Be Human. Get Personal with your Customers

Take time to get close to your customer base, because in 2010 customers will continue to dictate your marketing efforts. Take care to polish up your company’s blog and social media channels, like facebook and twitter, and keep them healthy by posting regularly. If your communications are sparse, users won’t respect you as an authority. It is necessary to participate in conversation and contribute valuable content to be respected in your marketplace. Providing direct and timely responses to customer feedback is a powerful and effective marketing tool.

Follow the Search Funnel

In-depth conversion tracking and analysis can shed light onto the profitability of search campaigns. Just as some keywords or ads may provide a great number of clicks but low conversion levels, high-converting keywords and ads provide different levels of customer engagement and revenue over longer periods of time. These sorts of ‘deep dives’ into conversion tracking will provide more customization, optimization, and ROI in the long term.

Analyze and Synthesize

Research and invest in new tracking technologies and tools in the marketplace which will benefit your marketing campaigns. Social media tracking, for example, gives concrete insights into what your customers are saying about your brand. This newfound ability to listen to and adapt to customer trends in real-time is a valuable resource. Likewise, a comprehensive and properly configured analytics platform is probably the most important tool that a marketing team can have. If your marketing data isn’t interpretable and actionable, it isn’t useful.

Diversify and Integrate

Your many marketing channels should be working as one. Integrated campaigns consistently perform better than campaigns running separately. When insights are shared among functional marketing teams, a comprehensive strategy may then be developed which incorporates findings and best practices from each marketing channel.

Audit and Update

Everything has a ‘Best By’ date, and your website and marketing collateral are no exception. Consumer tastes change as quickly as the seasons, and the images and copy which will generate positive responses need to be refreshed frequently as well. Update your paid search ad copy – revamp your homepage! Optimization of imagery and messaging are often overlooked, but the results are valuable marketing assets.

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By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist & Resident Analytics Guru

What would we do without Web Analytics? They provide the data necessary to make performance marketing possible. This allows for more efficient campaign optimization and higher ROI for businesses large and small. For most marketers, however, getting to that point is not an easy process. Most marketers will jump through hoops in order to pull the data they need to analyze, and merely end up with results which are confusing or difficult to interpret.

Web Analytics has evolved from log server files and stat counters into software packages whch provide a wealth of valuable data about website usage.. As such, Web Analytics as a practice began mostly as an arm of web development and developed in importance to the point that most companies now require an additional division to understand online profitability. However, the fundamentals of Web Analytics software which were originally built for website audits have yet to fully escape their roots in web development.

When one launches one of the well-known Web Analytics software packages today, whether it be Omniture, Google Analytics, or Coremetrics, the question that drives the user is usually “How is my website doing?” rather than “How are my online marketing campaigns doing?” These Web Analytics packages are structured by the process one would use to audit specific pages or searches, and how they are performing concerning website usability.

This is not to downplay the importance of these kinds of views and metrics, but rather to point out that Web Analytics should play a larger role in online marketing, rather than merely providing information about a website’s usage. There are changes afoot within Web Analytics that are providing deeper, more insightful, and more useful information to online marketers.An example of this is Coremetrics’ user-interface tagging or Google Analytics’ new ‘Analytics Insight’ section.

Yet, Web Analytics packages truly need to go through a full restructuring in order to avoid feeling like an add-on of an add-on, charging by the number of users or by the number of reports one creates. When an online marketer logs in to a Web Analytics interface, the first thing available should provide an overall view of performance by marketing channel, allowing any online marketer to dive into their own data and gain insights into their specialty without having to navigate through multiple areas in order to get data that is relevant to them.

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New service offers complex, comprehensive performance assessment and monitoring solutions.

San Francisco, CA – November 3, 2009 – Red Bricks Media, a full-service digital marketing agency, announced its new Analytics & Insights practice. Offerings will help clients better utilize marketing and website data to make more intelligent business decisions.

In order to meet the increasing and varied demands of digital marketers, Analytics & Insights will provide solutions that are both highly customized and platform independent. From defining analytics requirements to ad-hoc report development to generating robust data visualizations, the new service focuses on providing the data needed to make informed marketing decisions on budget and resource allocations.

“While a lot of agencies offer one-size-fits-all reports, our solutions focus on determining exactly what drives the success and failures of our clients’ digital marketing campaigns,” said CEO Elliott Easterling. “Whether we are analyzing the performance of a single channel or pulling together complex information from multiple campaigns, our goal is to provide custom, data-driven recommendations that will improve performance.”

The first offerings within the new practice will address the core elements digital marketers need to get analytics configured and intelligence uncovered:

• Analytics Platform Implementation Consulting
• Customized Reporting Solutions
• Deep Dive Analyses
• Cross-Platform Analysis Tools

For more complete information please visit www.redbricksmedia.com.

About Red Bricks Media:

Red Bricks Media is a full-service global marketing agency headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Hong Kong. Since 2003, they have offered services in search engine marketing, interactive media planning, email campaign management, creative, web design, and social media marketing. Their client list includes top brands like Microsoft, Hearst Magazines, THQ and the Los Angeles Times. To learn more about Red Bricks Media’s Web Analytics practice, please contact sales@redbricksmedia.com.

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by Elliott Easterling, CEO

I recall the first day I opened up AdWords almost 6 years ago to test out the self service functions. That feeling of bliss came to me again when I explored Facebook’s self service tool for the first time last December.

Joy came to me with AdWords because I encountered the tool as a data driven marketer. I spent 3.5 years at Digital Impact (now Axciom Digital) learning the ins and outs of database marketing before I started Red Bricks Media. At the time, we were working with algorithms to process large amounts of user behavior and self-profile data to predict the best products to put into individual emails. This behavioral targeting experience is what got me excited about AdWords. I quickly realized that search queries were in fact behaviors that could be used to present targeted ads to potential consumers. I was amazed that I could tap directly into the flow of demand. The combination of powerful targeting and scale is what made Google such a useful tool for marketers.

Excitement came to me with Facebook because I recognized the same opportunity to build marketing programs with amazing targeting capabilities supported by significant scale. Facebook allows marketers to target users based on the content of their profiles. Rather than being fueled by behavioral data, Facebook campaigns are fueled by profile data. This data is incredibly clean and accurate because, in general, people do not lie about their interests on Facebook. They might exaggerate but they won’t likely lie because peer pressure from Facebook friends creates a system of accountability. The profile data in Facebook is especially powerful because it represents the brand of Facebook users. The things you put in your profile represent the things that are most important to you and also the way you see yourself and want to represent yourself to the world. Facebook profiles are the sum of passions, interests, and make up the brand of one. Facebook also provides a separate targeting axis - one that surrounds demographic data. Where you live, where you went to school, and every piece of data collected in the registration process is targetable on Facebook. This matrix of interest data and demographic data make for great user segmentation and targeting. See chart below.

Since users are not actively seeking out information on Facebook as they are doing on search engines, the click-through rates (CTR) tend to be lower. This limitation can be overcome using the sheer scale of available inventory on Facebook, which can yield great click volume even with low CTRs. From our experience, Facebook campaigns can realize good conversion rates because our campaigns heavily segment users into tight interest groups and then present compelling messages to those users. Our background in database marketing has given us an edge in developing and designing successful Facebook campaigns.

Is Facebook right for your business? It is, to the degree to which interests in Facebook correlate to an interest in your product or services. If, for example, you are in the business of selling tissues online, you may not get much out of Facebook’s targeting capabilities. No one is likely to wax poetic on the virtues on a clean nose on their profile. Alternately, if you sell tours of India, you will have access to the more than 2.8MM 18 and older Americans that that show “travel” as an interest in Facebook. Matched with demographic data, a campaign could even target users in San Francisco with customized messaging – “Explore our tours to majestic India, flights leaving from San Francisco daily.”

As performance marketers, we tend to focus more on media that drives conversions. Facebook also has the amazing ability to drive great branding, so let’s not rule out the campaign for the tissue company quite yet. Facebook branding and fan development warrant a separate discussion, which is forthcoming next month.

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by Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become one of the most widely-used platforms on the Internet for web animations, web design, and website development. Though its use is not search engine friendly (with only the recent ability from Google to index links within Flash), the benefits of Flash have propelled its use around the globe. However, there is a dark side of Flash that you should know about: Flash can potentially run third-party scripts that gather your website’s information without your knowledge.

Last November Google announced that Google Analytics can track Flash by placing its code within the Flash file. This was received with great excitement as it allowed Flash websites to track their own Flash files, videos, and actions that were not captured as effectively as a regular HTML website. This announcement, however, spawned the troubling potential for malicious developers to run black hat analytics scripts through Flash that could effectively track a third party’s web data without their direct knowledge.

At Red Bricks Media, we ran a test to determine the seriousness of this threat. Through our test we determined that anytime a user uploads or embeds a third-party video, pixel, or graphic made from Flash, the data from that page can be transmitted into the same third-party’s Google Analytics or an analytics package built solely for the purpose of gathering black hat analytics competitive intelligence data.

People will embed scripts into their websites to become an affiliate partner, to run ads, or to display their latest movie RSS feed without reading any privacy notes, terms of service, or end user license agreements. Many of these Flash files can come in innocuous forms such as a common VeriSign Seal used by ecommerce websites (please note that VeriSign is not doing anything black hat). The openness of the web and the benefits that are given through online advertising are often abused by black hat tactics, so it’s important to be careful about which scripts you include on your website.

As a general rule, if you are thinking about embedding third-party Flash files or code, only place code from places you trust. Furthermore, we strongly suggest that you have your developers read the privacy notes and use data packet sniffing to determine just what these files are possibly sending out. Your data is a valuable asset in the competitive online world; do not let other sites have access to it without your explicit understanding or agreement.

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By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist

One of the more subtle, but ingenious changes to the free analytics package flagship of Google Analytics Enterprise was the inclusion of the motion charts that help visualize data in five dimensions.

Yes, you have read that right—five full dimensions: the standard x- and y-axes, bubble size, bubble colors, and time. Now, you could get all technical and note that the fourth dimension is really space-time, and that time should be merged with something, such as ‘bubble-time’ or ‘time-bubble’ (which actually is an accurate analysis of what you will be in when playing with motion charts), but let’s not quibble with these semantics, let’s stick to the motion charts as being five-dimensional.

The beauty of what Google did was to take the semi-used bubble charts and push them beyond the envelope by figuring out how to visually make something appeal to a larger audience, not just to nerds who played text-based MUD games in the 1990s or created their own 4×4 four-dimensional tic-tac-toe game (guilty as charged). Instead, the Google Analytics team figured out how to make a chart visually appealing, and just as importantly, useful to a large group of Google Analytics users—all for free.

The subtle brilliance of Google Analytics’s motion chart is in its ability to easily change scales such as the standard linear x-y axis to logarithmic x-y axis or variables from revenue to average time on site with a simple drop-down menu. Even (space-) time is made to look like a simple calculus formula by allowing the user control over the speed of the integral time period and pause at any interval to note any singular events.

The lightness of the program is a thing of beauty from which you can never escape, as you watch up to 50 data points flying around like fireflies in the night sky. Yet, the motion chart is better used for differentiating two themes across different metrics or KPIs in a kind of multi-variable A/B test. Nonetheless, as a caution to spending your time playing with this program, it is advisable to fiddle with it after work as you can quickly lose track of time until your boss comes around and yells at you for what he perceives as you playing a game on company time.

Take a look for yourself of Google Analytics’s motion chart below:

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