eMarketing Blog

By Katie Fish

After two long days of Google Analytics training put on by the eMarketing Learning Center and the NWIRC last month, local marketing and web gurus now possess not only tired brains, but the ammunition they need to analyze their web data and use it to optimize their organizations’ websites.

In addition to that, they’re actually prepared to pass along this info and explain it to their management teams and co-workers. (And, as we business people know, sometimes that’s the hardest part.)

Company websites are often a product of many different people’s opinions, including upper management, marketing, IT and even graphic design. They are designed, implemented, and managed with multiple ideas, goals and objectives.

For example, the graphics design team wants it to look fantastic. IT doesn’t care what it looks like - they just want it to work. Marketing wants everyone to fill out their customer satisfaction survey. The CEO wants a picture of a lampshade on it for no apparent reason.

In reality, the website should be designed and managed with the customer in mind. What does your company want customers to do when they come to the website, and how can you make it as easy as possible to accomplish those goals?

Tuesday and Wednesday, Erie professionals had a unique opportunity to attend two GA training sessions facilitated by Dorcas Alexander, a Certified Google Analytics Trainer from LunaMetrics in Pittsburgh.

GA101: Beginner Analysis Training and GA201: Intermediate Analysis Training were held Tuesday and Wednesday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Jordan Room at Knowledge Park. More than 25 professionals attended each seminar, which covered almost the entire scope of what Google Analytics is - from the basics of setting up an account, to discovering who your visitors are and what they do, to analyzing data to discover issues or problem areas.

The training also covered GA’s new interface and most recent features, like Google’s Website Optimizer, real-time analytics, and flow visualization.

So what was the most important lesson gleaned from these GA training clinics?

Simple: Measure, Analyze, Act. (In that order!)

Your website is too valuable to play guessing games with. Don’t make random changes just because someone in your organization “wants to try it” or thinks it “sounds neato.” Make changes based on actual data that is collected from actual visitors to your website. Google Analytics lets you do exactly that.

Numbers are boring, and alone, they mean very little. Google Analytics enables a business professional to take those numbers and craft a story they can relay to their management teams and co-workers about what is happening on their company websites - both good and bad.

Professionals who completed the GA training now understand how this tool makes all the various opinions of people within a company irrelevant. The data is the key to understanding who’s on the website, where they came from, and how long they stayed. It tells you what they did while they were there, and when and where they decided to leave. It points out problems, issues, successes, and failures.

For example, after the GA sessions, professionals can now to go management and say, “We have an issue on our website. The data is showing us that out of all the people who click on “Create an Account” only 20 percent of them actually do, while they rest of them completely abandon us. This tells me that something is wrong or challenging to visitors within the “Create an Account” form that they are required to fill out. Let’s test a shorter version and see if we get more sign ups.”

That’s not an opinion. It’s not an arbitrary suggestion that came out of nowhere. It’s a solid suggestion that stemmed from analyzing and interpreting web data. Making changes to the website should always be about the customer and making the goals you want them to accomplish as straightforward as possible. Don’t hope they get from point A to B - give them a specific path and use GA to follow them through it.

If your main goal is to get visitors to sign up for your e-mail list so you can funnel them through to the sales department, but they have to click five pages before they find it, your sign-ups may be much lower than you’d like. Using GA, you can find out how difficult it is for them to find it by following their path through your website, seeing how much time they spend on certain pages and finding out when and where they leave. You can then move the sign up to a more prominent place (like the homepage) and use GA to determine if it improved your conversions.

Business professionals who completed this training are going to spend far less time in meetings arguing over changes to make to their websites from now on - I guarantee it.

(It’s kind of hard to argue with numbers, you know?)

By: Samantha Sherwin

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Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy.

Is what was stuck in my head after leaving the SEM III: “Findability” Search Marketing Seminar on April 13, 2011. Neal Rabogliatti, senior e-strategist Consultant at Catalyst Connection in Pittsburgh talked about various strategies companies could use to make themselves more “findable” in search engines.
Whether your company is a B2B or a B2C, the information can all be used the same. The main thing you want to keep in mind when you are writing content and optimizing for your website, uploading a video or updating your social networks is to make sure that everything is relevant! There’s that word, relevant. You want to be targeting the right people so focus on target keyword phrases.

Neal talked a lot about keyword phrases and how important they are. There are certain guidelines that should be followed as close as possible for when writing your content marketing. Just to name a few: the keyword phrase should be the densest phrase, bold your keyword at least once and check to see if your keyword has multiple meanings. It is important to check your keywords for multiple meanings. Why? Because you may be sending potential consumers to somebody else’s page who could be in a different business but still use the same keywords as you. You may also be getting unwanted traffic to your webpage from people who are looking for that other business.

To help with optimizing your webpage visit the eMarketing Learning Center’s website and take a look at the different tools that Neal has suggested. There are tools to help you analyze your SEO and find the right keywords for you. Remember to always keep optimizing!

If you have not attended any of the eMarketing Learning Center classes/seminars or have never listened to Neal speak about Search Engine Optimization, I highly encourage you to do so. Whether you are just beginning in the world of Digital Marketing and SEO or are already experienced, there is something for everyone.

Don’t just take my word for it, read some comments below about what people had to say about the SEM III: “Findability” Search Marketing Seminar.

“Informative, helpful hints, anyone can use for marketing online effectively.”

“Speaker was very knowledgeable and clear. Good mix of technical/non-technical concepts.”

“I can’t wait to get back to work to apply what I have learned today.”

“Got me up to speed on the newer developments with SEO.  Put it into easily understandable format and showed how I can make it work for my organization.”

Being a recent college graduate, I really enjoyed the seminar and took away a lot of information that will help me in my future endeavors within Digital Marketing. Neal was an excellent speaker, when he talks about SEO and Digital Marketing you can see his passion for it and that’s what makes a speaker great.