Online Marketing Articles

You've installed Google Analytics on your website. Now what will you do with all of this information? Solution- create advanced segments. Advanced segments will help you track the behaviors of the visitors to your site. They're also very useful for tracking your online marketing and advertising efforts. 

For example, there was a spike in your conversions and you want to know what caused them. Setting an advanced segment will help you focus on which advertising or marketing campaign contributed the increase in sales. 

How to Create an Advanced Segment

An advanced segment lets you focus on one area of visitor type, behaviors, and in this example, traffic source- PPC.

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.

2. Go to the upper right of your dashboard and click All Visits.

3. On the left part of the screen, click the blue link Create a new advanced segment.

4. Under the green dimensions tab, click Traffic Sources.

5. From there, select Medium.

6. Click and drag this Medium box into the box 

7. Name your segment. In the example below, I've named it "PPC". Now click Create Segment and you're ready to apply it to your report.

I am now looking at my reports with my PPC segment turned on.  To learn more about the demographics of my PPC visitors, I can go over to the left to the Visitors report. From here, I can see things like browser and connection speed of my PPC visitors.

Advanced Segments for AdWords Traffic

Why set an AdWords advanced segment? AdWords gives you many tools with which you can monitor and optimize your ads' performance. There's ad scheduling, demographic targeting, and managed placements, just to name a few. Using an advanced segment will help you monitor your AdWords advertising efforts more closely. There are a few ways to find the behavior of your AdWords traffic:

Analytics

1.Set an advanced segment

Using the steps I describe above, set your Source to Google and the Medium to CPC.

2. Day Parts Report

*This is only available if you have destination auto-tagging turned on and your AdWords account is linked to Analytics.

Under Traffic Source, select AdWords. From there, select the Day Parts report. This graph will show you the time of day or day of week your ads were clicked. If you click on a time of day (say, 2:00), you can find the clicks, conversions, bounce rate, etc. for that specific time. Below is the graph by day. 

AdWords Dimensions Tab

The Dimensions tab in AdWords will give you metrics on day parts and conversions, and it will also give you demographic and geographic information on your clicks. 

What to do with Advanced Segment Information

There are many, many things you can do with all the information you gather from advanced segments. These are just a few ways to segment out your traffic to discover how your site and marketing efforts are performing: 

• Use a day part segment to schedule AdWords ads at certain parts of the day to increase ROI.
• Segmenting visitors by location to see if national campaigns are working at a local level.
• Compare engaged vs. nonengaged visitors.
• Compare campaign sources to decide where to allocate marketing and advertising dollars. 

These are just some of the segments that will give you very valuable information. Look for more blog posts from us with more detail on how to analyze the information you gather. 

In the meantime, if you'd like more help with Google Analytics or AdWords managment, please contact Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc. to learn more about our services. 

Check out this post with a little bit more detail on YouTube and a slide presentation on SlideShare. 

First, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Briana, an online marketing specialist here at Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc. (that's me on the right). Earlier this week I posted a blog, "Is Twitter Advertising Right for You?" and I posted the video of the presentation to YouTube yesterday. Now, given the title, the blog is clearly about advertising on Facebook and Twitter, but YouTube's transcription service thought otherwise.

Check out the video of the post below. This is what it believes I said on the first slide:

0:00:00.600,0:00:05.580

hello angry at african-americans something

and i'm presenting is to advocacy great for

0:00:05.580,0:00:06.470

you

0:00:06.470,0:00:11.119

the benefits of twitter advertising for things

that if it's a face pic every citizen

And here is the presentation. What do you think?

If you've been on Twitter in the last eight months, you've probably seen the "Promoted Tweet" badge come through your timeline. For these eight months, Promoted Tweets, Accounts, and Trends were available to select advertisers. Good news for the rest of us- Twitter announced this week that it will soon open its advertising platform to more businesses. Not quite all, but on its way.

How Twitter Advertising Works

There are three types of mediums you can use: Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends.

Promoted Trends

Trending topics are usually keywords with hashtags attached that users Tweet to find other users who are interested in the same topic. Promoted Trends get placed on the top of the trending topics list. When a user clicks on the hashtag to see the conversation related to it, the Promoted Trend will appear at the top of the conversation.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Tweets "enable you to speak to users that don't currently follow your account." They appear in timelines as opposed to next to the content. Currently, promoted tweets appear in search on Twitter and Hootsuite. The image below occurs when the Promoted Trend is clicked.

Promoted Accounts

These are for companies looking to build a Twitter following and expand their online presence. Promoted Accounts also will appear in Twitter's Who to Follow section on a user's homepage. Twitter "looks at your account and followers to identify similar accounts and similar followers" when deciding to place a Promoted Account on this page.

Twitter Advertising v. Facebook Advertising

Audience

Both operate using social targeting, or targeting friends of a brand's existing customers/fans/followers.

Twitter

• 175 million users
• Promoted Tweets appear in users' timelines, so people are more apt to see them
• Majority age 26-44
• 7% in high school

Facebook

• Target users based on interests
• Users don't have to be a fan of a business to see its ad
• 500 million users
• Majority age 18-34
• 21% in high school

(source: DigitalTrends)

Pricing

It's not yet been revealed how much a Promoted Tweet/Account will cost. We do know from our account management experience that an average cost per click on Facebook is about $0.85-$0.95.

Twitter

• Promoted Tweets have a cost per engagement (CPE) pricing model. Advertisers pay when their Promoted Tweets get favorited, clicked on, or a user replies to the tweet.
• Retweet impressions are free

Facebook

• Choose from cost per impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC) models
• Competitive bidding
• CPC from $0.05 (typically about $0.85)

Ad Format

Twitter

• Promoted Tweets- appear in users' timelines
• Promoted Accounts
• Promoted Trends

Facebook

• Text ad with images
• Appear on right side of content, away from major navigation links

Analytics

The analytics dashboards of each platform are fairly similar in that they both show impressions and clicks.

Twitter

• Monitor your paid and unpaid activity on Twitter
• Results can be supported by campaign
• See which tweets caused unfollows, retweets, and most influential users

Facebook

• Run reports on conversion time, responder profiles and demographics
• Results can be sorted by ad or campaign
• Less sophisticated than Twitter - cannot see who marked ads "uninteresting" or "misleading"

So, which is right for you?

It comes down to finding out where your audience is, your advertising goals and how much time your company has available to interact with consumers. Facebook works fine as a set-it-and-forget-it campaign, while Twitter works best if someone in the company is dedicated to engaging with users. Twitter is good for building a brand presence while Facebook benefits companies that

For more information, check out our Is Twitter Advertising Right For You? video presentation. Still not sure which to platform to use? Contact Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc. to find out which platform will better serve your advertising needs.

Wondering if you should advertise on Facebook? Here are a few reasons why you should:

• Niche targeting. Compared to other, more traditional advertising mediums- print, TV, radio- you can structure your campaign to target a more niche audience.  For each ad you create, you can choose keywords to target certain interests in the Facebook user’s profile.
  
  Say you want to advertise a sports water bottle (yes, it’s the first thing I saw on my desk). Enter keywords like playing sports, playing soccer, playing basketball, etc. you can also tap into angles like running, jogging, walking. 
• Budgets are easily manageable. You can choose pay per click or pay per impressions. Set a daily budget and Facebook will invoice you “once per Facebook billable day,” which is generally daily but not always.  You can also change your budget at any time.
  
  *Word of advice: Don’t set your daily budget as the maximum of  your credit card's daily limit. Because Facebook doesn’t always bill daily, you might have a couple days’ of charges to pay for. 
• Campaign management made simple. As with the budget capabilities, managing Facebook campaigns is fairly easy, sometimes too easy! You can edit, pause, or ad new ads and keywords at any time. However, because this is so easy to do, be careful not to over-edit. Give some time for your ads to accrue impressions and clicks to see what is working at what is not. 
• Reporting.  Run reports to see how your campaign is performing at the account, campaign, or ad level. Filter by impressions, overall performance, or responder demographics. This last filter is quite interesting. You can see which keywords triggered clicks, how old responders are, where they are from, and the percentage of impressions each state (if targeting U.S.) received.

There you go, Facebook advertising in a nutshell. If you need any help setting up or monitoring your account, contact Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc.. We offer campaign management as one of our services.