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I attended the You LearnTwitface event in Dubai a while back where 15 speakers shared their knowledge, tips and tricks about social media. The 2 day event was full of positive energy from every person attending. The speakers varied in energy and presence, some were highly Charismatic, some were boring and some simply had extremely relevant information to share. The last speaker of the 2 days grabbed my attention and I thought I should write his Steps/Facts to dominate google search. It was non other than the Google insider himself, Simon Leung! As simple and straight forward as the facts might seem, its very important for beginners to be aware of this know how. So, welcome to Google Insider Millionaire.

Here are 10 insider facts about google.

1- Google is a business so their main goal is making money. Their customers aren’t google users, they are advertisers. So, step 1: go ahead and get a product/service Step 2: Get the traffic

2- Once you have that set up, your top priority is BRANDING. Set up a google account to brand. create new content and make sure to make your main site a blog. Google loves information!!! So, be that content creator.

3- To achieve Mass network following, you have to build appeal for people and obtain Value and Trust. Google wants to see that your site is easy and navigational. Be sure to create relevant content and valuable content for readers to stay interested and always include relevant offers.

4- Google encourages link building. The easy way to do that is always refer related offsite offers. Also Have a call to action on every page. That way people enter their information, be it emails, phone numbers, etc and your list will build itself.

5- If you want to get top branding for free, you need to develop a CONSISTENT social media Brand. Be present in social media networks to expose your brand to millions of people.

6- Google will penalize you for poor branding!!! So, personalize it (make it your own and keep it consistent). A good way to keep building your Brand image is redirecting people from your main domain to social network. This will constantly increase personalization of your Domain.com

7- Google wants to see that you have multiple sources of traffic (Organic, referral, etc). They analyse website statistics to secretly evaluate your site. So, use google ad words which results in massive amounts of traffic (instantaneous traffic, extremely targeted traffic, most affordable traffic)

8- Google likes differentiation so make sure to have a nice graphic as that ads value. If you can’t afford investing in a nice unique graphic, have a personal picture. Always keep in mind to use google’s products (in this case, use Picasa). FYI: the top 10 search results are social media and pictures. it’s important to always keep track of what google posts on google.com. if they prefer pictures, have pictures

9- Another top 1st page search results are videos. So, use video marketing (youtube) and have videos relevant to what you are doing and don’t forget to have a call to action by directing traffic back to your website. Also, embed the videos on your website.

10- To become authority and dominate google search use everything google. (googlenow-twitter/googlebookmark/googleprofile/googlesites)

Now go ahead, use these tips and facts to become on googles Top searches! Enjoy

We have now been through three posts about the use of web analytics (more specifically Google Analytics) in the beginning phases of your online business.

In today’s post, we have decided to ask the marketing and web analytics community what they believe are the best uses and practices of web analytics for web startups…Enjoy!

Share your perspective on best uses of web analytics for startups. We will share it with the community!

In our last post (Part 2 of Google Analytics) we mentioned that we would go over funnel visualization and funnel creation, but in order to do that, it would be wiser to review Segmentation and how it can assist you in determining what aspects of your website can be most important to focus on, in order to achieve your business/ organizational goals and objectives.

Segmentation- The practice of separating the various Referrals (sites people are coming from), Behaviors (how your audience is using your site, what they are doing) and Outcomes (Results) into smaller subsets, and evaluating those subsets.

For any startup, the most important thing is cashflow. In order to attain cashflow though, you must first find your target audience. The best way to find your audience (as an online startup) after determining your business objectives and goals is to measure & observe existing feedback and data.

The question usually asked in regards to this issue goes something like this:

I have setup Google Analytics for my website, but what should I start tracking that will help me make future business decisions about my startup?

I always answer this question by introducing our clients to the idea of Data Segmentation. Segmentation is the most effective ways of breaking down data into insightful and actionable statistics and numbers. There are all sorts of questions you can answer with segmentation including:

• Which segment of the audience visiting your website is interested in specific product/ service offerings.
• When and why does someone choose to purchase
• Potential customer behavior
• Customer demographics and specifications

So now that you know briefly what segmentation is, and what its benefits are, lets actually discuss the segmentation process. Actual segments of web data can be broken down into the following:

• Referrals
• Behavior
• Outcomes

As Avinash Kaushik recommends, each of these categories should be used to measure and track results. Once you have been through these categories, best practices suggest you should choose 1 or 2 dimensions (dimensions are outlined below) in each category to measure and track. Lets look a bit closer at each of these categories.

Referrals

Referrals include any outside entities that bring traffic to your website. That includes the following:

• Organic (seo, natural search)
• Paid Advertising (Banners, Text Ads, etc)
• Social Media (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter)
• Other (Blogs, Websites, Microsites, Landing pages, etc.)

Referrals can help you determine a few important dimensions about your customers/ audience.

• Where your customers hangout
• How they hear about your service/ product/ name

Its important to know things like these, because it will help you determine where to reach out to them in the future.

Behavior

Next comes Behavior, which is a bit more complex in nature. The behavior of your audience may include any of the following:

• What pages are being viewed and how many times
• What do people read on your site
• Other behavioral action

Knowing more about your audiences behavior will provide you with the insight you need in order to determine a few things:

• The functionality of your website
• Whether your sales funnels are optimized for successful conversions
• Is the information where your audience can find it quickly
• Is your audience interested in what your selling, offering
• The flow and usability of your website

Outcomes

Last, but certainly most important, comes outcomes. Your outcomes are objectives for your website. That includes:

• Purchasing a Product/ Service
• Downloads
• Filling out a Form
• Etc…

Choose one or two outcomes to measure and to pin against Behaviors and Referrals. Focus on how customer/ user got to this point.

This summarization should give you a brief idea of the different characteristics of the segmentation process. Dig deeper to see what you can find out and let us know!

We hope that you have found this article helpful. Please leave us a comment or email us directly at info@digitusmarketing.com if you have a question.

Whenever someone asks me, or another colleague in my industry, what we think one of the first things they should do when they decide they want to reach out to their audience online, we tell them the same thing: follow the conversation!

Now at first this may not seem like such a complicated thing to understand or do, but the truth is, most people come back to me after a few weeks and ask me what I meant by it. Explaining the process always makes me think how much more over the top, the actual process could be if you’re not familiar with the available tools and how to use them. So I decided to put together a “to-do” list and some Google methods for you to use in order to follow the conversation. Hope it helps!

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Now before we go on, I would like to go over a few things to take into consideration as you track the conversation. Firstly, tracking and monitoring conversation is not something you can gain valuable insight from over night (most of the time at least.) It usually takes at least 30 days to start seeing any sort of patterns in behavior, trends etc. Secondly, there is no one specific way to track conversation, there are only methods, all of which can be done using different tools and rational.

Developing Objectives

Before you start tracking conversation you need to develop a solid list of objectives you hope to learn from the experience and process. The reason this is important, is because if your not aware of what your tracking, then the process will become both tedious and unorganized, not to mention you wont be able to establish a set of keywords and terms you need to use in order to track the conversation. So anyway, here is an example of objectives we created for the purpose of this article:
-Track the five top competitors/ players online, in the industry.
-Who are their customers and where are most of their customers located online? What are their customers interests? Why do these customers identify with these companies?
-Questions about top 5 competitors social media campaigns:
- how do these companies presently attract their customers online?
-have they accomplished their goals online? (i.e. retention, awareness, engagement)

So right off the bat you will notice a few things about the list of objectives we have drawn out. For one, they are all questions. Naturally, your objectives should be question orientated, because your trying to figure out more about the industry / company. You will also notice that the objectives are neatly divided into the following two categories: Companies, Customers & Company Campaigns. It’s important that you address these three categories. Of course you can track other types of objectives, but these are the three most basic and important.

Google Tools and Methods:

Google is a great way to not only research basic trends in your industry, but to conduct advanced searches and to monitor what’s happening. Lets take a look at the tools we can use.

Google Insights: Figure out where keywords and terms are popular- what regions, cities and countries. Also figure out variations of keywords and terms that are popular in given regions and countries.

Google alerts: receive emails daily organized by terms and keywords that you would like to monitor.

Google Advanced Search: this is an extremely underrated tool provided by google. Use search parameters correctly and you may find some really good information. Here are a few examples useful parameters:

Find terms by location:

intext:bio-*-(put search term here) intext:location-*-(State here)

Find files with specific terms

“put term here” filetype: (put type of file here- pdf, doc, etc)

Google Keyword Tool: You can use this tool to find synonymous of keywords and terms in your industry. Very useful way of finding high-ranking keywords.

iGoogle- This platform can be used for many reasons, but at our firm we use it to research and monitor brands, competition and industry buzz. In specific, its a great way to create a customized monitoring platform.

Example

So lets say that I am a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, and I would like to learn more about my competition and industry. How would we start?

Firstly, lets set up our monitoring screen, so we can set things up as we go. We are going to use this screen to keep track of all the information that is important for us to keep up with as we monitor our industry and competition. (If you dont already have a gmail account signup for one. ) Go to iGoogle and clear your platform of any tabs so we can start fresh.

Second thing we would want to do is go to Google Insights and figure out more about the keywords being used nation-wide and then narrow it down to our region.

Once on the site, plugin the word “hotel.”

Under these search results scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “embed this table” under “top searches.”

This should automatically embed in your iGoogle.

Now go back to Google Insights and click “United States” under search results for “hotel.” Click on Georgia under “Regional Interest” and embed “Top searches” on this page.

Now you should have two charts on your iGoogle. One with keywords for national top searches and one for regional top searches. This will give you a daily feel of what is being used to trigger key events in your industry.

Now lets find keywords that are most widely used world-wide for “hotels” and create a feed for them on iGoogle.

Go to Google Keyword Tool. Type in “hotels” and request results.

After you get results, choose 3-5 keywords that have a high search volume and write them down.

Now go to Google Alerts and plug in each keyword, one by one. (Request that it be delivered as a feed.)

Now go to manage alerts and click on feed next to the keyword alert you just created. Copy the feed url.

Now go back to iGoogle and click on “add stuff” to the right hand side of your panel. Scroll down and click on “add feed or gadget” and paste the url.

*Now repeat this process with your other 3-5 keywords that you selected using the Google Keyword Tool.

Bonus Tip:

You can add in feeds from all around the net into your iGoogle.

One important place to keep track of buzz is on Twitter. All you have to do is go to http://search.twitter.com and plugin one of your keywords “atlanta hotels” and search for results. Once you do that click on “feed for this query” at the top right hand side.

Copy and paste the url from this feed into “add feed or gadget” located in iGoogle. That all! Its pretty simple to get started.

This is how your iGoogle screen should look:

Now that we have helped you get started now comes time for the real work. Actual monitoring! Keep track of your iGoogle daily to make sure your keeping up with all that’s going on. If you cant do it yourself, either assign someone in your organization to the task or request outside help.

Now get to it!

We hope that you have found this article helpful. Please leave us a comment or email us directly at info@digitusmarketing.com if you have a question.

In Part 1 we discussed how to use Google Analytics to set up goals in the beginning stages of your online business. There are other features you can use though to identify an early wealth of hidden behaviors that you can turn into conversions and leads. So what am I talking about? Well there are two methods, but today we will talk specifically about _trackEvent() .

The Event Tracking features’ main purpose is to provide you with a way to track goals and behaviors on otherwise untrackable websites, like Flash.

In the early stages of your business (whether your selling a services online or your selling retail online) its is imperative to start measuring all functions and features on your website. I mean, what company wants to spend more time and money than necessary on creating a successful online site? And the easiest way to cut time and cost is to:

1.) Build the website with the minimum set of features and functions needed.

Note: In the case of ecommerce, it is still smart to live by the principal of minimalism but there are a lot of ‘big guys’ out there that have already invested so much into UI/UX research that you can simply look into what they did to come up with ideas. Its not always smart or safe to do it this way, but it can give you an idea of how the landscape is shaped for your industry.

2.) Analyze your data!!! This is so important, because there is no point investing in even a minimalist set of features and functions if your not analyzing and studying how they are being used.

These two points are important to take seriously at the early stages of your startup, but lets focus on the latter point today. We will talk more about the process of minimum feature/ function websites in the future.

When you start analyzing the behavior and actions users have on your website at the early stages, it can be a frustrating process because you don’t have much traffic to analyze. On the other hand, that also means its a good time to take advantage of gathering and studying every nuance of data that you can. Now, note that you dont want to study every nuance of data literally, but only the data that exists within the frame of your website goals. That means certain metrics will be actionable while others will remain irrelevant.

When studying the data that exist within your website goals, the _trackEvent() method used by Google Analytics can be a great way to track small pieces of actionable data that you cant otherwise track. Aside from tracking flash for example, you may need to track small features like buttons. ….

It’s not that difficult to set up the Track Event method. To do so, you will need to start with this code:

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

Now, dont freak out! All that stuff inside the parenthesizes isn’t as complicated as it may look.

Required Strings:
Category: is the name you give to the object/feature your tracking.

Action: this is paired with the category. It explains the type of user interaction you expect the user to have with the object.

Optional:
Label: You can use this to add additional information to what the user action should accompany.

Integer: I love this option! You can use this to attach a numerical value to the category/action. This can be very useful!

In order to use the _trackEvent method you will first need to install the Google Analytics tracking code to your website. If you dont already have a gmail account, you can create one for free. (http://gmail.com)

After you have set up your tracking code, you can start using the _trackEvent() method.

There are so many different instructional articles out there on how to install the _trackEvent() method, but little of the literature actually walks you through the steps in a detailed manner. I am going to walk you through the steps here one by one, but please keep in mind I am using the WordPress platform in this example.

_trackEvent() Example:

Lets say that you would like to measure a customized Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook button that you created on your blog, and that you would like to track how many people clicked on it. Here is what you would do.

First, install the _trackEvent method into the code for the button:

<code>&lt;a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/omaread" <strong>onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Linkedin','ClickLinkedin','1');"</strong>&gt;<img style="border: 0;" alt="" /></code>

Next you will need to add the tracking code into your HTML:

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12505354-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
<strong><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/omaread"></a></strong>

As you can see, the _trackEvent() method was placed right under the Google Analytics tracking code in the HTML.

If you follow these steps, the trackEvent method should work for you now. Give it a bit of time to setup, and check to see if your account (Google Analytics) is picking the clicks. You will find it under Content>Event Tracking. Here is an example of how it would look:

Use your imagination to figure out the best ways to use the track event method! It will help you a lot if used properly. In part 3 of Using Google Analytics in the Beginning Stages of your Online Business we will talk about funnel visualizations and how you can use them to your advantage!

We hope that you have found this article helpful. Please leave us a comment or email us directly at info@digitusmarketing.com if you have a question.

Web Analytics always has a roll in helping businesses and organizations achieving their online (and offline in many cases) objectives. Many times though, people wonder how they can interpret their data with a very minimal user base, especially when first launching their online business. Over and over again, I hear people asking “what good is Web Analytics (Google Analytics) if I have very few users and traffic? “ or, “how can I possibly use analytics when starting a business if I have very little data?” Its true that extrapolating information from minimal amounts of activity can easily be misguided and unrepresentative, but there are ways of achieving success with analytics even at the beginning.

With very little information to analyze (especially when starting an online business) sometimes people are left tempted to make assumptions about customer activity using vanity metrics, a term coined by Eric Ries. An example of vanity metrics would be looking at your total number of visitors as “stand alone” evidence of what needs to be done to achieve business objectives.

So what should one do if there is very little data to work with at first? There is always one piece of advice I suggest to clients who are starting a business online with no information to work with yet: set up goals! Goals, goals, goals!!!

Ok great so you may be asking, “why goals and how do I set them up anyway?” Great questions!

So goals in Google Analytics were created to help people like you and me with a way to label and measure the most important actions and types of connections customers can make when they visit your website. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, your ‘thank you’ page may be considered a goal, since its the desired page you wish for customers to ultimately connect to.

There are three specific types of goals in Google Analytics that help you create goals:
• URL Destination- goal is determined when a visitor views a specific URL you define under the goals menu. (Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Goal Settings.)
• Time on Site- this goal is determined according to a specified time a customer spends on your site.
• Pages/ Visit – this goal is set according to the amount of pages a customer visits on your site.

You can learn more about setting up specific goals by visiting this Google help page or you can contact us with specific questions.

Another important thing to keep in mind when setting up goals is that you can set a monetary value to the goals you define under URL destination. This is a very important feature especially for non-ecommerce sites that wish to determine value driven actions/ interaction on their website.

So, how about if your goal is only achievable on a flash website (or the like) where neither of the three above options comply with the action your customer would take to achieve the goal? That is where virtual pageviews and event tracking come to great use. This will be the discussion of the next article.

Meanwhile, set up a goal or two, and watch your insight into your consumer market grow!!

The recent online feud ignited by Jason Calacanis about comScore’s business practices has raised a lot of interesting questions around the different measurement tools intelligence gatherers use today- mainly server-side analytics and audience measurement.

If there is one thing this feud has proven, it is that there exists a lack of understanding between what the two different methods encompass and how they can be applied to different aspects of business intelligence.

I am sure many of you have heard of web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics), but you may be wondering what exactly audience measurement is all about. In essence, this method encompasses taking a select group of people from different demographics and lifestyles that visit your website, analyzing their behaviors and deriving an estimate for total unique visitors from that group.

Now many people in the internet industry are calling this an unfair way of analyzing a website unique visitors, but the truth is, there is no such thing as 100% accuracy using any measurement. Refering to the guidelines recently written by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, we can see how this method meets standardized guidelines:

“Data collected from registrants is one possible source that can be utilized in creating a Unique Users measure by a census-based measurement organization, if registrants represent a reasonable proportion of the total user-base and when appropriate scientific projection methods are used for non-registrrants.”

So even with this reference you may be asking how fair is audience measurement . Well, lets look at the IAB’s definition of unique visitor and then compare that definition to the two opposing methodologies (web analytics, audience measurement.) According to the IAB, a unique visitor is defend as:

“An identified and unduplicated individual Internet user who accesses Internet content or advertising during a measurement period.”

Audience measurement uses a unique and persistent identifier (unlike a cookie, which can expire, be rejected and other similar limitations) to measure audience impact, overlap and visit, which makes for a conservative way of measuring unique visitors.

On the other hand, server side analytics uses cookies, which can be rejected and deleted. That means, if a visitor deletes a cookie after they leave your website, and then come back 20 minutes later, they will be indentified as a second unique visitor. This can up a websites numbers of unique visitors.

With all that said, it can now be seen why it may be difficult to conduct “unique visitor” calculations just with one process vs another. Yes, its true that audience measurement can undermined a websites overall unique visitor count, but on the other hand, server side (cookie based) analytics can overestimate a website unique visitors. Hand-in-hand, these two methods can work brilliantly together if used in the right circumstances. For example, if your trying to track the “day-to-day” activities of your online business, and your immediate concern is trying to analyze how to best modify behavior to benefit conversion and sales on your website, than in my humble opinion, server-side analytics is the most efficient way of tracking this activity. However, if your a larger business, with millions of unique visitors, you may be concerned with macro level statistics, internet usage, how users interact with other websites (that you compete with) than audience measurement would be a much more effective way of analyzing data. Now, if you would like to track micro and macro trends and behavior about your website, these two methods can be used together.

Nothing is ever black and white, as some will try to make it out to be, especially when it comes to web analysis. Point is, whether an intelligence company uses one method or the other should not be an immediate concern, the concern should be to make sure whatever method is used, is applied for the right reason.

Though PPC and in specific CPM (cost-per-impression) has gained a lot of ground on social networks, it still remains a complicated subject to asses, especially when your trying to figure out how to forecast future revenue and sales.

Often people ask- how can I determine how much money my CPM model will be making five months from now?

Its really not possible to completely determine how much revenue you will be earning using the CPM model on social networks, especially since there are so many different factors involved in the amount of success your ad network experiences.

Non-the-less its always nice having a formula one can use to determine future earnings. Below I have posted a formula used by many successful businesses to determine the sales forecast of their CPM model.

Hope it helps!

Cost-per-impression Formula*

1.) First you need to write down the monetary income you are making per thousand impressions per ad. (e.g. $5 per thousand impressions.)
2.) Secondly, you need to determine how many people visit your site per day. (Unique visitors)
3.) Thirdly, determine how many members are affiliated with your network.
4.) Then, asses the amount of times a member visits the website per month.
5.) Then determine how many pages the member visits on average per visit

After you are able to determine these four important pieces of information, then you need to figure out the average amount of CPM ads that appear on your social networks average page. (e.g. three CPM ads per page.)

Once you have all this information you can then calculate the amount of money your network will make off CPM ads with this formula:

Members X visits per member per month on average X average amount of ads per page per month X average amount of page visits per member per month= Revenue Total

Note: This formula will work if you either already have a pattern on your website, or if you have done enough research on your industry. Please make sure to take the time to figure these numbers out before using this formula.

*This can only be used to determine the potential revenue earnings for CPM at 1000 impressions.