Blog
Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
The term refers to analytics that uses first party cookies. These cookies are tied to your domain, so they can’t be used elsewhere. The reason this is valuable, as only you can activate and use them. Whereas with a third party cookie, that third party could activate the cookie elsewhere. This was useful in other ways, for example, Google setting a cookie, then being able to serve ads to those folks. First party analytics is more respectful to your… Continue reading
To start with, you need to identify where waste is happening. And that is not always clearcut. Waste for each business can be subjective, as media that isn’t driving your objectives is a waste. Where on the surface it may look good or pass muster for other brands. So, Define your advertising objective. Create a scorecard, to see if advertising is meeting that. Remove or optimize any media that isn’t hitting objectives. Another way to put this, is you are… Continue reading
You may have seen ‘Direct’ traffic in your web analytics and are wondering what that means. How can traffic be direct? Direct traffic originally meant, that someone had typed the URL into their browser. Thus visiting the page ‘directly’. This would also be the same for if someone bookmarked a URL. However, often direct traffic means that your analytics system has been unable to detect the source of the traffic. So it is classified as direct traffic. … Continue reading
High impact content is targeted and focused on a particular use case or topic to a narrowly defined audience. It is impactful because this focus enables you to speak really clearly to the prospect. Analytics helps to see how impactful it is, be looking at things like scroll, engagement and attention on the content. To create high impact content, you need to: Define what the objective is Define the narrow audience What you want them to learn and to do… Continue reading
The most straightforward way is to ask, ask customers reading content, to take a next step. To subscribe to your newsletter. To download a whitepaper. To explore the products. You need to ask and give them that step to turn them into leads! That seems so silly, but are you asking them? Or are you asking them enough? Make sure that calls to action are in the flow of the content. As users would use your webpage. Buttons off… Continue reading
Use a platform like Nudge. To track your content, and the next steps in the customer journey people take. This will help you find what content is driving MQLs, but also insights like time of day, traffic source, where they come form, on what device. So you can stitch together a customer profile, on how they are driving business value. This typically involves, adding a piece of code to your content, maybe appending some data to click through URLs,… Continue reading
Starting with the customer, and working through, at what stage do they become a marketing qualified lead is the place to start. What things do they need to know? What do they desire to do next? Where do they start? Then use content marketing, from further up in the journey, to support them qualifying themselves. You have to link the content, to that customer journey, and support it. You can’t just throw content at them, and go, yay. It takes… Continue reading
Losses in media is a fact of doing business. But the simple solution to mitigating potential losses is a robust measurement and analytics program. One that keeps the media accountable, linked to strategic objectives, and is independently measured. That way, anomalies can be identify, fraud can be caught early, and low performing media can be weeded out. Taking learnings from the measurement program and adapting contracts to suit is also crucial. To make sure media buys have make goods or… Continue reading
This is a fantastic white boarding scenario, printing out and sticking up each part of the customer journey. Failing that, using presentation software can suffice. Just screenshooting and creating flow charts. Where possible, overlay relevant data at each step, number of people each reaches, the click through rates, attention, drop off, conversion etc. This helps to understand how well each component of the journey works. Many brands struggle with that, as they make it too complicated. This is an exercise,… Continue reading
The best approach to this, is to sit down and map out the customer journey. Where they start from through to where they end up. Note down their behaviors, and show this in a bit of a flow chart. Its no easy challenge but rest assured most marketers have faced this and it is addressable. Then overlay that with the metrics you get at each step. This then, helps show how analytics is involved in the customer journey, whilst keeping… Continue reading