According to Wikipedia, “A pet peeve is a minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly annoying to a greater degree than others may find it.” You may get annoyed when driving and someone tailgates. Or you may get annoyed at the supermarket or a doctor’s office because people are using their cell phones and yelling. Or you may get annoyed when a telemarketer calls your house during dinner. These may be examples of your day-to-day pet peeves, but what about social media? Do you have any social media pet peeves?
As the social media landscape has grown, both in the number of networks and the number of users, it’s natural to develop some minor annoyances. Here’s a list of my “Top 10” social media pet peeves:
[1] LinkedIn: When someone sends an invitation to connect but doesn’t customize the invitation. Who wants to receive a generic “I’d like to add you to my network” message? What if you never met the person in person or online? Shouldn’t a reason for connection be provided, or at the very least, some reference to a mutual acquaintance?
[2] Facebook: It seems as if the designers want to re-design the site on a regular basis. Can’t they be satisfied with anything they design? Settings have to be reviewed, users have to become comfortable with the changes, and above all, users have to spend time (that most don’t have) to improve the presentation of their pages and/or content.
[3] All major sites: Once a site makes a significant upgrade or design change, other sites follow. Now, many sites have similar user interfaces. What happened to unique design elements? Doesn’t any site want to look unique anymore?
[4] Twitter: When users send automatic direct messages (DMs). This goes against the entire concept of being social and participating in conversations.
[5] Twitter: #Highlighting #every #word in a #sentence with a #hashtag. The concept of a hashtag is to focus attention on one or two words for search purposes and emphasis. The excessive use of hashtags accomplishes nothing.
[6] Twitter Retweets: When users retweet every tweet that features them. While everyone appreciates positive comments, constant self-promotion turns people off. Another annoyance is when users ask for their tweets to be retweeted. Naturally, we’d all like our tweets to appeal to everyone, but it’s annoying when a tweet ends with: “Please RT.”
[7] Foursquare: When users announce that they’re at the post office, the coffee shop, the gas station, etc. If you want to meet someone, use the phone, speak to them, and make plans. Don’t expect them to surprise you at the gas station just because they happen to be nearby.
[8] Facebook and Twitter: Lack of an avatar. When users have the Twitter default egg image or the Facebook default white head on blue background image, it’s clear that the person has no intention of participating in social media. He/she might be a member of Witness Protection, and then he/she shouldn’t participate in social media anyway.
[9] All networks: When users post the same content on Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and a shorter version on Twitter. The platforms are different. A person may be connected to different people on each network. Some may use Facebook for personal connections, LinkedIn for professional connections, and Google Plus for a variety separated by circles.
[10] All networks: Users who don’t understand the concept of engagement and focus on selling their products or services rather than on conversations.
Did your social media pet peeve make the list? If not, please chime in.
A final note: a big “thank you” to some amazing Social Media Masterminds (#socialMM on Twitter) for sharing their pet peeves. They can be found on my Twitter List here.
LaTienda is an award-winning, family-owned business supporting artisanal firms in Spain. The firm works with small family-run businesses, many of which are dedicated to centuries-old food-making traditions. With warehouses in Williamsburg, Virginia and Alicante, Spain, the company ships hundreds of thousands of orders throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.
LaTienda’s brand equity is built on its fundamental commitment to the customer experience. They guarantee a positive experience for its customers – quality products delivered in excellent condition, or they will replace or refund the purchase. Overall, they had been seeing great success with their online orders, though they wanted to continue looking for opportunities to grow sales. To assist with this, they worked with WebStrategies, located nearby in Virginia.
They knew that a key product category in particular required more expensive shipping methods if it was too far from LaTienda’s Virginia warehouse. Their challenge was to understand the impact on sales of varying shipping rates for this subset of products.
LaTienda grouped visitors into two regions: Region A visitors were close enough to the warehouse to always get reasonable shipping costs. Region B visitors were everywhere else, and had to use a more expensive shipping method for the key product category.
WebStrategies wanted to measure the impact on sales whenever one of the key products was placed in the cart. To measure this, they installed Event Tracking to the “Add To Cart” buttons on every product page.
They then used Advanced Segments Custom Reports to separate visitors in Region A from Region B, and drilled down to view performance by product category. Sure enough, visitors from Region B were found to be 48% less likely to purchase if they placed an item from the key product category in their cart, which raised total shipping costs.
To combat this effect, LaTienda.com implemented a less expensive, flat rate shipping model in region B and monitored sales. After the test, the rate at which Region B visitors completed the shopping cart were found to have increased by nearly 70%.
Just to be sure, they checked to see if there was a similar increase in conversion rate for Region A visitors, and found that it did not fluctuate more than 3.4% over the same time period. The analysis confirmed that product shipping rates greatly impacted shopping cart behavior, and used data to measure the results of a key business decision.
Understanding the customer journey, from consideration to conversion, is no easy feat. But with tools like Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) in Google Analytics, we’re working to make it easier to uncover new insights and opportunities to improve marketing performance. As Google’s Global Program Manager for Attribution, I recently led a webinar that highlighted opportunities to:
Improve keyword coverage to reach customers at all stages of the conversion path.
Identify those channels that directly contribute to the growth of your business.
Learn how metrics like average order value can be influenced by early-stage marketing.
This webinar is the 4th in Google’s ongoing series on attribution and is designed for newcomers and seasoned veterans of Google Analytics alike. If you’re just starting with the tool, we do recommend that you take a look at our MCF Implementation Checklist below as well as our earlier webinar, Building Blocks of Digital Attribution to ensure you are capturing all the data to maximize these analyses. And please read on for answers to some interesting questions that came up during the webinar.
QUESTIONS
What do I need to use Multi-Channel Funnels properly?
MCF Implementation Checklist:
Install Google Analytics! Make sure that all of your webpages are tagged, and if you happen to have more than one website (yoursite1.com and yoursite.2com) or multiple domains (red.mysite1.com and blue.mysite1.com) that you are set up to use Multi-Domain tracking. This last step will ensure that you are tracking all interactions across your sites into a single customer path.
Set up E-Commerce Tracking or Goals. MCF needs to know what action represents the very end of the customer path - the conversion. The conversion may be a sale, or it could be another action that’s valuable for your business, like filling out a lead form or downloading a brochure. For businesses selling products online, you can measure conversions (sales) through e-commerce tracking. If you’re measuring visitors that take a specific action, such as completing a form, setting up goals will suffice.
Get your tags in order. For AdWords customers, make sure that your advertising account is linked to your Google Analytics profile and that auto-tagging is enabled. For other channels, such as e-mail or advertising run on other networks, our custom URL builder will help you build the tags necessary for each campaign. If you’re new, be sure to learn more about channels and channel grouping.
Start using the MCF reports. Once you’ve followed the steps above, you can find the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in the Standard Reporting tab of Google Analytics: click on “Conversions” at the left-hand side of the user interface, then click “Multi-Channel Funnels.”
Is it possible to integrate the data from Multi-Channel Funnels directly into our own systems? Absolutely. Not only are all of these data points available for export from the Google Analytics interface in commonly-used formats, we also just announced the release of the Multi-Channel Funnels API so that developers can tap directly into this incredibly powerful data source. See our recent blog post for more information.
How do we ensure we are tracking all our channels in a way that is optimal for these reports? By default, all inbound clicks that are part of a conversion path are captured by Multi-Channel Funnels. The default channel groupings that we provide then make a series of fairly reasonable assumptions to group traffic into their respective buckets. As a user, you have two approaches to ensure that all traffic is ending up in the right place:
The first option is tag all of your marketing activities in a way that matches the logic of the default channel groupings. You can find the rules behind the groups in this help center article. There is also a simple URL builder so that you can append the proper tags to your other campaigns.
The second option is to create channel groupings that match the way you are currently naming and tagging your campaigns. This approach tends to be favored by those companies that want to utilize all of their historical data in MCF right away, or have technical limitations preventing them from changing the actual campaign tags. Implementation details for this approach can be found on the Analytics Help section, in this article on channel groupings.
Does MCF have to be a true purchase or it will it work for a Business-to-business company looking for qualified leads? Companies that are pursuing leads tend to have much shorter conversion paths than those that are tracking purchases. It's not entirely uncommon to see lower assist / last ratios and, equally, to have the perception of less opportunity when reviewing the MCF reports around a single goal. As a better practice, we suggest that advertisers implement multiple goals to measure customer activities along a wider path.
For instance, goals could be set up at points before filling out a lead form but after becoming a slightly more qualified customer, either by increasing time or page depth on your website, reviewing a whitepaper or looking at cost information. These would help to measure performance even if there is a more significant lag before becoming a lead, lending insight to the very early parts of the journey.
After the lead form is filled out, any unique action that you could encourage to bring the now qualified customer back to the site again, such as completing a signup process, reviewing a contract or qualifying for a promotional offer, can then be used to go all the way back through to the beginning of the journey to find that initial contact point.
Why is (not set) so high for AdWords Keyword? When you select a primary dimension in the Assisted Conversions report of Multi-Channel Funnels, it is not filtering the information as much as it is adding a different view to it. As such, when I move from that basic channel grouping view to AdWords Keyword, the report still shows 100% of the data but now groups each interaction by its respective keyword. However, since not all interactions have AdWords Keyword data associated with them, including Direct, E-Mail and Social Network visits, they are grouped into their own (not set) bucket.
During the webinar, my colleague responded to this question by saying that “not set” may also appear due to broken AdWords tags. This response is also technically correct as broken AdWords tags can also prevent keyword information from being passed through, but in many cases it’s more likely that it’s just because the visits don’t have keyword data associated as described above, and AdWords tags are probably OK -- so consider this first before trying to troubleshoot.
What devices are in place to prevent Spiders and Bots from inflating data and thus causing a possible "bad" business decision? Multi-Channel Funnels measure specific goal or conversion actions that are hopefully beyond the grasp of bots or spiders that are just mining content. For instance, it probably wouldn't be likely to find one that tries to fake e-commerce orders.
If you have found bots coming through these conversions on your website (i.e. Store Locator), it may be practical to filter those visits out at the profile level in Google Analytics to make sure that they are not impacting any of your resulting analyses. Although we don’t recommend a specific set of criteria for limiting bots, there are dozens of articles online that you should be able to find with individual opinions on what is best.
Posted by by Neil Hoyne (@nhoyne), Global Program Manager for Attribution
We started a fun new chapter of our lives last Friday when we got two new dogs. Yes, TWO!!!! What was I thinking?!?!
It got me to thinking … we’re starting new relationships from scratch. Kind of like you do with customers every day.
So here are a few things that I’ve learned about loyalty from my dogs … and who knows loyalty better than a pooch?
Kindness
This one goes without saying – well, until now. But, like pups, customers respond to a kind voice and gentle demeanor.
Consistency
Dogs and customers both have a short memory. They are most likely to remember their very first and very last encounter with your institution. So you and your staff must be on stage and on-point with every single interaction. You can “say” you have great service, but it’s the consistent application of great service changes behavior and breeds loyalty.
Immediate response
Things don’t always go as planned. With our youngest puppy, I’m ready to hang a sign in the house that says, “XX Days Accident-Free.” For the record, this morning the sign dropped back down to 0.
When “accidents” happen, address them immediately. Errors are an opportunity for you to pro-actively address an issue and actually build a better relationship.
Certainly my dogs are becoming loyal because we love them. But having fun certainly doesn’t hurt! Every day, we make a point of playing fetch and wrestling and letting them chase the kids (in a fun way). My shepherd and I are quickly becoming great trail-running partners.
I’m not expecting your customers to want to chase a Frisbee, but understanding what drives your customers – when they’re not in your branch – will help you to build a better relationship. How do you accomplish that? LISTEN. You need to talk to your customers about their lives, not just their banking.
Positive reinforcement
Whether you're teaching Fido to sit on command or training a customer to use their debit card more times per month, rewarding good behavior works. You don’t necessarily need a detailed rewards program – though there are many great ones out there. But a simple personal touch, like a hand written “thank you” note for every new account opened goes a long way.
By following these five, simple ideas, you can become the Dog Whisperer of your customer loyalty program.
We’re pleased to announce the addition of Shortcuts to Google Analytics. Shortcuts help you get to the exact view you want of your data in GA in record time. Rather than having to go through the "find report, add segment, change, sort" process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click.
How to create a Shortcut
Creating Shortcuts is simple. When viewing a standard or custom report in Google Analytics, click on the “Shortcut” button found on the report’s Utility Bar:
Then, give your new Shortcut a name:
Once named, you'll be taken straight to your report in the new "Shortcuts" section in the "Home" tab. Your report configuration has been stored, and your report shows up on the left side of the screen.
The following information is saved as part of a Shortcut:
Standard or custom report for context
Currently viewed tab on the report
Sort order
Advanced segments
Graphed metric
Notably not saved is the date range and sample size. This is because they are very dependent on the data you are looking at.
Using Shortcuts
In the "Home" tab in Google Analytics, there is a new section called "Shortcuts". Here, you can find all of the shortcuts you’ve created, and navigate to each one. Clicking a Shortcut will "reset" the segments that are applied - so you know you'll always see the same customization every time you use a Shortcut.
If you make any changes while viewing a Shortcut and you want to have those changes persist for the next time you view the Shortcut, just click on “Save” from the report’s Utility Bar:
Managing Shortcuts
You can easily manage your Shortcuts from the Overview page, found under the Shortcuts navigation on the “Home” tab. From this page, you can also delete any of your created Shortcuts:
What else should you know?
Shortcuts can be emailed and exported like any other standard report.
Deleting a Shortcut will remove that report from any scheduled emails, as with deleting a custom report.
Shortcuts apply at the profile level, like the rest of reports in Google Analytics.
This is a continued step in making your experience with Google Analytics as efficient as possible. We hope you find Shortcuts a useful feature.
Canadian Postal Code FSAs Expanding on our launch of ZIP Code targeting in the US, Canadian Postal Code FSAs are now available for targeting. You can now reach over 1,500 Canadian Postal Code FSAs, the first three digits of the Canadian Postal Code. Now you’ll be able to plan, buy and get reporting with AdWords the same way you do with direct mail. Plus, with the “Bulk locations” tab in the AdWords location targeting tool, you’ll be able to easily enter up to 1,000 locations per country at a time.
U.S. metro changes We've recently changed our U.S. metro targeting areas to Nielsen® DMA® (Designated Market Areas) regions. Now your online campaigns and reporting will more precisely match TV-based audience data and campaigns. If you’ve been using metros, you’ll notice that the new geographic shapes look different on a map. While you might see some increases or decreases in traffic with the new regions, we estimate the impact will be small for most advertisers.
As always, if your business has a fixed service radius and you want to more tightly target a campaign to that area, we recommend using the radius targeting option to identify and select specific cities and postal codes to reach.
More countries get city-level targeting and location extensions We’re adding city and region targeting options in the following nine countries: Belgium (city), Bulgaria (region & city), Denmark (city), India (city), Ireland (city), Romania (region & city), Sweden (region & city), Taiwan (city), Vietnam (city)
That brings our full list of countries with city level targeting up to 43. Also new to Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, India, Sweden, and Taiwan arelocation extensions. Location extensions show your closest business address and phone number along with your search ad, making it easier for customers to visit or call.
Put it together and win in local markets So let’s say you are a manufacturer in India and sell through retailers in many cities across the country. You can now analyze your performance by city using the AdWords geographic report. You might see that you're getting a better conversion rate and larger order sizes in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai. So you create a supplemental campaign just targeting Delhi and Mumbai with higher bids and distinct budgets. Next, you set up location extensions to show your local sales office locations in each city. And you use location insertion to add “Mumbai” or “Delhi” to the end of your visible URL whenever your ads show in that city to help make your business feel even more local. You’re now set up to get more clicks, conversions, visits and phone calls to help your business grow where it matters most.
We are constantly evaluating our products to make sure that we are investing in tools that create the most value for our customers. Sometimes this requires making some changes...as we will be with DoubleClick Ad Planner. Starting on September 5, 2012, DoubleClick Ad Planner will become a tool dedicated to researching placements across the 2 million sites comprising the Google Display Network. Our goal will be to make this a best-in-class planning product for the GDN. It will also get a new name: the Google Display Network Ad Planner.
In order to maintain the highest level of quality planning data and to invest in new functionality, we will also need to discontinue some existing features. You will start to see, for example, that certain filters and demographic data will no longer be available in Ad Planner.
If there is any data or media plans that you will need after this change that will no longer be available, please export and save them before September 5th.
Thanks for your support and understanding as we continue to focus on developing new monetization features for publishers and advertisers.
This article is part of our Developer Spotlight Series that promotes new tools and applications built using the Google Analytics Developer platform. To see other tools, check out our App Gallery. Interested in having us showcase your story? Let us know what you’re working on!
Eduardo Scoz is a software architect and self-proclaimed, “analytics addict.” In early 2010, he grew frustrated with his daily routine of checking in on his web analytics from several sites and personal blogs. Very quickly he found himself spending an overwhelming amount of time monitoring his key metrics from across his own content kingdom: he yearned for a way to keep an eye on his KPI’s without having it feel like a full-time job. Eduardo was determined to find an iPhone application that gave him a high-level view of all of his sites in way that was easy to digest. After a few days of searching he realized that the only way for him to get exactly what he wanted was to build it himself. He had never built an iPhone application but his “learn by doing” mentality prevailed: after a few weeks of prototyping, he had come up with something he was proud of. He showed it to a few friends and gauging their reaction, he realized he might be onto something. He incorporated their feedback, finished building it out and decided to release it publicly. In February 2010, Quicklytics was born. Quicklytics allows users to rapidly check the status of multiple websites in a matter of seconds and visually understand how their site is performing for both current and historical timeframes. It has full support for both iPhone and iPad as well as custom filtering that allows for quick deep dives into areas of interest. While its primary views focus on top-level metrics, Quicklytics also provides detailed reports with most of the data also available through Google Analytics.
“All apps were about either showing as much data as possible, or focusing on less-useful stuff, like browsers and screen sizes, which are only really necessary when you’re doing deep analysis, not when ‘checking the weather’,” says Eduardo. As soon as Quicklytics hit the App Store, it spread like wildfire. In the 2 ½ years since it was released, Quicklytics has received over 40,000 downloads - most of which were paid. This has translated into a significant source of side revenue for Eduardo’s business that has allowed him to continue building new features for Quicklytics while looking for new projects to learn from. Now, Eduardo finds great joy in using Quicklytics to measure the mobile app analytics on - you guessed it - Quicklytics. Quicklytics leverages the Analytics Core Reporting APIs Objective-C library and OAuth 2.0 for user authentication. Although this was Eduardo’s first experience with the Analytics APIs and Objective-C, he was able to take full advantage of the Developer Forums for support: “In the few cases I found issues with the tool, Google developers were actually very helpful and fixed some issues from their side. It was a great experience.” Armed with a clear user problem and a willingness to learn, Eduardo was able to turn one of his biggest pain points into a viable side business and a solution that is enjoyed by many. According to Eduardo, “It’s great to know that a lot of people find it as useful as I do.” To learn more about Quicklytics, check out his App Store listing. Posted by John Milinovich, Google Analytics API team
Have you ever wanted to hear directly from some of the Google teams driving AdWords product and customer service improvements? Well, here’s a great opportunity to do exactly that!
On Wednesday August 29, 2012 at 1pm PST (4pm EST), we will host a Hangout on Air to answer some of your questions and discuss recent updates that make AdWords products and customer service better for you. Our guests will be Francoise Brougher, Vice President of Global SMB Sales & Operations and Paul Feng, Director of Google AdWords Product Management joined by AdWords Certified Partners working with small and medium business advertisers:Kim Clinkunbroomer and Tom Sands, who will share their experiences and ask the panel a few questions. The live session will be moderated by Deepak Khandelwal, Vice President of Global Customer Services.
Follow the Google Ads Google+ page to watch this broadcast live on August 29th at 1:00 pm PST (4:00 pm EST). Submit your questions for Francoise and Paul by 1:00 pm PST Monday August 27th. Tune in on Wednesday for the next edition of SMB Hangouts on Air!
How is the amount of time spent watching video divided among streaming, DVD’s, and broadcast/satellite/cable among the different cultural groups in the US? Here we present some of the data collected by Research Now for the Florida State University Multicultural Marketing study of 2012 that answers that question.
We asked our online sample of respondents to tell us “in an average week, approximately how many hours do you spend...?” for multiple activities. The respondents were divided into those born in the US and those born abroad because that could have an impact on the language they select for their video exposure.
Below is the chart detailing the number of weekly hours spent watching streamed videos by different cultural groups. As can be seen streaming is most popular among Hispanics and Asians not born in the US and least among non-Hispanic Whites. Asians not born in the US report more than five hours per week watching these videos, followed by Latinos not born in the US with almost five hours per week. It may be that these groups, because of their bilingualism add more content to their routines.
As seen in the chart below, watching rented DVD’s presents a similar pattern, but the number of hours allocated to this video delivery mode is lower and Hispanics born abroad have the highest tendency to rent DVD’s. In general, Hispanics and Asians are generally more likely to rent DVD’s than anyone else. Perhaps the heritage of countries of origin and the availability of certain types of content account for these differences.
Watching TV via broadcast, cable, and satellite is still the dominant mode of video consumption as can be seen below.
It is interesting to note, however, that those more likely to stream and rent are those less likely to watch TV in more traditional ways. Asians and Hispanics are less likely to watch broadcast than their African American and non-Hispanic White counterparts.
These results imply that changes in video watching routines vary by cultural group and by place of birth, with the obvious implication for language preferences. Video providers like Netflix and Hulu that favor streaming are likely to be more attractive to Hispanics and Asians, particularly those born abroad. Traditional video providers like Comcast, Dish Network, and broadcast may do well in anticipating the transition that is taking place by putting more of their content online, in particular if they wish to survive in a much more competitive environment. In this new environment emerging culturally diverse groups appear to be taking the lead in enjoying newer modes of delivery.
Cable and satellite companies may not only want to make their content available online but also they may want to reconsider how subscribers buy their content. The greater ability to choose provided by streaming and the fading DVD’s mode is not as available in cable and satellite since these companies require the purchases of large bundles of programming.
All in all, the competitive world of online video delivery seems to be hot and worthy of much attention.
The data for this study was collected by Research Now of Dallas, Texas, thanks to the generous initiative of Ms. Melanie Courtright. Research Now contributed these data to the research efforts of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University. The distribution of the sample is as follows: This national online sample had quotas for US region, age, and gender to increase representativeness.
