On January 6^th 2013, Beacon will celebrate its 15^th birthday.  It’s hard to fathom that fifteen years ago, today, “Beacon Technologies” didn’t exist yet.  It was still just an idea – a plan to form a web development company.  What?  Hasn’t Beacon been around forever???  These milestone birthdays are a great time to reflect on the past.  It’s a long story of twists and turns, ups and downs… but ultimately, being around 15 years requires some level of success.  Rather than look back all the way to the beginning, I believe 2012 was a representative year – a year that brought everything together.

But before diving into 2012, I can officially say that the MAJORITY of my career has been at Beacon now.  Hard to believe that I’ve been here more than my time at RJ Reynolds and AT&T… combined!  I still love the work, the business, the technology.  It’s challenging.  We have really good, talented people.  This team of people that we call “Beacon” really cares about making a difference for our customers.  It’s not about the “cool” factor or the “pretty pictures” of the early internet days.  It’s about business.  It’s about driving sales and streamlining processes with technology.  That’s what we do.

Each year I ask our employees to take part of a day to reflect on the previous year, particularly their individual and team successes.  We all get so caught up in “today’s” activities and forget to look back at all the things we’ve accomplished.  Everyone works so hard – you need to take a moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done!  It’s important to look back at what you’ve achieved, to remember that difficult web project that was launched for the world to see… that project that is now fully operational and producing results for your customer.  It’s motivating to know and see that your work has value and directly impacts the business of your customers.  For me, that’s all you can ask from your job, your work, your career.

As a business owner, I’m always thinking (ok, worrying) about today and the future.  If you are a business owner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  But, over the holidays, I took some time to look back at 2012.  Wow!  We accomplished a lot.

• New Business:  We extended our reach to now serve clients in 40 different states across the U.S., signing over 60 new clients, including companies like Hanes Brands, Honey-Baked Hams, Harvard, Syracuse University, Boston College, Total Wine & More, Renew Life and Shelba Johnson Trucking.  We now have over 30 universities and colleges as clients.
• Existing Business:  We continued significant support responsibility for clients such as Bassett Furniture, The Princeton Review, Business Supply, Burton & Burton and Cone Health Systems as well as many, many other existing clients.
• Web Hosting:  We now host/manage over 300 domains (ourselves…no outsourcing!) via shared, dedicated and cloud-based services.  This includes backup/recovery, email management, spam filtering, monitoring, regular maintenance upgrades, 24 hour support, database management and much more than the typical domain management farms.
• Marketing:  We expanded our marketing strategy (and budget) to more of a national approach, attending trade shows & events in Oregon, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia, California and multiple venues in North Carolina.
• Partnerships:  We established firm partnerships with nationally known leaders in analytics, email software, site search software and product recommendation software.  We concluded our sixth year of partnership with Google as one of their longest standing Google Analytics Certified Consultants and attended the invitation-only GA Summit in Mt. View along with 500 GACPs from 46 countries.
• Community:  We increased our collective contribution to the Greensboro United Way, fed a family for 2 weeks during the summer and provided Christmas gifts to a local family of 5.
• What else?  We hired eight new employees, had our highest revenue year since 2003, increased Beacon’s corporate 401(k) match for employees and produced over 200 blog posts, freely sharing Beacon’s ideas, news, expertise and knowledge worldwide.

The bar was raised pretty high in 2012, but we have many new, exciting things already planned for 2013!

Happy New Year!

Could it get any better????  If any of my friends heard that I was traveling to San Francisco in late October, they probably would bet that I was going to the World Series.  Nope.  Instead of going to the ballpark for the World Series with 42,000+ fans and the world watching via TV, I was headed to the Computer History Museum for my 6^th straight Google Analytics Summit with 500 fans in attendance from 46 different countries.  I guess this would be an apt comparison if the World Series game was held at Cooperstown (hey, there’s an idea!).

Like I said, could it get any better?  Two days with a technology Giant and an evening with the baseball Giants, especially when baseball and technology have been mainstays in my life.  As we landed in SF on Sunday, the pilot allowed us to listen to the last out of game 4.  Giants win.  Giants sweep.  The dream was over.  No game 6 in SF.  Oh well.

Now my focus was completely on the GA Summit and the gang at Google hit a home run.  Google’s technology superstars shared information, announced new GA features, provided key insights in true partnership fashion and brought the best analytics minds in the world together to network and provide feedback for the next round of enhancements.  See below for the box score and game summary

Best GA Summit yet.  No question that Google has ratcheted up GA support and its features.  The move to Universal Analytics is BIG and will not only give GACPs deeper analytical capabilities, but more importantly, provide even greater value to their clients due to the user-centric focus.

Looking forward to GA Summit 2013 (and maybe a World Series game in CA).

Google Street Car at Museum

Brad Henry (Beacon’s Director of Web Marketing) chatting w/ Jiajing Wang (Google Product Manager)

GA Summit Box Score / Quick Summary

~500 in attendance, GACPs from 46 countries represented, 50 Googlers, GA Premium Customers

Paul Muret, Engineering Director, kicked it off.

• Our Objective – Move customers along path to conversion.  Awareness > Consideration > Conversion > Loyalty > Advocacy
• “Zero Moment of Truth” è At the computer… is where customers are being won and lost.
• Universal Analytics Announcement è “The biggest change to Core GA”
  • Single ID
  • New measurement protocol (across platforms)
  • Simple + Reduced cookie size (82% fewer bytes; 80% fewer cookies)
  • User ID Control è User Centric View
  • Allows integration of offline Conv Tracking, remarketing using offline conversions, understanding of offline/online impact and a more complete picture
  • Dimension Widening è Custom Dimensions + User ID

Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, discussed the importance of data capture, providing value to your clients by letting the data drive strategy.  Always entertaining and passionate about what he does.

Bill Kee, Product Manager, had many announcements of new features regarding attribution

• Attribution Modeling
• 90 Day configurable lookback window
• Cost Data included for ROI Analysis
• New Acquisitions Section (importance of Acquisitions, Behavior and Outcomes)
• Channel Groupings in Acquisitions
• New Campaign Management Feature, utm-ID to simplify tagging
• Data-Driven Attribution Model Selection

Sagnik Nandy, Principal Engineer discussed “User-Centric Analytics” and how the shift in focus has moved from “Sessions” to “Users”.

• Loyalty, retention and lifetime value are key analytical areas (and possible now).
• Announced that GA will have 20 custom variables and 200 for Premium.
• Also announced that the number of rows that can be uploaded is increasing from 5000 to 50 million.
• It’s important to understand that “User Centric Analysis” is within the foundation of GA – not just another option in the left nav.
• Unified Segmentation, sequence filtering and RFM capabilities are coming.

Day 2 was a “confidential day”, so I’m not at liberty to share much.  However, the Optimal Analysis Track provided great information, particularly with respect to the importance (and demand) for deeper analysis.  Businesses now expect “ROA”, or Return on Analysis, via data-driven insights to make business/marketing decisions.

• Jesse Nichols and Timo Josten (Partner Program Managers)
• Chao Cai, Technical Team Lead (Display)
• Justin Cutroni (Analytics Advocate)
• Jesse Savage (Product Manager)
• Bill Kee (Product Manager)

It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to create a blog post on the Beacon blog.  It’s easy to get caught up in the daily activities of the agency as well as contributing time towards external organizations.  It’s long overdue but I hope this blog post is worth the wait.  I recently wrote a high level whitepaper for the higher education industry concerning how data is collected and used within the organization.   I am fortunate enough to get to work with a lot of great educational institutions and have seen some common issues and challenges across the industry.  My whitepaper is meant to help identify what those are and provide some strategic thought for how your organization can address those.

Get your Free Whitepaper Download Here:

I’ll provide a sneak peak at what to expect but you really should download the free whitepaper to find out my thoughts on each of these, how they impact your organization, and what you can do to help your organization face the challenges and better utilize information in your organization’s marketing strategy.

1. Google Analytics Installation and Configuration:  You’ve installed Google Analytics on your website and may have even setup a goal.  However, you are seeing a high number of internal referrals and don’t know if it is tracking correctly.   Your website properties are divided by ownership within the various departments and you have significant challenges obtaining meaningful information and determining what to do with the information you do receive.    Even when you have great ideas, the lack of a well-configured, centralized information source can be a roadblock for making progress.
2. Using Data to Drive your Strategy:  You may be doing some of the typical digital marketing activities including SEO, PPC, email marketing, and promotion of admission events and possibly even measuring traffic and conversions. But are you truly using the data to drive your strategy? Or are your actions just a reactive result of your efforts rather than what is centrally driving your marketing message?  In other words, can you tie your decision-making directly to trusted data?
3. Information Overload:  There is a lot of information available and it certainly can be overwhelming.  But how do you parse through all the data to get to the underlying decision-making information?  There is so much data coming in from so many channels that it becomes challenging to distinguish between relevant data and noise.  Different types of data are needed for different types of analyses.
4. Length of Admissions Cycle:  Searching, selecting, applying and committing to a college is typically a long process, which is significantly longer than ecommerce based or even service based organizations.   This creates measurement and analysis challenges because marketers don’t benefit from the faster turnaround of data.  The impact of marketing programs may not be fully measurable for years.
5. Attribution Modeling:  The conversion process spans online and offline channels, back and forth, creating large gaps in attribution modeling.   Tying an application to an originating source or even multiple sources doesn’t hold the same value and you must be careful in determining what the data is really conveying.  There is so much more to the conversion cycle than just the awareness component.  You must consider that a prospective student will shape his/her decisions based on many interactions with various purposes.  Isolating a single touch point and attributing application conversions to it can lead to decisions made on bad data.

Get your Free Whitepaper Download Here:

Beacon continues its conference tour with a stop in Milwaukee for the HighEdWeb conference.  We are real excited to be exhibiting for our first time at the sold out show.  With 6 great speaker tracks and awesome night time entertainment, it’s no surprise that there are no seats left at this year’s event.

I’ll be joined by Beacon’s Director of Web Development, Justin Klingman.  Justin manages many of our higher education partnerships and is a Cascade Server guru.  As you may know, Beacon is a long time design and development partner of Hannon Hill.  We support over 75 Cascade Server clients many of whom are in the higher education space.  We are fresh off of the Cascade Server User Conference, so we look forward to sharing our takeaways with any of the Cascade Server users in attendance.  You Cascade users will be well taken care of, because our awesome partner Hannon Hill will be exhibiting as well.

In addition to our design and development expertise, Beacon also offers Digital Marketing services.  Our team of Digital Marketing experts develop and execute customized digital marketing strategies for our clients.  Our strategies are comprehensive and incorporate the tactics that provide our client’s with the greatest return on their investment.  These tactics may include: organic optimization, pay per click, email marketing, re-marketing and social.  We always pair these tactics with a strong Google Analytics implementation and ongoing conversion optimization efforts.

While at the show, be sure to drop by our booth to receive a copy of Beacon’s latest whitepaper, “The 5 Things You Must Consider For a Data-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy In Higher Education.” Our Director of Digital Strategy, Brad Henry steps through some of the shared challenges our higher education clients (Wharton School of Business, University of Hartford, Randolph Macon College, Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship and others) and how digital marketing has addressed them.

This morning I was reading over a post from SEOmoz about Internal Linking using SEO Footers. Just in case you aren’t sure what I mean when I say “SEO Footer” let me give you an example.

This method is something we have used before and found success with. This method is used to help rank for specific keywords and generate new traffic to the site.

However, the post by John Dougherty suggest that these might not be helping sites anymore and potentially be hurting them. He claims that he noticed a few sites (that use this method) drop in traffic after recent Penguin updates. So this got me thinking, could this be happening to any of the sites we’ve done this for as well?

So I started to look at traffic for a couple sites we’ve done this for,  specifically noting times when penguin updates hit. (Here is an example of a smaller site.)

As you can see from the above example traffic after the penguin update didn’t appear to be affected. The blue line represents this year whereas the orange is last year. Looking at both lines we can see there is a slight trend happening in both years. So for this particular site I would say having the SEO footer hasn’t hurt us at all and might actually be helping us.

Here’s another example: (This example is for a much larger site with hundreds of pages)

My first thoughts when I see this one are, this one possibly could have been affected from penguin. You can see traffic after the penguin update does decrease. When looking into it, I could see that Google organic traffic did drop 3.5%. However, traffic from other major mediums such as PPC and referral also dropped. Since I don’t want to focus on that one time alone and really need to look at the entire picture, I see that traffic did slightly recover a week later and then really increased a few weeks after that. So based off of the BIG picture, I think it’s safe to say if this one was affected by Penguin then it has completely recovered and then some.

So what’s my takeaway on the subject? Personally, I think you have to look at it on a case by case basis. To know if you were affected set your date range to cover a few months before Penguin (May 25th) to a few months after. Then compare this year to last year so you know if the trend is the same or different. Once you have the times set up look at the overall pictures. Are you seeing a drop in traffic after the update? If so then take a closer look at that specific time. Compare Traffic after May 25th to traffic before that time and see where your drops were. See if there was a decrease in traffic from Google Organic. Once you look at this year then do the same for last year to see if there was any decrease then. From there you can draw your own conclusions and decide if you were affected.

Moving forward, I don’t think any SEO should rule out using SEO Footers. Should at some point it seem like it’s not helping anymore, then remove it and try something different. Google is constantly changing their algorithms and we’re always having to adjust our methods in order to keep ranking well. So don’t get discouraged if you were hit because there were many other sites that were too. Instead, come up with some new ideas and give them a try.

Question for you:

Was your site affected by the Penguin update? Has it recovered by now if so?

Building customer confidence is a key component to increasing conversions on your e-commerce website.  You must build a relationship with your website visitors in order for them to take that leap of faith and purchase your products.  Price points aside, if a user fails to make a purchase online it is more than likely due to a lack of consumer confidence.

To boost consumer confidence:

1. Always include a phone number on your website.  If a user is interested in your product offering, but weary of making a purchase online, you could still facilitate a purchase over the phone.
2. Include visible links to your Privacy Policy and Terms of Sale within the footer of your website.  Online shoppers need to know that you value the privacy of their personal information.  Show them this by creating an easy to read privacy policy.  If you are a member of the Better Business Bureau in your area, include the logo here as well for a boost.  By having the terms of sale easily accessible, users will be able to view your company’s return policies and sales terms.
3. Maintain Brand consistency.  It is so important to have the same ‘look and feel’ throughout your entire website, especially the cart feature.  Main navigation and footers should be included globally.  If you have several micro-sites as well, make sure the logos, colors, and site feelings are all consistent.  If things are too drastic, users could perceive you to be a scam site.
4. Make sure you provide an obvious link for your full contact information.  If you don’t openly promote communication through your email address, telephone numbers, and possibly your physical location, users will believe you don’t want to be found.  If your phone number is a local number, make sure to include customer service availability times so users know when they can call to speak to a ‘real person.’
5. Include customer testimonials on product and/or informational pages.  Testimonials statistically instill confidence in new and returning customers on your website.  You can promote product testimonials by either posting comments received on your website directly, or by including social share icons on your website so users can easily “Like” products you have to share with their friends and family.  Social sharing is also a great way to increase inbound links to your website as well.
6. Keep the checkout process quick, and never ask unrelated questions during the transaction.  If you are an e-commerce site that sells office supplies, there is no reason you would need to immediately know the customer’s age or annual salary.  The more information you ask, the longer the check-out process will take, and the less likely someone will become to complete their transaction.
7. Post security logos as calls to action.  If you have a secure checkout process, post security logos on your website to allow users to quickly acknowledge that you are secure.
8. Create your own press releases to increase brand awareness.  If a consumer reads an online article/press release that mentions your products, services, website or company name they will feel more confident about your website when they visit it.  Even a passing reference in an article can have a dramatic impact on consumer confidence.

1. Pinterest “Pin-It” Button - This is a great link building strategy you let your visitors engage by ‘pinning’ your website’s images.  This is also a great way to increase your brand awareness and recognition by allowing users to “pin” your images all over Pinterest.  This plugin allows you to add custom CSS styling.  You also get the freedom to pick the placement and formatting as to which pages it should be visible and where within the page itself.
2. SEO Friendly Images – This SEO plugin automatically updates all images with proper ALT and title attributes to help improve your organic rankings. If your images do not have an ALT and title already set, this free plugin will add them according the options you set automatically.
3. Outbound Link Manager – This SEO dream monitors outbound links in your posts and pages, easily allowing you to add or remove a no-follow tag, update anchor texts, or remove links altogether.
4. Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox – This social plugin will let you alert all your visitors about your Facebook page so they can spread your brand to their friends. This plugin lets you display a pre-configured Facebook page-like box inside a lightbox.  This plugin also allows you to set limits to the visibility of the lightbox so users could see it every day or only once every “X” days per individual visitor.
5. The Hello Bar – This is another call to action plugin that gives you the ability to create a top horizontal bar at the very top of a WordPress website.  To install, you simply just copy and paste your Hello Bar code snippet from HelloBar.com, straight to your WordPress admin interface. The plugin also allows you to choose where you’d like your code snippet to be placed within the code.
6. Video Gallery – While this plugin costs $15 to purchase, the money is well worth it when you compare how much better this plugin works on videos than the run of the mill plugins for high quality video experiences.  If a company invests money to create great media,  you need to show it off with the best quality possible and this plugin helps to expand your site’s video playback capabilities to the next level.  This plugin allows site owners the ability to feed videos from their hosting account, YouTube, Vimeo, s3 Amazon, and even plain old images and audio files.

Let us know if you have any questions.

1. Conversions – This is the completion of a goal on the website. Ex: Filling out an online form, Signing up for a newsletter, Contacting someone by email, etc.
2. Website Traffic – The number of visits to your site and how they got there.
• Organic Traffic – Visits that came from someone who found us in the search engine results. (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Aol, etc.)
• Referral Traffic – These are visitors that originated on another site but clicked on a link that brought them to our site. It could be a link in the content, a banner image, blogroll, etc. However, referral traffic can also be search engine traffic if it’s a small engine. The way GA filters our search from referral is from a list google specifies.
• Direct Traffic – These are visitors who typed your domains url into the address bar and came directly to the site. It also includes visits that come via a bookmark.
3. Time on Site – This is the AVERAGE time visitors spend on your site. On a sidenote, I read a report from CBS news that the average time spent on a page is 33 seconds.
4. Bounce Rate – This is the percent of people that come to a page and don’t visit any other page on the site.
5. Unique Visitors – This is number of people who came to the site.
6. Visits – This refers to the number of times the site was visited. This number is always higher than the number of unique visitors because a visitor can visit the site more than once. Does that make sense?

So there you have it. I hope those help to clear up any questions you have about terms we use when talking about web analytics. Feel free to leave us any other questions you have in the comment section and we’ll be sure to answer those as well!

We are excited to attend the upcoming IRCE Conference in Chicago. The 8^th annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibitions is expected to bring in more than 7,500 e-retailing executives who are going to learn the latest practices and tools for connecting with the 21^st Century consumer. There will be over 175 speakers and 100 separate sessions all talking about such topics as boosting conversions and profitability, e-marketing, social media, mobile commerce, web merchandising, improving back-end operations, and much more.

Beacon will be exhibiting in booth #313 at the conference and offering free 20 minute one-on-one consults with Brad Henry, Beacon’s Director of Digital Strategy. If you are experiencing declining or stalling results, are seeing your search engine rankings slip, want more conversions from your website, feel your PPC is getting to expensive to justify or not sure what to do with social media, we’d like to help answer your questions using our proven SMAART approach for digital marketing.

Please register here to reserve your spot today! Once we receive your request, we’ll be in touch with your confirmed time and location for your consultation. We will also include instructions on how you can prepare so you can get the most out of your meeting.

Brad Henry is a 10-year veteran of web marketing and drives Beacon Technologies’ unique SMAART Approach in providing ROI-based digital marketing strategies and consultation to corporations across the country. He directs a large team of marketing specialists to grow businesses via custom developed strategic plans and by leveraging Beacon’s other in-house IT strengths (development, hosting). Brad holds a B.S. in Business Administration (Marketing) from the University of North Carolina – Charlotte. He also speaks at conferences and is one of the most active contributors on the Google Analytics Partner Forum over the last 6 years.

Brad’s primary objective is to help you get more from your website and web marketing initiatives by giving you actionable takeaways. To make best use of this time, he will initially focus on your main areas of concern before providing insights and feedback relative to Analytics, SEO, PPC, Social Media and/or email – as time permits.

I have been getting familiar with responsive web design over recent weeks and have put together a list of resources I have found helpful when both developing and testing responsive layouts.

HTML5 BOILERPLATE

I recommend the HTML5 BoilerPlate  as a starting point.  Now in version 3, the H5BP sets the stage for a responsive site by providing media queries, JS resources, and utilizes optimization techniques.

Here is an excellent video presentation by Paul Irish, one of the developers behind H5BP.

SIZER

I have mentioned this small program in a previous blog, but found use for it worth mentioning.  Once installed and running, you can right-click the bottom-right hand corner of a window and set pre-configured window dimensions.  This has come in handy when re-sizing the browser to common device dimensions. (I use 320, 480, 768, 980)  You can configure these through the task tray icon.

Keynote MITE (Mobile Internet Testing Environment)

Keynote offers a free mobile testing suite armed to the teeth with different platforms and devices.  Android phones, iPhones , BlackBerry, the works! (See screenshot below.)  Account registration is required to open the application.  Keynote also offers a “Pro” version that includes:

• Advanced test automation
• Unlimited over-the-air testing from your desktop
• Remote testing from anywhere in the world
• Technical help from the Keynote Diagnostics Support team

Media Query Reporter

/* ======================================

    MediaQuery-Reporter Styles

========================================= */

body:after {

    content: "less than 320px";

    font-size: 300%;

    font-weight: bold;

    position: fixed;

    bottom: 60px;

    width: 100%;

    text-align: center;

    background-color: hsla(1,60%,40%,0.7);

    color: #fff;

}

@media only screenand (min-width: 320px) {

    body:after {

        content: "320 to 480px";

        background-color: hsla(90,60%,40%,0.7);

    }

}

@media only screenand (min-width: 480px) {

    body:after {

        content: "480 to 768px";

        background-color: hsla(180,60%,40%,0.7);

    }

}

@media only screenand (min-width: 768px) {

    body:after {

        content: "768 to 1024px";

        background-color: hsla(270,60%,40%,0.7);

    }

}

@media only screenand (min-width: 1024px) {

    body:after {

        content: "1024 and up";

        background-color: hsla(360,60%,40%,0.7);

    }

}

Fluid Grid and Mockup Overlays