Google Plus for Businesses in Australia

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Joey

Yesterday Google launched Google plus for businesses in Australia and across the globe. This is very exciting for many in the US where Google plus has had a very high uptake rate, but it is less exciting for me in Australia as we still have a very shallow penetration of Google Plus.

If you want to setup a Google Plus page for your business in Australia head over here.  It only takes about 2 minutes to setup and then you can interact in Google Plus as your business, much the same way as you can in Facebook acting as a page and not an individual.

Google Plus for Businesses Australia

Time will tell how much value Google Plus will be for businesses in Australia and across the world, but it could be one of those slow burns that you just have to keep adding value to slowly.

Check us out over at https://plus.google.com/s/fenton%20stephens

 

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Shorten a string in Excel up to a specific character

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Joey

I know this sounds like the most boring blog title ever, but I’m sure many analysts have had this problem before and wanted to find the answer to this annoying question.  So here goes…

Don’t you hate it when you have to analyse a list of URLs but the data you have received has dynamic URLs for the same page which you just want to treat as one page.  Simple, just used the Excel remove duplicates function right?  Wrong.  The strings are unique so Excel won’t trim them down for you.

Lets say you want to remove all of the characters after the ‘?’ there is actually a way you can do this in Excel which makes use of the ‘LEFT’ function.  Below is the code that you copy into the cell next to the cell you want to shorten the string.  What this function does is search through the string for the ‘?’ character and the deletes everything past this point.

=LEFT(A1,FIND(“?”,A1,1)-1)

Now you have a beautiful list of URL’s ,many of which will now be the same.  You can now use the trusty remove duplicates function and you now have your shortened list of URLs that you need to analyse.

 

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New Multi-channel Funnels in Google Analytics

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Joey

Well most of the bugs are out of the new Multi-Channel funnels in Google Analytics so I thought it was time for me to write a post about it and share some of my expeiences.  First of all I have to say that the new features, which has finally made its way across from Adwords is a fantastic addition to Google Analytics.  We now have a very clear view of what areas of our marketing efforts are actually contributing to conversions.

First of all I will explain what a conversion path is.  The most simple way to explain this is just to use the basic chart out of Google Analytics.  As you can see, all of the interactions leading up to the conversion are now stored within Google analytics and even if the source/medium/campaign does not get the last interaction conversion it is now awarded the assisted conversion.  This means that many of the traffic acquisition funnels are now being heralded for all of the new customers they are introducing to the brand, which were previously missed.

Conversion anatomyThis leads to some very powerful analyses to see which conversion parts are interacting with other conversion paths.  This leads to one of my favourite charts, the humble Venn diagram.  As you can see below, it is now very easy to see which conversion paths interact with others.

Multichannel Venn DiagramAs you can see in this example, there is a very big overlap between paid and organic search.  The area of organic which is mutually exclusive to paid is a very important area as these are most likely the punters that don’t trust ads and need to be acquired via SEO.

Some other interesting analyses are the impact of social media on customer acquisition which has now been made a great deal easier. It is still not perfect, but you can now get a much better idea of how you social efforts are impacting your bottom line by selecting social media along with other key converting channels like SEM & SEO.

There are still a few issues with filtering and multi-channel analytics but I’m sure that these will be sorted out over the coming weeks.

So the question I pose to you all is what insights have you found for your clients by performing multi-channel analysis in Google Analytics?

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Zing – Good or Bad Strategy?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Joey

There is an interesting new campaign by Australia Post hitting the market called Zing.  Zing is a replacement word for anything sent by Australia Post.  I love the creative and the ads are quite interesting, I’m just not a huge fan of the online execution.


The call to action on the TV ad is interesting – ‘Search Zing’ – however the major concern for an external strategist is that yes they have number 1 ad position for this term which has very little competition (for now) but hey do not have the #1 organic term.  The bleed from this would be quite large.

Zing

The other major concern is that they do not have a trademark for this term.  This means that any advertisers can ‘Buy’ this term as well and leverage Aus Post’s advertising budget.  These bids will generally be very low… in the vicinity of a few cents.  Here is the Google Search box a few minutes after the campaign launched… see one more advertiser using the term Zing.
And for a bit of a laugh, this is how easy it is to leverage a strategy such as this…
To date their YouTube video has only had 1537 views so it’s safe to say that it’s not ‘Going off on YouTube’.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this campaign?  I think it’s a great idea and I love Search Call to Cations in TV campaigns (it makes them measurable), I just feel that the online execution has let the campaign down a bit.

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New Top Level Domain Decision

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Joey

One of the biggest shake ups in internet history happened this week with ICANN approving the new top level domain decision.  What this means is that now businesses can apply to create new domain extensions such as .com & .net etc.  The application process costs $185,000 which means that it will only be available to very large organisations.

This is great news for large businesses so they can stand out from the crowd.  Cyber-squatting will be much less of an issue for example;

It is quite easy to cybersquat something like http://www.appl3.com but it is impossible to emulate http://www.genuine.apple

What are your thoughts on these latest changes?  Do you think they will give huge brands a distinct advantage over small to medium brands?  Time will tell.

Check out this cool infographic – a great summary of the changes.

new top level domain

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Google Webmaster Tools + Google Analytics

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Joey

Fantastic news for SEOs out there with the news that Google are going to be integrating these fantastic tools.  Google Webmaster tools provides some amazing insights for SEOs and with this data now being integrated into Analytics it ill be much easier to track keyword position performance.

More info here.

If you haven’t got Webmaster tools setup on your website its a very simple process.  Just go over to WebMasterTools and get up your account.

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Kinect Shop

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Joey

This is one of the most cool applications of the Microsoft Kinect I’ve seen to date.  It really opens your eyes into the future of eCommerce.  Imagine a time when you will be able to try on a complete outfit without leaving your own home.  You will even be able to get feedback from your friends all over the world via your connected social network.

Check out the video over at Creativity Online.

Kinect shopWhat are your thoughts on this amazing use of this technology by Razorfish?

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Google Fast Access Mode

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Joey

What are you doing to me Google?  This is the first time I’ve ever seen this problem, but my segments are not working in my reports for the month of April.  Not just my custom segments, but the generic segments such as non-paid search traffic.

What are you doing Google?  I have other ways to pull the data down, but this just wastes my analysis time.

Google Analytics Fast Access Mode

 

Now I know that this isn’t due to sampling as this site doesn’t have over 500,000 visits per month, but what else could it be?  Stay tuned while I find an answer!

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Multiple Google Analytics Codes on 1 Website

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Joey

Multiple GA codes on 1 websiteOften you have a situation in website analysis where you need to be able to track visitors on a subdomain but also track how they traverse across he entire website.

One solution is to use a modified Google Analytics code to track visits across the subdomain.  This inserts the below line into the GATC.  Notice the “.” before YOURSITE.  This allows each subdomain to write to the tracking cookie and allows visitor information to travel across with the visit.

_gaq.push(['b._setDomainName', '.YOURSITE.com.au']);

The other way to do this is to have multiple Google Analytics codes on the 1 website, and is often called roll up reporting.  It is quite simple, all you need to do is add the tracking parameters for the second GA account with a slightly modified name.. i.e. “b.”

_gaq.push(['b._setAccount', UA-636842-12]);

_gaq.push(['b._trackPageview']);

The second method is best when you have one parent site that wants a macro view of the overall performance of the website, but still want the smaller business units to have control over their own subdomain.

If you have any tricky Google Analytics questions please feel free to reply and I’ll give you some feedback, Google Analytics is highly customisable and answers can be found to almost every problem.

 

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Circus Festival – Commercial Creativity

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Joey

Last week I had the please of attending the first Circus Festival of Commercial Creativity in Sydney.  It was a great day with 9 speakers including

  • Jeffrey Cole from Centre of Digital Future
  • Angnello Dias from Taproot India
  • Jess Greenwood Contagious Insider
  • Marvin Chow from Google
  • Erik Vervroegen from GSP
  • Josh Spear from Undercurrent
  • Charles Wigley from BBH Asia
  • Rob Campbell from Wieden + Kennedy
  • Jose Cabaco from Nike

All of the speakers were amazing and made me sit bit and think about the solutions we provide our customers and how we can improve them.  Some of the highlights were;

Jeffrey Cole - His insights and analysis into the changing landscape of media and both offline and online habits.  Its great to think a bit further away than just this campaign, or this year, and his insights help you to do this

Marvin Chow – Google’s approach to marketing is much the same way in which we improve websites, launch early, launch fast, test, test, test, improve.  It’s great to get some insights into their marketing process.

Josh Spear – Josh’s insights into the bottom 80% of the web, and the trends they spawn were fantastic.  His insights into cultural meme’s were amazing and got people to think about the message and the communication rules of the medium and audience you are communicating with.

Charles Wigley - The anti-wind tunnel marketing movement is a great way to describe what Charles talked about.  Basically this presentation was about the homogenisation of marketing in many verticals such as Shampoo & AWD cars.  It’s kind of like Einstein’s famous saying ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.  If agencies use the same research companies, to get the same insights, to drive the same processes to come up with the same single minded propositions the end result will clearly be the same.

Anyway, it was a great day and I would highly recommend it to any business and marketing professional.

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