This was my first time to Search Leeds and it was great, so many fantastic speakers, I wrote a blog post of some of the sessions I attended. There have been some thorough write ups already and encourage anyone who did not go to Leeds to read all of them.

Analytics Tracking or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google Tag Manager

Emma Barnes was first up and she gave a cracking presentation from her own experience of Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Emma said that Google Analytics (GA) out of the box is very good.  Emma said that with GTM you can get so much from it. So many things, like click tracking, custom dimensions. She said the best way to get started is Pageview tracking. Emma said we need to Select the tag Google Analytics and set to all pages.

You may need to amend your triggers so they only fire if relevant cookies have been accepted (thanks GDPR) as you can see in the photo below:

Emma suggest we also create an event tracking tag. Event tracking is when someone comes to your site and carries out an action besides viewing a page. So you need to know what you want to track. What are they doing? What data do they should I pull.

To start with. make variables to collect data you need. A variable is the bit of info about your website.

Eg you want to know what links they click when they are on my home page.

So this variable is “Click URL hostname ” and the variable type is auto event variable.

Here are some cool things you can do with GTM:

You can see who downloads files, clicks. You can also track c;licks on .pdf .mailto or tel. You can call this category download.

Customer Dimension

Customer Dimension – local time of day (if have website that is multi national, might notice in GA, that you have different spikes throughout the day. By default GA only tells you info about your time zone.

Create a variable to split the data to get local time of day. Create a big of JS for this.

Grabbing author data with customer dimensions, then you can see how your blog posts are working. You need to create a custom author dimension. Put this information on the data layer on the website.

Internal Site Search

How to track internal site search using Google Tag Manager

If someone comes to your site and searches for something, you might want to know what keywords had results and what did not have results. See blow how you would configure this in GTM:

Specific Areas of The Site

• Can you track who clicks a specific are of the site?
• Yes you can. Branded 3 work with a kitchen brand and you can change the type of kitchen.
• Kitchen client wanted to know what areas of the site their clients clicked on.
• Ok this part, you do need the developer to help you. Make sure that you track clicks on specific items.
• Track clicks on “element’s title”

What about SEO?

• You can inject HTML/JS if you don’t have access to your clients website
• But it is not future proof. Sometimes Google see it as cloaking, sometimes does not.

What about Paid Search?

• In GTM there are so many tags that related to online media.
• You can select a tag and then put in an ID and page you want it to fire on.
• Facebook though you cannot. But you can use custom HTML if integration does not exist.
• So Create tag, input ID/HTML

Closing remarks from Emma – Tag manager might be scary but you can do it !!! 

Now I feel even more motivated to learn about GTM and implement my tags.

Below is a link to the presentation:

Making Your Marketing Work Harder

Jill Quick gave an excellent presentation especially as the screen was not working so she was talking and keeping the audience engaged when we could not see her slides.

Jill has done 157 audits, ranging from small business to big businesses so she certainly knows what she is talking about.  Jill is recommending some easy fixes. You just don’t know what you do not know. This is true.

She also said that  Google Analytics (GA) is a ball ache to learn, also true. It takes a long time to learn all the different areas and then Google changes it.

I really like the quote Jill used “without data your just another person with an option”. This is actually by W. Edwards Deming who is a Data Scientist.

There are four different areas of GA

1. Acquisition
2. Audience
3. Behavior
4. Conversion ( or you could think of this as Do I still have a job?)

A website is like a house, you throw a party and want to invite people to the party, eg some people from organic, some paid people. Google has something called the Core Reporting API .

Core reporting API , this is like the bouncer on door of website. If you have not tagged that traffic then the bouncer will not have put your traffic in GA.

What are campaign tags?

• They are tiny bits of info, tiny parameters, put on the end of the URLs.
• Mediums = big broad buckets like organic.
• Campaigns are campaigns eg August 2018. It is the name of the campaigns.
• Source = where does your link live. Organic is a medium, the link lives in Google, yahoo,

Then have the URL and the content is the CTA, Now look at the triangle that Jill went through.

• When go into your reports, GA does source then medium. That is why people get the links wrong.
• So Email is the medium. Where does the link live, the newsletter for example.
• If you are not tagging things on FB, Twitter wherever putting the social content. It will get put on the referral.
• But if you are doing paid social media, then you need to tag it. Your paid stuff will be thrown in with the referral stuff.

• If tag it as medium equals CPC, then it goes into your ppc data.
• Other culprits where data goes into the wrong pit is where you have links from http site to the https, will go into the direct bucket,
• Start thinking of other channels where getting inks from the webdste.   Eg pdfs sent out, no parameters.
• Staff signatures, google sheets, have traffic, but need to do tagging.
• Go into your GA account, go into all channels.
• Then add a secondary dimension. It is adding another layer of data to your report.
• Type in source and medium, then will give you a list
• Other in GA is the counter does not know where it is coming from. Email campaigns and paid social might be in here.

When go into admin settings, default channel group settings, the checklist is case sensitive.

• System defined, no groupings for paid social.
• If you go into Google demo account, they have removed this from the demo account.
• So amend your settings. Email campaigns, need to have medium email lower case.
• Do this in a test view.
• Test view is a staging environment. On view settings, see channel grouping.

Set up your tagging properly

• If doing paid social and don’t tag it, then it goes into referral. If you tag it as cpc then adwords gets the credit for it.
• Let’s take an example for a pdf from Search Leeds you want customers to read. The medium is pdf.  do this for a pdf. Want to know medium is pdf , where does the link live? It is Search leeds.
• Go through and call it name pdf
• Medium  is pdf paid social
• So from today, will get my own bucket and see what is going on.

Clarity within the teams

• Be careful with the agreeing the naming conventions.
• Keep a record of everything.
• Bake it into the SLA with your agencies.

Attribution

• 7 attribution models in GA.
• Google has decided to select in the acquisiton report, it goes to the last non direct channel
• Multi channel funnel report – assisted conversions, email brought in 10 sales, but assisted in 50. This showing that if you are not tagging, you are undervaluiing and over valuing tracking.
• Creating those user defined buckets, that is done at admin level.
• In MCF channel grouping, to copy the grouping and rinse and repeat what did before.

So to do list

• Agree on all mediums doing.
• Go through system defined check list.
• What are we doing?
• Then agree what calling your sources eg newsletters
• Create channel groupings, do in trust view, then test then roll over to reporting views.
• V important for paid social.
• Agree on naming courses
• Keep a track of this
• Think of how can use SLA

Great presentation, thanks Jill. Below is a link to the actual presentation.

5 False Assumptions About Your traffic

Andraz Stalec from Red Orbit kicked off the third session by saying that search can be rewarding. Based on all that we know on user behavior, we wrote the PPC ads and link to a specific landing page and deliver great results.

But sometimes things do not work out so well. Some surprising things may not expect and it is not your fault.

We assume users do not lie, but sometimes they change their mind.

Most failures are not caused by PPC challenges but it is because we make bad assumptions.

1) Stickyness

• Create a brand stickyness report . For example when looking at a brand like Nike, we only see  users acquitted by Nike – used nike terms.
• Adgroup Nike, then see the terms people userd. Eg some used adidas terms.

User this report to do dynamic remarketing, research low stickiness and establish better RLSA.

2) Misconceptions

People think that most loyal customers come from direct. But this is not true. Direct Channel seems to get more traffic. It is quite common to see channels like paid search , organic search and email outperforming direct.

3)  Focus on the people who did not convert, this is 98.7% of users

• Use sessions quality report to deliver more actionable insights.
• Direct traffic does not have highest session quality.
• Direct traffic has one of the lowers session quality report.

4) GA attributes all unknown sources to direct traffic.

• Loyal customer may be visiting the site directly but not wanting to buy.But more often than to products and brands, habits are connected to our behavior.
• So hard to tell which part of behavior is habitual and which are not.
• Cross Channel CDJ , First interaction is Direct
• Usually, channel selection is not habitual. You should be omni present and use remarketing.
• Build across Cross channel consumer decision journey report – put on the red-orbit blog.

Read this blog post on Red Orbit to help with your reports.

5) Generic search is in rapid decline.

• Almost 80% drop in paid search revenue.
• There are 3 different types of channel.
• Free fall, brand taking over and generics rule (increase in generic)
• (Market maturity stages and search ) insert the graph.Begging of the market it is genertic. Brand is at the end.
• It is very important to know the types of search users.
• THERE ARE 12 different users for the search query.

You can segment users on 2 dimensions – how familiar they are with recent buyers. (maybe use the slide – 12 types of search users.

Main problem is that we all assume.

• Users searching for a specific brand will by that brand )not true)
• Direct traffic will bring more qualified user (not true)
• Onece you go direct you will alsoway go direc
• Search is cominationed by generic keywords = it is true in early stages of the market.
• You can define user intent from search query. Not true, there are 12 different types of user and you need to understand what user is comong to your website.

You need to know the business, will help make better decisions

• Establish top level business KPIs and connect your activities to them.
• CES stands for client engagement score.
• Create dashboards for day to day monitoring so can have a top view of your business.
• User monitoring system to track your organic traffic to correlated it to conversions, for example SEOMonitor.
• Go beyond traffic, analyse the business. CRM data, transaction data from offline conversions.

Are we getting more loyal users?

• Don’t build reports, create value.
• Offer insights, write down lessons learned and based on that offer actions.
• Prepare some business impact on this.

Very good presentation. Lots of great insights, this is the link to the full presentation:

What Happens When a Werewolf Bites a Goldfish?

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