Your data’s essentially the backbone of your marketing efforts. It tells you what is and (perhaps more importantly) isn’t working. It shapes strategic decisions. It funnels your money into the marketing channels that give the greatest return. It helps you prevent dead time, maximize resources, and effectively utilize your budget. 

Knowing which numbers to monitor, and what they mean, is key to properly utilizing the data you’re collecting. Here are seven key marketing metrics you need to be measuring: 

1. Total visits

Your totals visits refer to the number of people who check out your website. You can monitor your total visits on Google Analytics for things like:

• Your entire website

• Specific pages of your site

• Campaign landing pages

 Keeping an eye on this type of data is important when you’re trying to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts or the effectiveness of a specific campaign.

2. Acquisition type

Looking for different ways to measure your traffic? Here’s our top four methods.

Acquisition is where your traffic comes from – for example is it direct, referral, email, organic, paid or social? This is a key metric to stay on top of, because it tells you which channels are top performers and which may need to be revisited. Either way, it helps you put your efforts into the areas that actually generate a return for you.

3. Bounce rate

Bounce rates tell you how many visitors enter your website and leave before exploring any other pages. For example, are people making it to your ‘About us’ page and then heading off the website without clicking on any internal links? 

Generally speaking, the lower your bounce rate the better. High bounce rates canbe associated with people not finding the content on your page useful, and low bounce rates are more likely to convert and perform meaningful actions.

Bounce rates can be measured on your overall site or for specific pages.

4. Conversions

 This is arguably one of your most important metrics. A conversion can mean different things depending on what your goals are -- for example, it might be a newsletter sign up, filling out a lead form, and or completing a checkout.  

Your conversion numbers help you measure the profitability of your marketing efforts and they can be tracked either directly on your site (depending on how it’s built) or by setting up goals in Google Analytics. If your conversion numbers are looking pretty low, it might be worth looking at your design, content, user experience or product/service.

5. Cost per lead

Quite simply, this is the amount it costs you to turn a prospect into a customer. Your cost per lead should be calculated on a channel-specific basis, and the numbers you retrieve will give you a good idea of which channels are most profitable.

To calculate your cost per lead, simply work out how much you’ve spent on each medium and compare it to how many conversions it’s earned you. For example, if you invested $1,000 into a PPC campaign and got 15 conversions out of it, your cost per lead would be $66.66. 

This cost per lead needs to be weighed against the cost of creating or delivering your product. If closing a customer costs $100 and it takes $400 to manufacture your product, you need to seriously revisit your marketing efforts. 

6. Open rate

Open rates tell you how many of the emails you’ve successfully sent are actually being opened. For example, if you send 600 emails to prospects and 75 of them are opened, your open rate would be 12.5%.

It’s important to keep track of your open rates to understand how a) far your email campaigns are reaching, and b) you can improve your subject lines. Low open rates mean your emails aren’t being read, which results in missed opportunities. 

7. Customer value

Last but certainly not least, is customer value. This is how much a customer is likely to generate you per year (or whichever cycle is most relevant to you) and can help you determine your overall return on investment. 

If you’re a start-up this figure will be more of a forecast. If you’ve been in business for some years, you can use the past few years’ sales numbers to calculate out the average number of yearly sales, along with the value of those purchases.

You can work your customer value out as an overall average or based on clusters – and your clusters could be anything from age and geography to persona and profession. Knowing your customer value helps you set organizational goals and expectations. 

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Hue & Tone: Greensboro Marketing firm

When it comes to your business’ numbers, everything from your design to your social media management plays a part in your success. To see how we can help give your bottomline a healthy boost, get in touch with our team today at (336) 365-8559.

Need a new way to aid your organic traffic efforts? Then look no further. Google My Business is a free, easy, and proven method that will help improve your site’s visibility in search results, make key information more accessible, and enable your company to cut through the crowd with a competitive edge.

The proof is in the results — for example, websites with a business listing get 25-35 percent more clicks than those without? If you’re sold by the stats and want to get the wheels in motion, read on for the all-important ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business lets you take control of how your business appears in Google search and maps, by letting you specify things like your name, description, location, opening hours and busy periods.

In addition, it enables you to monitor and reply to your customers’ reviews, add photos, and get more intel into how and where visitors are searching for you.

This is what Google My Business looks like in search results:

And here’s how it looks in maps:

Google My Business: the benefits

There are endless benefits to making the most of Google My Business, but here are our top seven:

1. It’s free - so what’s there to lose?! 

2. It helps your current and prospective customers find your physical location more easily

3. It enhances your search visibility

4. It makes genuinely useful information more accessible

5. Your Google My Business profile opens another communication channel to talk with customers

6. It equips you with useful analytics and insights into your visibility, engagement and audience, which can be used to shape future strategies

7. Reviews are relied upon by many, so getting customers to leave them is key. Fortunately, Google My Business makes this easy, allowing customers to rate your business by simply googling your name (they must have a profile themselves, though)

How to create your Google My Business listing

Step 1: create your profile

First things first, you need to set your business’ listing up. To do this, either create a new Google account, or, if you already have an account you’re happy associating with your company, log in using that.

Step 2: Fill out key information

Then head to google.com/business and hit the “Start now” button towards the top right corner of the page. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be prompted to fill in all the details of your business. Be prepared to fill out the following:

• Your name

• Address - there are two additional options with this one:

  • You can hide your address if you don’t have a physical store

  • If you deliver your product or service to your customers rather than them coming to you, you can check a box to tell people this

• Next you need to give delivery details by either telling Google you deliver within a region, city or postcode, or by pre-setting a specific number of miles from your business. The two choices will look like this:

Step 3: Pick a business category

You’ll be asked to specify your business’ category. Your response to this will help determine who Google displays your listing to, so it’s really important your category closely reflects your offering.

Step 4: Contact info

The penultimate step is dropping in your phone number or website URL.

Step 5: account verification

And last but not least, you’ll need to pick how you want to verify your account (if you’re not quite ready to verify, you can opt to do this at a later date). Whether it’s now or later though, your options are:

• Postcard: To verify your business listing by mail, enter your business address in Google My Business. They’ll send you a postcard with a verification code. 

• Phone: If your business is eligible to get a verification code by phone, you'll see the Verify by phone option when you request verification. If you don't see it, verify your listing by mail instead.

• Email: Not all businesses can verify their listing by email. If you don't see this option, try another verification method. Before trying to verify your listing by email, make sure you can access the email address shown in the verification screen.

• Instant verification: If you’ve already verified your business’s website with Google Search Console, you may be able to verify your listing instantly.

• Bulk verification: If you manage 10 or more locations of the same business, your business listings may be eligible for bulk verification. 

For more information on how to navigate your way through each verification method, head here.

Making the most of your account

To optimize your profile and make the most of all the fancy features we listed at the beginning of this article (like opening hours, reviews and photos), once you’ve verified your account, make your way to your Google My Business dashboard and select “Info.”

 You should then be presented with a screen that looks like this, for you to work your way through and edit the relevant sections:

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Hue & Tone Creative: All things marketing in Greensboro, NC

Whether you’re looking for help with branding, design, social media management, or email campaigns — or you just want to learn how our experts can help with your Google My Business listing — give us a call (336) 365-8559. We’re ready to connect and learn more about how we can help support you and your business.

Having a slick looking website is key. Having quality content is key. Having an SEO strategy is key. Having an enviable UX journey is key. But what use is all of that if you can’t, or aren’t, monitoring your results?

Measuring traffic is a monumental part of running a website - without it, all your efforts are essentially a guessing game. The benefits of meaningfully measuring your traffic are almost endless, but here’s a summary of our top six. It:
 

• Identifies which pages are and aren’t working for you

• Shows you where improvements can be made

• Presents your business’ peaks and troughs

• Allows you to identify trends and patterns

• Provides a benchmark to continually evolve

• Puts tangible data behind future design, journey and content adaptations
  

If you’re new to this data-driven side of things it can be daunting, but it needn’t be. To help you start your web traffic measurement journey, we’ve got four easy-to-use tools to share with you.

1. Google Analytics

Given it’s the leader of the pack, it only seemed natural to start with Google Analytics (GA). GA is a completely free tracking and reporting platform provided by Google, and it’s an absolute beast in the world of web traffic measurement.

So, let’s take a look at some key metrics you need to be getting the most out of:

Sources: Whether it’s email, SEO, PPC, social, referrals or otherwise, with GA, you can keep abreast of exactly which campaigns are driving traffic to your site, and how much of it they’re bringing in. This will help you to understand which campaigns are working, and which ones are falling flat.

Bounce rate: this is the number of people who land on your site and then ‘bounce’ straight back out. With this one, the lower the number the better. The bounce rate is a really good indicator as to how visitors interact with your site.

A high bounce rate could mean that people find the corresponding page difficult to navigate around, that they don’t like what’s on the page, or that the page isn’t what they expected it to be. Conversely, a low bounce rate shows that visitors have engaged with the page, so much so that they’ve gone and had a look elsewhere on your website.

Time on page: this one ties in nicely with what we’ve just been talking about. A high bounce rate and little time spent on page is the worst combo. Why? Because it’s a sign that the visitor is highly disengaged with what they’ve landed on.

On a more optimistic note, long page durations will show you which pages and content types visitors are interested in, which may help steer the direction you take other pages of your site.

Exit pages: quite simply, this’ll show you at what point visitors are abandoning your site. So, why is this so important? Of course, everyone will leave at one point or another, but if there’s a trend emerging that lots of your visitors are leaving on x page before they complete a conversion, it may well be a sign that some form of action needs taking to rectify it.

Such is the size of GA’s traffic tracking capabilities, we could literally go on forever. But hopefully we’ve given you a flavor of how it can steer your overall strategy.

2.  A/B testing

A/B testing lets you change what your traffic sees when it lands on your site - this could be anything from the text on the page to the color of a button.

So, why’s this so great? Because it puts real-life data behind which variations work best, which can subsequently steer your marketing efforts - for the better.

With A/B testing under your belt, you’re no longer sticking your finger in the air and implementing changes based on what you think might work. Instead, you can make informed decisions using a reliable and representative source of data.

One thing worth mentioning is that’s important to be patient and wait until you’ve built up a decent pot of data before coming to any conclusions. As with any type of research, the numbers need to be statistically significant to add value. Not sure what this means? Check out this calculator to help you with the maths. 

3.  Heatmaps

Another method you can use to measure your web traffic is setting up heatmaps: enter Hotjar (they’re big guns in this arena).

Heatmaps are a really handy way to monitor how your traffic interacts with pages on your site, by tallying up numbers for things like clicks, taps and scrolling behavior.

What does this tell you about your traffic? Well, it tells you where on your page visitors are losing interest. It tells you where people are clicking most, which might steer the placement of your page’s assets. It tells you if certain elements on your page are getting lost. And it tells you which part(s) of the page are drawing the most attention.

All of these learnings can form the basis of navigational, design and content decisions.

As with A/B testing, you should wait until you have a meaningful amount of data before interpreting your numbers and coming to conclusions. Heatmaps work by adding a snippet of code onto chosen pages, so if you’re after quick wins, it might be worth starting with sections of your site that you know receive large volumes of traffic.

 

4.  Visitor videos

Last but not least is the use of visitor recording tools. Admittedly, some of the perks overlap with that of a heatmap, but while heatmaps provide valuable numbers, videos let you actually see your visitors in action.

This helps you monitor and measure your traffic by:

• Understanding visitors’ movements

• Seeing how visitors interact on an individual level

• Getting under the skin of why people get stuck in certain sections

• Seeing exactly where visitors abandon you and forming a picture of the ‘why’

• Allowing you to test new designs and journeys and how they impact your user experience.

The end result? Ample learnings to feed into your website strategy. If you’re unsure of where to go for video recording support, tools like UXPin, Inspectlet, Hotjar and Mouseflow do it well.

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HUE & TONE: YOUR WEB MARKETING EXPERTS 

Know what you need to improve about your website, but not sure how to do it? Need a fresh perspective on your content and design? Give us a call. We're here to help you with all your web and graphic design needs -- big or small.

A business’s ultimate success has grown increasingly reliant on its web presence; particularly its website. According to an April 2017 survey taken by Statista, 40 percent of internet users in the US stated that they purchased items online, several times per month. Retail e-commerce sales worldwide are expected to nearly double between 2016 and 2020. More people than ever are performing research online before journeying to a brick and mortar store to complete a purchase. With so many transactions occurring online, how can you be certain your website is performing up to par?

Most small business owners can at least determine how much traffic their website solicits. But this can be as beneficial as knowing how many people attended a party without actually talking to anyone. There’s so much more information available. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to get analytical in 2018.

Conversion

This statistic tells you how successfully your website is completing your intended goal. For example, if you’re Pizza Hut and your website’s primary purpose is for a visitor to complete a purchase, then your conversion statistic will indicate the percentage of visitor’s doing just that. Maybe you’re a real estate company, and your conversion goal is to have web users complete a contact form; this statistic will give you those percentages.

Source Report

Again, most people are familiar with Traffic Acquisition Reports, which measure the amount of traffic your website is getting during any given period of time. But remember, we’re after much more; like, how did they find you in the first place? There’s an analytic for that. A Source Report can tell you if someone arrived at your site by way of a search engine like Yahoo, or a referring site like Pinterest which includes links that route users to a pin’s original site or page. It can even determine how many people typed your url directly into the address bar.

Medium Report

There is also a Medium Report which indicates whether the result was the product of organic search or unpaid search, a paid search result, or via a referring website. All of this information could help influence marketing decisions going forward and guide a strategy for capitalizing on the sources and mediums already generating much of your traffic.

Bounce Rates

This statistic can inform several website elements, because it tracks what happens once a visitor enters your online presence. Do users journey to another page within your site or do they leave it all together? If your bounce percentage is high, you can determine where visitors are landing, which may prompt insight into why they’re leaving. Essentially, this analytic provides valuable insight into what visitors like about your site and what they don’t. Moreover, it empowers you to customize and alter your website accordingly.

Pageviews

This statistic is self-explanatory. It measures how many views a specific page receives. If visitors are returning to the same page again and again, hypothetically, you can formulate content that may garner similar interest. It could also point to other contributing factors like design schemes that users prefer. Using this information to formulate a strategic response can ultimately assist in improving your overall conversion rate.

The world wide web will continue to change and grow to meet human demand and businesses must evolve to keep pace. With the new year, usher in a new marketing strategy with the help of web analytics. It will be the best resolution you’ve ever made.

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web marketing consultants  |  Greensboro, NC

Need help getting your website set up? Want a second set of eyes looking over your analytics? Hue & Tone Creative will take the stress out of marketing your business online. Check out our design portfolio to see clients we've helped in the past, and then give us a call to get your web presence ready for the new year.

There are tons of web tools out there, but there’s one you need to be using: Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is powerhouse for data generation. It’s easy to use and can help you figure out what's hindering your site’s user experience. You can figure out where your site traffic comes from, who your users are, and what content they like best.

So, let’s talk a little more about what Google Analytics is and why you should be using it.

What it is:

Google Analytics supplies marketing teams with all the data you and your team need to make better marketing decisions.

Signing up is easy and free -- a major plus for businesses on a budget. Start by filling out some basic info about your company, industry, website, etc. Then, you or your web developer just has to paste a small snippet of JavaScript code into your pages. This custom tracking code allows Google to monitor your pages and how often your site is visited.

Give it a few days and you’ll have access to new data that gives you a better understanding of your customer experience and site performance. 

Why you need to use it:

From big businesses to small blogs, Google Analytics can help provide you with comprehensive insight on who your visitors are and how they use your site.

Google Analytics shows you where your customers are coming from and which channels they use to discover you. Are they finding you through paid ads or organic methods? Do you get more visits through mobile? Which geographic locations bring in the most views? Having access to this data can help you examine trends to get a better feel for who your customers are and how they interact with your brand.

Do you feel like you site is lacking attention? Use Google Analytics to monitor your bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave a website after a single page visit). Figure what your pages are lacking and fill the gaps with engaging content.

Google Analytics can also help you measure your traffic and analyze which blog posts or web pages are the most popular. How many people visit your site each day? Are people responding better to visual content? What writing format attracts more viewers? Google can help you break it down and act as a guide to help you build a more customer-friendly site.

In short, it’s time to get Google Analytics on your site. Get started HERE. 

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Digital Marketing & Graphic Design in Greensboro & Winston-Salem

Feel like your website or social media pages aren’t getting enough attention? We can fix that! From custom web design to creative content ideas, Hue & Tone Creative can help you get noticed.

If you’ve watched Parks and Rec you might be under the impression that tigers, free iPads, and mobile hot tubs are the way to attract new customers. While part of us is curious to see what would happen if you use the "Ralphio + Haverford method," we're here to offer a few other ideas. 

If you're looking to go into marketing or feel like you're being left behind by the industry, there's a few things you need to learn:  

1. Inbound Marketing (More specifically, HubSpot)

In response to the growing dislike of pushy advertising strategies, more and more marketers are embracing inbound.

HubSpot offers comprehensive sales and inbound marketing software that helps businesses generate leads and turn them into customers. HubSpot offers a few free certification courses that are perfect for beginners. The best part? You don't even have to be a customer!

What you can earn (with no commitment):

• Inbound Certification
• Inbound Sales
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Growth-Driven Design
   

2. SEO

If you don't already know about Search Engine Optimization -- we hate to say it -- but you're way behind. The good news is it's never too late to catch up! SEO is the complicated process of generating traffic through organic search results. Because the entire process can get pretty complicated, we highly recommend checking out our SEO Do’s and Don’ts -- as well as this great Beginners Guide to SEO from Moz.
 

3. Google AdWords

Studies show that 75% of people who perform an online search never scroll past the first page of results. 

Google AdWords allows you to plan and purchase display ads, video ads, app ads and search ads. It also helps you discover new keywords, study trends, retarget, and geo-track traffic so that you can continue improving your ads. 

This a valuable tool for beginners especially because you can monitor goals like ROI, brand awareness, traffic, and conversion all in one easy place. They offer resources that allow you to dip your toes into their content -- or become a fully certified Google Partner.

4. Sprout Social

A social media management platform is a must if you have multiple accounts to manage. Sprout Social allows you to manage your channels, post/schedule easily, and monitor your interaction. We like Sprout because it let's you recycle content by easily rescheduling it.

If you're looking for a less heavy-duty social media management tool to start out with, we suggest looking into Hootsuite or Buffer. 
 

5. Google Analytics

Another powerful tool from Google, Google Analytics is valuable for beginners and seasoned marketers alike. This “freemium” service monitors and reports traffic so that you can better understand who your target customer is and what they're looking for.

Google Analytics can help you improve your SEO tactics by tracking the ways visitors discover your site. What words are they using when they search? How many pages and what types of pages do they visit? Which pages and links are the most popular? Google Analytics studies these trends and helps provide the answers you need to make your site easier to find and more relevant to searchers

Use what you learn from Google Analytics in conjunction with Google AdWords and you'll be an unstoppable marketing machine!

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is here to stay. It continues to grow in popularity year after year and consistently generates a high ROI.  

If you're looking for a cost effective and efficient way to keep in touch with customers then email marketing needs to be a part of your marketing strategy. We prefer MailChimp, but IContact, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monster are other great options. 

The takeaway? The platform you use isn't as important as the fact that you are using an email marketing platform! 

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Greensboro Marketing Company

Feeling more than a little overwhelmed? Pass your marketing off to the pros and get it off your plate for good. From email campaigns to comprehensive branding, Hue & Tone Creative is here to help you create. Not sure exactly what you need? We can help you figure that out too!