What is a brand store? It is an online store that allows a company to sell merchandise with their logo printed. Many of the top brands flaunt such stores. They can also be used to build a gift inventory for performing employees.

Here are some examples.

• Coco Cola: https://us.coca-cola.com/store/
• Google: https://www.googlemerchandisestore.com/
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoftmerchandise.com/
• AT&T: https://estore.att.com
• Deloitte: https://www.deloittemerch.com/
• McDonald’s: https://smilemakersonline.com/

In general, these stores sell apparels and consumer durables, such as t-shirts, water bottles, hoodies, gift cards, bags, etc.

Brand stores also help you spread word about your brand to a wider audience. It’s free advertisement.

Let’s learn in this article how you can build your own brand store.

1. Create your store on Shopify

Shopify is the world’s leading ecommerce store-building platform. It powers over 500,000 ecommerce websites out there.

Shopify allows you to start off with a trial of around 14 days or more depending on your location.

Once you sign up on Shopify, you are invited to create your own online store and add a template to make it stand out. In order to learn the nuances of how to use Shopify to your advantage and how to add and sell products, we have come up with a complete ecommerce guide that you can download here.

We are also a Shopify partner and will help you build your brand store for free. The plans available on Shopify are as follows.

Once you sign up, you will get to the Shopify interface as shown below.

As you see above, Shopify interface gives you the options to add your products, process orders, manage customers, do marketing, add apps, etc.

2. Link a subdomain to your store

You don’t want to create and dump your store in a sub-folder within your main website. As in: yourcompany.com/store. Instead, a better option would be to create a subdomain and keep the store there, as in: mystore.mycompany.com.

You can always have the first URL redirect to the subdomain URL if you feel that the first URL is a cleaner one.

There are key advantages to creating subdomain stores. Some are as follows:

• It’s usually treated as a fresh domain, so you can separate your existing assets on your website from the store assets.
• You can install a different content management system on the subdomain, which is not an option in case of sub-folders.
• Subdomains still get all the value accumulated by the parent domain.
• Subdomains will work almost like independent websites, so it will not affect your main domain even if you have completely different kind of content on subdomains.
• You can rank your subdomains for separate keywords.

In order to add a subdomain to your store, go to “Domains” under “Online Store” in your Shopify admin screen. Then you can select the option of “Connect existing domain” and use the Shopify domain management instructions to make it work.

3. Find merchandise vendors

There are two ways you can find merchandise vendors for your brand store:

• Finding local suppliers; stocking products in your own warehouse or within theirs with an arrangement to ship based on demand
• Finding a Shopify print-on-demand dropshipper who will take care of the entire product inventory and shipping.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both models.

In the first case, you can keep the product in your warehouse and do quality checks for every order very easily. But it adds the extra burden of shipping and inventory management on your head. In the second case, your supplier can be anywhere in the world, and the products do not pass through your hands. But you cannot do any quality checks for ongoing orders. You need to do the quality check by ordering from the supplier before creating your dropshipping contract.

3. Add Printful as your print-on-demand dropshipper

After you create your Shopify store, head over to the Shopify App Store (Click Apps->Visit the Shopify App Store).

Here, you need to look under the option “Finding products,” where you have “Dropshipping,” “Finding suppliers,” “Print on demand,” and “Product importers.”

For brand stores specifically, you need “Print on demand” suppliers. The print-on-demand supplier that we prefer is Printful, which is top-rated and used by hundreds of thousands of stores to dropship high-quality custom-branded products.

You can add Printful through Shopify App Store, or you can add your Shopify store to Printful through your Printful account.

Head over to Printful, create an account and then you will see the dashboard where you can select your Shopify store.

Click “Choose platform” and then connect Shopify; you can finish the integration through the Shopify App Store.

Once the store is selected and connected, it will be visible in your Printful dashboard as well as your Shopify Apps section. After this, you will see the “Add Product” page.

3. Adding the right products to your brand store

In general merchandise stores do not thrive on all kinds of products, but only those that are popular among brand followers and employees.

Some of the products that generally do well on brand merchandise stores are as follows.

• T-shirts and polo shirts
• Hoodies, sweatshirts, and jackets
• Hats
• Coffee mugs
• Water bottles
• Backpacks and tote bags
• Low-cost jewelry
• iPhone covers
• Throw pillows and pillow covers
• USB accessories
• Powerbanks

In order to add some of these products, head over to the “Products” section on your Printful app page and click “Add product.”

Select the product you want to add to the store, and you will be presented with a page to upload your print design. This is where you upload your brand logo to be printed on the product.

Click on “Upload file” to upload your logo. You can upload directly from the device or from cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Select a PNG file of high pixel resolution to upload. At least 1000×1000 pixels is needed for a high-quality print output.

Once you have uploaded the logo, check the print quality mentioned by Printful. Anything around 300 DPI should be excellent. Depending on the size of the print area, your DPI value will increase or decrease.

Proceed to mockups to see the print in actual situations. You can click on “Mockup view” tab to see all the mockups of the product with the logo in place.

Select the mockup style and click “Proceed to description.” You can edit the default description if you wish. But for most cases, the default description itself serves the purpose. Then proceed to pricing and set the price for each item and the profit margin beyond the base price set by Printful.

Based on the demand, Printful gives the following discounts.

After you review the pricing, select the Shopify collection where you want to add the product and then click “Submit to store.”

Once the Printful product is submitted to the store, you can edit it in Shopify among other products you have there. In certain cases, you may have to upload the product images manually from Printful product settings to the Shopify product page.

After publishing the product, the following is how the product page appears on your Shopify store.

The printing and shipment processing are handled by Printful directly from their warehouse.

You will have to follow the same steps to add any product from Printful to your Shopify store.

4. Alternatives to Printful

Is Printful the only print-on-demand dropshipper on Shopify App Store? No. There are other cool alternatives. Here are some of them and the kind of products they showcase.

The post How to Build a Branded Merchandise Store for Your Company appeared first on ZoomOwl.

There is one question that continues to baffle every SEO guy for years. That’s achieving number one position in Google search. It’s somewhat of a mystery especially due to the numerous factors that decide the fate of a search result.

I have seen organizations pouring tones of money into search engine optimization and digital campaigns hoping to see their results at the top of the search.

One thing that many people forget is the value of search terms. For instance, is it worth it to get your insurance company at the top of search results for the term “insurance”? Or is it profitable if you ranked for some other specific term such as “cheap car insurance in New York state”? You may see many more people bidding on the latter; also, the latter tends to be far costlier. The reason is the latter shows intent and can bring business.

Two reasons for ranking for specific, long search queries:

• You are targeting the right audience with such searches. The visitors of your website are already looking for your services.
• Most of your competition is still trying to rank for the generic terms, and they are competing hard against the likes of Wikipedia for that. Ranking of generic terms is harder than ever.

Your search ranking goal in 2020 should be to rank your website and well-designed landing pages for the search queries that your potential customers are searching for. Let’s see some of the ways to achieve this.

1. Market yourself with content, content, and some more content

Study reveals that around 3.01 billion people are internet users in the world. Global internet penetration is around 42% and is slated to grow steadily.

So, people are consuming content every second. And the content is reaching them through various means—websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, brochures, flyers, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, etc.

The channels for these are also very diverse: WordPress, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, the list is just endless.

Your success with your brand depends on how well you target each channel with your content. And how all your content tie well together to a single message that you are going to market with.

Steps involved in your content marketing strategy:

• Research your target audience and build their buyer persona
• Develop your message for this audience
• Develop various pieces of content specific to each channel
• Measure the reach and optimize

While developing a strategy, think about the most effective channels among those listed above. You may find some of your target audience in certain channels. For instance, the millennials are flocking Facebook while the Gen-Z, the people in their early 20s, are attached to Instagram.

Research each channel carefully and identify which channels cater to maximum of your audience. Your content should be built around these channels.

While working for an IT company as the global marketing manager, I have identified LinkedIn and Twitter as the better channels for engagement than Facebook and Instagram. These channels are more widely used by my target audience, and it made sense to invest in them.

How does content marketing help you come to the top of search results? Social media is one of the key aspects of SEO. The more likes and shares your content receives, the better it ranks on search as well.

2. Build links logically, not en masse

Since the early 2000s, one thing you kept hearing is the value of links in bringing search ranking. Google’s search algorithm depends on links to rank your web pages. It’s still the primary ranking factor. But there are a lot of other aspects attached to it.

Links no longer add value unless they are relevant.

For instance, when we are talking about link building, you can have a link to the Wikipedia page about “link building” within that sentence. That would be relevant and value-adding. On the other hand, if you place a link to a shady SEO services company that builds links en masse for you, then that would be regarded as illogical and unworthy. Why? Because your reader usually clicks that link to learn what is link building not to get to some sales page that gives such a service.

Similarly, awkwardly placed keyword links do not add value.

How do you build relevant backlinks? Well, again we go back to content marketing. You have to develop great content and publish it on your website. Links will naturally come. Secondly, create great content and approach leading online publishers to publish your content for free.

I have approached many online publishers over time to publish content on behalf of my company. And all of these engagements have built backlinks and online reputation for them. So, it’s something you can also try to build better backlinks and reach a greater audience.

Also, massive link building will only get you into trouble with search engines. Do not do that.

3. Brand yourself extremely well

What is a brand?

It’s a mark, name, design, or symbol that differentiates you.

Brand’s reach and credibility depends on a lot of aspects—the quality of your products and services, a brand story, the brand colors, the way it resonates to your audience, the people it associates with, etc.

Personal branding is also extremely important. Some key examples of personal branding are Richard Branson, Jeff Weiner, Tony Robbins, Neil Patel, etc.

Use the available media wisely to personally brand yourself and reach a wide audience.

How to do this effectively?

Firstly, find what you are good at and understand how you can turn it into a living. Identify all the social channels through which you can make an impact in the area of your interest. For instance, if you are building a personal brand over fitness, your best bet may be YouTube videos.

Next, as I mentioned in the first step, create content that is both useful and enriching to your audience. It takes time and effort and an insane amount of patience.

Once you have a genuine social media audience, it can help you rank your website to number one position in Google in no time.

4. Optimize for speed

Speed is the name of the game in 2020 and beyond. Without a high-speed website that launches in less than 3 seconds, you cannot hope for that first position. Especially in the case of advertising online, a high-speed website is extremely important. Check your website’s speed online through Pingdom or GTMetrix. Check out ZoomOwl’s speed data below.

One thing to note is that unless you use a content delivery network (CDN), your website’s speed from a location further away from your server’s will always be lower than ideal.

For instance, my server is located in New Jersey. When I test the speed from New York or Washington, the speed is optimal, but when the test is conducted from a farther location such as Zurich or San Francisco, the speed is lower.

Get a CDN such as StackPath (formerly MaxCDN) or CloudFlare to boost your website’s loading time.

5. Make your site fit for voice search

With Amazon Echo and Google Home filling homes worldwide, voice search has become extremely important today. Simple conversational queries are being used to search on Google. And this is something we foresaw with the Hummingbird algorithm update.

Today, over 72% of voice-activated speaker owners use it as part of their daily routine, so says Google.

Don’t you see queries being answered as part of Google search? Google introduced the “People Also Ask” snippet which came up in 2016. This snippet is answering queries that people may have around a search term from within Google Search itself.

The content for this snippet is derived from several websites which actually answer queries that people may have.

This is extremely important; going forward, if your content is not conversational enough, it becomes difficult for you to get into snippets like these.

Most experts agree that ranking on featured snippets such as these is more effective in driving traffic to your pages than ranking at the number one position. Search queries containing words such as recipe, best, vs., make, definition, etc., have a better chance of being ranked on featured snippets.

Going forward, answer more and more questions and seek ways to be featured by Google.

6. Rich snippets/structured data

For years now, Google has relied on structured rich snippets to unearth valuable information from web pages. It’s high time you have started using such snippets on your pages. You can test and optimize structured data on your website with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

What are structured data?

Structured data contains code in a specific format so that search engines can read it better. For instance, if your website contains recipes, you can add a rating to each recipe and let Google know what the rating is out of 5 or 10. Google can pick up these ratings and show them as part of search results.

The result may be enhanced by additional data too—such as the time taken to finish cooking a recipe, the calorific value of it, etc.

Such data is valuable to the searcher and will help you rank better on Google in 2020.

7. Enrich your content with multimedia

When you enrich your pages with images, you increase your chances of showing up on image search of Google. Also, it has been found that image-rich search results have improved click-through rate for Google search positions 3 – 10.

Image optimization is also important for SEO. For the most part, you should have all the HTML attributes for the image in place—ALT, title, description, etc. These attributes will help search engines index and categorize images more accurately.

Now, about video: It has been found that web visitors are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video. Videos are powerful, hence, to rank your web pages. Not only on regular Google search, but on Google video search as well.

In order to rank well, host your original videos on YouTube and embed them on your relevant web pages. Provide captions and transcripts for your videos. Give a detailed description and tags.

Third most important multimedia element for ranking well is an audio podcast. How do you create audio podcasts for your website? It’s very easy with services such as Castos.

8. Fix your website

More important than most, it’s worth your time and effort to fix your overall website structure, links, content, etc. You may have a lot of old content that is still pulling audience. But do you know how deteriorating the user experience may be when people see old content?

It’s found that as the website ages, the classic content draws fewer audience and causes higher bounce rate for the overall domain. It’s important for you to fix this issue by updating the content on a periodical basis.

You may be wondering how you can do it on a website that has thousands of pages. Well, this is where analytics comes handy. Open up Google Analytics and find out the most visited pages from your website. Open these pages and check them for broken links, old content, and any user experience issues. Fix them, and you are good to go.

If you do this especially on the pages which get maximum time from visitors, it will be worth the effort. Go to Google Analytics and open up the report under Behavior->Site Content->All Pages.

Sort the report based on page views as shown below.

You will see the most viewed pages on your website. Use this information to understand how your website is perceived by the external world. If any of your pages are well visited, that page will have an impact on your brand perception.

9. Make content long & deep

To pick up from the point 1 above, you need to know what long and deep content is. As mentioned above in the rich snippets point, Google is already turning into a content creator, not a curator. Which means, Google will create content and put it at the top of search results. All these content creation activities are done automatically too.

So, for instance, if your website gives shallow answers such as top 10 movies of 2019 or the date of birth of the US president, then you are about to be wiped off the face of SERPs by Google itself.

Google itself gives the answer right there on the search result page, so nobody would be interested to click through to even the first search result.

After the advent of rich content within Google search, websites providing shallow content have seen massive drop in organic traffic.

So, then how can you maintain your ranking and traffic? There is only one way. You need to create complex and long-form content with in-depth answers to questions from people. Forget about ranking for simple and easy keywords and straightforward questions. The era of such ranking has long gone.

10. Make your sites for the mobile

Since 2018, Google has been extremely serious about the mobile-first designs strategy. Jon Wiley, Google’s search lead for user experience, tweeted the above in 2018.

We can see that most of the search results have snippets already designed for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android and later adapted for the desktop version.

For instance, check out the desktop search result for the “best songs of 2019” below.

The search snippet is not as intuitive and well designed (with those left & right arrows and horizontal scrolling). That’s because it was originally designed for the mobile platform and then adapted to desktop. To compare, check out the mobile search result below, which is far more intuitive.

It’s very important that you embrace the mobile-first design and optimize your content to show up fast on all smartphone platforms.

Conclusion

So, those were the most important recommendations for successful maintenance of the number one position in Google in 2020 and beyond. As opposed to some of the suggestions for the last few years, the content creators have to become experts and develop more enriching content in 2020 and beyond.

The post How to Rank Number One on Google in 2020 appeared first on ZoomOwl.

B2B marketing is far more complicated and recondite than B2C, due to the diversity in the B2B market.

For instance, there are B2B product companies and services companies.

Some small companies provide fixed-priced services, while some larger organizations make deals worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. So the deal sizes across the board in the B2B market is quite diverse.

Some B2B companies target small- and medium-sized businesses, while others target much larger organizations.

Similarly, there is difference in the target market as well: An ERP vendor may target horizontal markets while others, such as a telecom-focused OSS/BSS provider, may target a vertical.

All companies need leads to stay afloat and sell their services.

Earlier, I touched upon how Google Analytics is useful for B2B organizations. Today, I want to talk about how you can generate B2B leads from your websites: Specifically by using a SaaS product known as Leadberry, a Google Marketing Platform technology partner.

About Leadberry

Leadberry is a wannabe startup SaaS product operating as an independent wing within a Hungarian full-service digital agency called Brandlift, which was established in 2010. Brandlift has offices in Budapest and Los Angeles.

They have done app development, social ad campaigns, web development, and user experience designs mostly in the B2B space.

Leadberry allows you to identify the companies among your website visitors by analyzing your Google Analytics reports and helps you turn them into leads.

1. Setting Up Leadberry

Leadberry needs read access to your Google Analytics account to work. After you sign up, it will request the connection.

Image 1h.2. Leadberry Connection to Google Analytics

The product will only read, and not modify, the data across various Properties and Views you have.

Image 1h.3. Leadberry Google Analytics Authentication

As shown in the following Image 1h.4, select the Properties or Views you want Leadberry to access by checking them.

Image 1h.4. Linking Properties and Views to Leadberry

Once done, it may take up to 10 minutes to process the B2B lead data and generate the reports. A typical Leadberry lead report looks like the Image 1h.5. You can select the date range at the top and see the B2B leads on your website during that period.

Image 1h.5. Leadberry B2B Lead Report

So, that’s it. Once the appropriate Google Analytics account is connected, there is nothing more you need to do to get Leadberry to work.

2. How Leadberry Identifies a B2B Lead

How does Leadberry identify a lead?

We might be playing fast and loose with the word “lead” here though, because all Leadberry collects and reports are the networks from which the visits originated. It employs filters to weed out the internet service providers (ISPs) among these networks.

Google Analytics provides the Network report under Audience->Technology section. This report is a list of the networks, or ISP, from which visits originated.

For the visits from normal people, like you and me, the report only shows the ISP name.

But for medium to large organizations, it will show the name of the company itself as they generally have their own network names.

Image 1h.6. Google Analytics Network Report

Most of the top results shown here are ISPs. When you look at Leadberry’s report for the same period, you can find the filtered company list which corresponds to the visits from specific businesses.

Identifying whether the leads are valid for your business would require lead qualification by your sales and marketing teams.

3. What’s in a Lead

Besides the names of the companies from where visits originated, Leadberry also shows a lead score as a colored bar to signify the validity of a lead.

You can get more validated leads depending on the level of sensitivity you set for the filtering algorithm. This can be set in your “Settings” page under “Filters.” Educational institutions are by default filtered out because you can’t be sure whether a visitor is an actual person from the institution or some student using the institution’s open Wi-Fi network.

Image 1h.7. Filter Sensitivity in Leadberry Settings

Once you click a lead, the system gives some useful information about it:

• Location
• Website
• Lead contact details (email addresses, phone numbers, and designations)
• Pages visited
• Organization description
• Organization address
• Social URLs (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• LinkedIn-based contacts
• Crunchbase URL

Image 1h.8. Lead Information

You should know that the contact information given here is almost never the information of the actual person from the company who has visited your site. So, it’s not a hot lead.

All that you get from this is that someone from that organization was interested in your content and has visited it.

Also, don’t assume that you will get contact details for all the leads. If Leadberry doesn’t have in-depth information, it doesn’t give anything.

Especially when you have no filtering enabled, there may be so many ISPs in the list. That’s why you should set your filter sensitivity to at least moderate level, which works great in providing accurate leads with high lead scores.

Image 1h.9. Moderately Filtered Lead Data

4. Working With Your CRM

As shown in the above Image 1h.9 above, you can see the option to add a lead to your CRM.

As of now, however, Leadberry provides integrations to only the following digital products:

• Pipedrive
• Insightly
• Zoho CRM
• Salesflare
• Zapier
• Slack

Image 1h.a. Leadberry Integrations

Besides Zapier and Slack, others are CRMs. What if you are using some other CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot CRM? That was one of my questions to the VP – Marketing of Leadberry, Balazs Dora.

Zapier is your answer!

It allows you to seamlessly connect CRMs that are not available in Leadberry’s system now.

Still, it’s a workaround solution and a native integration is always preferred.

Here is how I connected Hubspot to Leadberry using Zapier.

Firstly, get the Zapier API key by clicking the option.

Image 1h.b. Zapier API Key

Now head over to your Zapier interface and look for Leadberry among the apps to connect to.

Image 1h.c. Zapier Leadberry Integration

Now, I connected HubSpot CRM as an integration under Leadberry.

Image 1h.d. Leadberry & HubSpot CRM Integration

Now, while creating your first Zap, Zapier may ask you to input your Leadberry API key to establish a connection.

Image 1h.e. Leadberry API Connection in Zapier

Once it’s connected, the Leadberry account should be visible in your Zap window. You can test and make sure it’s working fine.

Image 1h.f. Leadberry Sample Gathering

Next, go over to the HubSpot CRM setup and select the appropriate action when a new lead originates from Leadberry. Ideally, you can select the option “Create or Update Contact.”

In the next step, connect your HubSpot CRM account.

Image 1h.g. Zapier HubSpot CRM Integration

Now comes the key part—setting up automatic data transfer from Leadberry to HubSpot CRM. In your Setup Preview page, you will find all the fields available on the CRM. You need to click the “+” button to select the variables from Leadberry to match to each CRM field, as shown in the Image 1h.h below.

Image 1h.h. Adding Data to HubSpot From Leadberry

Once you have selected and matched the appropriate variables to the fields in the CRM, send a test update and see if it works out. Oftentimes, if the data is not matched properly, it might throw an error, such as the company ID mismatch in my case.

But if you have everything matched appropriately, you should see the data updated in the CRM.

After finishing the setup, you may have to turn on the Zap for it to automate the process.

Even after the Zap was turned on and matched, I was getting occasional errors from Zapier about the data matching. If you are a paying Leadberry customer, you should be able to get support on such issues.

The Pros and Cons

Now, about the big question. Leadberry is a product that costs upwards of $29 a month. The detailed pricing data is given below.

Image 1h.i. Leadberry Pricing

You need to understand the pros and cons of the product before making a decision. While conducting my testing, I checked various aspects of the product to identify whether it is worth it for you.

I also got in touch with the VP of Marketing of Leadberry, Mr. Balazs Dora, who gracefully answered several of my queries.

From my testing, data accuracy and the lead contact information are the key disadvantages I found for the product. The pro of course is its excellent filter that lets you pinpoint B2B leads with high accuracy.

The Data Accuracy

The accuracy of the data was one of the key concerns I had while testing. I found several inconsistencies.

For instance, Leadberry lists Bill Gates as the Chairman of Microsoft, a post he left in 2014.

Another contact that I found for Electronic Arts in Leadberry had left the company in 2014. This was not a one-off case. I found several such contacts who were no longer with the respective company.

Leadberry collects data from open sources, such as LinkedIn, the company website, or Crunchbase. I asked how frequently the data is updated to Mr. Balazs Dora. He informed that every two to three months the data is re-indexed. But some of the data are evidently not updated for years. So, I drilled him further about that.

According to him:

“Every two-three months we reindex the data, but still, there can remain some discrepancies here and there, as you pointed out as well. Unfortunately, we cannot be 100% sure regarding the contact data, as we do not own the database (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.) Our periodic index activities are dependent on the data quality available in the databases, and there will be always smaller gaps.”

But what I have found is that LinkedIn profile of a contact was updated but the corresponding data shown on Leadberry wasn’t, in the case of Accenture, Electronic Arts (even after 4 years), and several other cases.

So, the data accuracy is a key concern I have with the product.

The B2B Lead Contact Is Not the Actual Person Who Visited Your Site

As mentioned, the contact detail given is a generic contact for a company. It’s not the actual person who visited the website. In my case, somebody from Microsoft network visited the website, and the contact given was Bill Gates.

So, the lead is usually a cold one and you have to do a lot of work to identify the actual person who visited your site.

Mostly, how you can use the product is in initiating a discussion with your existing B2B lead contact about the visit to the specific pages on the site. Or you can see which specific web pages are visited and see if that data can be used in qualifying or converting your B2B leads.

The Filtering

The filtering system Leadberry has in place is excellent. That’s a plus of the product. When I turn off the filter, I get to see all kinds of results, including several ISPs. However, it’s still better than the corresponding network report I get on Google Analytics.

When I put the filter to the moderate level, the system works brilliantly. It shows only the names of the companies whose networks were used to visit your site. This is a fine way to start your campaigns.

For qualification of the lead also, Leadberry reports can be quite helpful. For instance, if you are actively pursuing a company, it’s very nice to know that someone from that organization visited your site and checked out a particular piece of content. It’s a great way to start conversations.

Especially for companies which get thousands of visits to their websites, using the Google Analytics network report may be quite difficult. That’s where Leadberry comes into picture.

Recommendation

Leadberry is a great product if your requirement is in identifying B2B leads from your website. But it has gaps that may need to be fixed.

If you are a small business with not much traffic to your website, you may not find Leadberry worth your investment. Your digital marketers can do most of the filtering themselves.

But for medium and large businesses with a lot of traffic and want a good filter on their network reports, Leadberry is pretty much worth it.

The post How to Generate B2B Leads From Your Website Using Google Analytics appeared first on ZoomOwl.

Most of your Google Analytics reports are relevant for B2C companies. Even in Google’s literature, it’s hard to find a lot of information concerning B2B companies and their audiences.

It may seem Google Analytics is meant for B2C.

Why so?

This is due to several reasons.

B2B companies depend less on websites to bring customers than B2C. They also have longer sales cycles and usually higher deal values, making it important to provide a personal experience to the buyer.

This is why a dedicated sales team works well for B2B audiences.

So, a website may seem less important for B2B.

But contrary to the popular belief, website can be extremely useful for B2B companies too.

B2B companies take different forms.

A law firm that provides such services as incorporation and trademarking for businesses may charge relatively less and may even publish standardized service pricing on their website.

On the other hand, an IT company that provides bespoke software solutions for an industry vertical can never have pricing information on their website. They create deals by direct interactions with prospects and through RFP responses. Such deals may go into millions of dollars and involve teams of resources.

B2B companies also fall into product sector and services sector, and as you would think there are major differences between them as well.

A product company may use pricing tables and landing pages to attract customers. Look at business products by Google, SAP, or Microsoft. They have landing pages with outright pricing information.

Image 1g.1. SAP Hana Cloud Pricing

Services companies on the other hand rarely give pricing data. Instead, they depend on brand identity, customer testimonials, personal engagement, and the presence of a superstar CEO who can drive sales.

A third category has also emerged as a result of cloud computing revolution. It’s the “as-a-service” category, where products, platforms, and infrastructure are provided on a subscription basis.

For instance, look at Adobe’s strategy of selling subscription to its products–Creative Cloud as a Service. It’s the hazy middle ground of product and services marketing.

Also, this is not exclusively B2B, but B2C as well. Besides businesses, Adobe sells to a fair number of consumers as well–designers, photographers, videographers, and YouTube stars.

So, full-fledged digital marketing campaigns are extremely important for B2B. And an analytics application such as Google Analytics can help you track the data.

Digital Marketing

According to the 2018 CMO Survey by Deloitte et al, B2B companies put digital marketing higher than traditional marketing strategies. Spends are set to increase this year.

Image 1g.2. Traditional vs. Digital Marketing Spend (The CMO Survey)

The Survey identifies that B2B product companies will spend 9.2% of their entire firm budget on digital marketing, while B2B services companies will spend 8.9%.

Content (inbound) marketing is a key area in which B2B companies will invest.

Emarketer found the following to be the most critical content strategies to build engagement and bring sales for B2B organizations.

Image 1g.3. Content Types That Drive Engagement

The first two are key for product companies.

Then comes the video which will be effective for both product and services companies in the B2B space.

Either way, B2B companies will spend more on inbound marketing to make an impact.

Digital Analytics

Data plays a major role in inbound marketing. You need to track everything around your website, app, and social media properties.

Digital and web analytics allows you to gather critical insights from your data and make the right business decisions.

In order to understand the performance of your digital content, use Google Analytics on your website and your app properties.

Let’s look at ways in which Google Analytics will be helpful for B2B companies.

1. The Buyer Persona

The buyer persona is more important for B2B organizations than B2C.

This is because most B2B organizations have offerings tailored to specific verticals. So they need to understand their customers at a much deeper level.

Market positioning is much more effective with a well-conceived buyer persona.

The buyer persona is a virtual being that epitomizes your ideal customer.

For instance, check out the following.

Matt, 35 years old, is the owner of an IT consulting company in Philadelphia. He makes well over $600,000 a year from his business. His interests include skiing, traveling, and collection of historic artefacts. He wears trendy business casuals and owns a Prius. He is married without children, and his wife is a financial analyst.

Most businesses do not go deep into the creation of a buyer persona. But the more information you are able to glean from a customer, the better.

How do you collect all these information? Through surveys, direct customer interviews, or feedback campaigns on your website.

After you develop your buyer persona using these tactics as well as from the CRM and social media, you need to ensure that your buyers are actually visiting your website. Use Google Analytics to find out.

1.1. Demographics

Go to Audience->Demographics to get some key insights into your visitors. The important demographics of your users, their age and gender, can be found here.

Image 1g.4. Visitor Demographics Overview

Note that age and gender of your visitors are not provided by Google Analytics by default. You need to enable them.

Go to your Google Analytics admin page and select your Property.

Here, scroll down to “Advertising Features” section and turn on “Enable Demographics and Interest Reports.”

1.2. Interests

B2B organizations find it extremely helpful to find the interest categories that their visitors belong to.

Google Analytics categorizes visitors into three categories based on their interests: Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments, and Other Categories.

This feature can also be enabled under Advertising Features.

Image 1g.5. Visitor Interest Categories

1.3. Location

Another key B2B customer information is their geographical location. It’s found in Audience->Geo->Location report of Google Analytics.

Image 1g.6. Geographic Location Report

You can find the location of your visitors by continent, subcontinent, country, or city.

Take a look at the Image 1g.6 above showing the subcontinent-level location data of visitors.

1.4. Network

What if you can find out exactly which companies your visitors belong to? It’s something B2B marketers would kill for.

This is where the network data comes into play.

While small companies still rely on generic ISPs (such as AT&T and Charter), big corporations have their own networks spanning globally.

Such network names are provided by GA on the Network report (Audience->Technology->Network).

Here, you can use regular expressions to select the names of some of the companies that you are targeting.

For instance, the Image 1g.7 below shows the Network report of a few top tech companies.

Image 1g.7. Segmented Networks Report

So, when you see visits from such specific network names, you know that someone from that company visited you from within the company network.

You can use this information for remarketing and targeted advertising campaigns as well.

1.5. Advanced Segmentation

In order to keep your buyer persona ready for analysis, create an advanced Google Analytics Segment that identifies your buyer.

You can add Segments to any GA report. At the top, you will see the “Add Segment” option. Click it and then click “+New Segment” to create a new Segment.

Select all the parameters to identify your target audience–age, sex, location, interests, etc.

The following Image 1g.8 shows the creation of a Google Analytics Segment.

Image 1g.8. Google Analytics B2B Segment

If you have multiple target audiences, create multiple Segments to distinguish them; these Segments will be saved in the Segment library.

2. Effective Content Marketing

Content has become the buzzword of marketing. Quality content allows you to lure customers in rather than hunt for them.

Content marketing is akin to free higher education.

Look at reports, blog posts, whitepapers, and presentations from global organizations such as McKinsey & Co, Deloitte, Adobe, Microsoft, KPMG, Salesforce, etc.

They are all coming up with esoteric thought leadership and making it all available for free to everyone. This is quality content marketing.

Look at KPMG’s Growth Performance Indicators report for instance.

There are also digital magazines and blogs that B2B companies publish. Examples are Digitalist by SAP and CMO by Adobe. Salesforce has its excellent blog rich with all kinds of B2B marketing content.

Such reports, whitepapers, and videos are a way for B2B companies to reach and engage their potential audience.

But how do you track the effectiveness of these content avenues? Using specific Google Analytics reports.

2.1. Landing Page Performance

Do you have a landing page created for lead generation or selling? A landing page is a long page with quite a bit of content and a prominent CTA. Its statistics should tell you exactly how your landing page is performing.

B2B companies use all kinds of landing pages. For instance, products such as Splunk Cloud can be given as free trial to corporate customers. Here is the landing page of that.

Image 1g.9. Splunk Cloud Free Trial

You can also do demo pages, such as this Mouseflow demo page, where you can actually be amazed the product.

To analyze the performance of such landing pages, go to Behavior->Site Content->Landing Pages report in Google Analytics to track the Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration, and Pages/Session details for each landing page on your website.

Image 1g.a. Landing Page Performance

B2B companies need reputed CEOs, EVPs, and sales leaders to champion their growth. Look at a few superstar CEOs of the world–Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.

Every B2B company should invest in CEO marketing. Tracking the landing page statistics of the CEO is important for this.

Hope that you won’t have to host the CEO page for long. You know that success is achieved once Fortune and Forbes have their own pages for the CEO.

2.2. Source & Media Details

The Source/Medium report of Google Analytics can tell you exactly where your visitors are coming from. A good content marketing strategy should produce high volume of organic visits from search engines.

Go to Acquisition->All Traffic->Source/Medium. Here, look for organic search visits from various search engines. Also, check the social media visits to see how well your social campaigns are driving visitors.

Image 1g.b. Organic Search Report

This is a key metric that you want to see going up steadily. You can use an advanced filters to see specific Sources and Media.

2.3. Avoiding Click Baits & Bad Content

You may have come across overpromising titles such as “Shark Tank Star Talks About His Multi-Million-Dollar Investment Secret.”

Such titles are click traps. Why? More often than not the content fails to impress.

Do you have any such content on your website?

B2B organizations have a niche audience craving for technical and business-focused content. They have a pretty low tolerance for piffle.

To identify bad content, you need to analyze the performance of your blog posts and articles. Look for low engagement times, high bounce rates, lack of events (such as scrolling), etc.

Low engagement is an indicator of:

• Visitors not finding your content valuable
• Your content is not aligned to the title
• Your content is not insightful or engaging

3. What Your Visitors Do on Your Site

The actions taken by your visitors on your site should be tracked at a granular level in order to understand whether your website is effective.

You need some Google Analytics Goals and Events for this.

3.1. Goals

Goals allow you to track conversions on your site. Goals can be anything that you want visitors to do: a whitepaper download, signup on a newsletter, or a purchase.

How do you find out whether visitors are signing up for your newsletter? You can define the newsletter signup as a Goal and track whether people are landing on the Goal’s “thank-you” page.

You have to be the GA admin to implement Goals. Go to the View section in the admin page and click “Goals.” You can have up to 20 Goals for every View in the standard version of GA.

Image 1g.c. Goal Templates

Google Analytics provides various templates for your Goals:

• Order
• Account creation
• Contact
• Callback request
• Live chat
• Software update
• Product/service comparison
• Adding to favorites
• Media play
• Social sharing
• Newsletter signup

In addition to these, you can create custom Goals as well.

Here is a basic implementation of a purchase Goal that uses a “thank-you” page as the destination to track the conversion.

Image 1g.d. Goal Setup Example

3.2. Events

Events on the other hand are actions that users take on your website.

For instance, if a visitor clicks a particular link, that click could be an Event.

By default Google Analytics doesn’t track various actions, such as clicks or scroll. You need to implement such Events and define the parameters to measure them.

I have published advanced implementations of Events such as the following:

• Clicks on specific links and buttons
• View of a YouTube video embedded on the site
• Mouse middle-clicks
• Scroll tracking

3.3. Visitor Journey

A third thing you need to understand is how your visitors are coursing through your website. Are they taking the right paths?

You may have set up certain paths that lead to conversions or desirable outcomes on your site. You can track whether your visitors take these paths with a special report known as “Behavior Flow.”

By default the report shows the Content Grouping defined on your Analytics setup. But you can change the view type to show users’ navigation based on Google Analytics’s automatic page grouping or Events.

Image 1g.e. Behavior Flow

As you see, Behavior Flow generates a user navigation visualization for your site. It shows entrances, drop-offs, and subsequent page views.

You can use it to highlight traffic through specific pages or paths. It’s highly intuitive and helps you devise plans for visitor retention.

4. What Are the Visitors Searching For

Search queries are extremely important because they tell you the intents of your visitors. For B2B, the visitor intent is far more important.

B2B organizations have longer sales cycles, so they need to know every way of engaging their visitors.

Search queries also tell you which content on your website ranks on Google. Depending on the user engagement, you can tell whether your existing content needs augmenting.

But Google doesn’t divulge secure search queries anymore. It masks them with “not provided” or “not set” tags. But you can still make sense of such masked data.

Google Search Console report is a great way for you to get search keyword information. Link Google Search Console to Google Analytics and access the queries report right within GA.

Image 7.9 – Search Console Queries & Clicks Report

But you can dig deeper than that.

Google Analytics also lets you track what your visitors are searching within your website, using the site’s search box.

To set up site search, go to your View settings from the admin panel and look for “Site Search Settings.” Turn it on and input your query parameter.

Image 1g.f. Site Search Setup

What is your query parameter? Well, it’s rather easy to find out. Just go to your website and do a site search. When the search results turn up, look at the URL. It should be something like this:

https://www.zoomowl.com/?s=analytics

The “s” here is the query parameter. “Analytics” is the search query.

After you set this up, you can access the report from Behavior->Site Search->Search Terms.

Image 1g.g. Site Search Report

It gives you a lot more information about your visitors’ intents.

While analyzing search queries, also look for brand search queries. These are the terms that include your brand name.

Keep a separate report on the brand searches. It will give you insight into how your reputation progresses. Ensure that your website is at the first place for all brand searches.

5. Advertising Performance

Along with content marketing drawing visitors into your digital properties, B2B organizations also do a lot of advertising. Digital advertisements are through Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) or LinkedIn.

B2B companies that deal in custom solutions for niche clientele may find Google Ads campaigns less rewarding due to brutal competition, low search volumes, and exorbitant CPC.

Still, ROI from Google Ads is not that terrible according to the AdWords Industry Benchmark 2017 by Bizible.

Image 1g.h. B2B ROI From Google Ads

As with every digital strategy, targeting is key. You need to ensure that you are not bidding on worthless, generic keywords or targeting unimportant locations.

Ensure your campaigns are driving users to take action on your landing pages.

B2B organizations enjoy wildly higher average deal sizes than B2C. For instance, Amazon’s average product price is $26.86. B2B deal sizes on the other hand go up to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

The CPC for Google Ads campaigns for B2B, hence, will be much higher. Couple that with the extreme competition, and B2B firms need to pay through the nose for each conversion.

Image 1g.i. Average Cost Per Opportunity (B2B Google Ads)

Because deal size tends to be high, B2B companies can actually pay high for the keywords known to convert.

To analyze the performance of your search ads, link Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Once you link them, you can view your entire campaign data on Google Analytics.

Go to Acquisition->Google Ads to find the reports.

Image 1g.j. Google Ads Campaign Report on GA

6. Custom Campaigns

When you read the Source/Medium report in Acquisition->All Traffic, you get to see the Sources and Media from which the visits originated. The report is immensely insightful.

Image 1g.k. Source, Medium Report

But the “(direct)/(none)” row represents the data that Google Analytics couldn’t find.

For instance, a visit could be from one of your email newsletters. Somebody may have clicked a newsletter link to land your website, but Google is unable to track the click due to the security settings in place.

You don’t want to miss this data. It’s a huge chunk as you can see in the above Image 1g.k.

How do you ensure that the Source and Medium are tracked for maximum number of visits?

You could tag the URLs (such as the one in your newsletter or one you share on Facebook) with certain parameters to explicitly mention the Source and the Medium.

These parameters are known as UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters . Adding of the UTM parameters will not have any effect on the destination URL. It only gives additional information to Google Analytics.

There are 5 UTM parameters you can add to a URL. An example link with parameters is below.

https://www.zoomowl.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social%20Media&utm_campaign=Special%20Promo

The above URL modifies the home page of ZoomOwl to add the Source as “Facebook,” Medium as “Social Media,” and Campaign as “Special Promo.”

Here are the five UTM parameters for custom campaigns.

utm_source: This identifies the Source of traffic.
Example: utm_source=YouTube.com

utm_medium: This identifies the Medium that generated the traffic.
Example: utm_medium=Social-Media

utm_campaign: Here, you can put the name of your Campaign. It gives you more information to Google Analytics about the traffic source.
Example: utm_campaign=Special-Promo

utm_term: This can be used to add any paid search keywords to your URL.
Example: utm_term=B2B+Google+Analytics

utm_content: Do you want to add any more additional details to the URL? You can do so with the utm_content parameter. For instance, if you have two CTAs on your newsletter that point to the same page, you can distinguish them by changing utm_content.
Example: utm_content=Sidebar-CTA

You shouldn’t sweat over the tagging of your URLs. You can do it easily with Google’s URL builder.

7. Custom B2B Dashboards

You need to build custom Dashboards in order to get a snapshot of your B2B traffic analytics.

You can create one with all the critical B2B data you are tracking, such as Goals, Events, Segment-wise landing page performance, and ad campaign widgets.

With custom Segments already defined for your target buyers, you can have a granular look at your custom Dashboard.

Image 1g.l. Custom B2B Dashboard

The Image 1g.l above shows a custom B2B Dashboard I have set up.

Add the B2B Segments to the dashboard to get a more granular view.

If you are the Google Analytics admin, you can create Dashboards at Customization->Dashboards. You can create the Dashboard from either the Blank Canvas or the Starter Dashboard. The latter lets you start with a default Dashboard with popular widgets.

Image 1g.m. Custom Dashboard Creation

Conclusion

Data is extremely important for successful marketing. Without it, you will be completely blind as to the direction of your progress. Maybe you are going backward. How could you even tell?

But having just a web analytics application won’t be enough for most B2B organizations. They need to do some advanced implementations.

B2B companies are spending as high as 9.2% of their entire firm budget on digital marketing.

That’s a lot of money, and you need to ensure that it’s not wasted. Use advanced Google Analytics techniques to extract every meaningful insight from your digital properties.

The post How to Use Google Analytics More Effectively in B2B Marketing appeared first on ZoomOwl.

• Functionality
• Usability
• Interface
• Compatibility
• Performance
• Security

Image 1f.7. Technology Segmentation Example

Image 1f.8. Page Timing Report With Segmentation

4. Identify your most loyal customers

• Count of sessions > 3
• Page depth > 2
• Conversions > 1
• Transactions > 1 (completed purchases)

5. Traffic analytics of people with specific interests

Image 1f.9. Interest Categories in Sales Funnel

Image 1f.a. Segmentation With Multiple Categories

6. Study the performance of specific advertising campaigns

• The various “Media” include organic, referral, CPC, CPM, or affiliate.
• “Source” is the domain from which the traffic originates. For instance, if you want to analyze only the traffic generated from YouTube, select the source “youtube.com.”
• The “Keyword” option allows you to add any keyword that your visitor might have used to come to your site.

7. Visitors with long-tail search queries

Image 1f.b. Segment for Long-Tail Search Queries

8. To eliminate spammy referrals

Image 1f.c. Referral Spam Exclusion Segment

9. Exploring how your users convert

Image 1f.d. Real Customer Segment

Image 1f.e. Real Customers Sorted by Revenue

Image 1f.f. User Explorer for Converted Users

10. Assessing the quality of your social media visitors

Image 1f.g. Social Media Segment Creation

Using the Advanced Segments

1. Advanced Conditions

Image 1f.h. Advanced Condition Example

2. Advanced Sequences

Image 1f.i. Advanced Sequences Example

Conclusion

Do you want more revenue from your website? Use advanced Google Analytics segmentation to optimize and improve your web traffic.

• Location: East Coast of the United States (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc.)
• Age: 21 – 40
• Sex: Female
• Occupation: Doesn’t matter

Image 1f.1. Usage of Google Analytics Across Industries

Prerequisites

• For full benefits of Google Analytics’s segmentation features, you should enable Advertising Features.
• Ecommerce websites should enable Enhanced Ecommerce as well.

What Is Segmentation?

Image 1f.2. Segmented Target Market Overview Report

Table 1f.1. Google Analytics Segmentation Parameters

Creating a Segment

Image 1f.3. Add Segment Option in GA

Image 1f.4. Segmentation Options

10 Uses of Google Analytics Segmentation

1. Identify whether your target demographic is visiting your website

2. Identify locations to expand your business to

Image 1f.5. Creating Multi-Region Segment

Image 1f.6. City-Wise Location Report With the Segment Turned On

3. Identifying technical issues with your website

• Functionality
• Usability
• Interface
• Compatibility
• Performance
• Security

Image 1f.7. Technology Segmentation Example

Image 1f.8. Page Timing Report With Segmentation

4. Identify your most loyal customers

• Count of sessions > 3
• Page depth > 2
• Conversions > 1
• Transactions > 1 (completed purchases)

5. Traffic analytics of people with specific interests

Image 1f.9. Interest Categories in Sales Funnel

Image 1f.a. Segmentation With Multiple Categories

6. Study the performance of specific advertising campaigns

• The various “Media” include organic, referral, CPC, CPM, or affiliate.
• “Source” is the domain from which the traffic originates. For instance, if you want to analyze only the traffic generated from YouTube, select the source “youtube.com.”
• The “Keyword” option allows you to add any keyword that your visitor might have used to come to your site.

7. Visitors with long-tail search queries

Image 1f.b. Segment for Long-Tail Search Queries

8. To eliminate spammy referrals

Image 1f.c. Referral Spam Exclusion Segment

9. Exploring how your users convert

Image 1f.d. Real Customer Segment

Image 1f.e. Real Customers Sorted by Revenue

Image 1f.f. User Explorer for Converted Users

10. Assessing the quality of your social media visitors

Image 1f.g. Social Media Segment Creation

Using the Advanced Segments

1. Advanced Conditions

Image 1f.h. Advanced Condition Example

2. Advanced Sequences

Image 1f.i. Advanced Sequences Example

Conclusion

The post Using Google Analytics Segmentation for Effective Web Traffic Analysis appeared first on ZoomOwl.

Image 1e.1. Email Is 40 Times More Effective Than Social Media

Image 1e.2. Email Marketing ROI (Source – DMA)

Image 1e.3. B2B vs. B2C Objectives of Email Marketing

• Email spam causes domain blacklisting and inability to send any more email.
• Noncompliance could get you sued under several legislations, such as the CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003.
• Your campaigns will cause more harm than good by alienating the customers.
• Your brand reputation may be tarnished irreparably.

1. Do not send commercial emails without permission

Image 1e.5. Online Email Subscription Form

• Express consent boosts ROI. SmartInsights estimated that the permission-based emails create $40 for every $1 spent. That is an ROI of 3900%.
• Permission-based emails are opened 30-40% more than unsolicited emails. Also, they give a CTR of around 20%.
• A user receiving a permitted email seldom marks it as spam.
• You will adhere to the regulations as well as maintain your account with your email marketing company. Most email marketing companies want you to send mails only to opt-in subscribers.
• You will maintain your domain and IP reputation with your ISP.

A few guidelines for the permission-based emailing

• Do not keep the permission opt-in box checked by default.
• Do not buy email list. Ever.
• Keep the form simple. In most cases, you only need the name and the email address.
• Do not make subscription mandatory to get a resource or offer from your website.
• Clearly state your company information in the form page.
• Do specify the frequency of emails along with an idea of what kind of content.

2. Adhere to the electronic communication laws

• As mentioned earlier, do not send email without express permission.
• Do not use any false or misleading information on your mailers.
• Identify your business and give detailed contact information and physical address in the website as well as each email you send.
• If an email is with commercial intent, you have to explicitly identify it as an ad.
• Provide a clear opt-out method in every email (an unsubscribe button or link).
• Study and adhere to the legal guidelines for transactional and relationship messages vs. promotional messages.
• If you are sending email to EU countries, you need to ensure GDPR compliance as well. GDPR requires you to have proof of double opt-in.

Table 1e.1. Email Legal Regulations by Country

3.  Stay away from spam

Image 1e.8. Email Spam Statistics

• You will damage your domain’s sending reputation.
• You will tarnish your brand.
• You will get sued for spamming and will incur a large penalty or jail time.
• You will almost always lose your money.

• Ensure that you have express consent (more effective than implied consent). Do double opt-in with a confirmation email to be surer.
• Do not let your list age. Send the subscribers a welcome email as soon as they are confirmed. Also, stick to the regular emailing frequency.
• Do not link to spammy content on your emails.
• Do not use misleading subject lines or titles (avoid using “Re:” and “Fwd:”)
• Ensure your emails are designed well for all devices. Messy emails tend to end up in the spam folder.
• Do not use all caps anywhere.
• Do not use unauthenticated sender IDs.
• Ensure you segment your customers well and send them relevant emails.

4. Identify yourself properly

Image 1e.a. Spam Email Without Any Sender Information

• The company name
• The street address
• City
• State

5. Craft your subject line with care

• KISSS: Keep it short, simple, and specific.
• Mention a CTA within the subject line if you want the reader to act.
• Imbibe the objective of your email; it will allow you to craft better subject lines.
• Refrain from spammy language.
• Avoid the use of all caps.
• Don’t make any false promises.
• Write down the objective of your email first. Craft the subject line after finishing your email.
• Incite emotional response from the reader.

6. Avoid sales lingo

• “And it’s all available to you for free”
• “Exceptional quality”
• “I’d like to understand your requirements…”
• “I’d like to offer our…”
• “We have built years of expertise in blah blah…”
• “We offer discount”
• “Sign up today and get your freebie”
• “Only 48 hours left”

Image 1e.d. Cook Smarts Weekly Email

7. Always personalize your emails

Image 1e.f. Personalization Research by Salesforce

• Use personalized subject lines.
• Ensure your email starts by addressing the recipient by name.
• Use dynamic content by inserting personal information wherever possible.
• Do not limit with the name; use all the information you have collected from the customer to personalize the messages to them.

Image 1e.g. Topshop Signup Form

8. Use responsive emails

Image 1e.i. Email Client Market Share

9. Segment well

Image 1e.k. DMA Segmentation Is Effective

• Their position in the sales funnel: Do not send a welcome email to a seasoned customer.
• The purchase history and wish list
• Amount spent by them
• Customer surveys or quizzes
• The content your subscribers download from your site
• The preferences they set in their account
• Their location & ZIP code
• Their demographics: age, sex, marital status, etc.
• Occupation
• Your website analytics
• Whether or not they open your email
• Whether or not they reply to your email

Image 1e.l. Global Stats Across Segmented Campaigns

10. Preview your email before sending

Image 1e.n. Email Preview Test

11. Email marketing analytics

Are you sending emails to thousands of subscribers? You need to analyze your campaigns extremely well to understand whether they are effective. Here are some of the key metrics you must track for your email campaigns. Open rate: Percentage of how many people opened your emails. Click-through rate: Percentage of people who click the CTA and come to your site. Click-to-open rate: Ratio of clicks to opens. Calculation: Clicks = 50; opens = 190: CTOR = 50/190 = 0.263 or 26.3% Good CTOR, according to Campaign Monitor, is between 20 – 30%. Unsubscribe rate: Industry-standard unsubscribe rate is less than 0.5%. Some reasons why people unsubscribe can be:

• Lack of segmentation
• Too frequent emails
• Change in the customer’s email address
• Spammy or unprofessional looking emails
• Irrelevant content
• They signed up only for the initial offer.

Engagement time: How long do your recipients spend on your emails? Many email marketing tools provide this as a part of their analytics. Sender reputation: Are you maintaining a good sender reputation? Sender Score can provide you with a report of your sender reputation in a scale of 0 to 100. The higher, the better. A report looks like this.

Image 1e.p. Sender Score Sample Report

12. A/B testing A/B testing is beyond the normal email preview test. It’s an analytical method to identify which email is better among two alternatives. You have to first build two versions of the same email, with minor variations in subject line, content, and sender email address. Then, half of your recipients receive the first version while the other half receive the alternative. Based on the analytics, you can identify the most effective version. GetResponse provides this as a standard feature. It also allows you to see the results in real time and fix the most effective variant. According to GetResponse, 51% of marketers still haven’t adopted A/B testing as a way to analyze and improve their email campaigns.

Conclusion

ROI of email marketing campaigns is the highest among any digital marketing activity.

Image 1e.r. ROI of Email Marketing

That is an ROI of 3900%. It’s clear how important email is for your marketing success. But do follow the recommendations in this article to ensure that you are attaining that success.

The post 12 Important Recommendations for Successful Email Marketing appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> https://www.zoomowl.com/important-recommendations-for-profitable-email-marketing/feed/ 0 https://www.zoomowl.com/scroll-tracking-google-analytics/ https://www.zoomowl.com/scroll-tracking-google-analytics/#respond Wed, 15 Aug 2018 09:47:19 +0000 https://www.zoomowl.com/?p=642 How can you find whether your website’s visitors are interested in your content? The best way is to track their scrolling activity. Here is how it’s done. Do you ever read anything without interest? Probably not. People browsing your web page scroll through your content only when they are hooked into it. If they want…

The post How to Keep Track of Scroll Activity on Your Website Using Google Analytics and Tag Manager appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> How can you find whether your website’s visitors are interested in your content? The best way is to track their scrolling activity. Here is how it’s done.

Do you ever read anything without interest? Probably not. People browsing your web page scroll through your content only when they are hooked into it.

If they want to get out after seeing your first sentence, they do not scroll.

They bounce.

Image 1d.1. Bad Bounce Rate Example

This is one of the reasons of horrible bounce rates and pathetic time on page metrics for some websites.

However, bounce rate may not always indicate bad content on your website. It can also indicate that your post is so detailed and fulfilling that visitors don’t need to open any other page on your website.

But to be sure whether your visitors are reading your content, you need to track their scroll activity.

This will show you additional opportunities to place your calls to action as well.

A visitor action recorder such as Mouseflow can keep track of scrolls without needing any manual implementation.

In case of Google Analytics (GA), however, you need to do an advanced implementation, easier with the help of Google Tag Manager (GTM). Let’s see how.

The prerequisite for this tutorial is that you should be using Google Tag Manager to implement your Google Analytics tag on your website. To know how, please check out this Google help guide.

Steps

Let’s see the steps of adding a scroll tracker on your website.

1. Enable scroll and page variables in Google Tag Manager.
2. Create a scroll trigger on your Container Workspace in GTM.
3. Test the scroll trigger by going in the GTM preview mode.
4. Create your new Google Analytics tag to track scroll details (page URL and scroll percentage).
5. Ensure the tag firing priority is set.
6. Set the Google Analytics scroll tag to fire on the scroll trigger. Verify this on GTM preview mode.

Let’s look at each step in detail now.

Step 1: Enable Scroll Variables in Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager provides you many built-in variables to track details from your web pages and pass them to Google Analytics. You need to ensure that specific scroll variables are enabled.

From your Google Tag Manager dashboard, click “Variables” on the left and click “Configure.”

Image 1d.2. Enabling Scroll Variables in Google Tag Manager

Enable all the scroll-related variables. You may also enable other variables such as the Page URL, Page Hostname, Referrer, etc., in order to make them available in your scroll tag.

Step 2: Creating a Scroll Trigger in Google Tag Manager

As the first step, let’s create the scroll trigger in GTM. This will be the trigger that fires the Google Analytics scroll tag on your web page. You can also go the other way around by creating the scroll tag first and then its trigger.

Go to GTM and choose the “Triggers” section on the left-hand side. Here, put an appropriate name for the trigger and then click “Trigger Configuration” and select “Scroll Depth”.

Image 1d.3. Scroll Trigger Creation in GTM

You will find two options, “Vertical Scroll Depths” and “Horizontal Scroll Depths.” For most websites, the vertical scroll is the only thing you need to track, unless you have your content placed horizontally (like a studio or image website).

Image 1d.4. Scroll Depth Configuration

After you select your scroll type, you need to put what percentage of the page you want to track using the scroll tag. For this you can put numbers in the percentages box as you can see above.

This will help the Google Analytics scroll tag to fire for each percentage threshold you define.

You can also track with the pixels. For instance, if your web page is 5000 pixels long, you can put that in the pixel measurement option (as 2000,3000,4000,5000).

But in general, you are good to go with the percentage option.

After you select the percentages, you need to choose whether to enable scroll tracking for all pages or only some.

If you want to track the scroll for some pages, you need to select them using a custom or a built-in variable available in the system, such as Page URL, Page Path, Video Title, etc. There are many options for you to choose from.

After selecting your settings, click “Save” at the top right-hand side. This will create your scroll trigger.

Step 3: Test Your Scroll Trigger

Now, you need to make sure that your scroll trigger is working perfectly. It needs to fire every time you scroll on your web page.

Simply click the “Preview” option in GTM. Now, Google Tag Manager is in the preview mode. Open your web page in a new tab in the same browser; here, you will see the preview pane at the bottom.

Image 1d.5. Google Tag Manager Preview Pane

Now, slowly start scrolling down your web page. You should see a new event called “gtm.scrollDepth” cropping up as soon as you cross your scroll’s first threshold, the first number you put in your scroll percentage box.

For instance, if your first threshold is 30%, you will see the event as soon as you cross 30% of your web page.

Image 1d.6. Scroll Firing Triggered

This means that your trigger is working properly.

The trigger will fire on all pages by default, even in the case of the “Some Pages” implementation. It’s not a mistake. This is just the trigger; you haven’t created the actual scroll tracking tag yet.

Now, if you click the “Variables” tab in the preview pane, you will see the various variables associated with the event, as shown below.

Image 1d.7. Scroll Trigger Variables Pane

As you can see, the scroll percentage, page URL, etc., are listed in the variables pane.

This means that your scroll trigger is working perfectly.

Now you can create the Google Analytics scroll event tag.

Step 4: Create Your Google Analytics Scroll Event Tag

You can create your Google Analytics scroll tag within Google Tag Manager itself. This tag should be activated every time the scroll trigger fires.

Go to “Tags” in GTM and click “New.”

Give a name for the tag and click “Tag Configuration” to set it up. Among the various tag types, select “Google Analytics – Universal Analytics.”

Image 1d.8. Creating Google Analytics Tag for Scroll Tracking

Now, within the tag configuration, select the following options.

• Track Type: Event
• Category: “Scroll Event”
• Action: {{Scroll Depth Threshold}}% Scrolled
• Label: {{Page URL}}
• Value: Scrolled

The Scroll Depth Threshold and Page URL are built-in variables that you can select from the “+” button next to the field. (Ensure that those variables are already enabled in the Step 1).

You can select “Non-Interaction Hit” as false as this will be counted as an interaction by the user and improve your bounce rate.

Finally, select the Google Analytics variable that you have already set up for your website.

The scroll tag configuration is shown in the Image 1d.9.

Image 1d.9. Google Analytics Scroll Tag Configuration

Below the tag configuration, you should see the “Triggering” section, where you should add the scroll trigger to the tag. Click it and select the scroll trigger you already created.

Now the tag configuration is complete. Click the “Save” button to exit.

Step 5: Ensure the Tag Priorities Are Correctly Set

You have to send the normal pageview hit to Google Analytics before an event hit. Otherwise, Google Analytics cannot link the event to the correct page.

We can do this by setting event priorities.

In your “Tag Configuration” options, click and expand “Advanced Settings.” You will find the tag firing priority here.

Image 1d.a. Setting Tag Firing Priority

Give a number lower than your Google Analytics main page view tag. So, if you are putting 10 for the pageview tag, the number here should be less than that.

After setting tag firing priority, save the tag. To learn more about tag firing priority, go here.

Step 6: Real-Time Testing of the Scroll Tag

Refresh the preview mode in GTM before proceeding to save the changes.

Now, open your website in another tab to see the preview pane.

Start scrolling until you see the first gtm.scrollDepth event. Ensure that your GA scroll tag has been fired for that event, as shown below.

Image 1d.b. GTM Scroll Tag Being Fired

When you click the scroll tag, it will show you the various variables captured by it. This data is sent to Google Analytics.

As you can see in Image 1d.c, I have captured “Scroll Event” as Category, “Scrolled” as Value, “50% Scrolled” as Action, and the page URL as the Label.

Image 1d.c. Scroll Tag Details

The event variables can be anything depending on what you pass to them.

Step 7: Check the Real-Time Report in GA

You can now check the real-time report on Google Analytics to test if the scroll tracking is working properly.

Simply scroll further on your web page and open the real-time events view in Google Analytics.

Image 1d.d. Google Analytics Real-Time Events View Showing Scroll Action

Do you see the scroll action being captured? Click the Event Category to see the Action and Label.

This report will tell you which pages on your website are currently being scrolled by people and to what threshold.

Step 8: Go Live With the Configuration

Get back to GTM. You are still in the preview mode.

Leave the preview mode and click “Submit” to create a new version of the Workspace. Give a name and a description to distinguish it and click “Publish” to go live.

Image 1d.e. Going Live With the Scroll Tag

That’s it. You will now be able to track all kinds of scrolling events on your website and the data will be available in the “Events” report under “Behavior” in Google Analytics.

Image 1d.f. Scroll Event Report

Additional Tip: Enabling Scroll Tracking for Some Web Pages

As mentioned earlier, you can enable scroll tracking for some web pages.

For instance, you have a landing page and want to measure its effectiveness. You don’t want to enable scroll tracking for all pages but only for the landing page.

Let’s see how this is done.

After your step 2 of creating the scroll trigger, select the “Some Pages” option.

Image 1d.g. Enabling Scroll Trigger for Some Pages

Here, we need to select the pages that satisfy your condition. I will select Page URL as the variable and put the URL of the page that I want to track, as shown in Image 1d.h.

Image 1d.h. Adding Variable Conditions in Scroll Trigger

After setting the variable, save the trigger and refresh the preview mode.

Now, the Google Analytics scroll tag will be fired only when it is in the designated page. Verify this by opening the page in another browser tab.

To add additional conditions to limit the pages, you can use the “+” button.

Note: It’s tricky when you select additional conditions. GTM treats each condition as required. Hence, if you add a new page URL, the system does not work because GTM understands that as “fire the GA scroll tag when the page URL is A and B,” which cannot be true.

I hope this tutorial helps you track your website visitors more effectively.

The post How to Keep Track of Scroll Activity on Your Website Using Google Analytics and Tag Manager appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> https://www.zoomowl.com/scroll-tracking-google-analytics/feed/ 0 https://www.zoomowl.com/record-web-visitors-session-replay/ https://www.zoomowl.com/record-web-visitors-session-replay/#respond Sun, 05 Aug 2018 14:52:33 +0000 https://www.zoomowl.com/?p=535 Have you ever wondered about session replay, the recording of your visitors’ actions on your website? Here is how you do it using a website session recording tool. Your web analytics solution is intended to capture exactly what a user does on your website. Google Analytics is one of the best for the purpose. But…

The post How to Record Your Website Visitors & Their Actions With a Session Replay Tool appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> Have you ever wondered about session replay, the recording of your visitors’ actions on your website? Here is how you do it using a website session recording tool.

Your web analytics solution is intended to capture exactly what a user does on your website.

Google Analytics is one of the best for the purpose. But how visual is it really? Can it show you a video recording of a visitor’s exact actions on your web pages? Not yet!

Google Analytics by default tracks only your website’s page views. To track additional activities, such as mouse middle-click, page scrolling, or the playback of a YouTube video, you need to create custom events (by combining Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, for instance).

I was in the lookout for a cool product that could show me what my visitors are doing on my site, through video recordings, heat maps, scroll details, clicks, etc. That’s how I came across Mouseflow.

Image 1c.1. Mouseflow Logo

Mouseflow is a solution to track digital customer experience; hence, it provides features such as session replay, website heatmaps, and form analytics, which are extremely essential for conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Strangely enough, these CRO features are not available on Google Analytics.

As an example, check out the following video illustrating the session replay feature of Mouseflow.

In this article, let me give you a detailed review of Mouseflow and its advanced features:

• User action recordings (session replay)
• Heatmaps (click, movement, scroll, attention, geography)
• Custom funnel visualizations
• Form analytics
• Visitor feedback campaigns

In 2015, Mouseflow became the market leader in web customer experience analytics, according to Marketshare.

Image 1c.2. Mouseflow Is Market Leader in Customer Experience Analytics

Live Stream & Session Replay of User Actions on Your Website

As mentioned, the main feature of Mouseflow is the live streaming of user actions and session recordings, also known as “session replay.”

After you install Mouseflow on your website, you can get to the Mouseflow dashboard and click the “Recordings” option on the left sidebar. It will bring up a list of all the user actions captured as video recordings.

You will find a filter on the top right to change the date range of recordings (just as in Google Analytics).

Image 1c.3. Recordings List

The session replay list also shows you other key parameters of the visitor, such as the referring URL, entry page, number of pages in the session, session (recording) duration, device details (OS, browser, device), and various Mouseflow custom tags.

The session replay list also shows you the number of pages seen by the visitor.

The visited pages list is a dropdown, and if you click it, it shows you a waterfall model of all the visited pages. The dropdown is a perfect visualization of a user’s page view activity—showing the landing page, the visited pages, and the exit page.

Image 1c.4. Page View Dropdown

If you click one of the recordings, it will open in a new window where you can view the playback of the session. The entire actions, such as scrolls, page views, clicks, form signups, etc., can be seen on the session replay window.

Here is a sample of a session replay window from ZoomOwl itself.

Image 1c.5. Mouseflow Sample Session Replay Window

If you want to get a taste of the recording, you can check out the demo of Mouseflow.

At the top left-hand side of the session replay window, you will see a dropdown of all the pages viewed by the visitor in the current session, along with the time spent in each.

Since the dropdown also gives you the time spent on each page, you can get an idea of which page has made the user stick around longer—it may indicate an issue with the page or something interesting that the user wanted to check out. The recording will show you exactly what happened.

Within the session replay window, you have a toggle button (marked in the Image 1c.5 as “visit details”) that provides you with the entire details of the visitor.

Details such as location, IP address, ISP, OS, browser, device, screen resolution, language, referring URL, time of visit, and the duration can be seen here.

Image 1c.6. Visitor Details in Recording Window

The session replay timeline will show user actions with specific color codes:

• Red: Mouse movement and scrolls
• Yellow: Mouse click or tap on mobile devices
• Green: Form interaction
• Black: There is no activity (the user may have navigated to some other application).

You can also speed up the recording playback to twice or four times the original speed.

When you watch a recording with multiple page views, Mouseflow automatically switches among the pages during the playback, just as the user does.

If you want to come back later to a recording, you can favorite it by clicking the star icon on the top right. This will allow you to mark the session for future reference. Further, you can add custom tags or notes to the recording, share it, or download it.

Getting Started With Mouseflow: Installation

Installation of Mouseflow is quite similar to the installation of Google Analytics tracking code on your website.

After you sign up, open the “Settings” option on the left-hand side and find the “</>” icon to get your tracking code, which looks like this.

Image 1c.7. Mouseflow Tracking Code

Just take it to your website and paste it before the closing </body> tag on all the pages you want to track. Mouseflow also provides integration options with popular content management systems such as WordPress.

Since I use Google Tag Manager, I implemented the tracking code through it.

Image 1c.8. Mouseflow Tag Implementation Using Google Tag Manager

Once installed, Mouseflow starts tracking all the details about your visitors and their interaction on your site. These will be available on the side in the various sections: Recordings, Heatmaps, Funnels, Forms, and Feedback.

Viewing and Filtering Through the Data

When you visit your “Recordings” section, you may want to segment the data and filter it down to certain minute detail: For instance, data of the last week’s visitors from the iPhone.

Such filtering is done from the filter icon and the date selection options found at the top right; they are available on all kinds of reports.

The filter button opens a plethora of options that you can apply to your list.

Image 1c.9. Data Filter Options

You can filter based on:

• Country
• Operating systems
• Browser
• Traffic sources
• Visitor type
• Screen resolution
• Devices (smartphone, tablet, PC/laptop)
• Number of pages viewed
• Visit duration
• Navigation tags (entry page, exit page, etc.)
• Built-in and custom tags
• Custom variables

It lets you segment your visitors every which way to achieve an astounding level of specificity.

Built-in Tags

Along with data filters, you also have certain built-in tags in your reports to identify certain types of traffic. For instance, a form interaction or anomalous clicking is tagged with a built-in tag.

Here are some important built-in tags.

Click-Error: This tag is applied to a recording when a user comes across some error while clicking an element on a web page. This tag helps you identify website issues, such as JavaScript errors. Your session replay will show you exactly where the error occurred.

Click-Rage: This tag is applied when a user clicks repeatedly on an element, indicating frustration. For instance, you may have colored a plain piece of text in blue and the user expects a link at that place. Such web design gaffes can be spotted with this tag.

Form-Interact: This tag is added to the sessions which include an interaction with a form.

Submit: This is tagged to a session when the visitor submits a form. This makes it extremely easy to identify form submissions and conversions among your web sessions.

Bounce: Applies to a user who navigates away from a page to another for a very short duration. This is different from the typical bounce you come across on Google Analytics.

Mouse-out: Is applied to a visit in which the visitor navigates away from your website to another application or browser tab.

In addition to the above, Mouseflow provides several other built-in tags. You can also create your own custom tags.

Key Features of Mouseflow Other Than the Session Recording

Session replay is not the only feature of Mouseflow.

This web analytics product is replete with features and allows you to get detailed information about your visitors.

Let’s see some of the additional features that are useful to webmasters.

1. Website Heatmaps

Do you want to see where your visitors are clicking, where they are scrolling to, and which parts of the website they are looking at? For this, you need website heatmaps, the visual overlay that shows you which parts of your site are attention-grabbing.

Image 1c.a. Mouseflow Website Heatmap

Mouseflow features five types of heatmaps. Four of them for your web pages, and the fifth for the visitor geography.

• Click heatmap
• Movement heatmap
• Scroll heatmap
• Attention heatmap
• Geo heatmap

Let’s look at each heatmap in detail.

1.a. Click Heatmap

When you click the “Heatmaps” section in your Mouseflow dashboard, you will see a list of pages along with the number of visits, visit duration, engagement time, aggregate number of clicks, rendering time, scroll percentage, page size, etc.

Image 1c.b. Click Heatmap List

This is by default the click heatmap list you are seeing.

The click heatmap is shown on the Image 1c.a above.

It shows all the clicks and touches (in case of mobile devices) by the users on your page. This will give you an instant picture of your entire click activity on that page.

Hovering over a portion of the heatmap brings up a click hover view with certain key information.

Image 1c.c. Click Hover View

The click hover view shows you what percentage of the visitors click, how much time it takes for an average visitor to click that element, how long they hover before clicking, etc.

This information can be extremely essential for improving your site’s user experience and increasing your conversion rate.

1.b. Movement Heatmaps

Being able to track the eyes of a visitor is every marketer’s dream. We want to place our most effective content and CTAs where users are looking. Movement heatmap may be the next best thing.

Imagine the way most of us browse web pages. When we are looking at a piece of information, we subconsciously move our mouse cursor over it.

Mouseflow’s movement heatmap captures the mouse movements and provides you with a snapshot of that. For every single page.

Image 1c.d. Mouseflow Movement Heatmap

This heatmap will tell you exactly where you should place your CTAs.

1.c. Scroll Heatmap

Now, let’s talk about scrolling, a clear indicator of whether users are consuming your content.

Users who scroll down till the end are enjoying your content and getting something good from it. Those who want out as soon as they see your first sentence do not scroll.

Essentially, you want to encourage scrolling.

The scroll heatmap tells you what percentage of visitors are scrolling through your content and which parts of the website are getting maximum attention.

Image 1c.e. Mouseflow Scroll Heatmap

The top of the page (above the fold) is almost always fully red, indicating that almost all of the visitors see that part. Moving further down, the color gets lighter, indicating that the scroll activity is reducing. By the end of the page, the color is generally the lightest, indicating reduced scroll activity.

The heatmap will tell you how you should structure your content to improve its overall visibility.

Also, you will see a tiny snippet that shows you the percentage of visitors who scrolled to the current region, average time spent, and the average engagement time.

1.d. Attention Heatmap

The attention heatmap is alike the scroll heatmap. But here, you get to view the exact percentage of visitors who have seen a part of the page.

Image 1c.f. Mouseflow Attention Heatmap

As you can see, it shows a snippet with the percentage of visitors who viewed a line, average time spent, and average engagement time.

1.e. Geo Heatmap

Mouseflow also provides off-page analytics, such as the information of the geography of your visitors through the geo heatmap.

This is not generated on your web page as an overlay. Instead, it forms an overlay on the top of a world map, showing the locations of most of your visitors.

This is perfectly similar to the geography data provided by Google Analytics.

Image 1c.g. Mouseflow Geo Heatmap

The geo heatmap helps you optimize your ad spending. You can learn where to concentrate your efforts to get maximum results.

The geo heatmap lets you zoom into a neighborhood level to learn exactly where your visitors are coming from.

Image 1c.h. Geo Heatmap Zoomed In

As seen in the Image 1c.h above, one of ZoomOwl’s visitors from New York has viewed the website from Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. (Thank you 🙂 and visit again, if you are seeing this.)

This level of detail is not available even on Google Analytics.

2. Custom Funnels

Custom funnel creation is extremely simple and entirely intuitive on Mouseflow. Click the “Funnels” option in the sidebar and then “Add new funnel.”

This way, you can create as many funnels as you want, without having to tie it to any specific goal. Note that the custom funnel is an advanced feature available in Google Analytics 360.

Once you identify the navigation path you want your visitors to follow (such as Home -> Pricing -> Signup -> Thank You), you can simply add them into the funnel steps and create your funnel.

Image 1c.i. Funnel Creation

As soon as the funnel is created, Mouseflow shows you the conversions based on the existing visit data.

Image 1c.j. Funnel Conversion Report

You may notice the “watch dropped” and “watch converted” buttons.

Use “watch dropped” to view the session replays of all the users who dropped in each step. This will give you important information on why people are dropping off and how to improve the retention rate.

“Watch converted” shows you the recordings of converted visitors.

The funnel, as you can see, shows you the real conversion rate based on the extant traffic data. Use the extensive filters provided by Mouseflow to identify segment-specific conversion rates.

For instance, you can apply filters such “as all mobile devices using Chrome browser” to find conversion rate specific in that segment. This way, you can zoom in on the conversion rates for all kinds of segments on your traffic.

3. Form Analytics

Do you have forms on your site to capture users’ information before you let them download something from your site? You want to ensure that these forms don’t alienate or frustrate your users.

The form analytics provided by Mouseflow is simple and straightforward. Click the “Forms” option on the sidebar, and you will see all the forms you are tracking.

They show up as tiny snippets with basic information, such as number of visits, interactions, and conversions. You can click on any of these snippets to see actual recordings of people interacting with the form.

You can also add new forms from this page. Mouseflow can automatically detect all kinds of forms, so it’s perfectly easy.

The form analytics gives you a comprehensive report on all the fields and shows you how many people interacted with each form field. Dropoff percentage tells you important UX insights on your forms.

Image 1c.k. Mouseflow Form Analytics Report

Another intelligent metric that form analytics gives you is the refill rate. This is the percentage in which users refill the data on a field.

For instance, if the refill rate for an element such as “Email” is higher than 50%, it means more than 50% of the people interacting with that element are refilling that field.

This clearly indicates that the users are confused about that field, doesn’t it?

Another intuitive information is the “blank submit,” which indicates that a user hasn’t filled a field. This is high for optional fields as well as required fields without the asterisk indicator.

These metrics can clearly provide an indication of your forms’ user experience.

4. Feedback Campaigns

Have you seen short feedback forms at the end of some websites?

Image 1c.l. Mouseflow Feedback Snippet

Such forms are used to collect opinions from the visitors themselves about content and user experience. This is known as the feedback campaign.

Mouseflow lets you launch a feedback campaign on your website easily.

Navigate to the feedback section on your Mouseflow dashboard and click “Add New Campaign.”

Image 1c.m. Adding Feedback Campaign

Simply fill up the questions and options of the campaign and launch it on your site.

Image 1c.n. Creation of a Feedback Form

Mouseflow lets you add multiple questions to your feedback form and multiple options for each.

You can change the appearance of the form in several ways: colors, location of the form on the website, etc.

You can trigger the form at page load, with a delay, while scrolling down, during inactivity, while mouse leaves the page, or manually. You can also show the form on all web pages or some, as well as for all visitors or some.

You can also set Mouseflow to notify you via email whenever a feedback is given.

Once the feedback form is added on your website and is collecting data, you will be able to see the detailed stats on the feedback section.

As you can see Mouseflow is a feature-rich application for session replay, website heatmaps, form analytics, custom funnels, and user feedback. Such an analytics application is absolutely essential for improving your conversion rates over time.

The post How to Record Your Website Visitors & Their Actions With a Session Replay Tool appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> https://www.zoomowl.com/record-web-visitors-session-replay/feed/ 0 https://www.zoomowl.com/google-analytics-free-360-comparison/ https://www.zoomowl.com/google-analytics-free-360-comparison/#respond Wed, 25 Jul 2018 09:40:59 +0000 https://www.zoomowl.com/?p=497 Have you ever wondered how Google Analytics, the free edition, differs from the premium edition Google Analytics 360? ZoomOwl brings this guide to show you the key differences and help you choose the right product for your traffic analysis needs. The year 2005 marked the beginning of web analytics as a serious, hardcore business with…

The post Google Analytics Free Vs. Google Analytics 360: A Detailed Comparison Chart appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> Have you ever wondered how Google Analytics, the free edition, differs from the premium edition Google Analytics 360? ZoomOwl brings this guide to show you the key differences and help you choose the right product for your traffic analysis needs.

The year 2005 marked the beginning of web analytics as a serious, hardcore business with the advent of Google Analytics (GA). A huge percentage of webmasters like you and me gravitate to GA for traffic measurement.

Google Analytics (GA) managed to destroy the competition fast: As of 2018 April, it enjoys over 690,818 websites among the top 1 million (69.08%) according to BuiltWith. GA is a complete solution to gather insights on the traffic to your website, however popular it is.

But you also have Google Analytics 360, the premium version, targeted at large and medium businesses and high-traffic blog networks.

Many people wonder how the exorbitantly priced ($150,000 per year) Google Analytics 360 differs from the widely used free version. Let me give you an idea on that.

Google ships several products for traffic analytics and audience measurement. Google’s audience measurement suite (also known as Google Analytics 360 Suite) comprises six products: Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize, Data Studio, Attribution, and Audience Center. As you can see, Google Analytics, the product, and Google Analytics 360 Suite, the collection, are two different things.

Image 1b.1. Google Analytics 360 Suite

But Google is merging the 360 Suite with the Doubleclick platform to form the Google Marketing Platform.

Each of these products exists for a specific purpose. And if you are shelling out for the 360 Suite, the products take the “360” suffix: Google Analytics 360, Tag Manager 360, etc.

Here, I would like to take you through the key differences between Google Analytics standard version and Google Analytics 360. So, we will not be checking out the other 360 Suite products.

TL; DR

The key differences discussed across this article are given in the comparison image below.

Image 1b.3. Google Analytics 360 Suite vs. Google Analytics Standard

Let’s look at each individual item in detail now, shall we?

The Target Market

GA 360, being the expensive, premium version, is meant for large enterprises with websites and apps enjoying enormous traffic—we are talking about millions of users.

Say, you have massive traffic coming to your site, can you still track it all with free Google Analytics? Majority of websites only need the GA standard, which is already full-fledged and capable of analyzing reasonably heavy traffic. To give an idea, even websites getting tens of thousands of visits every day can be comfortably tracked using GA standard.

Both products excel at collecting data across websites and apps. The standard version itself supports data collection through an API. All major reporting features including real-time visits and User-ID-based data are available on the standard version. User and account administration features are also quite the same.

Advanced Features of GA 360

Let’s now look at some of the advanced features either not present or present only in a basic form in Google Analytics standard.

1. Custom Funnel Reports

Do you know about the Funnel Visualization in Google Analytics? It’s a visualization of the custom events and goals you are tracking on your website. Image 1b.4 is an example of a Funnel Visualization report that I had on our corporate website.

Image 1b.4. Funnel Visualization Report on Google Analytics

GA 360 provides more advanced Funnel Visualizations. As in the Image 1b.5 below, your Custom Reports section shows the additional “Funnel” option. This allows you to create “Custom Funnel reports.”

Image 1b.5. Custom Funnel in Google Analytics 360

The Custom Funnel reports can have up to five stages with up to five rules in each. Custom Funnel reports let you track all kinds of sequential actions your visitors take—page views, events, duration, etc.

Unlike the regular Funnel Visualization, which is auto-generated based on your goals, Custom Funnels allow you to track any wild path your visitors might be taking.

Image 1b.6. Example of a Custom Funnel Report in GA 360

Custom Funnels are perfect to track crazy pathways that lead to handsome conversions—for instance, you can track a visitor going in a path for which you don’t have a goal set up, like blog entry -> about us -> testimonials -> sign-up.

2. Data-Driven Attribution Modeling

You need to identify the right actions and pathways that lead to conversions. That’s how you learn where to put your dough.

Attribution Modeling allows you to accurately credit the actions and sources that lead to a conversion on your site.

For instance, Last Interaction Attribution Model gives credit to the last interaction the customer has taken on the website before conversion.

Imagine a visitor coming to your site five times over the course of a week through various sources—an ad, a link on a third-party site, a social media post, and finally an email. In the last visit (through the email), he makes a purchase. As per the Last Interaction Attribution model, the entire credit of that purchase is imparted to the email.

Other Attribution Models include Last Non-Direct Click, Last Google Ads Click, First Interaction, Linear, Time Decay, and Position-Based.

GA 360 introduces something more advanced—Data-Driven Attribution Modeling. It uses the actual Google Analytics data to impart conversion credit. Instead of tracking the last interaction or the first, wouldn’t it be smarter to use your own conversion paths to impart conversion credits?

Also, Data-Driven Attribution Modeling uses the data from all linked Google products, such as Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Google Display Network, and DoubleClick. Also, it considers the data uploaded via the Cost Data Upload feature.

Crediting conversion paths in this way is much more logical. And that’s why Data-Driven Attribution Model is brilliant.

3. Cross-Property Roll-Up Reporting

Imagine your company has country-specific domains (company.co.uk, company.in, company.ca, company.fr, etc.) Each of these domains can be analyzed as a Property in GA.

Standard GA doesn’t let you view the data from such different Properties in one place; you will come across the hassle of switching among Properties.

GA 360 provides Cross-Property Roll-Up reporting feature that allows you to view the data across Properties in one place. Roll-Up Properties are special Properties that aggregate data from multiple Properties.

Image 1b.7. Cross-Property Roll-Up Reporting

Roll-Up reporting allows you to remove unnecessary clutter in your reports and the need for signing into multiple Google Analytics Accounts to view data across your Properties.

4. Unlimited Data & Unsampled Reports

GA standard is already powerful, capable of tracking huge volumes of traffic. Up to 500,000 sessions can be tracked in a month per Property. When you overrun this, Google places a notice at the top: “This report is based on N% of sessions.” This means Google Analytics has taken a subset (known as the sample) of your actual data to generate the reports.

For instance, if your actual traffic is 600,000 and GA takes a 25% sample, your report will be based on 25% of 600,000 visits or 150,000 visits. Obviously, sampling reduces the accuracy of your reports.

If you select the “greater precision” option, your report will use maximum possible sample size to give the best possible accuracy. “Faster response” allows you to get the report faster with a smaller sample size, but with less accuracy.

Image 1b.8. Sampling Controls in GA Standard

But in the case of GA 360, you will come across no practical difficulty in getting the most accurate reports because the hit data collected is 200 times that of GA standard. Up to 100 million sessions per month can be tracked before sampling is even considered. In addition, this is per View, not per Property.

Also, as shown in Image 1b.3, the standard GA API doesn’t support unsampled reports.

5. Raw Data Export

As mentioned in the Image 1b.3, Google Analytics 360 allows integration with Google BigQuery. This is for raw data export and analysis using the BigQuery platform.

BigQuery is a database query platform through which you can analyze huge chunks of data by running commands using the structured query language (SQL).

Google Analytics 360 allows you to export your entire raw data to BigQuery and analyze it better with the query language.

BigQuery allows you to analyze up to 1 TB of data and store up to 10 GB of data in a month for free. BigQuery also provides seamless integration with BI tools such as Tableau and MicroStrategy.

Hence, for large organizations, the raw data export from GA 360 and analysis using BigQuery can unearth key business insights.

6. Data Freshness & SLAs

Google Analytics standard’s data freshness is around 24 to 48 hours. This means, your standard reports will show a visit only after at least 24 hours have passed.

On the other hand, Google Analytics 360 has a data freshness SLA that ensures visits are analyzed and reported usually within 4 hours. In addition, something called “enhanced data freshness” allows GA 360 to generate fresh reports as early as 10 minutes from a visit. Check out the Table 1b.1 below.

Table 1b.1. Google Analytics 360 Data Freshness

7. Implementation & Support

While you need to implement the standard version of Google Analytics yourself, as shown below, GA 360 provides implementation services.

Also, if you are a GA 360 customer, you are treated with special support options from Google or one of its partners such as Lunametrics.

Google Analytics Data Limits

As shown in Image 1b.3, Google Analytics imposes some data limits. While the standard version collects data up to certain predetermined limits, GA 360 takes it much higher.

1. Hits

The number of hits tracked by GA standard is up to 10 million per month. Also, each visit enjoys a huge hit limit of 500.

A hit is the most basic interaction a visitor makes on a web page. For instance, a page view is a hit that is tracked by default. If you implement custom events such as a button click or a video play or custom variables, those are also tracked as hits by the system.

Every visitor generates a few hits within his session—a click here, a page view there, etc.

10 million is a huge number in itself. This means, even if every visitor on your website generates 50 hits each (very high a number at that), GA standard can still track up to 10,000,000/50 = 200,000 visitors in a month.

On the other hand, GA 360 can track up to 1 billion hits per month. Beyond the 10 million hit limit, GA 360 provides you tiered pricing.

2. Custom Dimensions & Metrics

Let’s talk about custom dimensions and metrics.

GA standard allows you to create up to 20 custom dimensions and metrics each per Property. GA 360 on the other hand allows you to track up to 200 custom dimensions and metrics (each) for every Property.

3. Views

Every web Property can have up to 25 Views on the standard version, while GA 360 allows as many as 400 Views or more.

4. Sessions

As mentioned earlier, GA standard tracks up to 500,000 sessions for every Property before sampling is needed. In case of GA 360, the limit is per View, and it’s as high as 100 million.

5. Custom Tables & Unsampled Reports

In addition, as you read in Image 1b.3, GA 360 allows custom tables and unsampled reports with up to 3 million rows.

It’s definitely possible to analyze a high-traffic website using Google Analytics standard, but large organizations and high-traffic blog networks can take advantage of the massive data collection limits offered by GA 360.

Product Integrations

Google Analytics allows native integration with certain other Google products and some third-party solutions. You can get the linking done if you are the admin of your Google Analytics account.

Linking is done on the Property-level as shown in Image 1b.9. In your Admin page, under your Property, you can find the “Product Linking” section.

Image 1b.9. GA Product Linking

Click on “All Products” to get a list of all the Google products that you can link to your Analytics Account. GA 360 allows you to link a lot more products than GA standard. Even Salesforce Sales Cloud, a non-Google product, can be linked to GA 360.

1. BigQuery Integration

As mentioned earlier, Google BigQuery is a cloud-based platform that helps you analyze large chunks of data using a DB query language such as SQL.

To use the BigQuery platform, you need to be able to export the raw data from Google Analytics to BigQuery, a feature available only in GA 360. If you have the free version, you can use a workaround provided by Dayne Batten.

BigQuery integration lets you generate additional insights from your Analytics data by querying it with a DB query language and transferring the interpretations to a business analytics tool. This will show you unusual data patterns, site issues you may want to fix, and key opportunities you don’t want to miss.

2. Salesforce Sales Cloud Integration

Another key integration available on GA 360 since Jan 2018 is with Salesforce Sales Cloud, the leading CRM software. This was the direct result of Google’s partnership with Salesforce that went into effect in November 2017.

Salesforce is the market leader in CRM and enjoys over 100,000 customers worldwide.

Image 1b.a. CRM Market Share Till 2015

Integration to Salesforce Sales Cloud will radically improve the data accuracy of Google Analytics 360 as you can now bring the sales lead data from Sales Cloud to GA 360 and use it to improve your Attribution Models, bid optimization, audience creation, and remarketing.

Similarly, the GA 360 audiences will be available on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for use in your Salesforce campaigns.

Hence, for organizations that depend on a CRM, this integration would be extremely logical and essential.

The Cost Factor

Google Analytics standard is a free tool, quite like most of the Google products. GA 360 on the other hand is somewhat exorbitant at $150,000 per year, billed monthly to the customers.

Check out the Table 1b.2 below showing the pricing of competing digital analytics products.

Table 1b.2. Pricing of Digital Analytics Products

Even though the pricing may be indicative of their data collection and reporting limits, these competing products are also perfect for tracking even high-traffic websites and apps. However, they are nowhere nearly as pricey as Google Analytics 360. Why?

Also, IBM Digital Analytics is a major contender, but its pricing information was not available.

Why Is Google Analytics 360 So Expensive?

As mentioned, GA 360 is probably the most expensive of all the digital analytics solutions out there. Even Adobe, notorious for its overpricing, provides a more affordable product. However, Adobe Analytics could cost as high as $350,000 depending on your custom requirements.

But should you really treat GA 360 as prohibitively expensive? G2Crowd’s user-reported pricing data tells otherwise. GA 360 ranks at 61^st percentile in terms of cost in the digital analytics category.

Image 1b.b. Google Analytics 360 Pricing Analysis by G2Crowd

The customer discount is also given in the Image 1b.c.

Image 1b.c. GA 360 Customer Discount Given by G2Crowd

Individuals and small businesses may find it unnecessary to pay for such an analytics product as they almost never reach the level of traffic that GA 360 is designed for.

It may seem counterintuitive to spend money while GA 360’s promise is to save some. Let’s see whether the investment is properly justified for large and medium businesses.

Imagine you are optimizing your site based on the real-time data and additional unsampled reports available on GA 360. Your data accuracy and the capability to integrate with several products are certain to elevate your conversion rate.

As a practical example, consider Domino’s Pizza, a pizza lover’s favorite.

According to a Google case study published in 2015, Domino’s Pizza, UK generated a monthly revenue boost of 6% in 2015 by the implementation of Google Analytics 360.

Domino’s UK had a revenue of GBP 757.8 million in 2014. By 2015, the 6% increase had generated an additional revenue of GBP 45.47 million, merely due to the implementation of GA 360.

Now, the ROI of this would be:

ROI = (Revenue/Cost) – 1

i.e., ROI = 45,470,000/150,000 – 1 = 302.13 or 30,213%

Domino’s was able to achieve such a whopping ROI because its revenue was already high, and even a small improvement could bring a handsome revenue boost.

That kind of an ROI completely justifies the usage of GA 360, doesn’t it?

However, before implementation, you should consider a few things.

• To justify the use of GA 360, your website and apps should be large enough pulling massive traffic, of the order of millions of users.
• You should have a dedicated team or an account manager for managing digital analytics.
• You should be prepared to utilize the information obtained from GA 360 to improve your marketing campaigns and channels. You shouldn’t let personal opinions interfere in this.
• Your organization uses a business analytics suite that could take advantage of raw data on your traffic.

So, GA 360 is a perfectly justified investment if your organization is large enough and you don’t want to miss out on insights from your high-traffic websites and apps. Google Analytics standard version is free and feature-rich, and it’s more than enough for a medium- to high-traffic blog or a small business website.

The post Google Analytics Free Vs. Google Analytics 360: A Detailed Comparison Chart appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> https://www.zoomowl.com/google-analytics-free-360-comparison/feed/ 0 https://www.zoomowl.com/google-analytics-structure-for-website-tracking/ https://www.zoomowl.com/google-analytics-structure-for-website-tracking/#respond Fri, 22 Jun 2018 12:46:42 +0000 https://www.zoomowl.com/?p=432 Organizing your Google Analytics (GA) account can be a little challenging with ample technical terminology (Property, View, Organization, etc.,) to confuse you. ZoomOwl brings a guide to help Analytics admins establish the right organizational structure for their Google Analytics accounts. A concern that most small business owners and webmasters have is about the proper organization…

The post How to Organize and Structure Your Google Analytics Account appeared first on ZoomOwl.

]]> Organizing your Google Analytics (GA) account can be a little challenging with ample technical terminology (Property, View, Organization, etc.,) to confuse you. ZoomOwl brings a guide to help Analytics admins establish the right organizational structure for their Google Analytics accounts.

A concern that most small business owners and webmasters have is about the proper organization of their Google Analytics (GA) account(s) to track their websites and apps. You’ll come across confusing technical terms such as Organization, Account, Property, and View. But do you know the purpose of each?

If you have a single website, what should you create—a Property or a View? If you have multiple web apps, what should you create? Can you track the web assets of a large organization with just one Google Analytics Account, or more?

So, I developed this guide to answer your questions in account organization. By the end of it, it should be clear to you as to how you should structure your Google Analytics Account(s) to track a single website or many websites and apps.

TL;DR

Totally lost (too long); didn’t read? Here you go.

Image 1A.1. Organizational Structure of Google Analytics Accounts

The Various Terms

When you open an Account in Google Analytics, you should input a few things; two of them are the Account name and Property details.

After you set up your Account, you may need to create Views as well; GA creates a raw data View by default for you.

If you are managing a high-traffic website and are paying for premium Google Analytics 360, you may come across an additional term “Organization.”

Let’s look at these terms in detail in the following mini glossary.

1. Organization

This is a no-brainer, I hope? If you have a company, that’s what it refers to. Imagine you run a company that owns multiple websites and mobile apps—kind of like a blog network.

When you sign up on Google Analytics, you should ideally create an Organization for your company. This is your brand name.

Organizations can be created only through the Google Analytics 360 interface, not through the free version.

Take a look at Image 1A.2 below to see how ZoomOwl’s Organization page looks.

Image 1A.2. Google Analytics 360 Organization Page

2. Property

A Property could be the digital counterpart of any kind of real-world property. For instance, a website could be a Property. A mobile app could be a Property. A social media account could be another Property (although GA doesn’t track it). Each website or mobile app should have its own Property created in GA. This is how GA tracks visits to them.

3. View

Views consist of reports on the Properties you are tracking. It’s a collection of customized reports pertaining to your website or mobile app. You can create a View on any specific type of traffic. For instance, you can create a View to show only the traffic from your target market.

Setting Up the Analytics Organization Account for a Company

For an organization, you need to set up a Google Analytics Organization account and attach the organization’s other GA Accounts and Properties to it. Essentially, the account setup looks like Image 1A.1 above.

First, you need to create an Organization to club all your Analytics solutions under one umbrella—your Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize, Data Studio, Surveys, Attribution, and Audience Center.

Don’t be fretted by so many products. They are all part of the Google Analytics 360 Solution Suite. However, for traffic measurement, you will be using only GA and, to some extent, Tag Manager.

In order to create your Organization, head over to the 360 Suite org page. Here, click the six-block icon at the top left.

Image 1A.3. 360 Suite Organization Icon

On the page that shows up, click “New Organization” and then select the details of the Organization. Finally click “Create” to create the Organization. You can create a Google+ account also to represent your Organization.

Image 1A.4. Creating Organization in 360 Suite

Also, select the existing accounts on the Suite products to link them to the Organization. They will all be available under one roof from now on.

Take a look at ZoomOwl’s Organization page below. As you can see, I have set up one GA account and two Google Tag Manager accounts, which are linked to the ZoomOwl Organization.

Image 1A.5. ZoomOwl Google Analytics Organization Page

Each Organization account allows you to add multiple Google Analytics Accounts, Properties, and Views.

Google Analytics Account Limits

Now you know that you can create multiple Accounts, Properties, and Views under a single Google login. Table 1A.1 shows the limits for that.

Table 1A.1. GA Account Limits

You should note that the limits of Accounts, Properties, and Views for GA 360 accounts are not known. Your GA 360 account manager can help you increase these limits as needed.

This Analytics support forum answer may give some hope to free account holders on increasing the Account limit beyond what is possible.

Furthermore, you can always sign up for additional Google accounts and use them to increase the limit again.

Creating Multiple Google Analytics Accounts Under One Organization

Why do you need multiple Accounts? Well, there are several reasons. Imagine you are like me managing Google Analytics Accounts and traffic reporting for a few clients. In such case, you don’t want to club all of those Properties under one Account.

Also, you might want to impart Account-level access to other stakeholders. If you don’t maintain separate Accounts, stakeholders can access Properties that don’t belong to them.

Maintaining separate GA Accounts for your clients also allows you to give Account-level admin access to other admins. They can edit, collaborate, read & analyze reports, and manage other users in this way. Later, we’ll see the various user privileges.

So, in order to create several Google Analytics Accounts under one Organization, head over to your Analytics page and click the cog Admin icon at the bottom.

Image 1A.6. Opening the Google Analytics Admin Page

Then click the “+Create Account” button.

Image 1A.7. Creating a New Google Analytics Account

Now, select the appropriate settings for the Account—whether you are tracking a website or an app, the account name, etc. You may also notice the option to link the Organization you have already set up.

Image 1A.8. Settings of New Google Analytics Accounts

As you notice, you can set up a Property in the Account creation screen itself.

The maximum number of Accounts you can have for your Google login is 100. After reaching the limit, create additional Accounts by creating additional Google logins.

Setting Up Additional Properties

After setting up your Account, you may want to set up additional Properties. It’s pretty easy. As you see in the image above, you can simply click the “+Create Property” button to set up a new Property under the current Account.

Properties can be either a website or a mobile app. Each has its own settings: While the website asks for the URL, category, and name, the mobile app asks you to connect to Firebase. Firebase is Google’s integrated app development platform.

You can have up to 50 Properties defined under your Google Analytics Account, as per Table 1A.1 .

Setting Up Additional Views

Views are a little trickier than the Properties and Accounts. A View contains a collection of various types of traffic reports of your Property.

When you log in to your Google Analytics Account, what you see is the default View of your Property.

By default, when you create your Analytics account, a View is created. This is the raw data View, which includes all the information Analytics is able to collect from your traffic. By default, this raw View is known as “All Web Site Data” as shown below.

Image 1A.9. Google Analytics Default View

You may want to create customized Views that have filters applied on them, in order to view specific data.

Let’s see now how you can create your first View. Head over to the Analytics Admin panel and click the “+ Create View” button at the top. Set a name and a time zone and then click “Create View.”

Image 1A.A. Creating a Google Analytics View

That’s it. This will create a raw View that is not customized at all. In order to customize the View, you need to set up some Google Analytics filters and apply them on the View.

When you create a new View, it doesn’t automatically display the historical data. It will only show the traffic from the date of creation of the View.

Using the top left dropdown, you can switch between all the Views you have created.

Image 1A.B. Google Analytics View Switcher

If you want to copy a View to create a new View, you should go to “View Settings” in the Admin panel and click the “Copy view” button. Make sure that you are in the correct View at the top left.

Different Types of Views You Should Create

Depending on your website, your traffic locales, target market, demographics, etc., you may want to set up various additional Views for your Analytics Property, in order to analyze your traffic smarter. Let’s look at some Views that you should create.

1. Raw Data View

As we saw above, Google Analytics creates the “All Web Site Data” View by default. This is the View of your raw traffic data. So, it gives you the complete picture of your entire traffic. It would make sense to apply no Filters on this View to always have access to your raw traffic data.

2. Test View

You may need to create a test View out of your main Google Analytics View. The purpose of the test View is to help you with testing various manipulations that you do on your data. If those manipulations permanently affect the data, it makes sense to do it on the test View first.

3. IP-Filtered View

You don’t want your own visit to your site distorting your data; so, you should set up a View with the traffic from your IP range filtered out. This can be set up using the IP/ISP exclusion filter.

3. Target Market View

If you have a location-bound business, you may want to create a GA View that shows traffic originating from your operating location. This way, you can keep track of the traffic originating from your target market.

4. Subdomain/Subsite Views

If you have several subdomains on your website to focus on specific topics, you may want to segregate them on Google Analytics as well. Creating specific Views with Filters to identify the traffic to these subdomains is one way to achieve this.

5. Device-Specific Views

The smartphone is the new laptop. More than 50% of global web traffic originates from mobile devices. In such a world, it makes sense to set up separate Views for traffic from laptops and desktops and the traffic from mobile devices.

Image 1A.C. Mobile Vs. Desktop Traffic (2016 Vs. 2017)

6. User ID-Based View

You know that Google Analytics allows you to track the members of your website using a feature known as User-ID. If you have User-ID implemented on your website, you may find it logical to set up a User-ID View to track the visitors who log into the site.

Google Analytics Organizational Structure Use Cases

Let’s check out some account structuring use cases specific to certain scenarios.

1. How to Structure My Account If I Have Only One Website

If you have only one website, you need one Google Analytics Account, a Property, and multiple Views (as necessary).

Image 1A.D. GA Structure for Single Website or App

If you have only one mobile app, follow the same structure.

2. How to Structure My Account If I Have One or More Websites and Apps

If you have one or more websites and mobile apps, you should create a Property for each of them. For instance, if you have five websites and a mobile app, you should create six Google Analytics Properties under one account.

Image 1A.E. GA Structure for Multiple Websites and Apps

3. How to Structure My Account If I Have Only One Website and Several Subdomains

As we earlier mentioned in the View section, for subdomains you can create separate Views to track the data. If you have only one website and a few subdomains under that, you can safely track the data by creating separate Views for each subdomain.

Image 1A.D. GA Structure for Single Website or App

4. How to Structure My Account If I Manage Analytics for Multiple Clients

If you are a Google Analytics manager with several clients, you will have to create a proper organization structure for yourself and create separate Google Analytics accounts for each client. The image 1A.1 above shows the organization structure you need to follow.

Ideally, management of Google Analytics accounts for different clients, you need access only to the various Properties, such as websites and apps. Your client should create the GA account under their email address and invite you to be the admin of the web Property.

Image 1A.F. Adding Additional Admins to a Google Analytics Property

This way, you will only have the Property-level access with all the privileges of an admin. The only downside is that you won’t be able to create any Filters, which are an Account-level feature. The organization structure in this case is given in image 1A.1 below.

Image 1A.G. GA Admin Property-Level Access to Manage Client Properties

User Account Management

In Google Analytics, you may also need to manage multiple users. For instance, if you are the Analytics manager for an organization, organizational stakeholders may require access to the traffic reports. Let’s see how to manage them properly.

As the admin of the Google Analytics Account, you have the complete access to it. You can manage users in three levels: Account-level, Property-level, and View-level.

Go to the Admin panel and see the “User Management” link in each section.

Image 1A.H. User Management in Google Analytics

Here, you can add or remove users in the three sections, by using their Gmail addresses.

The level in which you add the user determines the access privileges of the user. For instance, if you add users at the Property level, they will have access only to that Property and the Views under it. If you add users at the View level, they will be able to access only that View.

Image 1A.I. Google Analytics Add User Screen

Your “Add User” pane looks the same on all three levels as shown in Image 1A.I. The privileges are determined by four types of permission check boxes. Let’s look at each in detail.

• Edit: With the Edit permission, your user can perform most of the administrative functions, such as add or delete Accounts, Properties, or Views; create Filters; create Goals; etc. Edit permission doesn’t allow the user to add new users though.
• Collaborate: With this permission, a user can create and share assets including attribution models, channel grouping, custom reports, calculated metrics, etc.
• Read & Analyze: With this permission, a user can view the data, filter and sort tables, add secondary dimensions to reports, create segments, etc. Users can also create shared assets, but cannot collaborate with them.
• Manage Users: With this permission, a user can add or remove users and change their permissions.

Each of the permission levels above is inclusive of the permission level below it (except Manage Users). For instance, the Edit permission allows the user to collaborate and read & analyze. The Collaborate permission allows them to read & analyze as well.

But the Manage Users permission is not given by default to the other permission levels. So, for users to be an admin, they need both the Edit permission and the Manage Users permission.

I hope this article has been helpful to you and answered your queries in organizing your Google Analytics accounts. Please like, comment, and share. Also, please don’t forget to subscribe to my updates.

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