How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics

On the last post, we discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign. Why? Because E-mail Permission Marketing: it works! As promised, I will talk in this post about “How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics“.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

Actually receive your permission e-mail.
Open your permission e-mail.
Click on the link you want them to click.

How do you measure that?

Simple, you need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to effectively and efficiently “tag” your link.

Here’s what the Google Analytics URL Builder looks like:

tool_-url-builder-analytics-help

Let’s take for example eMarketer. This company sends daily e-mail updates to people who have a) visited their website, b) are interested in sampling their market data for free before signing up for it (and of course paying for it!), c) have signed up to read the free updates, and d) have provided the company permission to send them daily updates via e-mail. I cannot be more specific about the importance of asking them for permission.

Here’s how they do it:

internet-marketing-free-newsletter-emarketer-daily-articles-charts-e-business-emarketer

Notice that there’s no checkbox for the newsletter itself because it is very explicit that the person viewing for the page is signing up for the newsletter. However, notice that there is one checkbox for people who don’t mind receiving news about webinars, event announcements, whitepaper offers, best practices guides, and research briefs.

eMarketer sends The eMarketer Daily: The First Place to Look as a daily e-mail newsletter. Here’s how it look like:

emarketer-daily-207-messages-1

As you can see, there are plenty of links on this eMarketer newsletter but for simplicity I will focus on the boxed link in the picture above. Let’s imagine that the URL of this link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount.

Here’s how we set up the target URL with the Google Analytics URL Builder:

tool_-url-builder-analytics-help-1

Let’s review the fields:

Campaign Source: Input newsletter because we are talking about an e-mail permission mareketing campaign. I indicate that this is the newsletter #25. Is not mandatory to number them, but I would suggest to do so. It’s important to segment your referrals so you can see what e-mail newsletters are more effective.
Campaign Medium: It’s e-mail.
Campaign Term: In this case, we are paying for keywords.
Campaign Content: Another source to further segment your e-mail campaigns. However, in this simple case it is not necessary.
Campaign Name: I am assuming that this campaign is part of the “CTR products” campaign because the ad talks about CTRs of online banner ads in Europe. eMarketer could be interested in tracking the number of people who click on this article to measure the interest on white papers that discuss CTR optimization techniques, CTR softwares, CTR reports, etc.

The resulting link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount?utm_source=newsletter25&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CTR%2Bproducts. eMarketer would use this link as the link on its newsletter.

That’s it! Now eMarketer would have to just wait for the reaction of its The eMarketer Daily recipients.

Once people start clicking on the target link, Google Analytics will start measuring the clicks.

Here’s a sample referrals report:

traffic-sources-overview-google-analytics

Google Analytics will report the clicks on the link coming from “Other” sources. The “Other” category will lump all clicks on links optimized with the Google Analytics URL Builder, so that’s why it’s important that you make smart use of the different fields that this tool offers you.

Here’s a teaser for the medium and advanced users of Google Analytics: Once you start using the Google Analytics URL Builder, you can created Advanced Segments to do all kinds of fun segmentation of your data.

traffic-sources-overview-google-analytics-1

So, once you find the total number of clicks on your target URL, you can calculate the CTR of your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

Remember:

Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

I hope that you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, please leave a comment for this post and I will reply to you within 24 hours.

Thank you for your time!

Disclaimer: I don’t work for eMarketer. I don’t receive any fees or payment for talking about them. I just really like their product.

: )

E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals

Thank you for the response via e-mail and comment post at idaconcpts.com about last week’s post regarding E-mail Permission Marketing. If you’re still interested on the free copy of the first 4 four chapters of Seth’s Godin Permission Marketing, please e-mail me at damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] com.

So, you’ve created a great product or service and you have users lining up to register online for your product or service so they can use it. You have provided the option to received personal, relevant, and anticipated messages; and guess what? they are choosing to do so by clicking on the checkbox!. Excellent! You cannot believe that people are interested in you and you send out your first e-mail…and…now what?

This week I’m going to discuss, the basics of the “now what”: the E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.

Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):

chinese-question1 Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:

Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.
Identify core criteria for e-mail campaigns (what, why, how, when, and so forth).
Create and execute campaigns (mine your e-mail list, scrub it for do not contacts, create the right text or other type of offering, and send it to your e-mail vendor).
Analyze your campaigns.

Email analytics can focus on both ends of this process: defining objectives and criteria as well as campaign analysis.
chinese-target

As you can see, planning is 90% of any e-mail permission marketing campaign. You cannot expect results, if you don’t have an idea of what good results are. The most important part is that you have to figure a return-on-investment (ROI) for obtaining 1 unit of your desired goal (e.g. one download of a software, one download of a flyer on how-to-stop smoking, one call to one 1-800 number, one view of a blog post, etct). That’s the ultimate goal that you want to set up first before anything. How much are you willing to spend in order to get 1 unit of your desired goal? Once you set that goal, write in 60 font size, print it out, and hang it somwhere visible in your working space. This will guide your overall e-mail permission marketing campaign.

However, before getting to the specifics of calculating the ROI, we need to establish the fundamental metrics. Remember, walking before running. In the case of an effective permission e-mail, you can only have up to 2 goals, for example: a) click here to learn more about my great website, b) click here to download my great free mp3, c) click here to make an appointment, etc.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

Actually receive your permission e-mail.
Open your permission e-mail.
Click on the link you want them to click.

In order to track these results, you will need the following metrics. Kaushik suggests that you use an e-mail vendor, however I will assume that your operation is pretty small and does not exceed a couple thousand e-mails. At that level, there are only a couple fundamental metrics that you need to worry about.

Number of e-mails sent
Number of opened e-mails
Number of bounced e-mails
Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

chinese-smarts With these metrics you will determine:

Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

That’s it, nothing more, nothing else, to get started. I believe that even with little or no experience, you should be able to calculate everything except the CTR.

I will disccus the specifics of setting up the measurement of CTR with Google Analytics on the next post.

Thank you for your time.

E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!

In 1999 Seth Godin wrote an incredible book called “Permission Marketing” (you can check out part of “Permission Marketing” for free at Amazon or could read the entire first four chapters if you e-mail me at damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] com, and yes, I am authorized to forward the first three chapters of this book via e-mail, as long as I don’t make any profit out of it). Seth is a truly great author and you should check him out. He’s such a good author that he often gives out part of his work for free (as in the case of “Permission Marketing”) or even complete books.

The concept of permission marketing is best exemplified by the smart use of e-mail.

skitch-permission-email — Use of permission marketing from Skitch.com.

Recognize this little checkbox? Every time that you are interested in an online service or product and you need to register to be able to use it, the makers will ask you this question. Do you want to hear from us? This little question is very powerful because you are already engaging in a conversation with your users. You’re letting them know that you want to keep in touch with them and likewise you are asking them, if they are ok with it.

Now, I understand that you might challenge this proposition: people are ok with an organization reaching out to them. Well, consider this survey from eMarketer:

Do you notice the change in user trends about e-mail messages from companies from 2005 to 2008? People care about these e-mails because 1) they are REGISTERED, 2) they checked the little “it’s ok to contact me” box during registration, 3) the e-mails that they are receiving are personal, relevant, and ANTICIPATED messages (the three pillars of Seth’s permission marketing), and 4) they can choose when and where to check these messages.

“It’s about me, it’s about what I’m interested right now, and it’s delivered in a format that I want to get it.” – Seth Godin (“All Marketers are Liars” presentation at Google, 8:41)

The beauty behind e-mail permission marketing is that people do not have to be interrupted, they choose when to review the information (if, at all).

However, any organization can mess up this priceless, golden permission that its users have provided by abusing this permission and turning its e-mail messages into impersonal, irrelevant and unanticipated.

In conclusion:

Provide your users a check-box during registration so they can decide whether or not to give you permission to contact them.
Make your e-mail messages personal (ask for feedback, provide various channels for communication, thank them for giving you a job), relevant (tell them about how you are making their experience better, tell them how other users got in touch with you and they made a difference in the new release) , and anticipated (bi-weekly, monthly).
Don’t abuse the permission your users they have given you: NEVER sell your e-mail list to other vendors, ALWAYS provide the option for 1-click, easy unsubscription, and ALWAYS respect if they decide to unsubscribe from your e-mail list.

Thank you for your time. In the next post I will discuss about web metrics of permission marketing e-mail campaigns.

"Google Devalues Everything It Touches" – Wall Street Journal Chief

I have chosen this title for today’s post from an article by Tom Foremski at the SiliconValleyWatcher because it touches my experience with Google Adwords both for a real state broker’s website in Guayaquil, Ecuador and a Mac photo software developer here in Hawaii.

The gem from this article is the quote:

Mr. Thomson (Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal) said, “Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it’s terrible for content providers.” He said that Google doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads, it is concerned with quantity rather than quality.

I have to agree with Mr. Thomson on this comment because Google Adwords currently lacks a lot of features that are necessary to truly create ads that are segmented towards specific niches. I know that this last statement might be challenged very quickly by talented SEO experts.

Let’s take a look at two cases, one positive and one negative.

Positive:

Visits to srbienesraices.com from August 1, 2008 to February 13, 2009

As it becomes quite clear from the graph above, having included a Google Adwords CPC campaign into srbienesraices.com was a great idea because it create up to 20 times more daily visitors. More than 80% of the site visits were provided by this campaign and the bounce rate from these visits was not that much higher than the bounce rate, about 40%, of direct traffic during the same time period. Once the CPC campaign was finished, the number of daily visitors drop back to previous levels (this means that extensive A/B Testing is required! However, that is beyond the objective of today’s post).

Google Adwords was able to drive visitors to a small website for a real state broker in Guayaquil, Ecuador because the concept of the website was simple: 1) visitor wants to buy real state in Ecuador, 2) visitor can take a sneak peek at some properties (very few pictures are uploaded ON PURPOSE), and 3) visitor have to contact real state broker to get more information. The funnel strategy is plain vanilla.

There are no visitor requirements. Neither technical (e.g. browser type, operating system) nor demographic (e.g. age, income).

So what happens when technical details and demographic are included?

Negative:

I cannot go into specific details of my Google Adwords campaign at my past position at iLovePhotos but I can tell you that when you add technical and demographic requirements for your visitors from a Google Adwords campaign, things are not that smooth.

For example, if I am targeting a male in the 18-25 year old range that uses Firefox on Windows Vista and that is interested in photography, I am at a serious disadvantage with Google Adwords. Remember the quote from Mr. Thompson above: Google is good for quantity, not quality. Google Adwords will allow me to target a lot of people (I had about 3 million ad impressions during a 2 week period) but the number of clicks from the people with the technical and demographic characteristics that I required was about 0.0026%).

A/B Testing of ads? At Google Adwords I did plenty but there is no way I can customize the ads to target users with specific types of browsers or operating systems (if you know how to, then contact me at damiandavilarojas [at] gmail [dot] com right now). The only way that I see around this is to do extensive research on the demographics and technical background of the users at specific websites and then target these specific websites using Google Adwords.

In conclusion, Google provides useful customization options such as region, ad location and target content but still lacks more ad segmentation features. If you have a very simple funnel strategy and just require quantity of users with very few (or no) demographic and technical requirements, then go ahead use Google Adwords! But if your funnel strategy is more complicated and/or your users have specific technical and demographic requirements, then you will have a tougher time using Google Adwords. Google Analytics is doing a great job at advance segmentation, how long is it until Google Adwords catches up?

Viral marketing

Take a look at the AARRR model from Dave McClure and tell me what you think is the hardest step?

The AARRR Model from Dave McClure (Master of 500 Hats)

I asked this same question to a class of MBA students here at the Shidler College of Business and the answer of choice was the last step: Revenue.

Yes, conversion is very, very hard to do. However, I think that what my MBA colleagues missed is that you cannot get to the Revenue step without Retention and Referral. Even though viral marketing only appears under the Referral step, I have found from my personal experience that viral marketing involves both Referral and Retention.

The current state-of-the-art of Acquisition is so advanced that acquiring users (more than 30 seconds on your site and at leat 2-3 pageviews) is relatively easy.

There are plenty of techniques (refer to the orange square above) that are pretty effective of practicing interruption marketing (as Seth Godin calls it and he provides quite a sad example of it). A highly effective of acquiring customers is through Facebook Advertising, if you want to find out more about it read this post on how to target your audience using Facebook Advertising.

Currently web marketers are masters of the Acquisition step and MBA students (future web marketers) are focusing on finding out how to excel at the Revenue step. The best example of this sad business model is the thought that Twitter is a Cash Cow in the Making (derive a funny @name, horde tons of followers, and reap the CPC rewards). In a nutshell, the thought is that Retention and Referral are going to happen automatically somehow in any startup model. During the dot-com era, and some still today, Internet startups fail to understand that the most common source of failure for startups is a lack of customers and not a lack of product development. Often startups are good at managing its product development, but terrible at managing its customer development.

The gold (a.k.a traction or conversion) is to develop effective, scalable, contagious, ADDICTIVE Retention and Referral steps.

Viral marketing is essential for the success of any business enterprise. Word-of-mouth beats any marketing concoction any given day.

Really good examples of viral marketing are:

1. Photojojo’s Scavenger Hunt: This little forum post has created 504 responses from Photojojo’s readers. It is a very, very simple idea, yet very, very, very A-D-D-I-C-T-I-V-E.

2. Sprout widgets: I am big fan of Sprout because it allows you to tell a story and then that story can be shared with others. Here is my stab at creating a Sprout widget for iLovePhotos. This little widget can be found in various places of Facebook and I have found that people see it as a little pin of support for a little startup from Hawaii. You can found our widget at Bacon Lettuce Photo – The iLovePhotos Blog.

3. Blogs that instead of being e-mail are ME-mail: the perfect example is Flickr. This should not be a surprise but it is still a very hard idea to push. Instead of telling people how great your company and product are, you should be telling your users how awesome they are. Build a tribe (another Seth Godin term) that is about making feel your users good.

Retention and Referral are hard to achieve and there is no magical sure-shot way to do it. I hope that this post gets you thinking about their importance.

How to target your audience using Facebook Ads

For the last week, I have been pretty busy creating and tweaking online ads at Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, so I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of advice from my personal experience using Facebook Ads.

Why did I choose Facebook Ads? Consider the following bar graph from Venture Beat’s article titled Facebook’s traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust.

For simplicity, I will assume that you want to drive visitors to a single website.

Do your research: You cannot expect Facebook Ads to do miracles for you. It will do a pretty decent job at providing impressions but the “clickability” of your ad is 100% up to you. Forget one-size-fits-all approaches, you will require to develop at least 5 ads (I am currently working with 8). You need to think about the profiles of your website visitors. For a quick video tutorial of this idea, take the quick tour of the web attitudinal web analytics firm iPerceptions from Canada. (Avinash Kaushik is on their Advisory Council, so yes, you have to listen). Is your ad audience: female? male? young? old? English speaking? Time-constrained? Etc, etc, etc. Preparation of audience profiles should be about 60% of your time dedicated to develop online ads.
Select your text and image for your ad: As you can see from the two ads below, you can have a subject line of 25 characters, text of 135 characters, and you can upload an image (there are appear no limits on the image file size because Facebook will resize it to fit the add). It is important that you have a variety of images available because you will be needing as you A/B test your ads. Notice that Facebook users can give your ad a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to your ad! Don’t try to fully capitalize words (e.g. FREE), or use strange characters (keep to the regular alphabet, both using different languages is ok, actually I encourage it!). Remember to use proper punctuation, otherwise your ad won’t be approved.
Think of the keyword(s) of your ad: This step is critical because it will allow you to use SEO and SEM tools such as Google Trends. Let’s assume that you want to promote your great widgets at www.widgets.com. So an important keyword to consider would be “widgets”. Let’s check out what is the search volume index of “widgets” at Google Trends. Wow, this is a lot of useful information! Notice that we get a couple of relevant news that show what drove queries for this term. Company names and product names are useful because then you can go into their websites and see what are their current SEO and SEM practices. Also, you should look if the already have ads around Facebook. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and keep an eye on the current practices of your competitors. It is also important to check out what keywords are related to your keyword, what regions (or countries or cities) provide the most queries for your keyword, and what languages are those queries made on. Another important source of information is Google Ad Planner. For a discussion on how to use Google Ad Planner, refer to this web analytics analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterlfly, Snapfish, and Slide using Google Ad Planner.
Reach the (exact) audience you want: Using the information from the previous steps, you can fill in the fields on step 3. Notice that not all keywords are available at Facebook, so its important that you look for keywords related to your own keyword(s) of choice.
Price your ad: I will skip this step for now, because it deserves a whole post of its own. If this is your first time creating Facebook ads, then I would recommend setting the price towards the lower limit and setting a total budget for 1 month. Keep track of your A/B testing and then you will have enough information to develop a more detailed pricing strategy.

That’s it for now and happy experimenting with Facebook Ads!

2009: An interesting year for idaconcpts

Hello idaconcpts readers,

Happy New Year! I apologize for the delay since my last post at idaconcpts.com but work has been quite busy (which is always a good thing!). I still cannot believe that it has been almost 6 months since I started this web analytics blog. The response has been quite positive, as the following chart shows:

Number of monthly readers at idaconcpts.com

Back in August 2008, this web analytics blog only had a bit over 200 readers but those numbers grew much larger because of the ongoing discussion about the key players of the photo sharing industry (Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide). The use of great SEO and SEM tools such as StumbleUpon and Twitter, (my username is @idaconcpts and the username of the account of my company is @ilovephotos) combined with useful examples of web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ad Planner, have brought a lot of people to idaconcpts to put ideas and concepts to work in web analytics.

An important update for this blog in 2009 is that it will migrate to another hosting company because I am getting quite irritated that I cannot implement a lot of useful Java script widgets while hosted at WordPress (e.g. here for a discussion about installing Google Analytics while hosted at WordPress.com). Also, I really want to install my Twitter badge here and, under the current hosting status, I can’t.

Regarding the number of Mac users worldwide, the question is still up in the air, but I had interest from Gartner, Inc. (@gartner_inc). I am still pushing the 80 million number for Mac users worlwide, what do you think? The Macworld 2009 keynote brought very little light into this issue and I am still looking for validation of this statistic.

On a personal note, what the Macworld 2009 keynote brought was a lot of heated competition for us at iLovePhotos. The new release of iPhoto09 caught us by surprise, particularly the “Faces” update. Some people say that a pictures speaks louder than a 1,000 words, so let’s give it a try.

iPhoto9 “Faces”:

overlay_organize_03_20090106 overlay_organize_01_20090106 iLovePhotos:

2840700284_b3e8210e64

tagging-faces

I know that the second shot is a bit overwhelming, but I am heavy user of iLovePhotos and I have a lot of tags already.

We live in a competitive market and the reality is that if it hadn’t be Apple, it would have been somebody else (e.g. et tu Picasa?). The important point is, in the own words of Seth Godin (page 108 of Tribes):

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret to success.

2009 will surely be an interesting year and I am really looking forward to it because adversity always brings the best out of people.

Here at idaconcpts, I promise to be bring you the most interesting, up-to-date articles about web analytics and web marketing. I look forward for your comments this 2009.

Cheers,

Damian

How many pageviews do news-oriented web sites need?

Today I ran into an interesting article from my daily feed of Online Media Daily. If you are curious how it would look in your mailbox, it would be something like this:

Nicholas Carlson wrote an eye-catching article titled “NYTimes.com Needs 7X More Traffic To Survive (NYT)”, which summarizes the findings of an advertising study of contentNetxt. Basically contentNext states that news-oriented web sites operations can be sustainable at the 200 million pageviews mark.

Carlson explains further:

“Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million,” ContentNext’s Lauren Rich Fine writes in a report.

For big operations, like at Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWS) or the New York Times (NYT), that bar needs to be even higher. In order to survive as a Web-only news product, for example, Fine says the New York Times needs about 1.3 billion pageviews a month.

That’s about 1.1 billion more pageviews than the 173 million ComScore says NYTimes.com saw in October.

Here’s a bit of a problem that I have with these numbers. If you go to Google Ad Planner and take a look at the numbers for the New York Times, this is what you get: 490 million pageviews in a 30-day period.

Google Ad Planner shows web metrics of the New York Times.com. — Google Ad Planner shows web metrics of the NYTimes.com.

I might sound a bit picky but I wish there was more consistency in reporting a web metric such as pageviews. As a web analytics consultant, if I was to try to understand how to increase traffic at NYTimes.com, I would start by taking a look at the trends in daily unique visitors as to segment (or slice like a ninja, as Avinash Kaushik would say) the audience into customer experiences. Given that I am cheap, I try to work with free data as much as possible, so free tools such as Google Trends and Google Ad Planner are my best friends.

Going back to the cited article, contentNext mentions that for news-oriented online operations, the bar needs to be set really high at more than 1 billion pageviews. Yahoo! and AOL are cited as examples.

Let’s take a macro view of the audience demographics of Yahoo!, AOL and NYtimes.com.

My conclusion is that NYTimes.com should target more its female readers (notice how Yahoo! and AOL have a bigger percentage of female visitors) and its younger readers (notice how Yahoo! and AOL have a high number of visitors on the under 18 category, that is the first bar on the age graph).

This is just a general suggestion, but it’s a start. Besides, it’s free advice, unless of course they would like to hire a new web analytics expert. : )

What do you think?

Exploring Flickr Communities

For the last week, I have been quite busy exploring Flickr communities, in order to develop a better understanding of what drives people to organize and share their digital photos online.

Here’s my Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/i-love-photos/

Through the search of full text (and tags) such as face detection (face detection), face recognition (face recognition), and photo lover (photo lover); I am finding the most interesting people you can imagine.

Why face detection and face recognition? Because I believe that we can use face detection and face recognition to make organizing, sharing, and enjoying your photos better!

Why photo lover? Because that’s the term we use to describe the users of iLovePhotos.

I will keep on exploring Flickr communities the rest of this week and will write about my experiences later on next week.

A (not so) simple question: How many Mac users are there in the world?

How many Mac users are there in the world?

Pretty straigthforward, huh?

Not so much.

According to Apple in May 2006, there were about 15 million Mac OS X active users worldwide.

In March 2007, the number of Mac OS X users was estimated to be 22 million strong, according to analysts at Bank of America Securities. The Leopard release generated about 6 million more users.

Continue reading “A (not so) simple question: How many Mac users are there in the world?”