As a marketer, I understand how today’s marketing campaigns face fierce competition. With so much content and ads competing for eyeballs, creating campaigns that stand out is no easy task. 

That’s where strategies like tagging come in. 

It helps you categorize and optimize your marketing efforts. It also helps your campaigns cut through the noise and reach the right audience.

To help you out, I’ve compiled nine ways brands use a tagging strategy to create an impactful marketing campaign. 

Let’s get to it. 

How Brands Use a Tagging Strategy

Tagging involves using keywords or labels to categorize and organize content, products, or customer data. You attach tags to specific items or information to make searching, sorting, and analyzing data easier. 

There are various types of tags, including meta tags, analytics tags, image tags, hashtags, blog tags, and more. 

So, how do brands use a tagging strategy to make their marketing campaigns stand out?

Improve Social Media Engagement

With over 5 billion users, social media provides an easy way to connect with your audience, build relationships, and promote your offerings.

Use a tagging strategy to boost social media interactions. Consistently use hashtags that align with current trends and topics. This encourages people to interact with your content and boosts content visibility.

You can also use tags to monitor brand mentions of your products or your industry. This allows you to engage with your audience promptly.

Consider virtual social media assistants to streamline your tagging strategy. These AI-driven tools can suggest relevant hashtags, track mentions, and automate responses. Implementing them can save time and resources while ensuring consistent engagement across your socials.

Build a Personal Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform, with over 1 billion members across 200 nations. It offers excellent opportunities for individuals and businesses to build and nurture their brands.

However, simply creating a professional profile isn’t enough to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. 

Use various tags to increase your visibility, establish thought leadership, showcase expertise, and attract the right connections. For instance, use skill tags to showcase your expertise and industry tags to attract connections and opportunities within your industry. Use certification tags to help showcase your expertise and credibility to potential employers or clients. 

Facilitate Customer Segmentation and Personalization

Personalization matters—more so in today’s data-driven world. In fact, 65% of consumers expect your brand to adapt to their changing preferences and needs.

To meet this expectation, consider using a tagging strategy.

Segment your customers based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, interests, purchase history, cart abandonment, and behavior.

Here’s a summary of the steps to customer segmentation.

With your customer segments ready, use tags to tailor your marketing messages and offerings to specific segments. Imagine sending targeted email campaigns based on what your customers need. That’s the power of segmentation and tagging in action!

Enhance SEO and Content Discoverability

Tagging content can have a profound impact on search engine optimization (SEO) and content discoverability. When users search for specific topics or products, well-tagged content is more likely to appear in search results, driving organic traffic to your website. 

Additionally, tags can help you analyze the most popular topics with your readers. Then, the results of this analysis can help you adjust your content strategies accordingly.

And get this— certain AI tools can help analyze your content and suggest relevant tags and keywords. Using these tools in addition to a tagging strategy can help optimize your SEO strategies and boost content discoverability.

Partner with the Right Influencers

Influencer marketing has become a go-to marketing approach for modern brands. Recent stats show that 85% of marketers and business owners believe influencer marketing is an effective marketing strategy. 

But how do you find the perfect influencer for your campaign? 

Utilize tags to identify influencers who are relevant to your niche. Beyond this, find influencers who align with your brand values and target audience.

Additionally, look for influencers who use hashtags that are relevant to your campaigns. For instance, fashion influencer Chiara Ferragni uses #adv (advertising) and #ghd (good hair day) hashtags in this campaign.

Monitor industry-specific hashtags and mentions to discover influential voices and build profitable relationships with them. 

Track Hashtag Performance

Tracking your hashtag performance helps you understand your campaigns’ engagement, reach, and effectiveness.

To achieve this goal, assign special hashtags to each marketing project. This helps you see which hashtags generate the most engagement and reach, enabling you to refine your tagging strategy. 

Here’s an example of a hashtag performance report for the #SuperBowl2024.

This curated list of hashtag generators by Attrock discusses the top tools for your consideration. You can analyze each and choose the one that best fits your needs.

Categorize Content Accordingly 

The human attention span is shrinking. The last thing you want is for your audience to have difficulty in finding or navigating your content, get frustrated, and bounce.

Untagged content can be difficult to navigate and manage. As any marketer knows, content is important in digital marketing campaigns. 

To categorize your content, identify the main categories by topics, themes, campaigns, target audiences, or product lines. Then, assign relevant tags based on the categories you’ve identified. After that, implement a consistent tagging strategy for existing and new content. 

Organizing your content using tags can also help streamline your content management workflow. Most importantly, readers can easily find the content they’re looking for, thereby boosting overall user experience, engagement, and conversions.

Boost Your Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing remains a powerful marketing tool in today’s digital world. It’s also another area where brands use a tagging strategy to directly reach their target audience.

Use tags to segment your email list and personalize your marketing messages. Then, you can send targeted emails based on factors like purchase history, interests, and demographics. 

Personalization can significantly improve open rates, CTRs, and overall engagement and conversion rates. It’s a simple yet impactful strategy to make your email marketing strategy more effective.  

Plus, you can use tags to track how well your emails perform with each group. This helps you understand what content resonates best with your audience and provides insight on how to improve your emails going forward.

Enhance Analytics and Reporting

Every marketer appreciates the immense value of data. For brands using tagging strategies, tags are powerful tools for gathering valuable data. 

Analyze how users interact with your tagged content. See which tags generate the most clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement. Gain insight into audience preferences and campaign effectiveness.

This granular data about your marketing efforts allow you to make data-driven decisions, allocate resources effectively, and refine your marketing strategies.

Final Thoughts 

There isn’t a single correct way for brands to use a tagging strategy in marketing. You can use a tagging strategy however you see fit. However, the bottom line is that this strategy offers you a simple yet powerful way to create attention-grabbing and unique marketing campaigns. 

Fortunately, tagging strategies are useful across various marketing initiatives, from social media and email marketing to SEO and more. 

So, if you’re ready to elevate your marketing campaign, build a strong brand presence, and stand out among the competition, consider employing effective tagging strategies today.

The post How Tagging Strategies Transform Marketing Campaigns appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Search engine optimization is becoming incredibly challenging and unpredictable. As search engines are integrating generative AI and learning to surface more diverse results, creating a strategy to rank your pages in the top 5 takes a lot of trial and error.

Video marketing is almost equally challenging. Gone are the days when you had to invest in professional equipment and hire an editor to be able to create a video. These days anyone can create great videos at home and edit them using affordable software. The competition is insane.

So where is the opportunity here?

It’s in combining these two marketing channels.

Let me explain:

• Videos rank incredibly well in Google (they have their own sections in search results, so you are not competing with giants)
• Not many video marketers are optimizing their videos for organic Google search, so it is actually doable.

Video opportunities we are targeting here

Videos are very search-friendly if you optimize them the right way. In this post, we’re going to look at the ways you can optimize your videos on the top networks, YouTube and Vimeo, for increased search rankings and views.

When it comes to organic search, there are two distinct opportunities we are targeting here:

• Video rich snippets (these are usually earned when you embed your Youtube code on your page)
• Video carousels (or video packs): These are separate sections within organic search results, and they are pretty easy to capture. All you need is a traditional SEO.

Here is how to best optimize your videos on YouTube and Vimeo for better search rankings and increased views.

Titles

The title is one of the primary elements of optimizing your video for search as it is equivalent to the SEO title for the video page on YouTube and Vimeo. Therefore, the standard rules apply.

Keep it under 65 – 70 characters, including the main keywords you want it to rank for, and make it appealing for visitors to encourage more views. Think of your video title just like the headline for your blog posts – eye-catching and SEO-friendly! Keyword stuffing is not advised. Using ChatGPT to brainstorm better video titles is a great idea.

If you are using videos as a way to boost your personal reputation or the reputation of your business, be sure to include your brand name.

Descriptions

The description of your video is important for a couple of reasons. For starters, the first 160 characters count as the meta description for your video page on YouTube and Vimeo. While meta descriptions don’t necessarily help with rankings, they do come up in search results in both the major search engines and the networks’ own search results.

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The descriptions also come up as a snippet when you share the video on Facebook and other social networks. This makes the description highly valuable for encouraging views.

As an added bonus, you can include links to your website in the video description. You just need to try to include your links earlier on in your description as most of the description gets cut off at a certain length on both YouTube and Vimeo, and visitors will need to click on the See More / Read More to see them if they are past that point.

Transcription

Is it important to say your primary keywords, name, and business name in a video? It just might be. YouTube automatically transcribes your videos. This means they can make search results for videos more accurate by indexing the video content itself.

On a side note, if you’re curious about any verbal ticks you might have while speaking during a video (like using a lot of um’s), they will be more noticeable in the interactive transcript.

Thumbnails

Take advantage of the ability to choose a thumbnail for both YouTube and Vimeo videos. A good thumbnail could encourage a view the same way a bad one could discourage a view, especially when your video is jumbled in with others in search results.

Embedding

If you want to increase your video views, allow your videos to be embedded. Better yet, add a Creative Commons license to them in the Advanced Settings on both YouTube and Vimeo. This will encourage more people to share them, and potentially increase the links to them as well. It is a good idea to use Youtube gallery plugins on your site to showcase your video content on your site.

Channel optimization

Many people will click on your channel to check out who is the video is coming from. So make sure it is optimized for those user journeys:

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• Complete the about section of the channel
• Add your links
• Set up the “Welcome” video
• Add a Youtube channel header image
• Set up a channel @username so that it’s is easier to type. This tool is great for coming up with memorable names.

Pinterest

Take advantage of Pinterest for more than just image sharing. Pin your videos in order to increase traffic and views from Pinterest to your video content. As an added bonus, Pinterest will give you a link back to both the video and your YouTube / Vimeo channel.

Videos pinned from YouTube will automatically start playing when someone clicks on your pin. Videos from Vimeo will be pinned as the thumbnail image with the ability to click through to the video.

Analytics

Want to know what is working (or not) with your YouTube and Vimeo videos? Be sure to use the video insights to find out where your video has been linked or embedded, the keywords that drove traffic to your video, and much more.

Create a sales journey from each of your videos

Once your video starts generating views and interactions, you want those viewers to go to your site and engage with your sales funnel. So keep that in mind when creating and uploading your videos to Youtube or Vimeo:

• Mention your product or service in the video content
• Use end cards with your contact details and QR codes to direct people to your site. Using IVR technology will help you funnel these calls better, that’s what we were doing.
• Include important links in the video description (and invite your viewers to check the description below the video to click the links)

Make sure to use URL parameters to segment traffic from Youtube and Vimeo. This way you can clearly see the source of each lead and personalize your follow-ups. Using CRM solutions will make segmenting your traffic easier.

Using the strategy above, we were able to create a powerful traffic generation strategy in which video was the second most effective channel for us!

Snowball effect

Videos with a lot of views tend to rank higher than others. Therefore, part of your optimization strategy should be focused on getting more views of your videos. Promote your videos just like you would your blog content. Share them on social networks, include a link to them in your email newsletter, create a blog post around them, or even create a page on your website devoted to all of your videos.

The more views you receive, the better your video will rank in search results within the video networks. As you receive more views, you will receive more shares, embeds, and links back to your video from other websites. Thus, the video’s ranking in main search engines will increase as well.

So as soon as your videos start generating clicks from Google, they will start ranking better on Youtube as well, so you will have more and more visibility for your video content.

This strategy will work even better if you collaborate with Youtube influencers to publish your videos to their channels in the form of interviews or podcasts. This way Youtube will learn to associate your name and content with popular Youtube creators, so your videos will show up in more recommended videos. Hari Ravi is a great example of implementing this strategy well.

Inexpensive Ways to Make Videos

Excited about the possibilities of creating videos, but not sure how to get started? Here are some quick ideas of ways to create a video without having to spend a lot on professional recording hardware or software.

• Host and record live videos on Youtube, Facebook, or Instagram. Gain extra views by inviting industry experts for regular panel discussions to capitalize on searches for their names.
• Record interviews on Skype or Zoom.
• Use Screenflow or Camtasia to record screencasts and tutorials.
• Use tools like VideoScribe to create animated videos.
• Ask customers to make quick testimonials at your business, at conferences, or other places you interact with them.

Ready to take your content marketing to the next level? Then video marketing combined with organic search optimization is the answer.

The post Rank Higher and Capture Leads with Video SEO appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There’s so much data, from so many different sources, with so many different reporting tools, that you could just drown in reports, attribution, and meetings. With so much noise out there, it’s important that you look at the data in a certain way. There’s important information hidden in the metrics that will help direct your digital marketing strategy.

In this article I’m going to walk you through this technique that I’ve been using for 25 years, called MAA.

Metrics, Analysis, Action

MAA stands for metrics, analysis, action.

Let me show you how powerful it is when you use this technique on any kind of data set you have. It could be SEO data, website data, email data, conversion data, shopping cart data.

The Data Doc is in…

Think of this as if you are a surgeon in the emergency room. You must follow these three steps.

• Collect vitals.
• Diagnose.
• Treat.

First you collect the vitals. It could be heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, x-rays things like that. These are the numbers that clue you in to the cause of the problem.

The second phase is the diagnosis. In this phase you interpret all the vitals that you collected. Based on the data, you make the determination of a heart attack, broken bone, virus, etc. The key point is that the diagnosis is based on the data.

From that diagnosis, you create the treatment plan. The plan might include surgery, medications, a recovery plan, etc. But the list of things to be done to make the patient healthier is based upon the findings and the diagnosis.

The marketing analytics data you collect leads directly to analysis of the problem. That then leads directly to the action. What I will show you in this article is a number of examples from a variety of digital marketing projects. This works whether you’re working on a large or small project.

Data vs Analytics

Lots of people think that they have analytics because they have Google Analytics installed on their website.

But let me tell you a dirty secret.

There are no analytics in Google Analytics. It’s just Google charts. It should be called Google Chart-Maker.

Marketing analytics is figuring out what’s actually going on. It’s the interpretation of the data. Interpreting the data tells you why sales went up or down. It helps you discover why conversion rates went up or down. Analyzing the data answers questions like:

• Why did people buy or not buy?
• Why did a competitor take a certain action?
• Where are we losing customers along the customer journey?
• Is our content hitting or missing with our customers?

Analytics is more than making charts and collecting data. And action is the next step after marketing analytics.

The way we see it, if you are not taking action based on the analytics, which was based on the data, then whatever you’re doing is random.

Returning to our analogy, not everyone should take the same pill. If you’ve got a broken bone, you shouldn’t take the same medication as someone who has a headache. So the action that you take, the optimization, should be contingent upon the analysis, which should go straight back to the data that you gathered.

Most people make the mistake of just trying to look at lots of data. This Metrics Analysis Action framework is the easiest way to figure out what you really need to do versus what’s noisy.

MAA Framework Case Study: Ecommerce

If you are in ecommerce, lead gen, or any kind of performance marketing, then you’re going to start with the action, mapped back to the analysis, and back to the metrics.

Because the actions are all the things that you could do.

So make a list of the things that you could do.

• You can play with the website.
• You can change your budgets.
• You can change ads.
• You can optimize creatives.
• You can work with influencers.
• You can buy another tool.
• You can change bids.

Think of all the actions that you could take. Start with the end in mind.

Once you decide on the action, look for the trigger. In other words, when analyzing the data, what diagnosis will cause you to take that prescribed action?

That’s where you have automated rules on Google, Facebook, or Shopify. Wherever you’re looking at data, you can set up these rules.

For example, if your cost per acquisition goes above $50, then turn the ad set off. If someone leaves a positive review on Yelp, then reach out to them to say thank you.

So if a certain thing happens, then here’s the particular action.

Then there’s a limited number of things that you could do, so you don’t have to look at everything. And then if you need to determine if that triggering condition is true, then what data do you need?

Data, Analytics, and Attribution

On the far left of this image, we have plumbing. Plumbing is collecting the data from different tags in tag manager, UTM parameters, pixels that are firing, and other events inside an app.

These are the things that people are doing. For example, opening an email. When that happens, you get plenty of email marketing data. But the data doesn’t mean anything unless you can tie it to a goal.

How do you tie data to a goal?

Here’s a lifetime value example…

Seeds of Life sells flowers to people who’ve experienced the death of a loved one. The lifetime value (LTV) of a customer is $150. What can they do to increase the LTV?

They might offer a referral bonus, free shipping for orders over a hundred dollars, etc. Their goals, checked against the marketing analytics, will determine the direction of their next marketing campaign.

The important thing is to define the goals and measure them against the data. If the data doesn’t tie to the achievement of a particular goal, then you have to ask, “why are we even collecting that data?”

We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack, here. Although, that’s what most people do with their reporting.

Most people log into Google analytics, or whatever they use to pull in all the data from all the different places. And then they just hunt and peck and wander around and look for interesting things.

They look at the data then filter down to this date for that particular segment and this part of the country. It’s like the lotto, like the power ball where you choose six random balls to try to win the million dollar jackpot.

You want to have your goals before you figure out the plumbing.

Don’t Make the Same Mistakes with Analytics

Large and small companies make the same mistakes. They tend to go after impressions or click through rate or secondary metrics when the primary metric, the business goal, is more important than a diagnostic, secondary metric.

I love looking at cost per mille, or CPM, in advertising. For example, how much are you paying per thousand impressions? What is the trigger or check engine light, to let you know whether the algorithm is penalizing you for having a low click through rate, low quality score, low relevance score, etc.

Analyzing a marketing campaign in this way may show that something else is wrong.

Please don’t make the same mistake thinking that a secondary metric like click through rate, cost per click, quality score, or CPM is more important than the main business metric.

Profit, lifetime value, or cost of acquisition should be the goals that tie to your content and targeting.

Plumbing, Goals, Content, Targeting, Amplification, Optimization…

Here’s an example (above) of a marketing campaign we ran for our friend, Brennan.

At the very top are the financial metrics, specifically profit. There’s some kind of margin with or without cost of goods and services or overhead.

Then we have revenue minus costs.

Revenue is driven by factors like conversion rate, LTV, and how well you use things like recency and frequency to increase revenue.

Then there’s costs: people costs, ad costs, software costs, other kinds of costs.

On the revenue side, units (high price vs low price) multiplied by volume (clicks and/or conversion rate) is your revenue.

On the cost side, let’s say you run all your digital marketing campaigns on a cost per click basis. You can break that down to different fixed and variable costs. So we know if we double the number of clicks we’re buying from Google, we’re going to pay twice as much. Multiply the cost by the number of clicks you get for the overall cost of that campaign.

This decomposition pyramid helps you figure out the data you need to collect using secondary diagnostic metrics.

Start to think about how those different metrics will help you uncover the main issue to focus on right now.

MAA Framework: Case Study

Let’s look at how this actually applies when you’re looking at tabular data.

In this example (above), we’re looking at a lot of information. There are 132 ad sets here. That means we have all this information for 132 projects…

• Data
• Campaigns
• Ads
• Landing pages
• Messages

This happens to be a set of Facebook campaigns, but it could easily be any social media platform or other traffic source.

We use a concept called “Top N” to select a manageable number of ad sets to work with. Why? Because it’s intimidating to try and look at ALL of them to diagnose the problem or issue.

You don’t have time to look at every single keyword, creative, or landing page. The idea of Top N is to look at the top, best- or worst-performing ad sets and ignore the rest. This is just another way of using the 80/20 rule or prioritizing your work.

I find that when you use the Top N technique on any large dataset you can quickly zero in on the most important thing.

In this case, we can see that this very first ad spent $10,000 out of $43,000. That means 25% of all of the money being spent is inside that one ad out of the 132 ads total.

Look a little more closely and you’ll see the top five already account for 60% of the total spend.

That’s not uncommon. In lots of cases the top three to five ads will account for about half of your ad spend.

Applying the Top N Method

I like to start by doing Top N on spend, because that’s where I can identify a “bleeder” (a high-spend ad with very low return).

Then I look at what drove the most revenue or had the highest number of conversions. Because then I can find where the winners are.

Then I look at clicks, leads, or other metrics that are important to the business.

Using this method, I kill the losing ads and amplify the winning ads.

Let’s say you were to sort just by conversions or revenue. If you do that, then you could have an ad that’s wasting lots of money that doesn’t make it into the top four or five for your most important metrics.

So I use Top N for three or four metrics in succession. Each time it reorders the ad sets or ads or creatives or whatever it is that you’re looking at.

You can use this method to determine ad performance in just three minutes.

Find and Fix the Issue

If something’s out of whack, it could require a big change or it could be something wrong with the tracking.

It could be iOS 14, or the pixel wasn’t on that landing page. It could be the data didn’t come through and it’s delayed. There’s all kinds of things that could play into why numbers aren’t adding up.

A lot of people freak out when sales are way down. Understandable. But many times it’s because of some silly issue. So before you pull the fire alarm, just think, does that really make sense?

I like this particular ad here.

There’s no way we spent this amount of money with no return. So we know there’s an issue. And we know with social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, their systems often will not show data.

We know that because of the iOS 14 update, impressions and clicks are reported on different frequencies. So you might see a bunch of spend show up before the conversions show up or vice versa.

Make sure it’s statistically significant. Also make sure that you have enough data, so you don’t jump to any conclusions.

We’ve seen these systems spiral out of control. For example, let’s say you decide to reduce the bid amount on a marketing channel when the ROI falls below a certain amount. That seems logical. But if you’re only looking at revenue, not conversions, you might kill off a marketing campaign that was actually working quite well.

Imagine if it all boiled down to a hiccup in the data that caused the downward spiral. Not good. So be careful about that.

Now, if you see that a metric is out of whack and the data looks good, then ask yourself why that campaign isn’t performing as well.

Data and Instinct for the Win

Don’t let everything you do be completely automated and dependent upon rules. A successful marketing strategy requires a human touch.

Don’t set so many rules that the software automatically terminates your ads.

Instead, take a moment to look at how far out of bounds the ad performance is. It could be that you launched a new campaign and you’re doing an AB test or some kind of split test. The winner stays on and continues to win, even when other ads are losing, because you’re trying to find another winner to take its place.

If the cost per acquisition is high, then you can break that down using the metrics decomposition pyramid.

For example, the cost per acquisition will double if:

• the conversion rate is cut in half and the cost per click is the same
• the cost per click doubles and the conversion rate is the same

The cost per acquisition remains the same if either factor doubles while the other one is cut in half.

Always look at your marketing analytics when the cost per conversion goes up. Determine whether it’s because of the cost per click or the conversion rate.

When you run ads using objective-based bidding you don’t have to worry as much about cost per click, click through rate, or conversion rate because the artificial intelligence behind the ad platform is going to seek your target metric.

If the target metric is out of whack, you can decompose it into the underlying metrics.

That’s true for organic traffic. But it’s not as true for paid traffic because the systems are getting smarter and can optimize for the objective you set. Either way you should still look.

Balancing Metrics

This method gets you to look at metrics that matter according to our business goals. It gets you to think about and analyze why the data might be good or bad. And it gets you to outline the actions you’re going to take when goals aren’t being met. Over time you’ll find that the same pairing of metrics change alongside each other. So let’s talk about what these balancing metrics are.

One company we were working with was spending a hundred thousand dollars a month on advertising. When they were unhappy with the return, the analyst on the project adjusted the Google ad campaign. All of a sudden the cost per conversion dropped from $20 per lead to $7 per lead.

But I wanted to know how and why it dropped so dramatically. I found out that this person went into the Google ads campaign and turned off all the campaigns except for the brand search terms. Of course it was going to convert super well!

But the balancing metric was volume. When the analyst “fixed” the cost per conversion, the number of leads dropped from 5,000 leads a month to maybe a thousand leads a month.

The key takeaway here is that if you optimize one metric blindly, you can fool yourself into thinking everything is better when in reality another metric took a nosedive.

Analyzing Like a Scientist, but NOT a Rocket Scientist

Metrics don’t matter, unless there’s a clear analysis that can come from the information. Remember, you’re seeking a diagnosis.

Think like a surgeon or scientist. Start with a hypothesis. If a certain thing happens, what will you do to correct it and what outcome do you expect? If there’s no potential action based on some metric, there’s no need to gather the metrics.

I see companies spend most of their efforts collecting data. No one even knows why they’re using the data. Be strategic and ask, “what are we doing with this data? Is there some meaningful action we’re going to take?”

Maybe there’s another metric that would measure the goal better.

The point of analytics is to figure out whether something is worthwhile. Most of the data you thought was important, doesn’t even matter.

I’ll give you one example. Our client was a large company, but this works for small companies, too.

We were working with an airline, taking one database and matching it against another. They wanted to know things like whether a customer that goes skiing has kids and what their income was.

They wanted predictive models to uncover which customers would be most likely to sign up for their credit card or buy flowers or upgrade or travel to new destinations.

We went all in on the idea that more data is better. After all the time and money spent on sophisticated data models, what we found was that the best predictor of people flying more was past purchase behavior. Not a surprise, right?

In this case, purchase behavior predicted purchase behavior. And the fact that they drove a station wagon, or liked to eat Haagen-Dazs ice cream, might be interesting but it had very little impact on their flying behavior.

Moral of the story, you might find that the most obvious thing is the best place to start optimizing in your business as well. Start thinking about what kind of “if-then” logic you can implement. And don’t dismiss the really simple idea just because it’s simple.

The MAA Framework is Not Just for Advertising

Collecting data allows you to put if-then sequences in place across your business. In Google and Facebook you can set up automated rules using if-then logic. For example, one might be for conversions. If conversions fall below a certain number, then an automated action would be taken or an alert might be sent to whoever’s in charge of that area to let them know there is something that needs their attention.

Here is a table of common if-then scenarios we’ve come across. Start small by looking at just a few of these things.

You’ll find a lot of value when you look at the patterns. For example, look at posts with the highest engagement versus posts with the lowest engagement. What can you learn? What do the high-engagement posts have in common? Is there a cross-over with the low-engagement posts?

Don’t spend all your time messing around inside the tools. Even Google’s head of analytics said that 90% of every dollar you spend on analytics should be on people and 10% should be on the tools.

We see a lot of businesses do the opposite. They spend 90% on tools and 10% on people. The hard truth is, the most sophisticated tools are useless without someone who knows how to make sense of the numbers.

To ensure success, set the framework in place. Make it clear that everyone is accountable for the results.

Summary

I hope the metrics, analysis, action framework I’ve just introduced you to encourages you. Data and analytics aren’t really that technical. You don’t have to collect a ton of data, build regression models, or feed your AI any recipes.

Customers buy this over that. It’s not math. It’s not huge databases. It’s not engineering.

The MAA framework is all about understanding the numbers in the context of business performance and goals. Tracking metrics should always begin with the business strategy in mind. 

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As a marketer, I still rely on numbers to guide my efforts—not to decorate my walls, but to drive traffic, sell products, and make smarter business decisions in general.

You could call it “marketing by the numbers.” In reality, it’s website analytics. And whether you consider yourself a numbers person or not, you need to get comfortable with it.

To help, I’m going to give you 3 simple principles for quick success—the analytics basics you need to know—so you can find your best numbers and start using website analytics to grow your business.

Step 1: Know Your Goals

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by analytics. Open any dashboard, and you’ll see lots of charts, graphs, and numbers.

The only numbers you need to pay attention to, though, are the ones that matter to you. You see, static numbers are meaningless. So until you decide they’re important, they’re not.

That’s why goals are so important. Before looking at any analytics dashboard, you need to know what information you’re looking for—the question you’re trying to answer.

Google Analytics is the standard for tracking your website metrics

Be aware, you should have different goals for the different stages of the funnel. Which means you’ll be asking different questions.

At the top of the funnel (TOFU), you want traffic from new visitors. The question you ask at the top of the funnel is whether the decisions you’re making are generating enough traffic.

To answer that question, you’ll look at these metrics:

At the middle of the funnel (MOFU), your goal is converting new visitors into leads. Here, you’ll ask whether people are subscribing, filling out a form, or sharing your page in social media—actions that reflect a growing interest in your brand and/or products.

To answer these questions, you’ll look at these metrics:

At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), your goal is conversion—turning traffic into sales. So when you look at your analytics, you’ll ask yourself how well a page is converting prospects into sales.

To answer that question, you’ll look at these metrics:

Step 2: Know What’s Working

Once you’ve identified the numbers that are important to you, you’ll want to watch them carefully to see whether they’re trending up or down… whether there are spikes that indicate something worked extremely well… or downward spikes that indicate something hurt your results.

Your goal, of course, is to identify what’s working and what’s not. So when you see a spike in your website analytics numbers, you want to look around for the marketing activity or industry event that might have impacted your numbers.

For instance, a big spike in direct blog traffic could happen after you publish a new YouTube video or a guest post goes live on a reputable blog.

Examples of pageview spikes after popular or new content is published

Step 3: Use the Numbers to Drive Your Strategy and Website

In an ideal world, data will support every business decision you make—especially your marketing. That’s why you need to be tracking your analytics, watching the trends, and identifying the marketing activities that give you the most traction.

Bottom line, you want to do more of the activities that help you meet your goals—and do less of the activities that don’t give you a good return on the time you’ve put into them.

To do that, you need to understand what metrics can tell you on a strategic level. For example…

What are people searching for? You need to know what searches are bringing the most traffic to your site. And you need to verify that those keywords are closely related to your core products.

If they aren’t, you need to do a better job of branding. At the very least, you need to update your website copy and create high-value content that tells people what your brand is about.

Sears is a good example of a brand that didn’t do this.

They were the early 1900s Amazon, the innovator of mail-order catalog marketing. In fact, until 1989, when Walmart passed them up, they had the largest domestic revenue of any retailer in the US.

They’re still known as a mail-order giant—so why didn’t they jump on ecommerce? Strategically, they could have approached it as catalog marketing for a new generation.

Sears should have been watching their metrics (and their competitors’) and jumped on this trend when it was just getting started.

What topics get the most traffic and attention? If you’re doubling down on one topic while your best traffic comes from another topic, you’ll struggle to grow your business.

Watch for the blog topics and product pages that get the most attention. Then create a strategy to build on that activity.

Let’s say you run a site on productivity. You’ve been promoting your Daily Planner because it’s the most obvious productivity tool. But analytics tells you a different story: It’s your article on goal setting that gets the most traffic and shares.

Clearly, setting goals is a pain point for your audience. Explore ideas for creating a product, like a goal setting planner, that helps your followers achieve their goals.

Analytics can uncover new or updated products your customers want.

Where does that traffic come from? You need to know where your traffic is coming from, so you can turn up the volume whenever you need to.

Let’s say you have 5 ads running for 1 product, each targeting a different customer segment. If one of those ads performs significantly better than the others, you could create more offers for that audience.

Or let’s say you’ve been writing guest posts for 5 popular blogs in your space. If most of your guest blogging traffic comes from just one of those sites, you might consider dropping the other four and doubling down on the one that’s working.

How do visitors behave once they’re on your site? You need to know which pages have high bounce rates… which pages send the most traffic to your sales pages… and which pages get the most engagement.

This helps you understand how to optimize your website and your funnels. It also tells you the type of content people like—so you can create more content that gets high engagement levels.

Bottom Line

Analytics isn’t really about the numbers. It’s about figuring out what’s working and what’s not.

The key is to always be analyzing and testing, then use the numbers to help you make smarter decisions.

That’s the bare-bones basics of website analytics. Or, as I like to call it, marketing by the numbers.

The post Marketing by the Numbers: How to Get Started with Website Analytics appeared first on DigitalMarketer.