Quote”
• “Request a Consultation”
• “Contact Us”

If you have any suggestions on what the test out in the future, please leave a comment below!

NEW POST (September 29, 2011): How an Owl Increased Our Retargeting CTRs by 430%

A few weeks ago in this space we talked about organizing content for mobile to better optimize website conversions. As everyone already knows, it’s all about the conversions. The post generated a lot of interest from readers and a few suggested a follow about how to go about maximizing overall conversation rates on mobile devices.

Why is this important? Because mobile web content consumption continues to increase as double-digit growth was seen across all major categories in the U.S. in 2011, according to comScore.  In the U.S., 82 million consumers have already adopted smartphones. And from a marketing perspective, while only about  6 percent of ad budgets are currently reserved for mobile, marketers will increase their mobile spend to 35 percent of the total over the next year.

If you’re designing websites, you better do it with mobile in mind.

So it makes sense to start building out sites that make it easier to convert visitors on a mobile device. Keep this in mind: to convert users on mobile you MUST play to the strengths of mobile devices.  We’ve long moved passed the days when replicating the desktop experience was good enough.

Here are five of my top 10 steps to help make mobile conversions easier (come back next week the the next five!):

What are you writing, a book?

Very few people these days even like to read books, let alone want to write one. So why are you annoying them with a tome worth of compulsory fields asking for a glut of semi-useless information on your contact form. Keep it short!

Helpful hint: Use of radio buttons and check boxes. This will reduce time spent users and encourage them to continue toward your goal: completing the form. This way you make sure to secure that conversion before bogging visitors down with irrelevant questions.

Eliminate extra steps, save the searches.

The easier you make things for visitors the likelihood of converting them increases. The ability to save searches should be alluring for just about anyone with a website that asks for information, especially in places where users are likely to search for the same things repeatedly. Allowing visitors to save their searches makes completing regular purchases that much easier. Amazon does this very well on numerous levels (see below).

Helpful hint: Visitor doesn’t have an account, no problem. Include an email option that allows them to save their searches. You can go the cookies rout to remember and remind of previous searches.

Efficiency with HTML5 form fields.

Keep them coming back for more with a simplified form set up. HTML5 simplifies many common tasks when building a Web page including multimedia content, validating forms, caching information and capturing data such as date and time. By Simply the users experience using HTML5 to create auto-complete form fields.

Helpful hint: By using HTML5 in form fields, it is possible to help users to complete those fields more efficiently.

Keep it real… real consistent.

Creating a uniformed experience across multiple platforms means mobile users will have the same experience as laptop users, tablet users, desktop users and just about another other kind of user connecting to your website. When a customer starts the conversion process on an iPad, it can be completed on an iPhone. For example, if I’m shopping at TommyHilfiger.com on my desktop and need to abandon my shopping cart to go to a party, I can login to their account on my mobile device and complete the transactions while on the go. (Do I really need a striped shirt that bad? Some people do and will.)

Helpful hint: Keeping style and layout consistent will help users navigate your site easily from one device to another.

Take action here!

Everyone knows the importance of having call-to-action buttons, but somehow many still manage to muff the implementation, and this can turn a conversation into a bounce faster than a 404 error message. Usually the biggest mistake occurs in providing too many conversion options, or worse not clearly identifying these options to the visitor.

Helpful hint: Avoid using multiple conversion options and use button color and size to clearly indicate to a visitor what you want them to do next.

Next week I’ll round out the top 10 ways to whip your website into mobile shape.

As mobile continues to dominate tech talk in 2011, a  wave of of ancillary issues – from location-based technologies to hyper-local marketing trends – are reverberating through businesses across the country.

Last month we presented Part 1 of  Making Conversions Easier for Mobile Users. If you hadn’t noticed there’s been a lot of chatter about mobile optimization in this space and prior to that post we talked about organizing content for mobile to better optimize website conversions. As everyone already knows, it’s all about the conversions.

Before we move forward let’s briefly look back on highlights of five issues to consider from the last post:

• What are you writing a book?

Use of radio buttons and check boxes. This will reduce time spent users and encourage them to continue toward your goal: completing the form.

• Eliminate extra steps, save the searches.

The easier you make things for visitors the likelihood of converting them increases.

• Efficiency with HTML5 form fields.

Keep them coming back for more with a simplified form set up.

• Keep it real… real consistent.

Creating a uniformed experience across multiple platforms means mobile users will have the same experience as laptop users, tablet users, desktop users and just about another other kind of user connecting to your website.

• Take action here!

Avoid using multiple conversion options and use button color and size to clearly indicate to a visitor what you want them to do next.

These five are also important to keep in mind when designing websites for mobile:

Check, please.

Not matter how great mobile technology increases in the coming years (even with the iPhone’s voice recognition, Siri); there is one problem that is likely insurmountable in the current format: Finger size to keyboard button ratio.  The essence of any mobile device is that it can fit in the palm of your hand. That’s not conducive to typing. In that respect, requesting a minimum amount of data entry from users is paramount. When building out a site for mobile consider using check boxes, lists and scroll menus. As always, making it easier will help guide visitors through the conversion process.

Side note: Too many options is not a good thing. Don’t  give a visitor too many options  when creating lists or they may become even less decisive. Remember to ‘guide’ them along toward your conversion goal.

It’s easy to call.

Click-to-Call. Listen up, they’ve already got a phone in there hand! If you offer call options make it the easiest call options available. Tag phone numbers on your website for click-to-call and turn those links into buttons.

Side note: When visiting a website mobile users are twice as likely to call then desktop users.

Mobile vs. Desktop.

Location based technologies aren’t really that big in the desktop space at the moment, nor do we anticipate a great deal of movement there. Generally speaking desktops have one location and rarely (finding locations/directions) are used to orient the user. If conversions are going to take place offline (ie. your store), it’s important to use geo-location technologies to get visitors from point A to point B (through your door). Maps, directions and a little discount savings incentive often do the trick.

Side note: A discount is a powerful motivator. Consider adding a discount code for mobile shoppers who come to the shop and convert quick.

From top down.

Your desktop screen is a rectangle from left to right (more or less). Most mobile devices are narrow and vertically orientated.

For mobile forms, horizontal labels (left- and right- aligned) should be avoided. When users click on an input field, the page is often automatically zoomed in to focus on the field. If horizontal labels are used, it is almost impossible to view both label and input field in one screen. In addition, due to small screens, it could be tricky to show long labels if horizontal labeling is used on mobile devices.

Side note: Top aligned labels also allow users to move down the form in one visual direction, instead of two visual directions with left and right aligned labels.

Save the Baskets

In the same manner that saved searches are alluring for just about anyone with a website that asks for information, providing the ability to save baskets is a key component to racking up those conversions. If you’re asking for pre-check out info on your website it’d be smart to include visitors can save their baskets for their return or even for them to access the basket again from another platform.

This is going to encourage cross-platform purchases.

If you have an email address, you’ve seen plenty of examples of email marketing. A clothing store might tell you about some new styles, a car dealership might let you know about a special financing deal, a local restaurant might let you know about new menu items.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which allows anyone to send messages directly to a pre-determined list of users. These messages can be anything from simple, plain text to rich, graphic-laden pages (similar to normal websites). Email marketing messages are delivered right to the recipient’s inbox, just like normal email.

Email marketing differs from other online marketing in that it is inexpensive, easy to send, highly measureable, and goes straight to a target’s inbox. It’s another tool in your online marketing toolbox.

Now, let’s take a look at what makes email marketing so useful.

The Advantages of Email Marketing

1. Low Cost

Email-based marketing costs can be as low as $0.005 per email. This compares favorably to other online marketing methods like pay-per-click or cost-per-impression advertising. Compared to the expense of traditional mail marketing, the savings are even greater (think about all the printing and postage costs!).

2. Measurable Results

Using innovative tracking systems, email marketing allows you to know exactly how many people receive your message, how many open it, and how many actually click on the links and calls to action contained within your message. Armed with this knowledge, you can make adjustments and improvements to subsequent emails.

3. Precision Targeting

Send emails exactly where you want them to go. You can easily create segmented lists and direct different messages to designated customer groups. You can collect email addresses from a number of sources, including your existing customer database. Adding a “mailing list” box to your website is a great way to build a list of users who are interesting in to hearing from you.

4. Interactive

Email newsletters don’t limit you to simple, static content. You can include video, music, polls and more. These tools provide multiple ways to engage your customers.

5. Strong Calls to Action

Clicking on a link or button is very easy, which means that recipients have to take very little effort to follow through on a call to action. Compare this with traditional newsletters where recipients have to dial a phone number or type a website address into their computer.

6. Highly Personalized

Use your database to easily greet recipients by name. Make them feel that they aren’t receiving a generic mass email.

7. Time and Venue Shifting

Recipients can read your message on their own time and on the device of their choosing, whether that means in a traditional email inbox or on an iPhone. This freedom increases open rates and engagement rates.

8. Opt-In & Unsubscribe Options

Because email lists are easy to opt-in and opt-out of, you don’t have to worry about customers receiving unsolicited and unwanted advertising.

9. Instant Response

Most recipients will read your message within minutes or hours. You can know the success of your campaign the same day you send it instead of weeks down the line.

10. Simple

No need to coordinate design, printing, and mailing as is necessary with physical mail-shots. And unlike other forms of online marketing, you don’t have vague targets and results. Email marketing is straightforward: send a message to a targeted list of recipients. Write the message and press send.

11. Easy To Get Started

Getting started with your mailing list is simple. You probably even have a huge database of email addresses already. Think about all the email addresses you have in your current email system, Rolodex, Blackberry, or other device. And surely you have at least a handful of company news, special offers, or other piece of information you want to share with your contacts.

Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

Among consumers, that means brand loyalty is waning as people search for better deals, perhaps reevaluating and switching brands, or even going with generics. Among businesses, it means focusing more on ROI, and making sure your service providers are getting the right kind of results and giving you the metrics to back them up.

It’s a familiar concept at Blue Fountain Media; we’ve always held ourselves accountable for the success of our clients, focusing on your goals, and only recommending solutions that will yield a return on investment. We enjoy working with clients who feel the same way about their own customers. It was nice to have our strategy validated by others, like keynote speaker John Gerzema, who spoke about the erosion of trust, about the lack of permanence of institutions that used to appear untouchable, but ultimately about the opportunity that the crisis has created for smart companies. It’s a win for the consumer, and a win for businesses willing to take a step back, and make sure that they’re adding value that’s worth paying for.

In this example, Google includes a plus-box below a Newegg.com ad, with product images and information pulled from microformatted tables on their product pages:

Much like the Google Checkout badge and the maps plus box, this isn’t something you can just turn on via AdWords; it’s a result of having your ad campaigns set up correctly, and Google crawling your website and determining that they’ll be providing users with a better experience by displaying additional content from your website (either letting users know that you support Google Checkout, or giving a preview of products related to your search).

This is yet another example of the importance of a holistic approach to online marketing; advertising should integrate not only searchability and online reputation, but site architecture as well. (For a more in-depth explanation of how Google uses information like microformats in the SERPS, check out their recent entry on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.)

1. Unclear call to action.

Focus your visitors on one thing. What it is that you want people to do on each of your pages? 1-800 Flowers is one of the big companies that was messing this up (on their product detail page).

Use Attention Wizard heatmap to find where people are looking on your page.

2. Too many options – steps.

Reduce the friction between the user and the product they are seeking. Show main categories that are most popular on your page – not every subcategory and product on each page.

3. Asking for too much information.

Require less information in your forms to increase conversions. Do not ask questions that are not absolutely unnecessary, or inappropriate. Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing.

4. Too much text.

Do not make your visitors to suffer. Do not write in paragraph form. Instead use headlines and bullet points.

5. Not keeping your promises.

Intent is the number one factor in conversion. If a user clicks on a pay-per-click ad that says “Best Digital Camera” then they expect to come across the best digital camera. If they land on a page that does not match that query and the promise of seeing reviews of the best digital cameras, then they will promptly leave.

6. Too many visual distractions.

Use visual hierarchy to organize information, just like in an outline. Only important things should be bright and bold. Use other colors/sizes to organize information. Do not make everything equally important or unimportant.

7. Lack of trust.

Provide trust symbols in visible places (top 2/3 of the area visible through a monitor). This can be a “McCaffee Secure” symbol, brands that you work with, mentions in the press – whatever will increase trust by association.

• Keywords: do keyword research, and use keyword groups to segment your audiences. Also use different match types to make sure you’re targeting the right users at the right times in their buying cycle, but not overpaying for lower-performance phrases.
• Ad copy: Use keywords in your ad copy, and prioritize the relevance of what you’re advertising (in relation to the search terms) over branding or your company name.
• Landing page: Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords, and ads.
• Performance Tracking: Know what metrics are important to your business; monitor and improve your campaigns over time through controlled testing.

But what if you’re already doing all that? Here are the next 8 steps:

1. Use negatives on your broad match keywords.

   If you don’t want to limit your options to specific phrases by using only exact match, because some of your keywords might be combined with an unpredictably long list of other keywords, most of which are relevant combinations, but a handful of which are irrelevant, set the main keyword to broad match, and enter the handful of irrelevant modifiers as negative matches, at the keyword level.

2. Use dynamic keyword insertion.

   If you’re targeting a lot of similar products, or one product that comes in a lot of different colors (e.g. blue plaid shorts, red plaid shorts, etc.), you can improve the relevance of your ad copy quickly by using DKI to insert the user’s search terms into your copy (space permitting).

3. Brand vs. Non-brand keywords and ads

   If you get traffic from people searching your brand name and also bid on brand-name keywords for SERP domination purposes (assuming you rank organically for your brand name), this is when you should test the inclusion of the brand in your ad copy. Similarly, if you sell another company’s brands on your website and it’s popular enough to get branded search traffic, monitor the performance of branded vs. non-branded keywords, as well as brand names in ad copy. (Note: Google has relaxed its restrictions on using brand names in ad copy in the US at least; if you are advertising in another country, please learn about local copyright law and Google’s country-specific policies.)

4. Discounts and other selling points

   If you offer free shipping, online discount codes, guarantees or other differentiating points, test them against eachother in each keyword group. They might perform differently at different stages of the buying process. However, monitor the performance of discount codes carefully: they will most likely increase sales or orders, but they also erode margins, so make sure that you’re not increasing volume at the expense of profits. In other words, make sure your discount volume isn’t cannibalizing visitors who would be willing to pay full price anyway.

5. Link AdWords with Analytics

   Even if you’re using the same Google Account login for both AdWords and Analytics, they might not be linked by default: check in the “Reports” tab or AdWords. Linking these two services allows Analytics to incorporate cost-per-click data, and allows AdWords to incorporate Analytics Goal data into keyword and ad performance reports. (Note: if you’ve just linked the two services, it might take a week or two for the latter option to become available.)

6. Bid based on time of day

   Most search advertising programs now offer the option to schedule your ads for certain times of the day, and even increase or decrease bids. Monitor performance by time of day, and increase your budget at peak-converting times, not necessarily peak traffic times.

7. Create separate campaigns for the content network

   There is too much variance in costs-per-click, ad performance, and keyword relevance between the Search network and the Content network to use the same campaigns across the two. If you’re currently advertising everywhere, stop. Disable content partners in your current campaigns. If you have gotten ROI out of the content network, duplicate these campaigns, and have these new copies target only the content network, and optimize your two sets of campaigns separately.

8. Prioritize & Find New Opportunities

   There is a wealth of data about searcher behavior available, much of it for free if you know where to look. Two good places to start are Google Trends, and eBay Pulse. Google Trends provides great historical data on popular keywords, so you can identify seasonal keywords, outdated terms that aren’t worth pursuing anymore, or up-and-coming buzz words that should be on your radar. eBay Pulse is great for growing your keyword list, as it can help you identify the language that shopping searchers specifically are using.