How to track return customers using Google Analytics
One of the most valuable people to visit your website is your existing customer. This is the person who’s already bought into you, the person who has already decided you’re worth doing business with. This person is leagues more valuable than the random pay per click visitor. Do you know what your returning customers want from your website efforts?
Here’s one way to make that determination. If you’re using Google Analytics and you have a place on your website where only returning customers go, this will help you identify and track them.
First, you’ll need to modify your Google Analytics code on that customer-only page. This can be a thank you page after someone has filled out a form or purchased something from you. It can also be the screen immediately after a login to a web service, or even a special customer-only landing page that you direct email subscribers to.
Create a custom variable on that page in Google Analytics. Here’s the format:
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required. You can have up to 5.
'Member Type', // The name of the custom variable. Required.
'Paying Customer', // The value of the custom variable. Required.
1 // Sets the scope to visitor-level. Required for tracking customers.
]);
Place this within your Google Analytics tracking code for that page only. You only need it on the page or pages that returning customers visit the most.
Next, you’ll want to see what your returning customers are actually doing. Create a custom traffic segment in Google Analytics and identify it by the customer variable name and value. For the example code above, it might look like this:
Congratulations, you now have a way to identify returning customers! Browse through Google Analytics data with this traffic segment on to see only those returning customers and what they did on your site, where they went, what was most popular, where they came from, and arguably most important of all: did they convert again?
If there are certain pages which returning customers visit far more than others, you may even want to think about rewriting them or focusing on them. For example, if returning customers are constantly revisiting a tech support page about a certain product, you might have an early indicator that something is wrong with the product.
Obviously, you can tailor these custom variables to anything you like. If you host a website with a variety of subscription levels, you could track to see whether Gold members visit different pages than, say, Silver members. The sky’s the limit with custom variables and your returning customers.
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Why social media is like ranch dressing
Have you ever wondered what the heck ranch dressing is? I have. It’s very tasty stuff, making almost anything better. According to Wikipedia, it was first invented in 1954 by the Henson family at their dude ranch, the Hidden Valley Ranch. Eventually, it became so popular that in 1972, it was bought by Clorox (yes, the bleach maker) and made commercially available. Internet-savvy cooks have managed to replicate the original recipe as follows:
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon dried chives
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried dill weed
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
Mix well and let sit overnight.
Ranch dressing is known for its ability to make just about anything taste better. Salad, snacks, baked potatoes, you name it, ranch dressing can probably improve it, which is why it overtook Italian dressing in 1992 as the best-selling salad dressing in the world.
It’s also known for being hideously bad for you in larger quantities, since 2 tablespoons clock in at about 145 calories, 94% of which is fat.
Finally, Clorox had to work some scary chemical magic to make it shelf-stable, since so much of the recipe is dairy-based and would otherwise spoil within days of making it. Take a look at your generally available commercial bottle of dressing and you’ll find antifungal drugs like natamycin in it. This is why it’s generally a better idea to copy the recipe above and make it at home when needed.
Here’s the thing about ranch dressing: its powers only go so far. Put ranch dressing on a salad and it makes for a better salad. If the salad is really good to begin with, you don’t need much dressing. If the salad is a pile of shredded iceberg lettuce that’s wilted, you’re going to be making ranch dressing soup in order to be able to eat it.
You can (though you shouldn’t) put ranch dressing on things like piles of paper shreddings. Again, it’ll be barely edible, but the dressing will manage to help you overcome what is otherwise something you wouldn’t eat.
So what does a very tasty salad dressing have to do with social media? In many ways, social media is just like ranch dressing:
1. You have to do a lot of crazy things to it if you’re not making it fresh yourself. The end product is okay, but not nearly as good (or good for you) as when you do it yourself.
2. It will improve just about any product or service to some degree to make it more palatable.
3. It’s bad for you in large quantities. After all, if you spend 100% of your time on social, you’re spending 0% of your time on your actual business.
4. If your product or service is bad, you can overcome it to some degree, but you and your company’s health are much better off making a better product or service first, and then adding social media to it afterwards.
Enjoy the salad and the social media!
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4 signs that you’re not actually a marketing ninja
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Marketers love hyperbole, and when we ran out of superlatives like guru, expert, and maven, we turned to sillier superlatives like ninja. However, like many foreign loan-words, you have to be careful about using it. Here are 4 signs you’re not actually a ninja, and therefore probably shouldn’t use the word in your marketing efforts unless you want to be laughed at a whole lot.
1. You can’t spell or say ninjutsu correctly. In fact, the Japanese language escapes you.
2. You don’t practice the martial art of ninjutsu. There’s one surviving lineage of ninjutsu, from Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi of Noda City, Japan, and his many students around the planet including my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, and his teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. If you seriously claim to be a ninja, you had better be training at an actual ninjutsu dojo.
3. You don’t know what ninja were actually good at. Most ninja, during their miserable “golden age” (hey, who wants to be a refugee from the losing side of one of the civil wars that will be killed on sight?) were information gatherers, not assassins or martial arts experts. A webinar by an actual ninja would be highly interactive, where the presenter never presented any actual content but just kept asking the crowd for information for 45 minutes in one giant Q&A session.
4. You feature ninja outfits in your marketing. The black martial arts do-gi isn’t something historical ninja ever wore. Ever. It’s a holdover from Japanese theater – the stage hands and prop handlers wore them so as not to distract the audience. What did real ninja wear? Well, if your goal is secrecy and blending in, you wore what everyone else wore. Today, you’d be wearing a business suit or a sweater and jeans or whatever’s normal in your part of the world. The keyword is: boring. Your appearance as an actual ninja should be so boring and unappealing that no one even wants to look at you. I suppose a true social media ninja would wear a blazer and jeans.
It’s a tribute to the modern day ninja masters like Hatsumi sensei or An-Shu Hayes that the word ninja is held in such general high regard. For centuries in Japan, being called a ninja was right up there with being called a mercenary, thief, or prostitute. Now it’s being used by marketers everywhere. That’s some great marketing for you!
Bonus: if you’re a real ninja, you know why this post only has 4 tips.
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Ask on G+ redefines be there before the sale
A long time ago, Chris Brogan coined the phrase “be there before the sale” with regard to social media. Google takes that yet another step further with the revelation of “Ask on Google+” to search results. Here’s the scenario: you search Google along your line of inquiry and don’t find anything super helpful. When you don’t, you see at the bottom of page 1 results a link asking if you want to ask your friends on Google+. Click it, the box appears, and you ask your network.
Think about the implications of this as a marketer. Why bother going to Page 2 of the results if you can ask your friends at the end of Page 1? The impact of this change is twofold:
1. Pages 2 and on are immediately less valuable as people are encouraged to ask their network first before changing pages.
2. If your customers have circled you on Google+, then when any of them use that link to ask their networks, you can effectively be the first to know about a product or service inquiry, before your competitors. Think about it: if a potential or current customer asks Google+ about, say, coffee, and you are a coffee roaster who they have circled, you will see their inquiry before they even get to a competitor’s website to fill out a contact form. If you’re fast on the draw, you’ll intercept that social search query and answer it, nabbing the business in the process.
So what must you do to take advantage of this latest social twist?
First, make sure you’re promoting your Google+ brand page in your standard communications. Let people know where it is on your site, in your emails, etc. Encourage people to circle you, and don’t be shy about it.
Second, provide ridiculous value on your Google+ page so that people stay connected to you and have a reason to share you with their networks as a company or person worth following.
Third, listen very carefully so that you intercept those requests faster than your competitors, then respond as quickly as possible with valuable help so that your prospective and current customers have no need to inquire elsewhere.
People are asking for your help right now. The question is, are you able to listen and respond as effectively as possible?
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Stop measuring audience in social media
Have you heard any of these questions lately:
What’s the value of a Facebook fan?
What’s the value of a Twitter follower?
What’s the value of an email subscriber?
I know I certainly have, and these are the wrong questions to be asking. Why? They assume that all people are the same. Let’s instead crib from Batman:
It’s not who I am underneath, but what I *do* that defines me.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of audience members: active and passive. Active members read your newsletters. They click on your tweets. They like your status updates on Facebook. They share with their networks. They read and forward your emails. They buy your products or services. They recommend you to other people.
Passive members… do nothing.
Here’s an example. I have, at the time of this writing, almost 49,000 followers. Awesome, right? I must be a social media success story. Not so fast. If I segment out the traffic on my website using Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments and ask me to show number of absolute unique visitors in the last 30 days from all things Twitter, the true number of followers I actually have that did the bare minimum of clicking on one link to my site in a month is:
1,293. That’s how many followers I have that actually showed up in the last month. That’s a pretty far cry from 49,000. Thankfully, there’s no cost to having the other 47,000+ in my network, but they’re basically dead weight that are providing nothing at all. It’s not like I’m asking them to buy a car or something, just click once on one link in 30 days in order to show up in the chart above.
Here’s another slice of life, my email list. Over 12,000 people subscribed. Great success story on the surface, but if we dig a little deeper…
Yep, less than half opened or clicked on ANYTHING in the last year. The rest of the list is dead weight, and I can and should just ditch ‘em since most email companies charge based on the number of emails sent.
If you’re trying to figure out the value of a person in your audience, you’re barking up the wrong tree. A person in and of themselves has no value until they actually do something, anything, to show that you have some level of engagement with them. Active members of your audience have value. Passive members do not. Start by figuring out how many active members you have, and you will have a much better idea of how your social media efforts are actually performing.
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How I’m using Buffer to sync my social
A while back I said that I was testing out Buffer, and would let you know what I thought of it. For what I’m using it for, I think it’s a brilliant little app.
Here’s what I’m not using it for: phoning it in on Twitter. While it can do that and reasonably well (I used it for this purpose during the holidays), it’s still not going to deliver game-changing results for you, since a large part of social media is the social part – interacting with other people. Phoning it in and getting results requires you to have unbelievably awesome content worth sharing, and very few of us have that.
What am I using it for? Periodic reminders. What I’ve done with Buffer is create something of a chart that helps me lay out the basic reminder framework I’m using:
Each week for 4 weeks, I’m reminding people in my various audiences about my presence on other social networks. Last week, it was LinkedIn. This week, it’s Google+. The other networks will be represented, then I’ll likely start the cycle anew.
Why did I choose this method for using Buffer? These are the kinds of periodic reminders that are important to keep publishing if new people are joining your network. One look at the basic raw Twitter graph illustrates the necessity of these periodic reminders:
In 30 days, the network has grown by about 2,000 people. Assuming that each and every person knows who I am, what I do, and where else I post is sheer folly. Thus, Buffer provides me the opportunity to gently remind the new folks where else they can participate and interact with me. How did I pick the times to set my periodic updates? Crowdbooster provides a nice chart of when my existing audience is most active on Twitter:
Crowdbooster + Buffer + a set of standard updates is my current formula for success with the app.
How are you using Buffer?
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