Month: November 2014

One of my go-to sites for digital marketing information and news, E-Consultancy has a great article on valuable Google Analytics custom reports. After having some first-hand experience with Google Analytics through my E-Marketing class’s client project, I now have a much better understanding of how Analytics can be used to gather the insights necessary to have a strong digital strategy.

Some of the custom reports that E-Consultantcy seem to be very useful, so I would like to share a few of them with you all.

Time of Day Report

Definitely thought this was an interesting one. This report allows you to see which days of the week are the most popular, which makes it easy to track your posts (ie. blog posts, social media posts) to see which time of the day will receive the most engagement. I think this is particularly handy for social media posts for Facebook and Twitter. By seeing which day of the week or hour of the day that receives the most engagement in terms of website traffic, we can make our posts hit a higher reach level by posting the post at the optimal time.

 

AdWords Report

You can use this report in tandem with your AdWords campaign reports. This combines Adwords acquisition data with revenue data all in one table, so it actually saves you going back and forth between different reports across the two programs.

Mobile Reports

A cool report that shows you exactly where your traffic is coming from. So if you find that your website has a lot of mobile traffic, and your website is not mobile-friendly… maybe your company should hire a web designer to incorporate those beautiful “responsive design” techniques that we’ve been learning about in class.

 

 

There are a lot of great reports, so if this post interested you feel free to read about more of them at THIS Econsultancy article.

To conclude this posting, take a look at this hilarious Google Analytics video. Warning, it contains a healthy amount of satire!

 

Source: https://econsultancy.com/blog/62271-10-valuable-google-analytics-custom-reports-2

I have found that a strong company website is very influential in my perception of a brand. A company with a great website shows that they are modern, up-to-date and customer-focused. When I have a good experience with a website, it makes me like the brand more.

A website that I really like is the MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-op) website. Right now as part of my Marketing Applications class, I am working on a client project with MEC. Through browsing their site for information, I found I had a great online experience. The tabs allow you to easily navigate through the website, and are organized in a manner that makes sense. They have a tab for each “category” of product that they offer – for example, “climb”, “bike”, “water”, “snow, etc.  Also, one can order products directly on the website to be shipped right to your doorstep. The process is very easy and user-friendly, and makes you feel like you’re right in the store. Funny enough, during class Julio used the MEC site as an example of a great website that other companies should model theirs after. I couldn’t agree more with him!

In class, we’ve been discussing “Responsive Design” in websites, and how it relates to a company’s marketing strategy. For those of you who don’t know what responsive design is, it’s a relatively new topic in online marketing today. Basically, it’s creating websites that respond to their environment where the layout of the website changes to adapt to different screen sizes. In this day and age, we access websites through the small mobile screens to giant iMac monitors. In order to save time for the web developer, the developer creates the code for a website that will work on ALL screen sizes.

For example, look at Disney.com:

Bigger Size:

Smaller Size:

‘

 

As you can see, the content is still the same, but it is just laid out differently. That’s the point of responsive design. It ensures the content of the website is the same, but it automatically modifies itself to give the person using the website the best experience. In digital marketing this is so important because people will be viewing  a company’s website through many different channels. To ensure they are taking actions that you want (such as purchasing products or joining your newsletter), it’s important to provide them the best experience possible.

 

Hey everyone – I came across an interesting TIME.com article that talks about the day of the week that overwhelmingly outperforms the other days in online sales. And that day is none other than Monday.

Very interesting, as I would have thought the weekend was the busiest day as people have free time to browse the internet for things to purchase. However, according to market researchers, it turns out is that the weekends are the quietest time as people spend least time on their computers. If I were to choose from a weekday, I would have thought Friday was the busiest as it is the “classic” day to slack off in the office.

But nope! It is Monday that is the biggest for online spenders. The primary reason is that people spend less time on their computers during the weekend, and so when they get to the office on Monday, they want to shop. Experts are saying that online shopping is an indulgent way to ease back into the workweek and to finish errands that could not be finished over the weekend.

On a related note, I found a cool infographic on online shopping and why people prefer it over shopping offline. As I’ve mentioned throughout my blog, I’m not the biggest online shopper, but I can definitely see why the biggest factor for people is the fact it saves time – with 73% consumers reporting time saving as a primary reason to shop online. I prefer using the internet and online stores in conjunction with shopping in-store. You get the best of both worlds this way!