Here are the details and RSVP for the first meetup of the Portland Google Analytics User Group. We really hope to see you there!

Customizing Google Analytics can provide a tremendous amount of new data (and yes, insights) but without an objective-first approach, you’ll be data rich and insight poor. Before you start looking at what’s possible when tweaking Google Analytics, start first with a simple framework that will define what to customize. Our approach looks something like this –

This framework allows you to understand what metrics need to be tracked and where the holes in your analytics strategy lie. That’s the foundation that needs to be put in place before you start customizing your Google Analytics install.

Let’s walk through an example using a question we commonly hear -

 “How are potential customers using my ecommerce website and how can I improve sales?”

It’s a question that can (and should) be broken down into multiple sub-sets. The objective is clear, drive sales. The next step would be to identify the levers that affect sales, and one (of many) has already been identified – website usage.  Now the question is – how do we optimize the website experience (lever) to encourage more sales (objective)?

There are more  levers for website optimization, such as, ratings, reviews, on-site messaging, usability, product videos, etc. In this case, let’s focus on on-site messaging and how it can be leveraged to put more potential customers in the conversion funnel. By applying the aforementioned framework and objective-first approach, it might look something like -

We now have a focused approach and have identified multiple levers that point back to the objective. Now the question shifts to –

“How do different messages and placements drive users into the conversion funnel?”

This is a much more concise and measurable initiative and Google Analytics can be customized for this. One of the more common on-site messaging tactics are homepage campaigns, most often in the form of a tout or banner. One metric we already know we should now watch would include – % of people who navigated to the landing page from the homepage. That’s an easy out-of-the-box metric in Google Analytics but doesn’t provide the full story. There are holes in the measurement plan.

You would likely want to know the CTR of a homepage banner in order to gauge it’s popularity among the homepage real estate. I also would want to know if someone clicked on the banner and then purchased a product. Both are custom metrics (using event tags and custom variables) that will better measure on-site messaging, leading to more potential customers in the conversion funnel and ultimately sales.

You can read the full 2-part series on measuring the effectiveness of internal campaigns here.

A good data-backed organization has a framework in place. A good framework lends itself to a good measurement strategy. Without a good measurement strategy in place, efforts spent customizing Google Analytics could potentially be squandered and drown you in data.

Like this post? Follow John Koenig on Google+.

What are Author Rich Snippets and Why Do I Need Them?

What is an Author Rich Snippet, you ask? An Author Rich Snippet consists of a specific author’s picture, name, and a “More by” link that’s added to a standard search result.

Aside from the obvious ego boost that accompanies your own Author Rich Snippet showing up in search, Author Rich Snippets offer the following additional benefits. An Author Rich Snippet:

• breaks up standard wall-of-text search results.
• calls significant attention to your result.
• leads to more qualified traffic by giving searchers a better idea of what to expect when they click on your results.
• establishes Author Authority for the author and builds search trust for the site.
• allows readers to get to know you and trust your contributions to the web.

Now, Author Rich Snippets aren’t for everyone. However, they are for most people, so if you’re serious about doing well in organic search, ask yourself the following questions.

Do you want to attract more search traffic to your site?

By setting up Author Rich Snippets, you’ll increase your CTR (some sites report a 20-30% increase in CTR) from search results. Users who have read your posts in the past will get to know you and be much more likely to click on your next blog that they encounter in the search results.

Do you want to set yourself apart from your competitors?

Unless you’re doing business in the online services space, the chances are that most of your competitors aren’t down with Author Rich Snippets yet. By becoming an early adopter, you can really set your site apart in non-branded search. Which search result do you think your target audience/customers will be inclined to click on?

Need to improve your site’s search trust or recover from Google Panda?

Modern search algorithms (notably Google’s) focus on what can be referred to as website “search trust”. Essentially, search engines have learned that spammy sites, sites that use boilerplate content, and sites that use low-quality or hastily produced content give their searchers a poor experience. As a result, Google’s Panda update identified criteria that indicated low-quality sites, applied them to machine learning, and released “Panda” on the web to determine the quality and trust of websites. Those that failed the test got hit pretty hard in the search results and their respective webmasters were left scrambling to pick up the SEO pieces. It’s been well over a year now since Panda hit, but if your site is still battling to establish itself as high-quality, Author Rich Snippets are a great way to speed the process along. Why? Author Rich Snippets connect website content with real people; this equates to quality content (in the eyes of Google, at least).

Want to build a reputation for yourself?

If you’re looking to build up an online reputation as an authority or thought-leader in your industry, you need to be using Author Rich Snippets. Not only will they allow your face to be seen all over the SERPs, searchers can also easily click your “More by” link to access more of your articles and posts. Soon enough, people will scan SERPs just for your picture so they can find reliable information that they trust. #winning

Author Rich Snippets for Companies

Faceless company blog posts are going out of style, fast. Google is well on its way to leaving anonymous corporate content in the dust and focusing on company spokespeople who have the experience and talent to produce truly great content for Google searchers. At present, you can’t apply the theory of Google Author Rich Snippets to Google+ pages (business/brand pages). A brand or company isn’t a person, so it would kind of defeat the whole purpose of promoting authors.

If you want to get your company on Author Rich Snippets, you have the following options:

• Set the author of every company blog post as a single company spokesperson (CEO or other key persona). However, I don’t recommend this option because it’s not authentically representing the true author.
• Highlight employees as the authors of their own posts. This is really the way to go. If employees are already active on Google+, their circles will be leveraged to benefit the company as a whole.

Your company is made up of talented individuals; don’t let that go to waste by stripping the person out of the post.

How to Set Up Author Rich Snippets on Your Site

If you haven’t been sold on ARS (moar acronyms!) yet, you can stop reading now. If you’re so excited about getting your face in Google’s search results that you can’t contain yourself, then this is your section. There’s a simple way and a somewhat more complex (IMO) way to go about this. I’ll begin with…

The Simple Way To Set Up Author Rich Snippets

There are a few things you need in order to step up Author Rich Snippets:

1. A public Google+ profile.
   Make sure to upload a decent looking profile picture. Google will use this when it pulls in your Author Rich Snippet. If you already have a presence online, I recommend using the same photo you use elsewhere (Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc).
2. Access to your blog
   That, or a webmaster/IT guy who doesn’t hate your guts. You’ll need to tweak your blog posts or blog post template a bit.

The Somewhat More Complicated Way to Set Up Author Rich Snippets

Now this probably isn’t that much more complicated. In fact, it may even be simpler. However, I prefer the previous method as this one places more trust in Google figuring out things on their own rather than being hand-fed the information. Another reason I don’t typically recommend this method is that it requires you to have an email address at each domain you write for. In a lot of cases, notably guest blogging, this isn’t feasible.

How to do it:

1. Make sure you have a Google+ profile (same as in option #1)
2. Make sure each blog post your write has “by firstname lastname” (the name must match that used on your Google+ profile).
3. Go to https://plus.google.com/authorship and “apply” for authorship with Google.
4. Google will send a verification email to the email address at the domain you write for; verify.

Now, Let the Magic Happen

After completing one (or both) of these options, you might be inclined to repeatedly Google the titles of your recent posts until your fingers bleed or hold your breath until your Author Rich Snippet appears. I don’t recommend it. It can take a day or two for Google to make the association and re-crawl your blog post. I won’t guarantee this will work, but go ahead and re-pimp your posts on Twitter and Google+; you know Google is going to be crawling those links and therefore end up on your posts.

So that’s how you configure Author Rich Snippets to appear in Google SERPs. I highly recommend it. Give it a shot and I’d love it if you came back here to give me a report on how it works out in the comments. Happy optimizing.

Like this post? Follow Mike Arnesen on Google+

The expected schedule is as follows:

5:30 – 6:15: Networking/Drinks/Snacks

6:15 – 7:00: Short Presentation (Topic TBD) & Discussion

7:00 – 8:00: More Discussion and Networking

More information on the WAW website. Please sign up there  also, so we have a good idea of how many are coming.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

UPDATE: Here’s the preso topic.

Tackling Attribution in the Era of Instagrams, Pinterests, and Tablets

If you have some foos skills, or just like fun, you should enter the tournament. We’ve already got over a dozen teams, and we expect to have about 20 by the event. We’ll cap it at 32. We’re borrowing ShopIgniter’s table, so we’ll have two games going at all times. Show us what you’ve got!

In 2012 we’re going to continue to focus on what we’ve done exceptionally well for 3 years – making marketing decision making as easy as possible for our clients. John and I launched the company with 3 clients at the beginning of 2009. All three of those clients are still with us – our attrition has been virtually non-existent! That’s because our clients lean on SwellPath for their most important marketing decisions. We inform, support, and facilitate those decisions in ways none of their tools or partners can. We’re going to keep doing that in 2012, and we’re going to find ways to make it better, faster, and ultimately easier for our clients.

Charts and graphs and numbers are great – data should drive decisions. But behind all those things, there ultimately had to be human design. We’ve got an outstanding team here at SwellPath. We added some awesome folks in 2011 (Charles, Dan, Christian, and Danish), and we plan on adding more in 2012. What makes startups fun is the tightness of the relationships that are developed – everything is small and close together. We’re psyched to add more people to the SwellPath team, and develop those relationships. We’re also excited to develop relationships with more clients and partners, and we think we’ll have a lot more of those by the end of 2012.

So that’s a bunch of high-level talk – besides what we’ve always done, anything different? Yes! We’ll have some big announcements this year, so keep your eyes and ears open. We’ve found ways to help way more marketers – we think the “old” way of tackling digital marketing analysis is out – we’re the new.

Finally, what’s with the baby picture? For the first 3 months of 2012, our rockstar Katie Sachse won’t be in the office. Baby Olive was born on 12/31 just before we started 2012. Katie was employee #1 at SwellPath 3 years ago; I still am not used to her not being around. The picture of baby Olive personally reminds me of some things that are important to keep in mind when running a startup. Enjoy it.

How to Disable Flash

The conference is ending with an Ignite-like Super Accelerator session. I’ve thrown my hat in the ring and have a few words of wisdom of my own to impart on the crowd. If are making it to ACCELERATE, make sure you stay through the end and see the Super Accelerator session. The list of presenters is great, and it’s sure to be an entertaining hour. Hope to see you there!

Malcom Gladwell Portrait by Alex Beck

Last week, I found a great TED talk by one of my favorite non-fiction authors Malcolm Gladwell which really got my digital marketer mind moving. I have enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s works ever since I read Blink for the first time 6 years ago. While I feel he does gloss over some of the more scientific reasons behind his thoughts, I believe he does a great job illustrating interesting concepts about human psychology and its dramatic effects on our environment. This in my opinion, is what we marketers are trying to do every day. As digital marketers our main goal is to understand our customer’s digital needs and desires in an effort to influence them to purchase or consume our said service, product or content. We spend our days filling the world with fantastic campaigns loaded with wonderfully crafted headlines and magical visuals meant to influence our audiences, but are we being as effective as we could be? Below I will be going over concepts from Gladwell’s books Blink and Tipping Point and his TED talk, pointing out 3 cool insights I feel you can walk away with to increase your success rate as a digital marketer.

While most of you I’m sure have read these books, I will warn you right now, this post contains SPOILERS. If you wish not read these spoilers, I would recommend checking them out at your local library or making the purchase from your favorite book outlet.

1)   What can spaghetti sauce and pickles tells us about our audiences?

Here is the video of Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk I mentioned above. If you have some time, I highly recommend watching this whole presentation before reading further.

The first thing I took away form this video is how often I hear the question, “What is the BEST PRACTICE here?” When my client is talking about a specific web page or marketing tactic, and the term “best practices” comes up, I feel it is used in the same way that the Pepsi and Vlasic folks were asking for the “perfect” product for their customers. In my observations marketers and clients are always looking for the “perfect” marketing solution that covers the bases for all of their target audiences. Which in my opinion always leads to muddled concepts and half-assed attempts at speaking to everybody and really never getting through to  anybody. Gladwell illustrates in his examples about how there is not a “perfect pickle or spaghetti sauce” that works for everyone, but rather “perfect pickleS and perfect spaghetti sauceS” that work for certain clusters of people. In marketing we already cluster through our target audiences, but often we forget that within in those audiences we have rather different groups of customers.

I have run into this exact phenomenon while I worked at my previous digital design agency and we were debating a fix for the supposed horrendous side navigation.  My designer and I who we’re “experts” and understood design best practices felt that the current side navigation design made the page look to cluttered and since there was so much copy that side navigation we felt was almost unusable due to the fact that it was really hard to identify any text at all. As we spent the next hour explaining to the client the virtues of cleaning up the nav, she told us, that in fact they had tried to do this the year before and we’re promptly bombarded with support calls and emails form angry customers who now could not find what they were looking for and how dare the company change the navigation which worked so perfectly before. Like most cocky agency folks, my designer and I were not having it, and we wasted 30 minutes of our client’s precious time trying to persuade her that in fact, the way they tried was not properly executed. Luckily she did not budge, she knew the type of  ”pickle” some of her customers liked and no design best practice was going to tell her otherwise. Looking back on this as a more experienced marketer, I would have actually recommended that we run a test where we cookied all previous customers, so that they would always be shown the old side nav and then I would run an A/B test on all the non-cookied visitors testing site interaction and overall conversions for the site to see if a more “best practice” nav performed better if we took out the old customer who likes things the way they are bias out. The takeaways for all of you marketers out there would be; next time you are looking for those best practices that have helped others in the past, take a step back and think about your different audiences and how they are segmented, then ask yourself, am I using the right “pickles”?

2)   Getting the “buy-in” that matters

In the book Blink, Gladwell looks at how some very trained professionals can make some extraordinarily big, seemingly calculated decisions in seconds and be almost 100% accurate. My take away from it, was that people who have been doing things long enough just develop a rhythm with their craft through hours and hours of practice and exposure and literally just “go with their gut.” I think most of us have at least some experience in this, but what about in the marketing world? Sometimes decisions are HUGE and if they end up being wrong and you’re answering to your CEO with your reasoning that “it just felt right”, you probably will be clearing out your desk that afternoon.  Usually we are presenting our work unseen by most of the company outside of high level folks who we need “buy in” from. As we prepare our final presentation to the “big-wigs” before final sign-off, have we taken the time to get the real “buy-in”? For most of the companies I have worked with, there are  people have been talking and working with the real customers for decades, and while they may not know how to use Mail Chimp or Sales Force, they can tell you know from their gut whether a marketing message or visual is going to resonate with the customers. Personally one of my favorite clients always gave us a creative brief full of insights from her trusted folks in customer service and the folks who actually manufactured the product we were marketing before any concepts had been created. No matter what, we saw great results every time we focused on those specific insights from the brief. By speaking with people who fight the good fight everyday, we can get great feedback in a minimal amount of time.  Understandably, we need to respect other people’s time, but I would bet there are a lot of successful marketers who are making time for a quick 5 minute conversation with people at the front lines, like their customer service or engineering folks. I would also bet that an ounce of their insight is worth a pound of their execs. So next time you have that big email campaign to send out, or if you’re going through a site redesign, go talk to those great folks who fight in the trenches day in and day out and see what they have to say.

3)   What SEO/SEM tactics can The Tipping Point teach us?

The Tipping Point, the book that brought the buzzwords “stickiness”, “influencer” and “context” into the lexicon of every modern marketer. I’m not sure if this was the first book to explore how trends and epidemics seem to start in small isolated environments and then almost with out warning, go “viral” and spread exponentially throughout a population, but I’m pretty sure this was the first book that modern business folks read in masses.  The most obvious insights we can glean from The Tipping Point are around Social Media practices. Now there have been numerous posts and presentations about this topic, so I will not write one more word about it. For those of you interested, here is a great presentation on that very topic- Increasing Social Media ROI using Gladwell Tipping Point Framework by Colleen Carrington.

The key-takeaway I got from the book is for those who dabble in the SEO and SEM space. One concept we can take away as digital marketers from The Tipping Point is the idea of predicting trends by watching the trendsetters. For our clients industries there are key people, blogs and publications that represent these trendsetters. Right now, they are using the new “buzz words” that are going to influence how the general population will start to search for terms in your industry in the next few months or years. By identifying these sources and keeping tabs on this content through through RSS feeds or just your weekly readings, you can start identifying these new keywords. Now what are we going to do with these new keywords? Since we are predicting what will be happening in the future buying these keywords and changing copy on our pages right now would not be the wisest move. What we can do though is use Google Insights to track the popularity of these keywords, so when you begin to see an upward trend this is when to start revising content along with getting the jump on some cheap clicks early in the game.  Also, if you use the iGoogle dashboard you can create a gadget for these trended charts to check them out on a daily basis with minimal effort on your part. This simple and straight forward practice can help you start seeing huge gains and make you look like the rock star in your next reporting meeting.

Beyond just Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I’m sure that there is a wealth of knowledge out there as well that we digital marketers would love to apply or own little spin to. I would love to hear from any of you digital marketers, are there are any great not-strictly-marketing focused books or presentations out there that any one would recommend or if you have some other great digital marketing insights you have taken from Gladwell’s works, please let me know in the comments.

Now everyone with Google Analytics can geek out on their real-time data like those of us with Chartbeat have been doing for the last couple years. In all seriousness, real-time reporting is an exciting new feature, and does provide some fantastic insight when there are “momentous” events driving traffic to one’s site. An example might be a rush of traffic from a blog post getting picked up on Digg Reddit. There is a lot of debate in the web analytics community about the value of real-time analytics, with many practitioners saying it is simply monitoring, and not analytics. But with the speed of change these days, and the quickness with which a swell (see what I did there?) can form and move, some type of real-time reporting is necessary.

So will Google put Chartbeat out of business? Hardly; Google has a ways to go before the features are as robust as Chartbeat’s offering. But most sites don’t need most of those features; those that do are already paying the $10/month that Chartbeat starts at. As Google did to the paid analytics platforms when it started to gobble up market share, this will simply force Chartbeat to continue to improve and enhance it’s offering. A challenge Chartbeat is up to, and has proven it is capable of doing for two years. Again Google is pushing the industry, and improving the conditions for all of us.

Finding out about the real-time rollout was one of the more exciting moments at the Google Analytics Partner Summit earlier this month. I am excited for our clients using Google Analytics, and look forward to playing around with it myself. It should roll out to all users over the next couple weeks. Kudos to Google for an impressive enhancement; real-time reporting with the volume of sites Google Analytics is on is no small technical achievement.