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How to Use the Google Analytics New Custom Audience Report For Better Remarketing

May 29, 2018 No Comments

On most sites, over 90% of visitors leave without converting.

That’s an estimate for all traffic to your site.

As bad as that might sound, the numbers are even worse for first-time visitors. You can expect that only 2% of your site’s visitors will convert on their first visit.

Regardless of what your goals are for your website, these statistics are a bit depressing.

It might be enough to lead you to despair. After all, if you don’t do anything to bring these visitors back, many of them will never return.

But that’s only if you don’t take any further action. Thankfully, you can take matters into your own hands to get conversions from these once-lost visitors.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is one of the best ways to avoid losing potential customers.

When you do it correctly, it can be a great way to bring users back to your site and increase the percentage of your visitors who become customers or clients.

But much like any other channel, creating an effective remarketing campaign requires careful planning and a strong understanding of your target audience.

Google Analytics has long been one of the most important places to find data to help you understand your audience. And now, Google offers even more help.

The new Custom Audiences Report in Google Analytics gives you access to in-depth information on how users respond to your campaigns and help you create even more effective remarketing ads.

If you aren’t yet using it for your remarketing, now is the time to try it out. In this post, I’ll teach you how you can use your audience data to improve your remarketing efforts.

But first, you need a basic understanding of what this report is. Let’s start there.

What is the new audiences report?

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, your first thought may be that an “audience” report is nothing new.

But it’s important to note that this new feature refers to a completely different set of data than the standard “Audience Overview” report.

If you have access to this report, you may have seen the following announcement after logging into your account over the past few weeks.

If you see this notification, you can click “See Report” to access the new audiences report.

If you don’t see this notification, you can access your data manually by selecting “Audiences” from the “Audience” tab.

If this is the first time you’re accessing the report, you’ll see another banner that provides more detail than the first.

As this pop-up explains, Google designed the new audiences report to help you “easily view how your audiences are performing and evaluate your remarketing efforts.”

However, this report will only show data if you’ve enabled demographics and interests reports and have audiences configured in your Analytics account.

So if you haven’t yet created audiences, you’ll need to do so before you can gain any value from this new report.

Fortunately, the process is fairly straightforward. In fact, you should be doing this anyway if you’re running any marketing campaigns with Google’s ad network.

How to create an audience in Google Analytics

First, it’s important to understand what the term “audience” means in the context of Google’s advertising platform.

Fortunately, it’s not all that complicated.

An audience is a group of users that you want Google Analytics to group together based on any combination of attributes that is meaningful to your business.

These attributes can be as broad or as specific as you’d like them to be.

These attributes allow advertisers to deliver custom ads in real time.

For example, if you want to create an ad campaign that targets all of your customers, you might create an audience that includes all of the users who have ever made a purchase on your site.

This would necessitate a fairly general ad, but it would give you a large pool of potential viewers.

Now, let’s say that you want to create an ad campaign with the goal of earning new customers.

In this case, you might want to create an audience segment with users who have downloaded a whitepaper on your site but have not yet made a purchase.

This way, you can focus your efforts on the visitors who don’t yet think that buying from your site is worth it. This will allow you to tailor your campaign toward convincing them.

Regardless of the exact qualifications you choose, this is an excellent way to focus your ads on the exact audience you want to reach.

And, if you’re ready to get started, you can create a new audience in either Analytics or AdWords.

In this article, we’ll focus on how audience creation works in Google Analytics.

But once you’ve created an audience, you can activate it on AdWords, too, as long as you log into the same Google account.

To get started, navigate to the “Admin” page of your Google Analytics property. Then, select “Audience Definitions” and then “Audiences.”

Next, click “+New Audience.” From here, you can choose from preconfigured audience types or create your own new audience definition.

Google’s recommended audiences make it easy to create audiences based on criteria that many marketers find important. Here are some of Google’s recommendations:

Smart List: Smart Lists use machine learning to determine which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions. It uses signals like location, referrer, session duration, and page depth to compile this list.
All Users: This type of audience includes all of your visitors with necessary advertising cookies.
New Users: This includes users who have only conducted one session on your site.
Returning Users: These users have visited your site more than once.
Users who visited a specific section of my site: These audiences include users who’ve visited specific pages or directories within your site.
Users who completed a goal conversion: These users have completed a goal on your site.
Users who completed a transaction: This type of audience is only available for e-commerce site owners. It includes all users who have made a purchase from your site.

If none of these criteria meet your needs, you can also create a new custom audience with the audience builder.

This option can take a bit longer than using one of Google’s preconfigured definitions, but it gives you much more control over which users you include in your audience.

You can determine who your audience is based on demographic information, device, behavior, date of first session, traffic sources, e-commerce actions, and more.

The criteria you use will depend on what your goals are, but it’s important to consider that you would typically want to use audiences for the purpose of remarketing.

And most remarketing campaigns center on users who visited your site but did not take the action you wanted them to take.

So whether you want to reach users who visited a specific page without converting or users who never made it to a conversion page in the first place, your audiences should reflect that goal.

Once you’ve created an audience, Analytics will populate it with up to 30 days of data and make your audiences report available within 24-48 hours.

How to use the new audiences report for your remarketing campaigns

The audiences report will give you insight into specific sets of your site’s visitors.

And that’s great!

But it’s only useful if you know what to do with that data.

So first, it’s important to understand what you can expect to learn from this report.

To put it simply, it allows you to dig into data regarding each audience’s acquisition, behavior, and conversions.

This way, you’ll be able to see how well each audience performs in comparison to other audiences and your site’s overall traffic.

And the way you respond to this data will depend on how well the specific audience you’re looking at does at moving your business closer to your goals.

Let’s look at some different scenarios of what your data can tell you about your audiences and how you can respond to that information.

Scenario 1: An audience performs well

If an audience is performing well in terms of engagement and conversions, this indicates that they’re a valuable set of users for your site.

In this case, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget to ads for those users. Or, if you aren’t yet running ads for these users, you’ll want to create ads for them.

For example, Marketo just took this approach.

Their ads were already performing well.

But, later, they defined their audience further in Google Analytics to push personalized ads through AdWords.

They saw 200% more conversions for B2C and 150% more for B2B by segmenting between two groups to create personalized ads.

If you want to see numbers like this, then follow Marketo’s example.

If an audience is performing well, don’t settle for “good enough.” When you discover that a particular audience is yielding results, it’s time to double down on your efforts to convert them.

Upping your advertising budget for them isn’t a blind risk. It’s a reasonable investment in light of real data.

You also may want to consider expanding the number of sites on which you advertise to those users to maximize your chances of bringing them back to convert.

Unfortunately, not all audiences will perform well.

Let’s look at what you can do when an audience isn’t yielding the results you want.

Scenario 2: An audience performs poorly

On the flip side, if an audience shows low engagement or conversions, this indicates that it isn’t a high-performing set of users for your site.

When you discover this, how should you respond?

You’ll either want to scale back on any ads that target this audience or spend some time editing the audience.

GarentaDAY, an auto leasing website in Turkey, developed a remarketing strategy to push special discounts to previous site visitors who did not convert.

GarentaDAY segmented their audiences by location and keyword terms for their remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

The edits they made to their audience paid off. 30% of their revenue came from the remarketing ad campaigns.

If you decide to edit an audience, it’s important to note that one of the most common issues among remarketing campaigns is that the targeting is too broad.

For example, let’s say that you created an audience that targets all of your site’s visitors over the previous month.

You might think that this is an effective way to target users before they forget your brand altogether.

But what if a large chunk of them found one blog post or piece of content via search, read it, and left?

These users likely have no intention of becoming a customer so targeting them with ads is a waste of your budget.

But revising this audience to only include users who visited a product page could eliminate the issue — and have a major impact on the overall performance of your ads.

Scenario 3: An audience is attracting users who don’t convert

Some audiences are clearly high or low performers.

But in many cases, it’s not quite that black and white.

For example, let’s say that you have a campaign that’s targeting a specific audience. This campaign is effective in attracting site traffic, but it doesn’t lead to many conversions.

In this case, you shouldn’t write off that audience entirely.

After all, those users are showing interest in what they’re seeing in your ads. They just aren’t following through on that interest.

And it’s up to you to figure out why that is.

Dig into your campaigns and look for any disconnects between your ads and the content they direct your audience to.

For example, you can look at which goals in Google Analytics are converting your audience more and then develop new ad campaigns and landing pages around those goals.

If your campaigns don’t provide this level of convenience and simplicity, you could be missing out on conversions simply because users don’t want to spend time navigating your site.

Identifying and remedying any disconnects could be the solution. It might be exactly what you need to help your high traffic numbers translate into results for your business.

Scenario 4: An audience is attracting low numbers but high conversions

On the flip side, some of your audiences may turn out to have high conversion rates but low overall numbers.

This can be extremely frustrating because it indicates that you’ve found a great set of users, but there aren’t very many of them.

Fortunately, you don’t have to limit your ad targeting to just your site’s visitors. You can also use your high-converting audiences as a starting point for creating similar audiences.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s similar audiences, this feature helps you expand campaign targeting by including users with characteristics similar to a site’s visitors.

Once you’ve identified an audience that performs well for your business, you can use this feature to target other users who haven’t yet visited your site.

This way, you can expand your campaign’s overall reach. And, as you do so, you can have confidence that the new set of users you’re reaching has the potential for a high conversion rate.

Conclusion

Bringing new users to your site is challenging.

So, when those users leave without taking action, it can be extremely frustrating.

Fortunately, remarketing makes it possible to bring them back to your site and encourage them to convert.

But achieving that goal requires strategic targeting.

You need to make sure that you’re reaching the visitors who are likely to become customers and that you’re communicating with them in a way that will make them want to return.

And with the new audiences report from Google Analytics, you can access the data you need to make informed decisions about your targeting and your campaigns.

The custom audiences report offers you detailed data about how your site visitors are responding to your conversion efforts on your site.

By digging into the behaviors that each audience takes on your site, you can see if they are performing well for your business.

Then, you can use that insight to decide how to improve your results moving forward.

You may find that you should ramp up your campaigns, adjust your targeting, alter your ads, or experiment with similar audiences. Each audience will likely necessitate that you take a different course of action.

And that’s precisely why these reports are so powerful. They’ll show you how you should respond to the audiences you set up so that your marketing efforts to them will be effective.

And if you use multiple custom audiences, you may find that you need to combine all of these actions.

But with each improvement you make, you’ll become more successful at turning lost visitors into customers for your company

Sourced from Neil Patel

He is a New York Times best selling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

In News

What Is Crawl Budget And How It Will Affect Your Website Ranking?

May 28, 2018 No Comments

By Ruturaj Kohok

Nowadays, SEO is not all about optimizing content for right keywords and getting backlinks to your website. SEO factors are changing every year and thus, you have to put more efforts to rank #1. SEO is a vast concept and it’s better to stay updated with every new terminology that endures in SEO world.

You might have heard webmasters talking about Crawl Budget and Googlebot.

Wondering what is Crawl Budget?

Does crawl budget have anything to do with my website ranking?

Let’s dive in to update SEO knowledge.

What is crawling in SEO?

Google sends its bots called Googlebot or Google’s Spiders (probably not as scary as real spiders) to crawl your web pages and index the words and content within. Once the crawling is done, these results are put into Google’s index. Thus, it is important that Google should easily find all your Web pages. Hence, to make all URLs easily found by Googlebot, sitemap is a must.

If your site has few hundred of URLs then the search engine will crawl your website easily. But, if you have a website with thousands of pages and many new URLs are auto-generated every day then Google might not crawl all of these pages. Thus, prioritizing what to crawl, when to crawl and how much to crawl becomes important.

Now comes the crawl rate and crawl budget into the picture.

Don’t worry — it’s not difficult to understand this concept.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is derived from two very important factors: Crawl Rate and Crawl Demand. Considering the crawl rate and crawl demand of your website, we can define the crawl budget as ‘the number of web pages or URLs Googlebot can or want to crawl from your website’.

Crawl Rate Limit:

Crawl Rate limit is introduced so that Google should not crawl too many pages too fast from your website leaving your server exhausted. Crawl Rate limit stops Google from making too many requests as it may result in slowing down your website’s speed.

Crawl rate may spike up or drip down depending on:

Your site’s speed: If your site speed is slow or server response time is low then crawl rate limit drops and Googlebot crawl only a few of your pages. If your site is responding quickly then crawling rate may increase.
You can set crawl rate limit in search console. However, setting high limit doesn’t guarantee high crawl rate.

Crawl Demand:

If the demand for indexing your web pages is low then Googlebot will avoid crawling your pages. Google says that popular and updated content has higher crawl rate demand. Crawl demand depends on the popularity of your web pages as well as the freshness and originality of your content.

Thus, your website’s Crawl Budget is defined as the number of URLs Googlebot can or want to crawl depending on your website’s crawl rate limit and crawl demand mutually.

Got it? Great!

But the bottom line is, you want Google to crawl all your web pages and you want that Googlebot should keep revisiting your website for new pages. Obviously, you don’t want to miss out the traffic on pages which are not crawled by Googlebot.

So, let’s see what factors can affect crawl budget.

Pages that add low or zero value will decrease your crawl budget. Thus, make sure you remove all low-value-add URLs.
Outdated content is not preferable. Update your website time to time giving new fresh content to your users.
Duplicate content can ruin your website. Come up with original content.
Duplicate Meta and Title Tags can cause disasters. Remember, it’s better to have no Meta and Title Tags then to have duplicate ones.
Nobody likes a slow loading website. Optimize your website speed for both mobile and desktop views. Here’s where you can check your website’s speed: Pagespeed Insights.
User comes first. Always do it for your users and not for Google. Fulfill your users’ demands rather than impressing Google by doing unwanted optimizations.

Here is a snapshot showing PageSpeed Insights for a price comparison website called Pricekart.com

Now is the time to answer some of the questions that may be rising in your minds.

1) How to increase crawl budget?

You can increase your crawl budget by:

Giving fresh and original content to users.
Making sure that your page response time is quick.
Avoiding Infinite spaces and proxies in web pages.
Making sure that every URLs in your website should add value to your user. Here’s where you can get your website audited for technical errors that are preventing your website from ranking high: Get SEO Audit Report.

2) How to check crawl budget?

You can use the free tool given by Google itself, Google Search Console. You can easily check your crawl stats here. Also, you can check server errors and crawl errors and optimize your site to increase your crawl budget.

Here’s a snapshot from Google Search Console showing crawl variations over a period of 90 days.

3) How will crawl budget affect your website ranking?

Obviously, if many of your web pages aren’t getting crawled, you’ll never see traffic on those pages. Low crawl budget can lead to low ranking as many of your pages will never rank in Google. Thus, you need to make sure that all your important pages must be crawled by Google.

Note: High crawl budget doesn’t guarantee high rankings. It’s all about quality and demand. To increase your website ranking you can opt for our Profession SEO Packages. We are best in the market to provide you all the SEO help you need.

4) How to check crawl demand?

When a topic or a search query becomes popular and frequently searched by users in Google search box, the popularity of web pages giving information related to it also increases. Thus, we can say that demand has increased and Googlebot are out now to index more and more pages which can be displayed as SERP but making sure that user experience is not degraded. You can check what is trending by using Google Trends and try to make your content revolve around what is trending in Google World.

Here’s a snapshot showing Google Trend stats for keyword ‘search engine optimization’.

Verdict:

Crawl budget is an important factor to be considered while doing SEO for websites.

Very low crawl budget means Google doesn’t like your web pages much.

Very high crawl budget doesn’t guarantee high ranking. Also, you don’t want very high crawling as that might overload your server.

You can’t increase or decrease your website’s crawl budget by simple setting some limits. However, you can make your site capable enough to have a sufficient crawl budget by taking care of factors like good unique content, updated information and high page speed

By Ruturaj Kohok

Sourced from HACKERNOON

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8 Tried-and-True Methods to Drive Website Traffic to Your Business

May 28, 2018 No Comments

By Makki Jaqwani

Ever notice that some businesses get online traffic quickly, and even though you’re doing everything you know how to put your product or service in the best light online, it just doesn’t compete? Knowing how to drive website traffic is essential to building a business. After all, the more traffic you have, the more leads you can get.

Build a Good Site, then Drive Website Traffic

Having a decent functional website is like having an employee who out performs the others because he or she works 24/7. Moreover, it’s a representation of the brand and generates leads that turn into conversions for your business. However, it’s no good if the website is not yielding the number of visitors you’re hoping for.

8 Proven Ways to Drive Website Traffic and Get More Sales

Here are some of the best-proven tactics to make your website work for you.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

Right now more than a billion people connect to the web from their mobile devices, and around 80% of these people are internet users who also own a smartphone. It only makes sense that you receive most of your online traffic from people who use mobile devices.

You cannot ignore the importance of having a mobile-optimized website. It improves your viewer’s experience when they land on your site, and it also gives your site better SEO, which ultimately gives you an edge over competitors. One great example of this is when Walmart in Canada saw a 98% increase in its mobile orders with its mobile site.

What You Can Do: Work with your team to pick out SEO practices that work for your business. Look for keywords that are being used by your competitors and include link building in your SEO strategy, so your content and posts get a lot more exposure.

Working with Good Content

You might have heard it plenty of times before, and that’s only because it really matters – generating and marketing quality content makes a whole lot of difference to your website traffic.

People are always looking for meaningful content that can help boost their knowledge with necessary information. Now the trick is to mix this content with SEO.

When you write about your product or service, you get to create brand awareness and educate your potential clients. This is also what lets you create a relationship with audiences and establish yourself as an industry leader.

Furthermore, people prefer to seek information in articles and consider it a more viable source than advertisements, making this outlet one way to make conversions easy.

What You Can Do: Think about the pain-points for your target audience and create credible content accordingly. Remember, it’s better to produce one well-written and well-researched piece in one week than to churn out seven that offer nothing to the reader! Other than written content, customers also respond well to how-to videos, because these provide a lot of information in a short time.

Lower Loading Time for Your Website

When your site takes a lot of time to load, it may just be the thing that puts off visitors from even bothering. This is one reason you should optimize your site’s page load time to see a difference in your conversion rates.

Also, when visitors have had a slow experience with a site, in many instances they tend not to revisit it, but that’s not all. Search engines have now begun to appoint ranking according to loading time as well.

The good news is that there’s a definite way around this. For example, all you have to do is invest in link building. This is a service that can boost your site’s search engine visibility to ensure that more and more people visit the page. Therefore, it is crucial that you work towards minimizing website load time – and maximizing website traffic.

What You Can Do: Avoid using a lot of heavy graphics for your website, as this is usually what makes a site’s loading time slower. Other practices such as reducing the server response time and minimizing HTTP requests also affects the load time positively.

The Right Meta Tags

Optimizing meta tags is a super-simple process that’s often overlooked. However, if one does it with tremendous care through keyword research, it brings proven results, mostly by boosting your visibility on search engines organically.

There’s a lot of debate on whether Google makes use of a page’s meta tags for indexing. However, there’s confirmation that when you optimize meta tags, the webpage ranks better on search engines and also gets increased traffic. The best way around it is simple – you have to stick a few meta tags on every page on the website.

What You Can Do: Research the best-suited keywords for each of your website’s pages and make sure the tags are simple, but get the word through. Pay particular attention to your title tags, as these show up above your website’s URL on search engines, and are instantly read and recognized by the target audience.

Email Marketing Helps

Many small businesses are always busy using novelty strategies to get new customers. In doing so, they forget some useful methods like email marketing. To this day, email marketing has proven to be very powerful.

A good email blast can bring a significant increase in traffic. As a matter of fact, many stats have shown us that email marketing is a very fruitful method for getting out the word. All you have to do is ensure that you don’t bombard all the people in the email list. You must be strategic in how you send personalized reminders about new services and products.

What You Can Do: Talk about promotions, discounts, and any new products you may be offering. Learn about how you can attract the reader from the get-go so you can create catchy subject lines and content. Remember, email marketing doesn’t have to be boring and dull – think creatively and get your juices flowing so the customer takes action after reading your email.

Advertising

When you’re looking to increase traffic, never be afraid to go through the conventional approach. Paid advertising is still a handy way of getting traffic to your website. You might think it’s too heavy on the budget, but if you do manage to target the right people on social media, you can get the word out for your site better and with less money. However, remember that before deciding on what platform you want to use, look into the advantages and disadvantages of each so that you’re able to stick to your primary aim before you start spending money on online ads.

What You Can Do: Mix traditional and online marketing and advertising together, so you get to enjoy the benefits of both worlds. Advertising techniques such as billboards do a lot for your business, and while they may cost a little at first, you can benefit from them for a long time.

Content Discovery

These platforms provide a different sort of advertising service for you. They work like a lot of other advertising outlets with advertisers and publishers. The only thing unique about content discovery is that it works by promoting content inside content. Some great tools to help you with this include Outbrain and Taboola. Make them a part of your website traffic generating strategy.

What You Can Do: Use apps and online tools to “boost” your content and make it more recognizable to your target audience. Though it may take you some time to get the reason behind the content discovery, you’ll be addicted to the tools once you get the hang of it.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

You can get an advantage if you keep yourself in the loop about what your competitors are up to. There are plenty of tools that you can use to help you with this, like Buzz Sumo, that helps you observe your site’s competition and also enables you to analyze the content. This will also give you a good idea about topics that resonate well with readers. You can always use these insights to make content that is viral-worthy.

What You Can Do: Always be up-to-date on what your competitors are up to. When you use tools that help in monitoring competition, you aren’t just keeping an eye on the kind of keywords and content they use, you’re also finding out about their progress and shortcomings. This gives you the chance to grab an opportunity your competitors might be oblivious to, and get the benefits that come with it.

The Goal is to Drive Website Traffic

We all want more traffic, because increased traffic means a higher conversion rate and higher sales. Driving website traffic is an ongoing effort, and it’s also a reachable goal. Work on a sound strategy to amalgamate the 8 tried-and-true methods above so you can strengthen your website. In a fast-pacedworld where everyone uses online media more than the conventional kind, it helps to tap that too, to get to your audience.

By Makki Jaqwani

Makki Jaqwani is a passionate SEO by trade and a full-time dad. He works for the digital marketing agency, Pac and Copy, and is always striving to learn all the latest marketing tricks of the trade.

Sourced from Rocks Digital

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4 Simple Metrics and Formulas to Start Tracking Marketing Success

May 28, 2018 No Comments

By Kevin Page

Did you know that only 1 in 4 marketers can prove the impact of their marketing efforts for their business? That’s really astonishing if you think about it. We live in a marketing era with tons of data at our fingertips, yet 75% of marketers can’t prove their effectiveness. How can we possibly hope to expand to new, improved marketing campaigns if we don’t know the impact of our past tactics?

image: https://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/william-iven-22449-unsplash.jpg

Having the ability to collect and interpret data will equip you with the insight to know if your marketing activities are effective. But, where do you start? What should you be tracking? And what tools can you use to collect the necessary data?

I’ve got you covered. Below are four simple metrics to help you start tracking online marketing success. Some of them may already be familiar, but the key is tracking all of them to get the complete picture and identify areas to optimize along the way.

1. Measure Your Website Traffic

Traffic to your website is a strong, lagging indicator to watch. Attracting interested prospects to your site is one of the most important elements of an effective online marketing strategy. You can have the best lead generating offers and sales process in place, but without new traffic, your pipeline can easily grow stale.

Website traffic can come from a variety of sources. When tracking visits, it’s important to understand which channels are responsible for attracting new and returning visitors. These channels include:

Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo
Direct Traffic: Visits from users with the direct link to your website
Social Media: People who visit straight from a social site like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
Referral Traffic: Traffic that is directed to your site through links from other websites
Email Marketing: Visits to your site that started from an email tool
Paid Search: Any click from a paid source like Google Adwords
Paid Social: Traffic that comes as a result of a paid social media campaign

Step one in this process is to make sure that you have a tracking code on your website that logs any visits to your pages. The most common tool to track this type of data is Google Analytics because it’s free. If you don’t have website analytics right now, start by setting up a free Google Analytics account.

After you’ve set up your account, make sure you put the tracking code on each page of your website. This code is how Google can track the website traffic on your site.

If you’ve already been using Google Analytics and you’re looking for a way to take your tactics to the next level, check out other marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, or Eloqua.

2. New [Qualified] Leads

Is your website effectively generating new sales leads for your business? And, are they actually qualified to buy or just blowing smoke? Although there continue to be new ways to generate leads online such as Facebook Lead Ads, it’s essential that you are tracking the effectiveness of converting new leads on your website.

Do you have some kind of lead form on your website? Either a contact form or a lead generation form for a content offer?

Any forms you have on your website should be connected to a platform that gives you the ability to track not only the total number of form submissions but also pass that information to a system (a CRM) that allows you to keep track of the specific people that convert.

Remember the importance of quality over quantity. After generating new leads, “follow” your visitor through the sales process to see if they turned into a customer or not. This will help you understand which online offers [with forms] convert more closed business.

Tracking and managing converted leads is not strictly the job of sales. It’s a combined effort that will take work from both sales and marketing.

Recommended for YouWebcast, May 22nd: How to Hit a Home Run Competitive Brand Audit

Keep in mind, if you’re looking to increase the number of leads your website is generating, look no further than the sitewide visitor-to-lead conversion rate.

Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate Formula:
#of leads / # of website visitors = Visitor-to-lead conversion rate

This will tell you if you’re doing a good job converting your traffic into leads or not. If you are, focus on attracting more visitors to increase leads. If not, you may want to focus on reworking your conversion opportunities to better engage your visitors.

3. New Business from New Customers

In the previous section, I briefly touched on closed business. Not surprisingly, this is likely the most important measure of success for marketing and sales. In order to track how many leads are turning into customers, it’s wise to integrate your automation platform with a CRM system to implement closed-loop reporting.

Again, you’ll want to pay close attention to the conversion rate for this metric, the lead-to-customer rate.

Lead to Customer Conversion Rate Formula:
# of customers / # of leads = Lead-to-customer conversion rate

Also, don’t forget to consider the customer’s or account’s lifetime value when looking into closed business. A new customer may be worth more than just the value of the one-time purchase.

Customer Lifetime Value Formula:
Avg sale per customer x Avg number of times a customer buys per year x Avg years a customer will buy from you = Avg customer lifetime value

If your sales team is uploading deal information into your CRM, this should be easy to track and calculate. With this information, you can accurately calculate the return on your marketing investment.

4. Your Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)

Are your marketing efforts worth it? The timeless question. How can you say a marketing campaign was successful if you don’t know if you recorded a return on your investment?

When measuring ROI, you’ll need to calculate your customer acquisition costs for all online marketing efforts. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? This includes manpower, technology, and other expenses related to campaigns.

Return on Investment Formula:
(Sales growth – Marketing investment) / Marketing investment

In order to calculate your customer acquisition costs, like the metric above, it’s recommended to integrate your marketing automation solution with your CRM platform.

Keep in mind, if you want to accurately measure marketing ROI, you’ll need to be very diligent recording data and closely tracking the buying journey of a customer. The depth in which you’re able to drill down is dependent on the collection of information. Ideally, you’ll get the correct systems in place and benefit from the ability to truly understand the impact of specific marketing campaigns on your business.

Conclusion

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is an essential part of understanding which of your strategies and tactics are working well for your business and which ones are just wasting everyone’s time (including yours). After all, as Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote, “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

By Kevin Page

Sourced from BUSINESS 2 COMMUNITY

In News

B2B marketers can do more to unlock the potential of their brands

May 25, 2018 No Comments

By Tom Pepper

The team here at LinkedIn recently celebrated ‘B2B in focus’ week, a few days dedicated to unearthing the latest trends and innovations in B2B marketing.

One of the things that really struck a chord with me was a panel discussion we hosted with Kantar Millward Brown, BrandZ, Hill & Knowlton and a number of leading marketers – Dean Aragon of Shell, Judith Everett from The Crown Estate, Ryan Miles from Microsoft and Annabel Venner of Hiscox – which discussed how marketers can unlock the potential of B2B brands. There was certainly a consensus among the panel that the B2B buying journey is rapidly changing. And as a result, marketers need to work harder than ever to create opportunities for their brands.

I wanted to share three key things I took away from the panel, which I think bring this challenge to light and – when applied correctly – should help all B2B marketers take their brand to new heights.

Be more human

The growing group of decision makers playing a part in any B2B buying cycle contributes to it being longer, more complex and even more emotional than most B2C journeys.

One area where B2B marketers could borrow from their B2C cousins, though, is better understanding and tapping into the emotional drivers of decision making. It’s impossible to do this if you don’t humanise your customer first, though.

During the session, Aragon raised the point that for marketers operating in the B2B space, it’s all too easy to forget that buyers and decision makers are human. I challenge you to find someone who defines themselves as “just” a 24/7 fleet manager or procurement director.

With a better understanding of their customers, beyond simply their job title, B2B marketers can humanise their brand and content in ways which will more likely drive action. It’s no easy task in B2B, where the buying committee could be the size of a small village, but it was a great reminder for everyone in the room about where to start with campaigns.

Embed purpose in all that you do

Knowing how to communicate effectively with prospects and customers on a human level is only one part of the jigsaw. Humans are hardwired to buy into something as much as they want to buy something. It’s no different when it comes to the B2B world.

As much as selling a product, B2B marketers need to communicate the wider purpose of their business and use it to drive both awareness and conversions. That purpose needs to be more than just a pet project or the idea of growing a conscience. It needs to be lived and breathed by any organisation every day.

During the session, Venner made this point by explaining how Hiscox has a strong set of values that have successfully guided and defined the business and are consistently communicated through all that they do. In essence, Hiscox aims to be there when stuff goes wrong – to be there quickly, first and make everything right.

Not every business will always have a purpose that means something worthy; the important thing is having something to stand for. What was clear from the session was that this needs to start from the inside out, with employees, otherwise it won’t last and no one will believe it.

Break the structural silos

Engaging customers on a person-to-person level and communicating your purpose boils down to getting closer to them. Marketing teams need to break out of their own confines and better align with other parts of the organisation.

In the session the panelists talked about creating agile teams and the need for closer sales and marketing alignment. While it’s a challenge – especially within larger organisations – building nimble, forward-looking teams is also a massive opportunity.

As well as circumventing unnecessary hierarchies, it automatically means marketing activity is in tune with business priorities and sales targets, enabling a much faster decision making process.

On a more practical level, I have seen first hand how the most successful B2B sales and marketing organisations are those which integrate both types of engagement seamlessly throughout the consideration stage, delivering the right type of interaction that’s most relevant at any given moment. For example, thought leadership content from the marketing team has the potential to short-circuit the traditional buyer journey and lead directly to the award of the business.

For today’s B2B marketer, taking a broad brush approach and simply replicating the B2C buying experience is not an option. B2B marketers need to forge their own path, use technology to automate the process where they can but ensure they have purpose at the heart of their business and communicate it in a human way.

By Tom Pepper

Tom Pepper is head of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions UK

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

How to Write Stunning Blog Posts That’ll Drive Massive Traffic to Your Website

May 25, 2018 No Comments

By Moss Clement

With over 160 million blogs on the internet today, the need for stunning blog posts has never been more demanding. WHY?

Because every blogger want to stand out as the best, and in order for you to achieve that, you need to create stunning blog content frequently.

Many bloggers have been able to achieve that by creating epic blog posts that stands out from the crowd on a consistent basis, there-by walking tall as experts and influencers in their respective fields.

The blog posts they create has helped them establish a consistent brand message across all channels.

Question is;

How can I create remarkable blog content that will drive tons of traffic to your website?

In this post, you’re going to discover the best strategies that’ll help you to consistently create fascinating blog posts that will drive more traffic to your blog or website.

#• Write useful & informative content

The idea of writing useful blog post is to ensure you that you’re teaching and educating your audience, that’s the primary reason you setup a blog in the first place.

Your audience are always searching for answers or information to help solve their problems. Give them the information they’re seeking – provide them with useful content that will add value to their lives, thereby solve their problems.

That’s why I will always love this quote:

“People don’t care about your business, they care about their problems. Be the solution that they’re looking for.” – Melonie Dodaro

Here’s what Darren Rowse of Problogger also said about writing useful blog post:

“Unless a blog post is useful on some level I don’t think it’s worth publishing.” -Darren Rowse

With that said, try to figure out how useful your content will be to your readership. Thus, before creating content, take time to ponder over such questions as:

Will my post be useful to my readers?
Are my readers going to find this article valuable?
Will my post educate my readers?

These and many other questions are important in helping you write blog posts that are useful and drives tons of traffic.

#• Write in your unique voice

On WordPress alone, more than 79.2 million posts are published each month, which makes it a lot easier for your content to disappear in the noise.

So, it is important that you write in a unique voice, as it will help you stand out from the crowd.

Many Bloggers have successfully maintain consistency across all channels with their respective unique voice or style of writing.

People like Virginia Bautista, Lisa Sicard, Ryan Biddulph, Ravi Chahar, Lorraine Reguly, Cori Ramos, Arfa Nazeer, Janice Wald, Jane Sheeba, Susan Valez, to mention a few.

These experts have successfully set themselves apart from the crowd by their unique way of writing – their unique voice.

How can you write in a unique voice?

To write in your unique voice, simply learn from the examples of pro-bloggers in your niche and write what comes naturally to you.

Choose a niche topic you’re so fun of and have a passion for. This will help you bring out the juices in you.

But please, when choosing a topic you’re passionate about, try as well to keep a balance with choosing a niche you have a passion for and a profitable niche, because you’re going to pay the bills.

#• Be practical

The concept of creating contents that are practical is to help your readers take action, or help them put to practice the information they’re getting from your blog.

Your blog post should be written in ways that your readers and prospective customers can easily apply it to themselves and get positive results.

In this way, your readers will identify you as an expert in your field. So, be sure to create quality and actionable content by being practical in your writing.

Here is a tip to help you; study your readers and find out the issues they’re trying to solve, then offer a solution(s) by creating content around the issues they have.

For example, I read a post on Janice Wald’s blog about “4 Reasons You Are in Danger of Losing Organic Search Traffic.”

I also read the comments. One commenter asked Janice if she could write an article on how to regain your lost traffic. See screenshot.

This is a pain problem that must be addressed. Many lose traffic and wouldn’t know why and how to regain their traffic. So, writing in this way will get you more traction and social shares.

#• Create powerful headlines

I’ve written well enough articles about writing catchy headlines for your blog posts.

This is essential because an irresistible headline is a surefire way to attract clicks to your post. It urges your readers and moves them to click and read your content.

A statistics by Copyblogger shows that on average, “80% of blog visitors will read your headline, but only 20% of those will read the rest of your post.”

In other words, it means that while everybody might see your headline, not all of them will actually click to read your post.

Further studies revealed that an irresistible headline can generate as much as 500℅ more pageview.

With that said, spend reasonable time crafting the best headline that will attract readers to your blog.

Find here the best strategies to craft irresistible headlines every time.

You can as well use CoSchedule Headline Analyzer tool to help you craft catchy headlines.

#• Craft compelling intro

Just as a remarkable headline is a surefire way to get readers for your blog content, a compelling intro is equally important because it gives your readers heads-up to continue reading.

That is why I love this quote below:

The first sentence of your book is to convince readers that they have to read the second. – Simonoff Xuan

In other words, let the intro of your blog post convince readers that they have to read the whole content.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion. – Jhumpa Lahiri

This involves clear thinking on your part.

For example, if your headline is a promise-driven or benefit-driven headline, let your intro follow in like manner.

In this way, your readers will want to digest the whole article to get the benefits, which will result in more engagement and massive traffic.

#• Write to a Particular audience

A remarkable blog content can get the highest traction when tailored to the needs of a particular audience.

For example, let’s assume you already know your target audience – their wants and needs, and as you create your blog post, you channel your content to the needs of this particular audience.

What will happen when you use the right keywords in your content?

You will be driving endless traffic to your website, because your content is tailored to a particular reader and addresses his needs.

So, before creating content, try to find out who your readers are, and pinpoint their needs and problems as well.

Wrapping Up

It is sometimes difficult to write a unique blog post that will stand out from the crowd.

But with practice and consistency, you can work your way up as an expert and create remarkable content on a regular basis.

However, how you will achieve this kind of success over time may be slightly different because every blogger has his own unique style of writing.

But if you correctly apply these basic blogging principles, you will be able to consistently create compelling blog posts that will drive massive traffic to your website.

This article originally appeared on https://www.mossmedia.biz

Feature Image credit: Pexels

About The author

Moss Clement is a blogger and freelance writer. He delivers high-quality, evergreen content to clients and businesses via blog post writing, article writing, ghostwriting and other writing services, etc.

Connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook.

By Moss Clement

Sourced from The Writing Cooperative

In News

3 Hard Moves Entrepreneurs Must Make

May 25, 2018 No Comments

By Michelle Van Slyke

When it comes to business, patching your problems just won’t cut it. Find out how to handle three hard moves entrepreneurs frequently push off.

There’s a lot of pressure for small-business owners to be masters of every aspect of their business. This is especially true when you’re first starting out and are often a one-person shop. A recent survey by The UPS Store found that one of the biggest barriers to starting a small business in 2018 was fear of failure, behind concerns about financial security.

With somewhat limited resources and fear of failing, small-business owners will often push challenging tasks to the back burner. This may work out in the short term, but it won’t lead to long-term success. Think of your business like the roof of a house. Are there problems you’ve been patching up instead of completely repairing? It’s time to invest the time and resources, replace the roof and address your problems head-on. It may not be easy or cheap, but in the long run it will help you be successful.

The three most common holes entrepreneurs frequently patch up include: marketing, recruiting and investing in digital.

Marketing will retain and grow your customer base.

Are you stuck in a rut trying the same marketing tactics again and again? It’s time to branch out and try some new things. If you’ve been unsure how to start, begin by figuring out who your customers are.

The starting point can be as simple as talking to your customers. Find out what they’re watching and reading, what social platforms they’re using, what they are interested in, etc. Once you know them, you’ll better know how to reach them. For example, social media can be a cost-effective and targeted way to reach customers. Using images, videos and other multimedia, you can demo products, advertise promotions and engage with your customers directly.

Start with existing customers, but remember to keep in mind the type of customers you want to attract, too. By doing this, you’ll be able to focus your marketing efforts on things that matter instead of spreading yourself thin.

Recruit the partners and employees your business needs.

Have you put off recruiting or outsourcing to get the help you need to run your business? Don’t be afraid to ask for help!

Start off by clearly outlining the support you need to better run your business. Do you need someone with web design skills or someone to help with your finances? This is support you may be able to find from another small-business owner that specializes in these areas. Local small-business organizations and LinkedIn are great resources for discovering talented partners with desired qualifications. There’s a sea of people ready to help.

Are you looking for support in the day-to-day running of your business? Then it’s time to hire an employee. Once you get a few potential applicants, invite them in for an interview. An in-person interview can tell you much more about a candidate than a phone interview. Once you find the right candidate for your business, be sure to take the time to train her. If you’ve trained her and trust in her ability to run the daily operations, you can take a step back to focus on other priorities while knowing everything is in good hands.

Invest in your digital presence.

How does your front door look? I’m not talking about your actual door — I’m talking about your website.

Research shows that 88 percent of consumers pre-research their buys online before making a purchase either online or in-store. That means there’s a lot of potential for your website to drive traffic to your business.

You can look for a partner to help you, but there are also many cost-efficient and easy-to-use website builders. Most sites make content management simple and come with recommended formats and layouts. By utilizing these, you’ll make it easy on customers searching for your company or wanting to learn more about you. Similarly, make sure your social media presence is up to date — especially as more and more customers are turning to social media for customer service.

Making these hard moves may seem intimidating, but in the long run they have great potential to help your business be more effective and successful.

Feature Image credit: Hero Images | Getty Images

By Michelle Van Slyke

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

How to Use Social Media For Business

May 24, 2018 No Comments

By Maurice Jackson

Knowing How to Use Social Media For Business is a necessary marketing tool in the industry today. Thankfully new technology related to online marketing has provided software and tools to help you have success with an online home business in regards to social media marketing.

Affiliate Disclaimer: I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Learning How to Use Social Media For Business, in my opinion, it is learning how to plant your business in the heart of, I mean smack in the middle of, online marketing.

After all, that’s where everybody online is at, right? People associate themselves with like-minded people. Your job as a marketer is to find like-minded people that are interested in your niche. In other words, finding your target audience.

How to Use Social Media For Business

If your concentration is on wanting more traffic to your business or website, that’s what this article is here to help you with. Also if you haven’t already your business plan and strategy need to be in place. I also suggest having a mission statement.

Your (SMMS) Social Media Marketing Strategy should have defined objectives and tools necessary to achieve them. Now, the process and to finding your target audience involves factors that must be addressed. You need to know;

Who are you marketing to? What is your TA (target audience) demographic.

Where. Meaning, which social network are you likely to find your TA. Also knowing what groups, forums, communities or chat rooms your TA likes to hang out are necessary factors as well.

Because social media networks cater to different audiences, it is understandable that there should be a different promoting strategy for each social network. Your approach to promoting on LinkedIn would be different than promoting on Snapchat.

What does your TA expect from your product or service?

When is the best time to promote your product or service?

Why meaning you need to show, and inform why your TA should use or purchase your goods.

How will you convince your TA you have the solution to their needs.

Marketing online, be it marketing for other companies, a brick and mortar business or working to have success with a home business you need to apply content marketing to your strategy. This involves writing quality content and strategic placement of keywords within the article, all of which must be relevant to the title and topic of your article.

Do not be overwhelmed by the six-word questions you will ha e to confront in the social media marketing game, in fact, be happy for social media. Later in the article, I will show you exactly how to tackle those six-word questions.

Before social media, do you remember how marketing used to be? Marketers relied first on outbound marketing strategies. Then as the Internet was introduced to the masses, consumers became more savvy and smarter online shoppers. Along with the Internet came inbound marketing and marketers put the consumer first in their promotions.

Today, you can attract a huge audience thanks to new technology. Technology that allows one to not only track an individual as an individual consumer. Moreover, you also have the ability to interact with prospects in ways that weren’t possible in the past.

Technology And Marketing

This new era of marketing could not come at a better time because it is a perfect match for social media marketing. Your target audience is out there; you just need to analyse and diagnose the data you retrieve to find potential customers, and prospects. And then be able to attract them to your website.

Unfortunately, it’s not a simple task. Many marketers are on social media sites and get little to no response to their efforts.

It is not because they haven’t learned the game, more times than not it is because they are the sole proprietor and can only do so much in any space of time. Or the marketer has no business strategy in place.

Even the successful online marketer and anyone in a successful position will gladly tell you about the failures they faced. A successful social media marketing strategy takes a lot of planning, testing, and commitment. Below are eight tools you can start using in your social media marketing campaign.

Available Software

1. Commun. It is an easy way to grow followers. Don’t think that Commun is one of those online services that sell you Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook followers. Commun. It; is a Twitter/Facebook communities manager that helps you discover who your targeted followers are.

This tool lets you see who supports your content by sharing, retweeting, and mentioning. As you engage those fans, your trust on social media will grow. So interact on all fronts, the strategy will result in success.

2. Onalytica helps you find the influential leaders in your niche. If the influentials like your page and share your work, you will get tons of engagement on your website.

This software will analyze your content, and show you the top influential bloggers who have similar interests and activities related to your theme. Once you have that information, follow those people on social media and interact. Make comments on their posts, but make sure not to spam.

3. Edocr How about sharing some of that knowledge you have obtained in the form of an ebook. When you give something meaningful to users, they will reciprocate. An eBook reflects sound characteristics and will attract social media prospects to your site. When you create an Edocr is the tool to use.

4. Viralheat Viralheat analyzes the ranking of your posts and monitors the conversations that include your post or brand on Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other platforms. You can also communicate with the audience.

Improve Your Social Media For Business

5. Feedly When you start using social media, you have to offer something more than promotion. You do need to promote quality content as part of your marketing. However, focus on something else instead of your business from time to time.

Feedly can find top-notch online publications related to your niche. When you discover a useful and informative publication share it on your social media profiles.

6. Post Planner Facebook updates are important. You cannot log into page or profile as planned all the time. You can use Post Planner to schedule your posts when they peak. Post Planner helps you analyze the trends in your niche and plan your content about your target audience needs. You can also set the tool to automatically re-post.

7. Canva , The tool edit images, add text and speech bubbles to visual content, design grids, and add stickers, icons, and frames to your designs. However, you can also use Canva to create a flyer, presentation, photo collage, Facebook cover, Google+ header, infographic, and other forms of visually-intriguing content.

8. Bit.ly Don’t you get frustrated when you want to share a link via Twitter, but it’s too long for those 140 characters? You don’t have to be! Bit.ly is the tool all social media users need: it turns every URL into a much shorter version that still leads to the right destination.

Thanks for stopping by. I wish you all the best with learning How to Use Social Media for Business. Furthermore, may you have blessings and prosperity. Please, let’s communicate, share a comment or question and I will get back in touch with you.

By Maurice Jackson

Hello, my name is Maurice Jackson I live and, started my business in Detroit. My intentions are, to help any and every one with affiliate marketing as a home business, become a successful professional. My first career was working for the city of Detroit as an inspector, where I thought I would retire. But life bring change and surprises. I sustained an injury that led to an earlier retirement than I had planed. With that said I reinvented myself in April of 2014 and, became part of an affiliate program. Within the time of my reinvention leading up to the present, I am generating lots of traffic to my website and it grows everyday.ROI has been minimal but then again I invested nothing to start. I am at the point of letting my site mature, as I keep writing quality content about it. In this business you have to pay your dues. And, I and the rest of our family (become a member and you will see the family side of it) of 109000, including the founders of the program (yes they participate), will see to it that we all will be making a substantial amount of revenue in the near future.

View all posts by Maurice Jackson →

Sourced from Success with a Home Business

In News

Chatbots – the ecommerce tool nobody is measuring

May 24, 2018 No Comments

This is a viewpoint from Duncan Keene, UK managing director of ContentSquare.

Conversational commerce offers great opportunities to improve the customer experience. But, the quality of that experience is not a given; behavioural analytics are essential if organisations are to maximise the value of chatbots and drive up both engagement and revenue.

Chatbots are at the centre of the conversational commerce movement and are fast becoming a part of everyday life for most ecommerce brands. They’re changing the way brands interact with their visitors and adoption rates are rapidly growing. Chatbot technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and while the debate remains contentious about chatbots replacing human customer support agents, they are undoubtedly becoming more ‘human like’ in their ability to respond to a diverse range of commands, questions and even emotional sentiment.

The Holy Grail for many ecommerce teams is to truly understand how visitors behave and navigate through their sites on both desktop and mobile. Brands have been building towards this for over a decade with varying degrees of success; but in terms of analysing the behaviour of visitors when it comes to chatbot interaction, most teams are in the dark regarding the effectiveness of their automated bots. This is a huge grey area for the vast majority of organisations and is doubtless a source of lost revenue.

Aside from price and product, the quality of experience is proven to be one of the most effective ways to compete for consumers’ hearts and wallets: this continued lack of understanding regarding the way consumers interact with chatbots could be extremely damaging to a brand.

Understanding the UX

A poor chatbot experience will cause significant user frustration and risk damaging both brand engagement and perception. Organisations cannot afford to introduce chatbot technology without proactively monitoring and optimising the way in which visitors interact with chatbots from day one.

The ability to measure behavioural analytics is essential to understand how customers are interacting with chatbots across a website. It enables companies to rapidly identify problem areas and ensure they can be addressed, as well as pro-actively enhancing the experience based on trends in user behaviour. For example being able to see a visual map of visitors’ chatbot ‘journeys’ can identify high drop offs and site exit rates at a particular stage of a conversation.

Brands can also explore how specific visitor segments then behave after a bad chatbot experience – do they continue browsing on the site, end up making a purchase or instantly leave? The ability to rapidly identify and remedy such problems will be key to minimising revenue loss and brand damage.

Fully utilising chatbot UX analytics will also enable brands to explore the most effective time to deploy the bot on a visitor’s desktop or mobile journey; while further insight can inform the order of the questions surfaced, the effectiveness of various answers and the way different visitor segments behave when engaging with a chatbot.

OUI.sncf has developed a transactional chatbot where customers can book their train tickets. The bot is available on Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant (and Google Home by extension) and its own website. OUI.sncf is an early adopter of this technology and customers can do everything from searching for specific departure dates to booking season tickets.

We have been working on integrating a UX analytics tool so the digital UX teams can see how customers behave when interacting with the chatbots. This provides valuable insights which are key to improving this aspect of the customer journey.

Pascal Lannoo, digital customer experience director, OUI.sncf, believes conversational commerce is more than just a trend:

“It is a true new personal interface with our customers. We truly believe conversational will be a major channel for additional revenues, increased engagement and a stronger customer relationship.”

He adds that using an analytics tool helps the company understand what users are experiencing with its chatbot, identify pain points and be able to react much faster.

Conclusion

While chatbots are becoming an increasingly mature and widely deployed technology, in reality organisations still have much to learn about the way consumers interact with chatbots to maximise the value of conversational commerce.

It is likely that as consumers become more familiar with day to day chatbot exposure, their behaviour will change and evolve – just as it has with websites over the past decade. The ability to track and understand this evolution will be important for companies to further improve that experience and fine tune the way in which chatbots are introduced within the consumer journey.

By Duncan Keene, UK managing director of ContentSquare.

Sourced from tnooz

In News

Only 1% of Brits say they’re more likely to use brands sponsoring the World Cup

May 24, 2018 No Comments

By John McCarthy

Oath has studied the viewing habits of World Cup fans to deliver ad insight to its clients, and in doing so, it learned about brand recognition levels in the UK – and a staggeringly low purchase intent.

In February, 7,294 respondents from UK, France, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Spain gave their views on sponsors. For Coca-Cola retention levels were at 45%, at McDonalds it was 41%, Adidas (33%), Visa (31%) and Budweiser (27%).

Brazilians were found to be the most passionate fans, but they were also the most brand-friendly. 35% said they would be much more interested in using a brand that sponsors the World Cup tournament, in the UK, this figure slips to just 1%

Furthermore, one in four (26%) people in the UK said they would not support any other team in the football tournament should their team leave the contest. Stepping aside from the data, Scots have a habit of supporting any team playing England. It was the subject of a Paddy Power ad at Euro 2016.

The study also uncapped consumption habits. Three in four (75%) viewers will be watching at home on TV, as opposed to just 1% on mobile, However, nearly one in four (23%) will leverage smartphones as part of a multi-screen experience.

On the features fans expect, 33% wanted on-demand replays, 18% were keen on 360° virtual reality stadium tours, and 15% wanted to see tabletop AR football.

Stuart Flint, vice president EMEA at Oath, said: “Brands only have a small window where they can grab consumers’ attention while games are on, so they need to look beyond matches and engage fans seeking out supplementary information including stats, replays and interactive experiences.

“While some British fans will switch off from TV once their team is out of the running, they’re still likely to be keeping tabs on contextually relevant content throughout the competition.”

37% in the UK claimed they won’t be engaged in World Cup tournament until the first game kicks off.