7 Ways to Stand Out From The Crowd

According to a recent J.D. Powers and Associates and Novantas study, customer service drives 15%-20% of growth performance at the branch level - accounting for a differential of $50,000 - $90,000 of additional annual earnings per branch.

As a firm who conducts market research and secret shops for banks and credit unions across the country, we empirically know that customer service will provide the differentiation that your institution is looking for.

How do you standout from the crowd?

• Know your competition – what are their strengths and weaknesses?  Who is providing outstanding service in your market?
• Know your markets – your market needs may be different from branch to branch.
• Focus your efforts – don’t expect your staff to be good at all things.  Find your niche and maximize it.
• Train and set expectation levels – communication with the staff is the key.  Tell them what you expect and how to be successful.
• Offer the right products – Do you provide “value meals” that bundle key products together?  Do you offer product packages based on life stage?
• Provide the right tools – relook at your sales process and sales materials.  Remove obstacles and provide targeted benefit-driven materials.
• Track, recognize and reinforce – your team should know, at all times, how they are doing against their goals and be rewarded for success.

With a focus on customer service, you will cost-effectively:

• Support your brand
  
• Increase share of wallet
• Reduce customer attrition
• Increase revenue
• Increase staff retention

But it takes a commitment.  

From the senior management down, every level of the organization must support this effort.  Often, it's best to look to a third party for an objective perspective and to focus on the plan while you manage the day-to-day institution operations.

Take care,

Eric

Display Ad Builder goes global, and more updates

Since launching the AdWords Display Ad Builder, we've been pretty busy. Today, we'd like to give you a summary of what we've done so far, an update on the latest features and what's coming soon.

What we've done so far:

• Global availability: We've made Display Ad Builder templates available in over 40 languages and over 100 countries worldwide, with more languages coming soon.
• Templates for everyone: Currently, more than 90 customizable templates are available, many of which we've announced on this blog, with designs for local holidays and seasons around the world, specific industries and fully customizable "all-purpose" templates. We've also launched several text-only templates, a popular option with advertisers who don't have ready images to use in their display ads.

Recent updates:

• Availability in the new AdWords interface: We've begun to make the Display Ad Builder available to a small number of users in the new AdWords interface, and we'll let you know when it becomes available to everyone. If you're using the new AdWords interface, you'll find that the Display Ad Builder is now easier to use. You can also access the tool with fewer clicks - simply choose "Display ad builder" from the Ads tab to get started.
• Font selection: You can now select different fonts for each of your lines of text. Also, if you're advertising in a language that requires a specific font, we'll automatically identify a font that works for you based on the characters you type. As a result, you're more likely to build ads that meet your brand guidelines, making them more impactful and effective.

What's coming?

• More templates: We're working on many more customizable templates, ranging from general all-purpose templates to those for specific seasons and industries. Also look for new rich media and video-based templates in the coming months.
• Changes to Video Ads: The Click-to-Play video ad template that we launched several weeks ago will soon become the default interface for creating these ads in AdWords. We'll phase out the existing interface, currently accessed by clicking 'Video Ads" as an ad format option. Existing users of Click-to-Play video ads will be individually notified and we'll also update our Help Center to reflect changes in reporting for these ads, such as the fact that play rate will now be captured by the "Interaction Rate" stat for video ads.

To get started with the Display Ad Builder, choose it as an ad format option within your AdWords campaigns. To learn more, please watch our playlist of videos.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Back to Basics: Emailing reports

Usually reports are mailed out to marketing managers or directors to measure any change in progress from week-to-week. With Google Analytics, you can make the process completely automated -- you can schedule your reports to be emailed daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. To start emailing your reports in PDF, CSV, XML, and TSV format, just click the 'Email' icon above all your reports:

This Help Center article has comprehensive instructions on how to schedule your reports or email them on the fly.

If after scheduling reports you want to delete them, you can do so at any time by going to the 'Manage Scheduled Emails' dashboard. This may be a little hard to find since you have to click a separate 'Email' icon in the reports page.

To delete a scheduled email, please follow these steps:

1. Find the other 'Email' icon on the left hand side of the reports page. Look at the image below to get an idea of where it's located.

2. After clicking the icon, you should see a list of scheduled reports. Click the icon that looks like a trash can in the upper right hand corner to delete them forever.

Hopefully after reading this post, you've automated sending out reports and have one less thing to worry about on Mondays!

Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

New Interface Thursdays: Meet the Networks tab

In this edition of New Interface Thursdays we'll be talking about the Networks tab. The Networks tab replaces the Placements tab from the previous interface, and gives you more insight into where your ads are running. In the Networks tab, you can see your ads' performance across different networks like Google search, Search partners, and the Content Network.

(click for larger image)

When looking at how your Content Network ads perform, you'll see that the new interface divides Content Network statistics into two groups: automatic placements and managed placements.

Automatic placements are pages in the Content Network where your ads have been contextually targeted. Contextual targeting matches the themes in your keyword list to relevant page content on the sites in our network. For instance, if you have 'ski equipment' as a keyword in your ad group, Google might contextually target your ads to a page talking about the best online ski equipment deals.

Managed placements are sites or specific URLs that you've singled out. With managed placements you can set a specific bid for a site. If a site is performing very well for you and you want to increase your exposure, you might bid higher for that placement. On the other hand, if a site isn't very relevant to your offer, you might lower your bid or exclude the site.

When you add a site to your managed placements, we still use your keywords to find contextually matching pages. You can think of it like a Venn diagram:

(click for larger image)

Automatic Placements

Jumping back into the account, we can take a closer look at automatic placements. By clicking show details you'll see a table showing the sites on which your ads are running. If you've used the Placement Performance report in the previous interface this should look familiar to you. With the new interface you have this report right in your account.

(click for larger image)

You can see that each site's performance is broken out. The green "Added" badges appear next to the sites which you've already added to your managed placements.

From this table, you have a few actions you can take. You can add a site to your managed placements with a separate bid for that site. If you want to see a breakdown of your performance on individual URLs where your ads were shown, you can select a site and click Show URL report. Also if a site doesn't meet your advertising goals, you can exclude it from your ad group or campaign.

Managed Placements

Your managed placements are shown in a similar table:

(click for larger image)

Since you set specific bids for managed placements, this table has a Max CPC column. Like the rest of the new interface, you can make changes directly in the table. For example, if you want to change your bid for a placement, just click on the bid and enter a new one. As with your automatic placements, you can view a URL report to take a deeper look at where your ads are showing.

At the bottom of the Networks tab you'll find Exclusions. This area lists any placements that you've excluded to prevent your ads from running on them. You can exclude a placement at the ad group level or at the campaign level.

(click for larger image)

That's it for our tour of the Networks tab. You can always find more information in the Help Center and at the New Interface site. 

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

How to Use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics

Last year, Justin Cutroni of EpikOne published a four-part tutorial on how to use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. We've seen a lot of interest in this topic, so we thought we'd republish the first part of the series here on the Analytics blog.

Ecommerce Tracking Part 1: How it Works

This post is the first in a series of e-commerce transaction tracking with Google Analytics. Why is e-commerce tracking important? Well, transaction data is a vital piece of information when analyzing online business performance.

Sure, it’s great to measure things like conversion rate, but revenue is much more tangible to many business owners. Having the e-commerce data in your web analytics application makes it easier to perform analysis. Do you need to set up e-commerce tracking? No, but it sure helps. :)

The Big Pictures

E-commerce tracking is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends the data to a Google Analytic servers by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that e-commerce data is sent rather than pageview data.

But how does Google Analytics get the e-commerce data? That’s the tricky part. You, the site owner, must create some type of code that inserts the transaction data into the GA JavaScript. Sounds tricky, huh? Well, its not that bad.

Step by Step: How it Works

Let’s break it down and walk through what actually happens.

1. The visitor submits their transaction to your server.
2. Your server receives the transaction data and processes the transaction. This may include a number of steps at the server level, such as sending a confirmation email, checking a credit card number, etc.
3. After processing the transaction the server prepares to send the receipt page back to the visitor. While preparing the receipt page your server must extract some the transaction data and insert it into the Google Analytics JavaScript. This is the code that you must create.
4. The receipt page is sent to the visitor’s browser.
5. While the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the e-commerce data is sent to Google Analytics via special GA JavaScript.
6. Here’s a basic diagram of the process. Again, the biggest challenge during implementation is adding code to your web server that inserts the transaction data, in the appropriate format, into the receipt page. I’ll cover the setup in part 2 of this series.

What Data can be Tracked?

Google Analytics collect two types of e-commerce data: transaction data and item data. Transaction data describes the overall transaction (transaction ID, total sale, tax, shipping, etc.) while item data describes the items purchased in the transaction (sku, description, category, etc.). All of this data eventually ends up in GA reports. Here’s a complete list of the data:

Transaction Data

• Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
• Affiliate or store name
• Total
• Tax
• Shipping
• City
• State or region
• Country

Item Data

• Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
• SKU
• Product name
• Product category or product variation
• Unit price [required]
• Quantity [required]

A few notes about the data. First, the geo-location data is no longer used by Google Analytics. The new version of GA tries to identify where the buyer is located using an IP address lookup.

Also, you should avoid using any non-alpha numeric characters in the data. Especially in the numeric fields. Do not add a currency identifier (i.e. dollar sign) in the total, tax or shipping fields. this can cause problems with the data.

Continue reading parts 2-4 of this series on EpikOne's Blog, Analytics Talk

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics

Two upcoming Google webinars

We want to share with you two upcoming, online Google webinars that you may find useful: Analytics Webinar with Avinash Kaushik and Travel Shopping for Summer 2009.

Analytics Webinar with Avinash Kaushik

Little Changes, Large Results: 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now

In today's tough economic climate, it's increasingly important for marketers to utilize resources effectively – in particular, media dollars – in order to maximize ROI. But often times, marketers overlook what's immediately achievable.

Please join us on Tuesday, May 12th at 10:00am PST when Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, leads a discussion on the "Top 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now." This webinar is relevant to all marketers, especially advertisers looking to refine their campaigns.

You'll learn how to immediately implement Avinash's tips for using data-driven insights to guide your marketing message and media strategies. And you'll walk away knowing how to improve marketing efficiency, drive insights into consumer behavior, and generate greater returns on your marketing investments.

Register here today for Avinash's online webinar.

Google and Compete present: Travel Shopping for Summer 2009

With travel’s busiest season right around the corner, understanding consumers’ attitudes about traveling this summer and their planning process is more important than ever. Using an in-depth survey of traveler perspectives and a detailed online behavioral analysis, Google and Compete have partnered to create a new study exploring how consumers are shopping for summer travel.

Join us on Tuesday, May 19th at 10:00am PST to find out answers to these and other important questions:

• Are consumers planning to travel this summer, and how do their plans differ this year in comparison to last year?
  
• How has the volume of travel research and booking activity changed?
  
• What types of destinations and promotions do consumers find appealing, and how can travel sellers take advantage of this?
  

Register here today for this travel online webinar.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew

Share Customizations and Dive Much Deeper, Available Soon...

Today at eMmetrics San Jose, we announced four feature updates coming soon to Google Analytics. These features are especially relevant if you're an Advanced user of Google Analytics.

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions are new features available in most table views that allow inline cross-tabular analysis of data. You can use these new power features to do in-depth, on-the-fly analysis and see all the information in the same table. View data by two dimensions at once, such as keywords and cities. Next, pivot by another dimension such as source, while also viewing two additional metrics such as visits and pages/visit.... all within a single table view.

The possibilities are virtually endless and potentially mind boggling (you've been warned!). Watch the video below.



Share Custom Reports and Advanced Segment Customizations

Also announced today is the ability to share customizations you have made to Custom Reports and Advanced Segmentation by simply sharing a URL. Think you have the ultimate custom SEO report? Post the URL for the report to your blog or email it to a friend. When people click on it, they import the report structure, so rather than seeing your data, they see the report you built, but with their data in it. Now people can share their more interesting Google Analytics customizations without having to send detailed instructions, just share a URL!

Manage Customizations Across Profiles

In addition, if you have multiple profiles you will be able to pick and choose which ones get which Custom Reports and Advanced Segments associated with your account. So if you import or create the ultimate Search Engine Marketing report and one of your profiles doesn't do SEM, simply don't add it to that profile.

All of these new features are in beta and will first be available to show attendees, then will begin rolling out in everyone's reports over the coming weeks.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Google Analytics Team