This is just a quick post for all my subscribers to summarise a few changes in the Internet marketing arena recently.

First up, there have been a lot of changes with Google Analytics, with a new version coming out with a host of new features including dashboards, multi channel funnels, real time analytics and visitor flow.  I suggest you check it out and familiarise yourself.

Secondly any keyword data from Google organic SSL will no longer be passed on, so you may well see “(not defined)” as one of your top performing keywords, expect it to affect around 10% of organic traffic from Google.

Google Adwords has released a bid per call offering, where a phone number sits in the ad, if you get called you get charged a did fee of £1 minimum – definitely worth using in my opinion.

Mailchimp has released a new service called “goooals” where you can segment email subscribers based on what they do on your website.

I’ll try and do a better job of keeping you all up to date! I’ve been busy preparing for my exams next week, wish me luck!

Quick Catch Up is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

In the last post I talked about how important it is to track your marketing, but the problem arises when you have to figure out how you go about tracking your marketing. Well hopefully this will give you some idea.

Tracking Leads/Sales On Your Website
Google Analytics can be setup to track leads & sales and various other things on your website, it is fairly easy to do and I will go into it later. Fortunately all traffic is automatically tracked, so tracking your online marketing is fairly easy, you just need to setup Google Analytics properly.

Tracking Offline Marketing
If you want to track your offline marketing, then this can also be achieved, through the following methods:

• Create an 0800 number unique for that advert – it will cost you £5, but you will know exactly how many telephone calls it generates through the reporting provided by the 0800 number company.
• You can create a unique email address for the advert – this can be done in cpanel, you can create an email forwarded to your email. So for example localherald@david-whithehouse.org might forward all emails to my main email.
• Finally you have a number of options for tracking leads to your website from your offline marketing:
  1. You can create a shortened link using a service such as bit.ly that redirects to your website, but with added Google Analytics tags – see the Google Analytics URL Builder for further details.
  2. You can buy a domain simply for that advert, for example dwlocalherald.com, then have this redirect to your website, again with added Google Analytics tags.
  3. You can create a redirect on your own domain, e.g. www.david-whitehouse.org/localherald, which then redirects to the homepage with added Google Analytics tags (use Pretty Link Pro WordPress plugin to do this).
  4. Finally, if your website is ranking number 1 for its brand name in Google, you can get people to search for your brand name and the name of the advert – this will be less acurrate, but you have the advantage that you are more likely to show up for further related searches by this user on Google (see the SEO guide later on for explanations.

Using the Google Analytics URL Builder
You have a number of sections to fill in on the Google Analytics URL Builder, I’ll give you examples below.
Campaign Source e.g. Yorkshire Post, Yellow Pages, Direct Mailing
Campaign Medium e.g. print ad, display ad, flyer
Campaign Term – this is only used online for keywords – it is useful if you are using Yahoo or MSN search marketing.
Campaign Content – this is best used if you are creating two or more creatives, for example you send out 500 copies of letter A and 500 copies of letter B and you want to see which responds best. e.g. Letter A, Letter B
Campaign Name – this is ideal to identify particular campaigns, e.g. Valentines Deal, 2 for 1 Offer

Try entering these terms in the URL builder and see what it looks like, see if you can understand how it works by looking at the URL itself.

If you allow people to order online, you will be best placed for tracking your marketing and you will be able to make much better marketing decisions.

Tracking Your Marketing is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

In the last post I showed you how to get a theme for WordPress, now I want to briefly show you how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress.

First of all, I can’t stress how important it is that you use Google Analytics. It will allow you to track all your marketing and enable you to maximise sales through advertising. The best part is that it is easy to use and it is 100% free, so it’s all good! To install Google Analytics on WordPress, see the first video, then see the second short video to setup Google Analytics settings.

Once you’ve done that, have a quick read of my brief introduction to Internet marketing.

Installing And Setting Up Google Analytics On WordPress is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

Ok, so you lazy people out there, I know what your like, you just slap your Google Analytics code on the site and think that its done. Well your wrong, and your messing up valuable data right now! Here are the most common mistakes:

1. Failing to Exclude URL Query Parameters
Nobody ever seems to use this, its great though, it gets rid of all the crap out of the content reports. Every time a page loads with a query string (e.g. http://www.david-whitehouse.org/index.php?SirDickonTwitter=boring), Google Analytics treats it as a separate url to index.php. In order to prevent this, you simply put the variable name (e.g. ‘SirDickonTwitter’) in the handy little box (edit profile, edit main website profile information).

2. Failing to Setup Site Search
Again this is a similar problem to the one above. If you don’t state what your variable name is for the site search then url’s like: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=wanker and http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=bagels will both be treated as separate content. Instead you just put ‘q’ in the site search query box and then get it to strip the url of parameters.

3. Goal Conversion Setup
I rarely see this one setup right, people often repeat the final step twice, as they don’t realise Google puts the final one in at the end. Most people don’t even bother setting this up, but the ones who do, tend to do it wrongly.

4. Ecommerce Script Setup
When your setting this up, you have to put your ecommerce code after your tracking code, or it won’t work. Most people just paste it in and adapt it, not realising they need the tracking script before hand and an if statement in their footer to prevent the tracking script showing there.

5. IP Exclusion Filters
If you are going to be working on a site, whether you are the developer/designer or the marketing agency, perhaps even the business owner – you need to be adding your ip address to the exclude filter on the profile (make sure you have an unfiltered profile as a backup though).

The 5 Most Common Google Analytics Mistakes is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

We had a problem at work the other day where our AdWords account was not linking to Analytics. It wasn’t the autotagging option in AdWords and it wasn’t caused by us not choosing the ‘add cost data’ in Analytics, since this wasn’t an option.

The problem was caused on the 23rd/24th of March – Google switched over to their new system in AdWords, which meant all AdWords accounts can only have one Analytics account against them. Where they messed up was when an AdWords account had an Analytics account against it, it would choose the original. In many cases the original was no longer used and contained no information – something which I think they should have taken into account.

Anyway, to fix it you need to:

1. log into the account with the email address of the account that was originally used
2. Click on the Analytics tab
3. Edit Account Settings
4. Unlink from AdWords account
5. Then go back to the Analytics tab and link it to the correct Analytics account (the logon will need access to the account in question)

AdWords not linking to Analytics is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

Yesterday I gained the new qualification from Google for Google Analytics after passing their Google Analytics IQ test.

The studying I did for the exam was most useful – it will enable me to maximise the profitability of any website.

Google Analytics Qualified is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.