How to Setup Campaigns and Track Different Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

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trackingI have always been an advocate of data driven marketing decisions. Intuition is great but only when the data is unavailable. With data, decisions are always better than emotional guess work. Marketers never had this kind of data even 20 years back. Now with so much data around testing, tracking and optimizing is no longer optional.

In this article you will find out how to setup Campaigns for different promotions and track those traffic sources using UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics. All websites installed with Google analytics has the capability to track individual campaigns. A campaign is nothing but a particular promotion that you are running and it may be a free one or a paid one. For example, you can run a campaign for the promotion of the sales of your latest eBook. The traffic may come from your blog, newsletter, paid ads on Google, Facebook, other websites and so on.

To track the traffic from a particular source you need to build a new URL for it and then use that URL in the campaign that you are setting up. This URL will lead back to your original page but it will have tracking parameters in the URL which Google Analytics will pickup. To build a URL for a specific campaign, you should use the Google URL builder.

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Keyword List Refining – Finding Out the Keywords that Bring Revenue

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keyword list refiningKeywords are one of the most important data for an online marketer. Keywords find its way through PPC Ads, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing. Keywords are not just vague words to be used in the marketing. They are the words and phrases that run inside the minds of prospects and customers. That’s the language they use to describe what they want and need.

It is important for us, digital marketers, to speak the same language in our marketing materials so that it “rings a bell” when our prospects come across marketing material with that language.

With the latest automation tools, it is easy to generate a big list of keywords. One of the most used, most talked about and authoritative tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool, as you may already know, helps you generate keyword ideas from existing keywords, or with URLs.

Why Keyword List Refining?

Keyword generation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an online marketing strategy and work flow. While it is VERY easy to generate a big list of keywords, it is challenging to find out which keywords convert well and bring revenue and profits to the business.

This is important because low performing keywords are eating into the marketing budget all the time and without scavenging such low performing keywords, it will be VERY difficult to increase the ROI of a digital marketing campaign.

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How to Approach and Execute an SEO Project for a Client

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seo-clientWorking on an SEO project for a client is completely different from optimizing your own website for the search engines. While building a website, you may have all the right elements in place and the website may never need major restructuring. But when you try to optimize an existing website for the search engines, you run into a whole lot of technical and non-technical challenges. If you are a part of an SEO agency an individual SEO consultant, you will find the following tips useful.

1. Establish Your Authority

SEO is a fast changing field. A lot of people have misconceptions and misinformation about SEO. How you think about SEO is completely different from how your client thinks about SEO. If you think you can “teach” your client about SEO, it may backfire because it hurts their ego. Though you have been hired only because they think you are good, it still helps to establish your authority in this field. Demonstrate how you have helped previous clients achieve their organic traffic goals. Show your achievements and results before you get started. A good personal connection with the key decision makers on the client’s side helps a lot in getting results fast.

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What can the Crime Rate in New York teach us about Predictive Web Analytics?

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In a world of logic, mathematics and numbers; predicting the future is a concept that may seem out of place and something that has to be left to the superstitious and emotionally driven group of the human kind. But even in a world of logic and precision, LLN (Law of large numbers) does a very good job of helping us predict the seemingly random events in the future and it has a very good reputation of being right most of the time.

predicting web events

To explain this, let me take the example of a particular crime in New York. I know what you are thinking – Crime in New York and Web Analytics? They are two different worlds! But I promise you that I will link the two with a common theory.

So what is common in New York and your website? Random events happen. Crime in New York is a random event with too many variables involved, but so are events on your web page such as subscriptions, clicks, downloads and sales. There is no website in the world where 100% of the visitors convert. How do we predict random events?

Magic happens when one deals with large numbers… and the magic is predictability and the “guarantee” of seemingly random events in the near future.

According to the law of large numbers – random events over a period of time and with large numbers always form a pattern.

“In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.” – Wikipedia

That pattern helps us predict random events, something as random as crimes in New York. Let us have a look at some facts. New York has a population of a little over 8 million. The number of times a particular crime was committed happened 542.5 times on average per year in the past 10 years ranging from 2002 to 2011.

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How to Use Facebook Ads to Increase Likes for Your Facebook Page

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increase-fb-likesHaving more fans in your Facebook Page has a lot of benefits. If you have a blog and your regularly publish posts, you can share it in the fan page and people will discover your new blog post. It will result in getting more likes which helps in SEO – because the search engines pickup these social signals. Having an audience in Facebook also helps you get feedback about your products and services because the entire audience in Facebook is like your focus group.

There are a lot of methods to increase the fans or likes for your page. Some of the most common methods are:

  • Having a Like box or Like button in your website/blog
  • Buy Facebook likes from Vendors
  • Redirecting users to Facebook page from website, YouTube channel, Blog and so on.
  • Advertise using Facebook ads

Having a Like box or Like button in your website/blog is a straight forward way to get likes and you will get targeted fans to your page. But the problem is that the number of new likes will increase only in a linear fashion – directly proportional to the amount of traffic coming to your website. You can buy fans from vendors but the problem is that they may use unethical tactics to increase your likes and many times those Facebook users are un-targeted and not your real fans.

I believe that if you want to increase your Facebook Page fans very fast – 100, 1,000 or even 10,000 within a short span of time then Facebook ads are the way to go. I have used the following tactic to increase Likes one of my publication’s page by 10,000 fans within 1 month and that too at a very low cost – Rs.2 or less per Like.

I would agree that this is not as cheap as the price set by external vendors, but it is far more worth it because these people are really the people looking forward to buy your products or services. You will understand how targeted they are by the end of this article.

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Mobile Marketing in 2013 and Beyond: Top 5 Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

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mobilemarketingImagine a day in the distant future where marketers can directly communicate marketing messages in the form of “thoughts” into the minds of the target prospects. While such a day may never come, mobile marketing is the next best thing available to marketers.

People spend more time with mobiles than any other communication device available today and brands cannot afford to leave out mobile marketing in their digital marketing plan. According to eMarketer.com mobile advertising industry was a $4 billion dollar market in 2012, will touch $7 billion dollars by 2013 and will go all the way up to $11 billion dollars in 2014.

Just a while back we were talking about how digital marketing is growing faster than traditional marketing industry and now its mobile which is taking the hot seat. According to Forbes.com, the mobile market share within digital advertising market reached 11% in 2012 – up from 7% in 2011; which is a clear indication that mobile market is growing faster than the other digital marketing channels.

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Content Marketing 2.0 – How to Plan and Execute an Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign

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Digital marketing has a lot of modules in it. And each module is an ocean in itself. It is pretty difficult to become an expert in every module possible. Even for someone with 10 years of experience, covering all the subjects is almost impossible.

Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign

I’ve thought a lot about this over the years. And the only conclusion that I could come to was – it is more important to execute digital marketing in an integrated way, than build expertise in each digital marketing module.

Each module such as Content Marketing, SEO, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing is powerful on its own, but when they are combined in a unique way, it’s power goes up exponentially. It creates a snowball effect that is unstoppable.

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