Author Archive » Graeme
Graeme Benstead-Hume, Digital Insights Manager at
SiteVisibility, often found fiddling with numbers, code, analytics, design, illustration, photography & all sorts of other interesting things.
Follow him at @mrgraeme.
Read more of Graeme's posts
here
Why conversion optimisation
Most search & display marketers focus on driving large volumes of traffic to a site. Site traffic can be driven through SEO, paid search, display advertising, email marketing and many other channels.
The best online marketers aim to increase the quality of traffic as well as increasing the quantity of traffic. This can be achieved through better audience targeting, careful geo-targeting, timing campaigns carefully, more contextual, selective target keyword strategies and using the correct language for the target audience.
Read on
The Google Analytics IQ Exam is a formal test provided by Google for individuals to prove their proficiency in Google Analytics.
The test is conducted online within the Google testing centre, http://google.starttest.com, consists of 70 multiple choice questions and lasts 90 minutes.
The test has an 80% pass score threshold.
And it’s not easy…
Read on
On the 26th May 2011 the enforcement of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC was deferred for one year in the UK. Many of us wondered if it would all just go away… it didn’t, and Cookie Day* is almost upon us.
SiteVisibility has written a Privacy and Cookie policy which all site visitors should read.
How the cookie law crumbles
The ‘Cookie Law’, a tastier synonym of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC, is aimed at protecting individuals against the hitherto unregulated use of user behaviour tracking online.
In short the law means that we must now ensure that users are not just aware of the tracking information, such as cookies, that we plan to store on their computers but also that they consent explicitly to us storing that information.
Some cookies are fruitier than others
The controversy around this law stems from the fact that browser cookies are all but essential to the modern web experience, many sites simply wouldn’t function without cookies to remember certain information about the user, such as the contents of an e-commerce basket.
Read on
Originally produced and presented by Graeme Benstead-Hume and SiteVisibility for the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival event September 2011. Measuring social media with Google Analytics covers a number of ways to segment your Google Analytics data to better measure the success of your social media campaigns.
Handouts for this presentation are available below or as a download here: Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics Handout.
Creating Campaign Tracking Code
Visit http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 or alternatively search for ‘URL builder’ in Google.
Website URL – Enter the URL you will be linking to from your social media activity.
Campaign Source – Enter the name of the social channel / site you are linking from, e.g. twitter.com
Campaign Medium – Will group your campaign sources together in your reports so enter Social or Social Media.
Campaign Name – Choose a more specific identifier for your campaign, e.g. twitter outreach.
Click on Generate URL and copy and paste the resulting text instead of your usual URL.
You can find your campaign report in Google Analytics under ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘Campaigns’
This even works when the URL with tracking code is minified.
Read on
We love web analytics here at SiteVisibility, we’re measurement geeks and proud. The thing is, we reckon you should be a measurement geek too! Well… if you are in any way involved in Digital Marketing, Web Design, UX, UI, Online Advertising, Social Media or online PR anyway.
Courtesy of @Horia Varlan on Flickr
Analytics, or more specifically Web Analytics, is the name given to a set of techniques and tools used to measure the performance of a website or an aspect of a website’s marketing. The best known analytics tool is Google analytics which allows website or blog owners to easily track user behaviour free of charge in order to measure the performance and the effectiveness of marketing strategies and to gain insight into how they might better serve their users in terms of content & improved user experience.
There are lots of good reasons to take the time to get to know your web metrics a little better; and not just because you can’t run a successful digital campaign without effective measurement in place… Besides, we all know that, we want to talk about the other stuff which makes us do cheer leader dances every time we talk about low bounce rates.
So! we think you should be an analytics geek because, the moment you know what all those lovely numbers mean, you will: Read on
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development… For Digital Marketing.
Every so often a marketing campaign will hit what I like to call a ‘golden age’. These campaigns fall in nicely with a set of current trends, they are carried along by a wave of social noise and community; people will be hungry to digest as much content as you can throw at them. The internet is happy, the campaign client is happy and you can bask in the fact that you really understood your audience, the brief and everything.
The problem with the ‘golden age’ label is that these lovely pockets of opportunity tend to flitter by in no time at all. Popular interests and trends evolve and change every day… the thing is that most marketing campaigns don’t. Read on