Social marketing for brands is becoming a necessity. For link building, content creation, engagement and even increasing site traffic, social media brand pages are incredibly useful and free at the basic level. Facebook and Twitter pages have been important and valuable to businesses since the social boom several years ago. Now the addition of Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts for brands, the options are limitless in how to promote and engage with your consumers through digital marketing.

Google+ Builds Brands Bigger

In recent weeks, social mediums are beginning to make it even easier to promote and track the success of their online marketing. Google+ has completed refreshed the back-end for all brand pages on their network with insights into performance of posts, audience data for customers requesting driving directions and top searches for the business. This new Google Dashboard lets page managers edit AdWords campaigns, business information and other social mediums like YouTube videos from one page.

Google+ Dashboard (see above) combines many elements onto one page to completely manage your online profile. Examples of this being the ability to share videos and photos, monitor Google+ notifications and assign page managers. Page managers can even setup a Google+ Hangout with their followers to increase engagement and give users a glimpse behind the scenes. Added benefits are access to edit business info such as website, contact information and hours of business.

Google+ is also beginning to incorporate more with the Gmail people widget to include brands and businesses, making it easier for your customers to connect with you on Google+. When enabled correctly, when people receive emails from your domain, they can follow your Google+ page directly from their inbox. Your recent Google+ posts and past emails will also show in the widget which can help with engagement and gaining followers without ever sending them to your brand page. To appear in the new Gmail widget, all your business or organization needs is a verified Google+ page and digitally-signed emails. Learn more about verifying your Google+ page for the Gmail widget.

Next step for Google+? We can only hope for an easier way to post to brand pages with a mobile app update and better integration with third-party services for mass posting.

Facebook Jumps On The Hashtag Bandwagon

Facebook started rolling out hashtag functionality to select users on Wednesday with a slow roll-out to all users over the next few weeks. This is a great first step, coinciding with Graph Search, on helping Facebook users better search the network and interests. Facebook recently stated, many of its users already use hashtags, so why not make them work? Hashtags will be both clickable and searchable, so topics that I’m interested in (#CareBears and #Kittens) will now exist and be clickable/searchable.

Hashtags from other networks liek Twitter and Instagram will be clickable as well. Users will also be able to compose posts directly from a hashtag feed and search results. Users and brands that work to automate posts and simultaneously update multiple networks now have the ability to universally use hashtags across Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Aspdotnetstorefront offers lots of great search engine optimization opportunities (including the ability to pretty quickly add Google Analytics tracking to the entire site) which is one of the primary reasons that Beacon selected it as our go-to eCommerce platform many years ago.

However, the resources to set up these items are scattered about a bit, so I thought I’d note specific links I find useful when discussing these topics with clients and/or developers. Hope they are helpful and please be sure to include your own suggestions in the comments section below!

Online User Manual

• Google Analytics and eCommerce Tracking– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-441-google-analytics-and-ecommerce-tracking.aspx (Version ML8) and http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-1035-google-analytics-and-ecommerce-tracking.aspx (MultiStore)
• Submitting your Site to Google Sitemaps (Versions ML8 and MultiStore)– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-436-submitting-your-site-to-google-sitemaps.aspx
• Submitting your Sitemap to Yahoo! (Versions ML8 and MultiStore)– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-437-submitting-your-sitemap-to-yahoo.aspx
• Search Engine Optimization– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-505-seo.aspx (Version ML8) and http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-1029-seo.aspx (MultiStore)
• A/B Testing with Google Checkout– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-747-ab-testing-with-google-checkout.aspx

Forum posts

• SEO in ASPDNSF– http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.com/showthread.php?t=17028
• Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking– http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.com/showthread.php?t=16236

Blog posts

• The Token Analytics Article– http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/the-token-analytics-article/

• Analytics: What’s the Deal With All These Numbers? – http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/analytics-what%E2%80%99s-the-deal-with-all-these-numbers/

• Google Analytics and AspDotNetStorefront– http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/google-analytics-aspdotnetstorefront/

Analytics are great and very important for helping get your site a better ranking and being recognized. It’s also great for seeing what people are most interested on your site. Understanding the gathered information can help guide what’s most important on your site to fit the customer or client needs and maximize your site to its fullest extent.

There are analytics for tracking pages to see what page gets the most hits. Other analytics include tracking files such as PDFs, images, documents and other files you want tracked. Many sites also use onclick tracking for site web forms and specific links. For instance if you have a contest going on, you may want to track how many people are using the form or clicking on certain links in the contest to see what works best.

Using different aspects of analytics can improve your site value, increase revenue and make it stand out in search sites, such as Google and Bing. Our SEO team is partnered with Google to bring the best and up-to-date analytics setup that is available. Click here for more Google Analytics information.

“I do not want to increase the qualified traffic to my company’s website,” said NO ONE EVER!

Depending on the goals you set for your company to either 1) increase traffic for brand awareness, or 2) increase qualified, relevant traffic to increase conversions, Google Analytics should be your Jedi Master, helping you meet your goals through a logical, data driven process (aka- the force).  While Google Analytics is not as robust and sometimes serves up sampled data, it will still give you the ammo needed to make educated on-line strategy decisions.

Here are three elementary activities to help you on your quest, young Padawan:

1. Learn what pages are generating the most page-views.  Once you learn where this traffic is landing, review what the are clicking on, what events they conduct, and what conversions you have set they are achieving.  This will be your benchmark to improve upon.  If most of your traffic lands on the homepage, do conversion optimization on the homepage to try to improve your metrics.  It is also important to create a secondary dimension as well to see where this traffic is coming from so you know how to market to them, as well as reviewing the search terms they used to arrive on these pages so you can better understand user goals and SERP agendas.
2.  Discover when users are reviewing your site’s content.  By learning what days and the time of day users are active on your site will help you determine the best time to market to them through the use of post dissemination on social media as well as emails distributed to their in-boxes.  You can also avoid upsetting your users by conducting necessary website maintenance when website activity is at its lowest.  
3. Use advanced segments to better understand how users migrate through your website.  Let’s say you have an eCommerce website that sells custom light sabers (really trying to stay with my Star Wars theme) with a section for light and dark in the top navigation.  By creating an advanced segment with all traffic that view the dark side light sabers, and then another advanced segment that targets traffic that view the light side light sabers, you can then compare these two demographics to learn from their behavior.  This will help you learn metrics specific to these two sides.

Even as a child, I loved measuring things: shoe sizes, my height, the volume of non-regular polyhedroid solids—you name it! That’s why I get so stoked about Web Analytics…or maybe it’s the third cup of Joe I’m currently downing. Either way, they’re critical to your business success, analytics I mean.

You need to have some sort of analytics package on your Website. If you don’t, you’re basically driving a car with no dashboard and blacked-out windows in the middle of rush-hour. Amidst the screams of innocent bystanders, you may think to yourself: “Wouldn’t it be great if I had a clearer idea of where I was actually going…”

Quite.

So aside from appeasing your own burning curiosity, here are a few reasons why you should install Google Analytics today.

It’s Free, so Why Wait?

You may be thinking about starting a Website redesign, which is great! But don’t wait to install analytics. At the very least, you can add Google Analytics tracking code to your current site. It’s very simple to do, and depending on the complexity of your site, can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. Oh and by the way, it’s free to use.

I don’t advise waiting because you need to start establishing benchmarks now. Was a redesign really effective in bringing in more traffic? Without any analytics whatsoever, you won’t know. And don’t worry, you can easily transfer your tracking code to the new site.

It’s Like Having a GPS for Digital Marketing

Google Analytics is a great tool and measures a trunk-load of things from Website traffic, to what browsers people are using, what search engines they used, what sites they came in from, how long they spent on your site, what pages they viewed, how many of them were on mobile devices, where your visitors are located *breath in* how many visitors are new versus returning, and the list goes on.

With this easily accessible information, you can start answering questions like:

• How are most of my customers finding me?
• How effective was our Facebook campaign?
• What keywords are people using to find me?
• Where are my customers from?
• What are the most popular pages on my site?
• What devices are people using to view my site?

Knowing the answers can help you decide things like whether or not to get a mobile site, what platforms to develop an app for, develop content that excites and engages your customers, optimize your SEO strategy, and much more. If you do Pay-Per-Click advertising, you can also tie Google Analytics into your AdWords account to track your customer’s entire lifecycle from click-through to purchase.

Darn It Jim! I’m a Business Owner, Not a Math Nerd

Not to worry because we are! We have a whole department that can drill down the data and come up with some pretty killer recommendations. We offer some great consulting too.

But even if you don’t have a hefty marketing budget, keep in mind that you can access your site’s data at any time. So even if you’re six months or so away from doing anything with your marketing plan, get analytics now so you or anyone you hire can have the data they need to identify where you need improvement. The benefit far exceeds to cost to implement. And once you bring on the experts, they can make the proper configurations to get the most out of it. But you should at least start establishing a baseline performance level to improve upon, and don’t worry, you won’t have to stare at a bunch of spreadsheets to get a sense of how well your site is doing: Google puts it all in simple graphs, and I do love graphs.

Here is an interesting update to my article that used Google data and behavioral search analysis to predict that Ford stock would surge.    The USA Today website just posted this article…   “Record profits in North America drove Ford Motor’s first-quarter pre-tax earnings of $2.1 billion , or 41 cents per share, on revenue of $33.9 billion.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/04/24/ford-motor-first-quarter-earnings/2108583/

And here is the original article I wrote back in January that predicted Ford to show a large growth:  http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/can-google-data-be-used-to-predict-stock-values/

Although the stock value hasn’t grown significantly yet,  if Ford keeps posting numbers like these it’s sure to see strong growth over the next year.

If the 2013 version of March Madness has taught us anything, it’s that the best ‘team’ usually wins. It’s not necessarily the best individual players that get the glory, but the five most talented guys that work together that get to cut down the nets. As an Account Manager at Beacon, I’m lucky enough to be a part of a collaborative effort instead of an ‘every person for their self’ mantra.

It would be ultimately time consuming to explain to you what everyone at Beacon does on a day to day basis, so let’s utilize the March Madness theme to try and breakdown what our clients get when they choose Beacon as their web services solution:

Beacon Team Breakdown:

Head Coach—The Client; without our clients direction and goal setting, we’d just be a bunch of Digital gurus sitting around playing on Google+.

Assistant Coaches—When you sign on with Beacon, you get a Senior Level Member of each of our Departments (Digital Marketing, Software Development, and Sales) assigned to your account, ensuring that the goals laid out by our Head Coach are being achieved.

Players– Executing the game plan and ensuring victory is left in the hands of our more than capable ‘players’  They range from Digital Marketing Specialists, to Account Managers, to Desktop Administrators, Web Developers, and SEO experts. While they could all be the ‘Most Outstanding Player’ in their niche, we’ve combined all this talent into a powerhouse Web Solutions team.

Fans— Customers. The most important part of March Madness, and your website, are the fans. Without customers, businesses don’t exist, so they make up the most important part of this whole equation. Our ‘players’ know that our job is to help your business get the most information to, and get the most out of, your fans.

Like any good team, we enjoy getting feedback from our ‘fans.’ Recently we got the following feedback from our client, HRD Strategies:

“We have always received consistent and white-gloved service from everyone at Beacon.  William Nichols, Caleb Pruitt, Stephanie Baubie, Rick Boccard, and Justin Klingman have all been responsive and provided exactly what needed, when we need it.  William is “a Saint” and has been indispensable to us over the years; particularly with the nightmares we’ve put him through!” -Nina Lovett, President, SPHR, HRD Strategies.

For more information on our team, or to give your feedback of our team, please visit our company Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts.

NCTA Outlook For IT

Even though it seems as if 2013 is barely underway, Beacon is already several events into its event schedule. Beacon got things kicked off at NCTA’s 2013 Outlook for IT Annual Meeting & Tech Expo in Charlotte, NC. Beacon was lucky to represent itself with a booth at this years event and be a Gold Sponsor. Once setup at the event, we ran into Marc Montoro, Sr. Director of Programs & Communications for NCTA and gave us a warm welcome.

twitpic.com/c02bxj thanks @beacontec, we are very excited to kickoff our website redesign. Check out their booth at #OutlookForIT.

— NC Technology Assn (@NCTA) February 1, 2013

After meeting many of the other exhibitors, Beacon participated in a luncheon and saw several presentations from Michael Smith, VP of Research for Gartner, Michael Manos, CTO of AOL Services and Tom Becker, Vice President, Recruiting at Experis.

We would like to thank NCTA for the amazing time at Outlook for IT this year! From the big crowds, to the amazing speakers and information, this is an event we are surely looking forward to participate in again next year.

Coming Up Next: IRWD

Coming up on Monday, February 11-13 is the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference in sunny Orlando, Fl. The stage is set at the Omni Orlando Resort for over 50 exhibitors, 53 expert speakers and 34 conference sessions over the three day event. IRWD will draw a diverse crowd of top e-commerce executives, web designers and developers, and marketers from web-only merchants to e-commerce operations of the top chains. This conference is geared to people who want to roll up their sleeves and engage with pros and peers to learn how to enhance the design and functionality of their web sites to better serve their best customers and shopping prospects.

You can follow the happenings of the conference by following Beacon Technologies and Internet Retailer on Twitter. Check back frequently on both Twitter and Facebook to see photos, giveaways and updates from the event. You can tweet with #IRWD2013 or tweet at either one of us with @beacontec and @IR_Conferences. Connect with both accounts below.

Tweets by @IR_Conferences

Tweets by @beacontec

In the past few days, Google Analytics has started seeing structural and design changes to each user’s profile pages. The importance of these new structure changes is that Google is simplifying reporting, dashboards and real-time data into one central location. Overall, the Analytics interface has not drastically changed in terms of the amount of information you can find reported, but the “usability” has seen huge improvements; which is an excellent sign of things to come.

Tabs & Sidebars Get An Overhaul

One of the first things Analytics users will see when logging into their accounts after this update is the change to the top navigation (now only shows Reporting & Customization tabs and loses a Home tab) and new menu options on the left sidebar. The top navigation of this interface is also now sticky navigation, making it easy to switch between standard or custom reporting or switching profiles.

Old Interface

New Interface

Before, if an Analytics user wanted to view real-time statistics, customized dashboards or intelligence events, they would have to navigate to the “Home” tab. This made finding the reports users really wanted to see harder to find and the location made no sense outside of the “Reporting” tab. Now, in the new design we notice several new options(see above). Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events and Real Time are now in the Reporting Tab under “My Stuff”, making it easier to get access to your data.

Dashboards & Widgets

Another exciting change to Analytics is the option for different layouts within the Dashboards panel. You can now choose to show custom-made widgets that are more important or with graphs in a larger space while those with concise data are shown smaller. You can maintain the 50/50 layout or choose new options like 25% quadrants or 70/30. Take a look at the new layout options below.

The Dashboard panel also receives a design upgrade when you click on  the “+Add Widget ” button. You now have more ways to see your analytics with maps and bar graphs.  The dashboard widget updates are some of the most exciting improvements because with how easy Google makes it to export graphs, tables, reports and more…now users have more ways to analyze their site’s traffic and web marketers have more unique ways to show clients their results right within the dashboard.

In Summary

 Google Analytics is constantly changing and adapting. Users continually find new data and ways to present data from site usage. Look for even more design changes and user-friendly upgrades in the future as social media, mobile users and e-commerce  play an ever-growing role in site optimization and tracking.

Since so many of our clients are sending out emails and wanting to track the performance of them, I thought I would put together a short “How To” on using the Google URL Builder.

So let me begin with saying, EVERY link in your email should be tagged so you can see which links people clicked on and came to your website. So let’s get started on the tool. Use the image shown below as a reference for each step.

Begin with Step 1 in the image above and paste in the Website address your sending people too. Since we want to track visits to your site, this link should be your website address, not someone else s. As you can see above I used http://www.barnesandnoble.com/.

For Step 2, you’ll want to fill in Source, Medium, Content, and Campaign Name. Each of these fields will correlate to a report in Google Analytics.

• Source – This should be the name of the Email. As you can see above, I used “My Lunatic Life Book” as the source since this email is about that particular book.
• Medium – Since we’re talking about an email the medium is “email.” This will change depending on what the campaign is your putting together. If the campaign is a banner on another site then the medium is “banner”, basically this refers to how the person is getting to your site.
• Content – Content should be used when your tracking more then 1 link in 1 source. Since I’m using an email as an example, content would refer to every place clickable in the email. So if you have banners, text links, images, etc. As you can see from the example above I used “Book Image.”
• Campaign Name – Here I used “Nook Daily Find Emails” as awhole instead of doing a campaign for each product. This way we can look in GA and see how these emails did as a whole and then dig deeper by Source to see which product (since I used book title) generated the most visits.

For Step 3, click on generate URL and then copy the new URL shown in the box.

So now let’s fast forward and say you’ve sent out the email and people are coming to the site after clicking on the links. Well here’s what you would see in Google Analytics.

(NOTE: The above is just an example and not actual figures from Barnes and Nobles.)

Looking at the image above, you can see the campaign and beside it the source. Looking at this we can determine two emails were sent out that generated visits to the site, for the Nook Daily Find Emails. We can see My Lunatic life generated the most visits followed by Hunger Games Book 1. Now let’s dig a little deeper and just look at My Lunatic Life to see what most of the visitors clicked on to come to the site.

(NOTE: The above is just an example and not actual figures from Barnes and Nobles.)

Looking at the image above, you can see we’re only seeing data for the My Lunatic Life Book and what links were clicked on. This information let’s you know what drew people’s attention and got them to click and come to the site. As you can see, Buy Now button had the most appeal followed by the Book Image. This information is helpful for sending out future emails and deciding what content to use and not use based off of visits generated.

That sums up my lesson on How To Use the Google URL Builder to Tag Email Links. Hopefully you found this helpful and will be able to reference it when tagging URL links in the future. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comment section below and I’ll be sure to answer them as quickly as possible.