Tools of the Trade

Why You Shouldn't Replace Your Old Website

Mark Figart — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 18:02:22 +0000

Why You Shouldn't Replace Your Old Website

Mark Figart Tue, 07/16/2019 - 1:02pm

It’s mid-morning and my cell phone rings. I’m between tasks and haven’t talked to a soul all morning. I need to hear a voice, even if I don’t recognize the caller’s number. Surprisingly it’s not spam, and the lady on the other end, the owner of an MSP in Dallas, explains that she needs a new website. I try to get her to describe the problem.

“What’s wrong with the website now?”

“It’s not working for us”, she says.

So I ask, “Would you mind if I ask what specifically isn’t working?”

She replies, “I’m not getting any sales leads through the site.”

“Any idea why?”

“No”, she answers, “and I’m counting on a new website to fix this issue.”

We are trained to buy new.

Does this story strike you as a little ridiculous? It does me, but at the same time I get it. Most of us are busier than hell, so busy that sometimes buying new is easier than trying to fix what’s broken. We also live in a culture of disposables—electronics, home appliances—where repair ends up being more expensive than purchasing a new replacement. We have been trained to “buy new”.

If that’s not enough, others may try to convince us that new is better. As a marketing agency owner, I used to think convincing a client to replace a legacy website was, by default, in their best interest, knowing that what my team would build would be superior to what it was replacing. Some agencies will not consider taking on a new client if forced to work with the legacy website. It’s new or nothing. My agency now takes a contrarian view.

I’ve also seen stakeholders within a firm, if unhappy with their firm’s website for any reason, lobby for a new one. They don’t necessarily have to contribute, financially or otherwise, to the process of building it, so what do they have to lose in asking for it?

What’s so bad about a new website?

There are lots of reasons why you should not build a new website to replace a legacy site. For one, a website is not a dishwasher, and you can’t just pick out a new one on Amazon. Even the simplest websites generally combine some form of unique expression and tailored design with the complexity of an underlying content management system and hosting environment. As soon as you make a choice to rebuild your website you are likely committing yourself to double, triple, or quadruple your normal workload over the subsequent weeks and months to have any hope of a favorable outcome. You can’t effectively outsource or delegate the important decisions about your firm’s marketing, and the decisions are numerous. I’m not arguing that the effort is reason in and of itself to avoid building a new website, but I do want to make the point that buying new is anything but the easier option.

It’s not about what you’re gaining, but what you’re losing.

The reason you should think long and hard about replacing your website has more to do with what you’re giving up when you make the leap from the old website to the new one. The typical new website is birthed from hundreds, if not thousands, of assumptions based on opinion, intuition, and quite likely one or more persuasive personalities. Perhaps some new design trends are incorporated, and some new photography and video thrown in. Maybe the navigational structure is re-organized. And maybe, just maybe, the result of all these guesses is better than the existing website.

But you know what’s usually missing from that onerous process? What’s missing is evidence that any of these changes will make a difference to your audience. What’s missing is the influence of convincing data that supports each of our decisions. Red buttons instead of blue. Roboto font instead of Montserrat. Putting our philosophy on the About page. Adding all the employees to the Team page rather than just showing C-level leadership. Are you making all those changes because you have evidence they will move you toward your business goal?

Look, I have no doubt that a talented agency can create a “better” website than the one that your company published five or seven years ago. But unless you have rigorously been running marketing experiments on the site (I bet you haven’t) and unless the intelligence garnered is leveraged in the design of your new website (an awkward idea, given the way iterative experimentation works), then a wholesale replacement of your website is probably not a great idea.

Changes to your website should be made incrementally, based on the results of experiments that provide evidence that such change has a positive impact. What I have typically witnessed instead is a monumental (substitute “expensive”) effort resulting in the implementation a brand new design, a site’s underlying technical architecture, and typically some smaller portion of a website’s content. A brand new site that may, or may not, bring better results than the last one. Out with the old site, and along with it a ton of data that would have proved quite useful as a benchmark for experimentation.

To add insult to injury, these gargantuan efforts take so much in the way of time and money that many times there’s no appetite left for actually leveraging the asset in a meaningful way. “Set it and forget it” seems to be the prevailing philosophy. I’m reminded of the tortoise and the hare. The rabbit burns out, and I don’t blame him for sitting on the bench to catch his breath while the methodical tortoise inches forward, each confident step adding a new insight and creating value.

How to have the best website among your competitors without ever building a new one

The most successful marketers take a different approach. Instead of operating out of the perceived need to impress the CEO with a flashy new website or to make a big splash with a redesign, they seek to understand the connection between what happens on the website today and the buying decisions made by customers and prospects. They observe website behavior and develop goals related to how to deliver more value as measured by improved engagement, an increase in micro-conversion rates, higher page rank, or some other meaningful metric. They hypothesize and design experiments to measure the impact of small changes on those metrics. They seek to create one simple success after another, implementing change only when evidence suggests that such a change will bring about a positive result.

Continuous experimentation is not easy. But in contrast to the complexity of a major website overhaul it is infinitely more manageable. And if you want to maximize the positive impact of a website budget, you’ll most often do far better—that is, you’ll make a much greater impact toward meeting business goals—spending it incrementally through experimentation and incremental changes than you will on the typical website replacement route.

Challenges of evidence-based change

I have no expectation of seeing an end to this website replacement bias anytime soon. Even when marketers embrace the idea of pursuing data-driven, incremental change, they may face pressures that prevent its practice.

Another obstacle is the clunky and cumbersome nature of the traditional content management system (CMS) that powers most websites. Tools like Wordpress and Drupal solve a lot of problems, to be clear, but their complex intertwinement of interdependent database and file system content storage, navigation logic, visual “theme” layer, and content administration interface holds marketers hostage, and sometimes seem to force wholesale website replacement. Fortunately there are new technologies and trends emerging (e.g., the headless CMS, JAMstack) that are empowering a growing cadre of agile marketers. And again, we’re not necessarily talking about wholesale replacement of a CMS. Even the aging monolith CMS systems can be leveraged for incremental change, sometimes continuing to provide value well down the road, ceding some roles to more agile-friendly technologies.

Where we are headed

New technologies and tools, along with a growing general awareness of the weakness of traditional approaches to digital marketing as a whole, are behind a trend toward evidence-based website management. I hope to play a role in expediting the adoption, because I don’t like to see waste.

Do you have a website replacement project on your marketing roadmap? Consider, at least, an alternative, incremental approach. Ask yourself if your time, energy and budget might be better allocated toward gathering useful evidence and implementing incremental change rather than on rebuilding your site in its entirety. If you’re honest with yourself, you may conclude that the time has come to adjust your approach.

Right-Sizing Your Marketing Infrastructure

Mark Figart — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:42:45 +0000

Right-Sizing Your Marketing Infrastructure

Mark Figart Thu, 06/29/2017 - 1:42pm

Go big or go home. (- ubiquitous)

I first heard the quote above in 2001. It was a company mantra introduced by a new CEO who had been brought in to save our ailing company, one of the many beneficiaries, and subsequent victims, of the dot-com bubble. Four months later the firm shut its doors. We went home.

If the major marketing automation software companies had their way, you’d be convinced that until you invest in a robust and comprehensive automation platform—until you "go big"—your firm isn’t serious about B2B marketing. But investing heavily in any infrastructure to automate processes that do not demand such automation can be putting the cart before the horse. And so it goes with the entire ecosystem of marketing infrastructure—from content management systems (CMS) to social media management and monitoring solutions to analytics packages.

Companies like HubSpot—an indisputable heaver hitter in the world of marketing automation software—have done an incredible job of educating the masses on the potential benefits of inbound marketing. But there's an indisputable, albeit understandable, bias in the propaganda of just about every software maker out there that their tools are your starting point for success.

The Often Overstated Value of “Big”

I can tell you from experience that technology is not alone a solution for less-than-stellar marketing results. What's more, shiny tools can even distract marketers from high-value activities like content development.

Can marketing automation help make a good program more effective? Yes. Can a CMS upgrade help improve the efficiency and output of a good team? Right again. So don’t get me wrong. Technology can not only, in the right circumstances, increase marketing ROI, it is at times indispensable for company growth.

The problem I often see is that technology—and the market hype cultivated by the tremendous resources that are spent by the companies who sell highly-evolved and full-featured software platforms—lead many to think that it’s somehow fundamental to modern digital marketing. I disagree.

A Review of Marketing Fundamentals

What’s fundamental to effective digital marketing is compelling content. And great content is a product of leadership’s dedication toward leveraging resources inside and outside of the firm to better understand its audience and to creating content that speaks to that audience's needs, consistently, over the long haul.

What’s fundamental is reaching an audience. And reach, in a digital marketing context, is in part a product of thoughtfully planned and executed keyword inclusion and basic SEO best practices.

What’s fundamental is the conversion. And online conversions are a product of well-placed offers, clear and concise copy and effective calls to action.

What’s fundamental is the follow up. And following up with interested prospects is more a product of organization and discipline than it is dependent on automated lead scoring and integration with CRM.

Too Big, or Too Small?

The obvious point is that some companies have no business biting off big powerful software to support their marketing effort. Likewise, professional services firms who seem to have mastered the fundamentals, who have through years of dedication managed to transform their website into an effective source of new sales leads, should not avoid committing to an investment in automation because they can’t stomach spending money on software that they don’t understand. While I commend and even relate to the skepticism these firms' leaders exhibit, infrastructure that fits poorly—whether "too big" or "too small"—carries a cost.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

As I've recently articulated in Digett's Disruption Roadmap, there's a natural evolution to digital transformation of a professional services firm. Tier 1, often a firm's first foray into digital marketing, doesn't depend on full-featured marketing automation tools. Rather, there's an emphasis on the fundamentals of a sound marketing strategy incorporating basic tool sets. What some may not understand is just how much power a number of inexpensive tools can provide to support an effective content marketing effort. CampaignMonitor and Mailchimp, two of Digett's most beloved choices of email marketing platforms, do not try to tackle lead scoring, a potentially valuable capability for improving effectiveness related to signaling when prospects who have demonstrated interest in a firm's services warrant some sort of personal contact. But lead scoring is most valuable when there are too many sales leads to manage with a spreadsheet. This is likely not the case in the early stages of a digital marketing effort.

As internal marketing competencies in a professional services firm mature, so grows the potential for improving overall marketing ROI through leveraging more sophisticated technology. The automation suites Digett is most familiar with—HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo and Act-On, for example—offer advantages related not only to breadth of features, but to how they consolidate marketing activities—which may otherwise be spread across four or five SaaS-based services—into a single interface. Email marketing and nurturing, lead scoring, landing page creation and testing, and social media monitoring are examples of different capabilities that could each be handled by a different individual tool, or which could all be handled by any one of the automation offerings mentioned. Consolidation results in increased convenience, efficiency, and in some cases better data about your prospects' behavior.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

With power comes complexity, and some firms just aren't prepared for the learning curve presented by these capable tools. Managing the marketing technology stack is one area where agencies like Digett can provide great value. Not only can an agency hit the ground running to immediately leverage the extensive feature sets of sophisticated martech (please pardon the jargon) tools, quality agencies understand just how such capabilities can be employed for their greatest gain.

The bottom line is that professional services marketers should focus first on fundamentals, and consider employing newer or more powerful technology only when there is a clear advantage to be gained by doing so. Despite technology hype, there is wisdom in a "crawl, walk, run" philosophy.

Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

Jennifer Edwards — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 18:23:14 +0000

Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

Jennifer Edwards Wed, 12/10/2014 - 12:23pm

Although Black Friday has come and gone, we are still just getting into the holiday shopping season. Don’t wait any longer to pump up your marketing strategy — now is the time to give your customers some holiday cheer. Here are three ways you can improve your marketing this holiday season.

Oh what a sight

Winter is one of the most beautiful times of the year, so take advantage of it by wowing your customers with gorgeous visuals of the season. Whether you prefer an elegant Christmas tree or a snow covered forest, make sure to use high-quality photos that will catch people’s attention.

If you are ready to take it a step further, try asking your customers to send in photos. What is better than using great visuals made by real customers? Not only will they love being recognized on social media, but incorporating user-generated images can even allow you to run promotions centered around your fans’ content.

Send some cheer

You would be surprised how many companies actually take the time to send out holiday greetings this time of year. Stand out from your competition by getting a little creative this year with your cards or e-cards.

Want to stand out even more? Send your holiday card on non-traditional card-sending holidays, like New Year’s Eve. You’ll be sure to be the company on your customers’ minds as they go into the new year.

Give a little back

Since it is the season of giving, why not make a donation to a charitable foundation or volunteer some time for a special cause in place of sending gift baskets to your clients. This is the time to give back to the community, so choose a cause that hits the heart and gets your entire team excited.

And let your clients know about it, too! Include in your next newsletter or holiday card that your company is donating — whether it’s money or time — to a great cause this holiday season. You’d be amazed how far a little “warm and fuzzy” can go.

Are you ready for the season?

Preparing your marketing strategy for the holiday season doesn’t have to be daunting. Instead, make it a fun and creative time the whole office can get in on.

Are you using an outdated strategy? Download our Digital Marketing Guide to Growth to get started on developing your content marketing strategy that will truly wow your customers this season.

[Image credit: wlodi- license]

Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

Jennifer Edwards — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 16:19:47 +0000

Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

Jennifer Edwards Tue, 11/11/2014 - 10:19am

At the 2014 Content Strategy Summit, Ginny Redish discussed the do’s and don’t of content writing. Her most important tip: think mobile. But what does this mean for our content? Let’s go over how to create killer content that is easy to read and adaptable across multiple devices.

First, let’s plan

Before you can get started on writing, you must first create a plan. Whether this is an umbrella plan for your entire company or you are planning for each piece of content, it is important to consider three things when writing content:

Purpose: What do you want to achieve? Ask yourself, “If my content is successful, these people will do [this].”
Personas: Who are we writing the content for? What devices will they use? What should we keep in mind about them?
Conversations: What is the message? Is your content answering the questions the site visitor came with?

By keeping these three points in mind, you will have a better idea of how to form your content and provide a clear message that not only engages the site visitor, but more importantly, answers their questions.

How to think mobile

With over 50% of American adults using smartphones, it’s pretty likely you will have just as many mobile visitors to your site as desktop ones. With so many electronic devices available these days, how can you possibly write content for each one? Even responsive websites don’t always make your content look great across all devices.

Redish’s rule of thumb for avoiding this issue is simple: write all your content as you would for your mobile site — if it looks great on your mobile, then it will look great on all other devices.

Write less for more impact

Writing less for a mobile site doesn’t mean you are “dumbing down the content.” Instead, you are simply respecting your busy site visitor’s time. You can save page space and provide a clear, concise message by shortening phrases. For example, instead of “at this point in time” try using “now.”

Another key component to keep in mind is the order of your information. Visitors will only read until they have satisfied their need for visiting your site. So make sure to put your key messages and/or warnings before your marketing hype.

For example, Redish talks about how two women visited a mobile site for a stain remover to learn how to use the product on a silk blouse. After going through the directions, the women would most likely stop reading because they received the information they were looking for.

However, farther down on the page there is a warning that the product cannot be used on silk. That kind of information should be first.

Ready to write?

Writing killer content doesn’t mean long, complex sentences. Instead, focus on creating simple sentences and a clear message that provide the answers your visitors are looking for. The best way to achieve this is by thinking mobile — write your content for your mobile site and it will continue to look great across all other devices.

Not sure where to get started or using an outdated marketing plan? Download our Marketing Plan for Growth to get started developing your content marketing strategy.

[Image credit: Mike Licht - license]

The Impotence of Proofreading

Amy Peveto — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 16:54:35 +0000

The Impotence of Proofreading

Amy Peveto Tue, 10/21/2014 - 11:54am

I think I’ve spent more time editing than I have with my husband. Such is the lot of a person who dedicates her career to stamping out crappy content. In the rush to produce the content “they” say we have to, I worry that we’re skimping on making sure that content is correct.

Has this ever happened to you?

The inspiration for this article comes from Taylor Mali, a teacher and slam poet known for his grammar- and word-inspired poems. (Warning: Some NSFW language.)

Mali’s poem goes over-the-top, but the point holds true: proofreading is critical to creating successful content.

Why proofreading matters

Crappy content makes your business (and by extension, you) look crappy.

Visually pleasing, well-researched, grammatically correct content, on the other hand, indicates your professionalism and close attention to detail — not to mention your subject matter expertise.

Creating excellent content is one of the best ways you have to establish a trustworthy online reputation. Don’t blow it by not checking your work.

4 rules of proofreading

In his poem Mali lists two rules to keep in mind while proofreading — let’s break those down a little and throw in my favorites for good measure.

There is no substitute for careful editing

Drafting your content on a computer with spellcheck is a great way to catch the easy mistakes, but as noted in Mali’s poem, they’re not infallible. Double- and triple-check your content for repeated words, synonyms, and grammatical issues your computer can’t see.

Protip: Ask someone else to proofread your work. It’s amazing what a fresh pair of eyes can catch even after you’ve read through something multiple times.

The red pen is your friend

Another way to catch errors you might miss staring at your content on a screen is to print out your text and go through it “manually.” The new medium will give you a fresh perspective and help your brain spot issues you might not have before.

Put together a style guide

The purpose of a style guide is to help those writing content for your business to do so in a consistent way over time.

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just an easily accessible document that provides rules like:

Whether or not to use the Oxford comma
Whether content should be in first or third person
Whether percentages should be 20% or 20 percent

This document makes it easy for you to keep your own writing consistent, and gives guest bloggers or freelancers creating content for you a guide to follow so that all your content is consistent.

It’s all about the reader

Wanna know a dirty secret about editing? Rules matter less than readability. If a grammatically incorrect sentence makes sense and clearly gets your point across to the reader, you can chuck any editing out the window.

This idea is sacrilegious to many editors — myself included — but it actually makes life easier. Instead of obsessing over semicolons and Should there be a comma here? all I have to do is ask, “Does this confuse the reader?” and let my intuition lead the way.

Resources for editors (and writers)

No matter how long you’ve been writing and editing, there’s always room for improvement. Here’s a few books I’ve found helpful in that process.

Writing That Works: How to Communicate Effectively in Business (3rd edition, Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson)
The Subversive Copy Editor; or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself (Carol Fisher Saller)
The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications (3rd edition, Amy Einsohn)

Need help developing content?

Whether you need website content or blog posts, whitepapers or other advanced content, Digett can help.

We are experienced writers and experts in digital media, dedicated to creating content that is tailored for and speaks directly to your specific audience.

Contact us now to discuss your content needs.

Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Jennifer Edwards — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 17:40:23 +0000

Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Jennifer Edwards Wed, 10/15/2014 - 12:40pm

The advertising world is full of tricks and ploys for adjusting consumers’ views on products and services, but what do these tricks actually do? In a TED Talk from 2009 Rory Sutherland presented the idea of how changing perceived value can be just as satisfying as changing the real value. His findings reveal some interesting things for both advertisers and consumers.

Perceived value vs real value

When it comes to evaluating the value of a product, there are two way to measure it.

Real value is related to the actual manufacturing cost and the price the product is sold at for profit. In layman's terms, the real (or actual) value is what the product is actually worth, without any outside expectations from the consumer or seller.

Perceived (or intangible) value is what consumers think the product is actually worth. As marketers, we create intangible value to make up for real value. According to Sutherland, perceived value can be used to “make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

Creating perceived value

In his presentation, Sutherland discusses how advertisers can build perceived value in multiple ways—from creating symbolic value to adding contextual information—thus increasing the overall value of the product to consumers. However, like Sutherland said, you should remember that all value is subjective. But how do we create perceived value?

Sutherland asked a compelling question: can we tinker with perception rather than trying to change reality? Well, we can. In fact, Frederick the Great of Prussia tested this idea back in 1774, when he rebranded the potato.

Frederick used a little reverse psychology when his subjects rejected the idea of growing potatoes to protect against famine. After the public rejected the potato, Frederick declared it a royal vegetable and had it planted in the royal garden with guards protecting it night and day. However, the guards had secret orders to not guard the potato very well.

As Sutherland put it, peasants tend to know if something is worth guarding, it’s worth stealing. Thus began a massive underground potato growing operation and the potato was rebranded.

Although no actual modifications were done to the potato itself, Frederick the Great was able to tinker with the public’s perception of the vegetable. When declaring the potato strictly a royal vegetable, it sparked the public’s interest into why it was off-limits. The king made a familiar thing new.

Putting it to work

Creating intangible value provides fundamental opportunities to change consumer behavior without having to adjust the real value of your product/service—Sutherland discusses multiple examples of companies building intangible value as a substitute for using up labor or limited resources.

Although the way the intangible value was created varied throughout the companies, they all did one thing: increased the value of a product without doing anything to the actual product.

Strategy is key

Adjusting your product or service’s intangible value within your marketing strategy can provide efficient and cost saving methods to increase the overall value.

Are you using an outdated or ineffective marketing strategy? Download our Digital Marketing Guide to Growth to get started developing your content marketing strategy and showing your true value.

[Image credit: Quinn Dombrowski - license]

If Your Google Analytics Isn’t Customized, You’re Doing it Wrong

Wes Mills — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 13:36:41 +0000

If Your Google Analytics Isn’t Customized, You’re Doing it Wrong

Wes Mills Wed, 06/11/2014 - 8:36am

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that offers a plethora of data and undoubtedly the most ubiquitous web analytics tool out there. With all of that data, it makes it incredibly easy to lose the signal through the noise — the less important metrics can easily overshadow your actionable insights. If you aren’t using custom segments or reports, you’re losing the signal.

Remember why you have Google Analytics

First and foremost, go back to your roots — remember why you use Google Analytics. It’s to gain actionable insight, measure results, and provide a foundation for future strategies.

Once upon a time, measuring a website’s success in terms of traffic was sufficient. But with mobile exploding and quickly taking over desktop and the data available to measure conversions, just looking at traffic isn’t enough.

Google Analytics offers a platform full of data that allows you to be as creative as you can and view your data in endless amounts of ways. I look at it as a blank canvas waiting for a picture to be painted.

Aggregate data is irrelevant: Advanced segments

Looking for real insights can be the hardest part of an analyst’s job. You have to ask the right questions, look at the right data, and test your hypotheses. Using advanced segments makes this much easier to do.

Advanced segments do exactly as the same would suggest: segment your data. However you could possibly image.

For example, you could have a segment with:

Mobile users on iOS devices
Have visited more than three times in your set time period
Between the ages of 25 and 34

If you’re running paid search campaigns, this is incredibly valuable if you’re testing your ad text and catering to a certain demographic. You can look at things like conversion rates, bounce rate, and other user engagement metrics.

Would you be able to gain this insight without segmenting? Absolutely not.

Why stop there? Because you can have more than one advanced segment filtering your data at one time, you can compare how different segments compare to each other. This is wonderful when looking at conversion data, because you’ll learn which segments are converting.

And if you’re clever, you can use the same data to figure out why.

There’s no “one size fits all” custom segment that will tell you everything you want to know. It starts with thinking about your website goals and objectives, and how you plan to meet them. And they are only as powerful as the reports you run them on.

Custom reports

If custom reports aren’t a part of your regular website reporting, you’ve been stuck mining through data puke — and missing key metrics and best practices along the way.

The name “Custom reports” makes it sound more complicated than it is. In essence, you’re getting all of the metrics and dimensions from the standard Analytics reports and throwing them into your own spreadsheets. I’ll include a link below where you can download all of the custom reports Google Analytics Experts have put together for us to download.

One of my favorite and most useful reports is one by Avinash Kaushik.

Right here you can see how well each source of traffic performs. It lays out which traffic source and how many goal completions, among other user engagement metrics.

Another favorite report of mine, also by Avinash, is a mobile performance analysis.

Looking at this report can give you valuable insight, such as whether or not your website renders correctly on certain devices.

You can also see conversion data per each mobile operating system. If some mobile devices are converting and some aren’t, this is a great way to begin exploring that issue. It also can allow you to see how different mobile users are converting differently.

Overwhelmed with building your own custom reports?

The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery has everything you need to get going on customizing Google Analytics. The Solutions Gallery is a crowdsourced website where other savvy Google Analytics users submit their custom reports, segments, and dashboards and allow you to download them for free.

The two I mentioned above can be found here in this download package, among many other valuable things like dashboards and custom segments.

While these are created by experts, there’s no “one size fits all” report that works for everything. Each of these reports can be edited easily and tailored to fit your business objectives. (When opening up the report under the customization tab, the “edit” button can be found just below the name of the report.)

When first diving in, it can be confusing deciphering the differences between metrics and dimensions. If you feel like you may have trouble, this article from Google is incredibly helpful.

Add your segments below

Do you have any custom segments or reports that you use regularly? Throw a link down in the comments below with a description of what it does.

The customization possibilities are endless and it’s wonderful to see how other people are leveraging this tool to work for their business.

If you want to get even more out of Google Analytics and leverage actionable insights that can help your marketing strategy, reach out to us!

[Image credit: petantik, via Flickr]

How can we better optimize team meetings?

Valarie Geckler — Mon, 19 May 2014 13:29:36 +0000

How can we better optimize team meetings?

Valarie Geckler Mon, 05/19/2014 - 8:29am

What is the secret sauce that makes a good meeting? Generally speaking, I try to make sure every meeting I lead has these three components:

Make sure all key stakeholders are present. Don’t fall into the trap of inviting everyone in hopes of covering your bases. Select attendees strategically but err on the side of including someone if you’re on the fence.
Define the meeting purpose. Identify in advance and communicate at the beginning of the meeting the reason everyone is there.
End with action items. Most meetings have takeaways. Make sure it is clear who is responsible for what and what the next steps are before leaving the room.

We have a problem

For meetings with clients it’s easy to achieve these goals and lead really successful interactions. Since we have such productive client meetings then our weekly Digett team meeting is probably the best meeting ever, right?! Sigh. I think we can improve.

What’s great and what I want to change

The whole Digett team meets over lunch once a week, usually on Mondays. We fulfill the requirement for all stakeholders to be present because everyone in the company attends.

I struggle, however, with clearly defining the purpose of the weekly team meeting. We have too many purposes. If we’re doing too many things, are we watering down the potential of team meetings?

Things we accomplish at our team meetings:

Team Building
- We dedicate the first part of the meeting to socialization, catching up on everyone’s weekend adventures and the latest internet cat memes. It helps build culture and camaraderie.
Knowledge Sharing
- Discovered a cool new service or tool that helps you do your job? Share it. Attended a great conference or webinar? Tell the team about what you learned. Keeps us all sharp and current on trends.
Status Updates
- We go over our active projects and the sales pipeline. Helps give everyone an overview of company activities.
Brainstorming/Problem-Solving
- Has a project or team encountered a challenge? Let’s harness the cumulative brain-power of the team and come up with our best, most creative solutions.

Our meetings definitely have value, but are we getting the most value possible? You know the saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none”? I think we’re having a jack-of-all-trades kind of meeting. We’re trying to accomplish too much.

How can we better optimize team meetings?

Over the next few meetings, we’re going to try to make some changes to enhance the efficiency of team meetings.

A few things we may try:

Let’s get team input. Let the team help identify what has the most value and ditch what isn’t critical. What should we keep doing, stop or change?
Keep project status updates at the department, rather than team level.
Focus on one problem or topic, determined in advance. If we narrow our focus, we’ll have time to deep-dive, really harnessing team brainpower.
If something new comes up during team meeting, we’ll decide if now is the appropriate time to discuss or if there are better, smaller and targeted, venues for it. If it's worthy of Team Meeting, we'll have an Action Item for next week.

One of Digett’s Core Values is to strive for continuous improvement. It feels natural to evolve our approach to team meetings and we’ll continue to evolve our approach to make the most of team time.

This certainly isn’t an issue unique to Digett. Have you or your team found a way to take your team meetings to the next level?

Facebook Advertising Just Got Much More Powerful

Wes Mills — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 20:43:53 +0000

Facebook Advertising Just Got Much More Powerful

Wes Mills Wed, 04/02/2014 - 3:43pm

Up until now, targeting your ads on Facebook to those who have visited your site had to be done through a third-party company, like AdRoll. Yes, remarketing — that’s what I’m talking about. As excited as I am that it’s finally available to advertisers, I can’t believe it’s taken this long. But it’s powerful and everything I could’ve hoped for.

Remarketing is a wonderful thing

I’ll preface with providing a context about why remarketing is incredibly important and why Facebook’s new change is a big deal. It’s a way to re-engage your target audience.

When you’re browsing around the web and notice ads from the websites you’ve recently visited, you’re being re-engaged and exposed again to the brand. Traditionally, users who visit a website from a remarketing ad are much more valuable.

For those indecisive visitors who haven’t converted yet, or those who visited your site and have forgotten how amazing it was, this is your opportunity to invite them back.

But not every visitor is the same and you can’t market to them like they’re all the same. And this is why Facebook’s refresh of custom audiences is awesome.

It’s time to get creative

Facebook’s new custom audiences can be broken down into three levels:

All visitors
Visitors of a specific set of pages
Converters

From a marketing perspective, it’s instinctual that all three of these categories are marketed to with their own unique messaging. This is where we can be creative.

I’ll use a home builder’s website to conceptualize my point here. On this website, there’s a portfolio that’s organized by varying styles — all of which are unique. We’ll call one of the organized sections “Contemporary Living” and another “Classical Charm.”

With Facebook’s custom audiences, advertisers can now create one audience who has viewed the “Contemporary Living” portfolio and another audience that viewed “Classical Charm.”

Separating these audiences will now allow for highly targeted ads that you already know appeal to those users.

A good example of this would be two different sponsored stories, each targeted to the two the organized sections. Each ad could contain one of the popular pictures from the section on your site, with a call-to-action that may look like “View our most recent Contemporary Living homes by subscribing to our blog!”. This may be not the best call-to-action, but hopefully you get the idea.

This is just a simple example. The possibilities are endless, of course, but let’s look at how it can get more complex.

If you love Google Analytics as much as I do, you’re probably familiar with reverse goal paths and knowing which of the pages on your site create conversions. With this knowledge, you can easily create a custom audience that only includes visitors of those pages.

But wait, there’s more!

There’s one caveat to all of this: you have to have a significant amount of visitors to your website for your campaigns to have any kind of traction. But Facebook has a solution to that, too.

Facebook has always given the option to create a lookalike audience. After creating a custom audience, Facebook will look into a number of different variables and turn that audience into millions.

This was always a great option when creating audiences from email lists, but it just got much more valuable now with remarketing.

[Note: Facebook is somewhat ambiguous as to what exactly they’re looking at, so testing and pulling reports regularly is highly recommended when using a lookalike audience.]

For most businesses, the most valuable visitors are those who convert. Now that Facebook has remarketing available to those converters, the “create a lookalike audience” gives you a plethora of Facebook users to are similar to those who already converted on your site.

For those of you who are perspicacious, the ideas are probably already flowing through your head!

Pro tip: don’t be creepy

It’s important when developing your remarketing strategy to take your mind out of the context of the business and put your consumer hat on for a moment.

Remember to have your messaging highly targeted, but not so targeted that the audience becomes uncomfortable, which can be really easy to do.

A good example of this was an ad I saw on Facebook that used my name. While this was great targeting, don’t do this. With the thought of privacy very prevalent in everyone’s mind nowadays, it’s best to be discreet about knowing who your audience is. Admittedly, I thought it was awesome and immediately Google’d how they did it. But I won’t use it and you shouldn’t either!

Frequency plays another role in not being creepy. Facebook gives you the option of how long to keep a user on your remarketing lists, with a maximum of 180 days.

This is all dependent on your business, obviously, but don’t overdo it. It’s not beneficial to keep showing your ad to someone who has visited your site once 60 days ago and has not been back since.

Google Tag Manager can be your silver bullet

This is really where you can create endless possibilities with your Facebook advertising strategy. Google Tag Manager is a tool that deploys JavaScript snippets across your site asynchronously. But with each “tag” or snippet of code — like the Facebook remarketing code — comes a custom firing schedule.

Depending on your level of expertise with JavaScript, you can define custom rules that will only fire for certain web browsers, operating systems, mobile phones, or after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on a page.

I doubt that Facebook will release these as native features anytime soon, or at all, but I am a huge fan of Google Tag Manager and the wonderful things it can do.

Is your mind blown yet?

You still have to be marketing smart

Facebook’s new robust audience options are great, but they don’t do everything for you. To leverage them correctly, you still have to be a great marketer and understand who your audience is and what they respond to.

But if you don’t have a clue, no need to worry. Luckily for you, we’re digital marketing experts and know what it takes to reach success with Facebook advertising.

Do you feel that you’re not getting the most out of your Facebook advertising? Or are you ready to start leveraging the most ubiquitous social platform in the world to drive valuable leads to your business? Drop us a line here, and let’s talk about how we can help.

Why Infographics Suck

Wes Mills — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:02:38 +0000

Why Infographics Suck

Wes Mills Mon, 03/17/2014 - 10:02am

“Visualize your data!” is a phrase I see smeared around everything that has to do with infographics. It’s time to wake up, folks. Making the font bigger, changing the color, and sprinkling in great looking graphics along with numbers and trend lines isn’t visualizing data.

What it actually means to “visualize”

When we look at infographics, and websites that sell them, they’re selling the idea that you can visualize your data better. Sure, it looks prettier — but are you really visualizing it? Probably not.

Visualizing data isn’t knowing the bounce rate for pages on your website or knowing the average time on the site. It’s knowing the narrative behind the numbers.

Numbers can tell stories, but not by themselves. “Our traffic increased 15% from last month!” But what’s missing here? One word: insight.

Insight answers the who, what, when, where, and why. This is the hardest part about data analytics. Something I believe that can never be automated and could never be conveyed just by slapping some pretty looking numbers on an infographic.

Numbers need context. Without context, you don’t have insight. Without insight, the numbers are useless.

I challenge you. The next time you read through an infographic, think about what insight you’re actually gaining. Was it actually valuable? Are you really visualizing your data, or are you just wasting time making the same numbers look pretty?

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We are trained to buy new.

What’s so bad about a new website?

It’s not about what you’re gaining, but what you’re losing.

How to have the best website among your competitors without ever building a new one

Challenges of evidence-based change

Where we are headed

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Right-Sizing Your Marketing Infrastructure

The Often Overstated Value of “Big”

A Review of Marketing Fundamentals

Too Big, or Too Small?

Crawl. Walk. Run.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

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Time to Deck Your Marketing Strategy This Holiday Season

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Send some cheer

Give a little back

Are you ready for the season?

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Thinking Mobile: How to Write Killer Content for All Devices

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How to think mobile

Write less for more impact

Ready to write?

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The Impotence of Proofreading

Has this ever happened to you?

Why proofreading matters

4 rules of proofreading

There is no substitute for careful editing

The red pen is your friend

Put together a style guide

It’s all about the reader

Resources for editors (and writers)

Need help developing content?

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Perception vs Reality: What Do You Value?

Perceived value vs real value

Creating perceived value

Putting it to work

Strategy is key

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If Your Google Analytics Isn’t Customized, You’re Doing it Wrong

Remember why you have Google Analytics

Aggregate data is irrelevant: Advanced segments

Custom reports

Overwhelmed with building your own custom reports?

Add your segments below

LEAVE A COMMENT

How can we better optimize team meetings?

We have a problem

What’s great and what I want to change

How can we better optimize team meetings?

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Facebook Advertising Just Got Much More Powerful

Remarketing is a wonderful thing

It’s time to get creative

But wait, there’s more!

Pro tip: don’t be creepy

Google Tag Manager can be your silver bullet

You still have to be marketing smart

LEAVE A COMMENT

Why Infographics Suck

What it actually means to “visualize”

LEAVE A COMMENT