Be Like A Running Store

One of the best things that we can do as financial marketers is to bring retail principles into our discipline.

Take my running store for example. I'm a loyal shopper of Up And Running not because they have the best price or widest selection ... I shop there because they are specialists. They are experts in a field that matters to me.

Unlike the large chain sporting goods stores, my running shop asks me questions about how I run and where I run. They don't shove a shoe in front of me based on price - but instead measure up my foot and how my arches react to the running motion, they focus on my gait and pronation then RECOMMEND the shoe that's best for ME.

Best of all, they care about me after I've bought the shoe. I go to the store regularly for running groups. They ADVISE me on how to train for marathons or how to avoid recurring stress fractures. This, most of all, is why I'm loyal and willing to pay a few bucks more for my gear.

With our current economy, consumers are looking now, more than ever, for an expert to help them with their financial issues. And let's face it, you open more mortgages and auto loans, and deal with personal finance more in one day than any of your customers will have to concern themselves with in their entire lives!

You are the expert that they crave.

So, how do you demonstrate that you are a specialist, just like my running shop?

• Know Their Run – Do your customers need a one-time “quick fix” like a home improvement loan or are they in it for the financial marathon? Ask questions and keep a customer log.

• Size ‘em Up – Like each shoe fits each runner differently, so does each financial product. Instead of analyzing their gait and feet, ask them basic questions about how they will use the product and their goals. What are they using now? What have they used in the past? What features did they love? What would they change? What do they ultimately want to achieve (lower payments, faster pay off, security, faster retirement)?

• Be Their Coach – You and your staff are the experts! Coach your customers and they will entrust more to you.

Take are,

Eric

Update your skills - take the Google Advertising Fundamentals exam

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve training materials and the Google Advertising Professionals program we have updated the certification exam and learning center.

We've created a new Google Advertising Fundamentals exam designed to be more rigorous and strategy-oriented. Our teams have developed the new curriculum and exam to equip you with useful, relevant training to manage AdWords campaigns.

We've noted some questions since we introduced the new exam so we wanted to tell you a little bit more:

• We're testing a wider range of knowledge and the passing score is higher than the previous exam - 85% vs 75% on the previous test.
• You can access the new exam through your Google Advertising Professionals account. Navigate to the My Exams tab where you can pick up your candidate ID to use on the testing site and follow the links to either the Learning Center or the Exam Testing Site.
• The new exam is currently only available in English, but will be released in 20 additional languages in January.

Our goal was to bring the materials and exam up to date to ensure they cover all current products and best practices to help run and manage AdWords campaigns. We'll be introducing new advanced exams in 2010, so you may hear about some of them being tested now. At this time, however, you only need to hold a valid passing score in the previous exam or, if you're new to the program, the new Advertising Fundamentals exam.

Congratulations to those of you who've taken and passed the new exams and good luck to all test takers.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Think2010: The need for speed

In our Think2010 post a couple weeks ago, we noted how important experimentation will be in the coming year to help you optimize your campaign for the best possible ROI. A very closely-related tenet is the commitment to speed. There is great access to information and insights, and that information is now available faster than ever. This means that marketers who are nimble, work quickly, and iterate as they go will often be the ones who succeed.

A few ways to commit to speed in 2010:

* Set up custom Google Alerts to monitor news, blogs, videos and other coverage of topics related to your brand and its marketplace.
* Regularly mine Insights for Search to see trends as they're emerging for your brand or category -- and quickly create a plan to act on the opportunities you discover.
* Use Display Ad Builder to create display, rich media, and video ads in minutes by incorporating your own text, images, and logo into one of our professionally designed templates.
* Use Website Optimizer to quickly test variations of your landing page to see which works best -- then implement the winning version to maximize performance.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

Holiday Bonus: More Great Features

We all love the holiday season, and so now, here are a few reasons to love it even more! A few weeks ago, we announced a set of powerful, flexible, and intelligent features. Today, at SES Chicago, Phil Mui announced additional features that build on these same themes to make your life as an analyst easier. We hope you'll enjoy them.

Annotations

Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer?

For instance:

• Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?
• When did the new display ads campaign launch?
• Who's responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live?

Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn't scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing.

This week, the wild goose chase is over -- you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened" with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.

Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations.



Taking its usefulness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!

Note: Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.

Custom Variables Now Available In Advanced Segments

Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. In Google Analytics, not only are you able to define multiple custom variables, each custom variable is a name-value pair and can be assigned one of 3 scopes: page, session, or visitor. Each custom variable name and each value is an arbitrary string defined by you pertinent to your business needs.

When we announced Multiple Custom Variables in October, the only way to view metrics on these Custom Variables then was to open the standard "Custom Variables" report in the Visitors section. This week, a user can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, as well as key-value combination of all Custom Variables. In other words, if you've created a Custom Variable such as "Logged In Member", you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.

The ability to create visit segments based on Custom Variables is critical in maximizing the full potential of Custom Variables. Users can now slice and dice their metrics by decorating their site traffic with the appropriate key-value pairs.

Custom Variables Available In Custom Reports

You can also create Custom Reports with any of the key or value dimensions associated with any Custom Variable. Now, you can see how a segment defined by Custom Variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.

New Analytics Tracking Code Setup Wizard

One of the more daunting tasks in setting up analytics on any site is to manually configure the tracking code for specialized situations, such as multiple subdomains, cross-domain tracking, mobile web tracking, PHP sites, campaign tagging, etc.

Well, fear no more. When you create a profile, you'll notice a new tracking code setup wizard in Google Analytics. This wizard automatically generates the appropriate tracking code according to the setup options specified by you.

New Version of The Analytics API

Later this week, there will be a separate announcement about a set of very exciting features to our Analytics API. Here's a little preview: Support for Advanced Segmentation will now be available through the API.

In addition, new data dimensions and metrics will be made available, including those in our recently announced features.

Enjoy -- and happy holidays from the Google Analytics team!


Posted by Jeff Gillis and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

Starbucks to run world's biggest Facebook ad campaign to date

Starbucks to run world's biggest Facebook ad campaign to date (Brand Republic)

SES Chicago Next Week

Come to the windy city next week and catch Google Analytics' fearless Senior Product Manager Phil Mui in action at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. Phil will be presenting at two sessions on Monday at SES:

• MUST SEE: What's New and Exciting with Google Analytics - Monday at 12:45pm at the networking lunch which we're sponsoring. He'll cover the latest feature launch, AND - he might announce some new features. You never know with Phil. We really hope you can make this session - you'll want to share it with your friends, literally (hint, hint). We're not saying anything more.
  
  
• Phil will also participate in a panel called How to Turn Your Web Analytics Into a Money-Making Machine along with Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Sterne, founder of the Web Analytics Association and the eMetrics conference.

Also, the AdWords team will be there in force, presenting the Google Ads Factory Tour, a series of sessions designed to give advertisers practical tips they can use immediately to improve search and display performance. They'll also be holding a session on AdWords Optimization Tools as well as on The Next Generation of AdWords Bidding: Conversion Optimizer. Read more at the AdWords blog post, and register for SES here.


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Does Your Institution Make Outbound Sales Calls?

Community Banks and Credit Unions are catching on to what their larger competitors have known for some time.

Customers and prospects really do respond to being called at home!

The word "telemarketing" has really taken on a bad connotation over the years. The reason being that the message that might be interrupting our dinner wasn't relevant. For example, have you ever received a call from a aluminum siding company even though you live in a brick house? A lot of telemarketers use random digit dialing meaning they randomly call your number. They know nothing about you, your lifestyle, your wants, your needs, etc. They are simply "pushing product."

This horrible experience with telemarketers is why your staff is so reluctant to make outbound calls!

But what we do is different!

We analyze our customers relationship. We know what products they have purchased from us, how long they have been a customer, what types of balances they maintain, etc. We know a lot about our customers and we take the time to craft a relevant message.

When we call, it is to act as our customers financial advisor. Our message is that we can help them save money, make money, etc. i.e. reach their financial goals.

When we focus on prospects, we typically use segmentation, propensity to purchase data, etc. so that we can craft the same relevant message.

If you are having difficulty getting your staff to make outbound calls, make sure they understand the difference between "telemarketing" and "consultative selling."

If outbound calling is new to your organization, "walk before you run." Provide the proper training and set achievable goals.

Once your staff has a couple of successful calls, momentum will build within your organization. Your balance sheet and income statement will quickly reflect their efforts. In addition, customer satisfaction scores will rise. In many cases, you will convert customers to advocates (or unpaid sales people) that will tell their family, friends, etc. about how well your instituion met their needs.

Have a great holiday season!

Enjoy family and friends, recharge yourself and get "fired up" to tackle the new year!

Mike