Coast Digital Blog

Social media has long been a misunderstood and underrated part of the digital marketing mix.

Bosses can be understandably reluctant to let their marketing teams invest valuable time in getting to grips with the various social networks – especially when existing SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing programmes demand immediate attention.

With quantifiable ROI being that bit trickier to find, social media often gets pushed to the bottom of the priorities list. But its complementary value to online marketing campaigns should not be underestimated.

Thankfully, the latest survey by Hubspot should give social media champions some hope that opinion is slowly changing.

The corporate blog remains king

A comparison of 2009’s responses with 2010’s reveals that the company blog remains the most important social media channel for businesses.

I’d hazard a guess that this has as much to do with a blog's search engine optimisation and PR benefits, as its brand building and reputation management benefits.

Twitter continues to win people over

Twitter claims the second spot in this survey, suggesting that fewer people take the line that Twitter is simply “not useful”. This attitude looks to have more than halved in the past year alone.

Moreover, it has become difficult for companies to justify their Twitter-shyness when the big boys like Sony claim to have generated over £1million solely through sales on this channel.

MySpace’s popularity plunges

At the other end of the scale, it seems that MySpace’s days might be numbered – as a social media channel for business, anyway. Opinion on its usefulness took another big dive between 2009 and 2010, and businesses believe other social media channels now provide more attractive options for campaigning.

Picking the right channels for you

So where do you start if you want to get stuck in to the world of social media?

Here’s some advice:

• Think long and hard about what you want to achieve before you begin. It is incredibly easy to waste your time on social media if you don’t have clear goals in mind.
• Make sure you allocate your time wisely so that you put the most effort into the channels that deliver the best return for your business.
• It’s all about common sense. Before you get carried away with tweets and status updates just stop and think: "Would I talk to a customer like that if they were on the phone?", "Is my boss really happy that I'm promoting so much of the company’s social scene?", "Do my customers actually want to hear about this?"

It can also be prudent to try out a few of the services for yourself before setting up a corporate account – just until you get the hang of things and are ready to engage with the networks on behalf of a wider organisation.

Get it right, though, and you can soon steal a march on your competitors. Good luck!

I am going to lay my cards on the table early, but I’ve a gut feeling that AOL’s sale of affiliate marketing arm Buy.at to Digital Window, parent company of Affiliate Window, will end up being bad news for merchants.

Both Buy.at and Affiliate Window are already major players in UK and European affiliate marketing – and between them they represent more household names than any other affiliate network. Add Tradedoubler and DGM and you’ve almost got the UK affiliate market covered.

So, what are the ramifications of a major merger like this, and what does it mean to all involved? Let’s examine each interested group in turn.

Affiliates

The good news:

• One less affiliate network to deal with
• Fewer duplicate marketing emails from affiliate programmes that run through two or more networks.

And the bad:

• No room to negotiate with a network - you can’t threaten to join the same programme on another network.

Merchants / advertisers

Positives:

• Whole industries of advertisers could be represented by a single network
• The rigmarole of cross-network de-duping sales goes away.

Negatives:

• Whole industries of advertisers could be represented by a single network (!)
• Less competition, and worse deals on price
• Deterioration of service – the network would have no major competitors trying to steal its clients.

The networks

It’s almost entirely good news for the networks involved:

• Major benefits of scale
• Servicing more clients with fewer staff and one set of business systems
• Higher returns from larger clients – the networks earn a fee based on the function of their total affiliate commission (usually a negotiable 30% override) so the potential to earn from one high street name is larger than the potential from servicing hundreds of small programmes.

Unless, of course, you are an unlucky network employee:

• Redundancies in the network workplace.

Agencies

Things are equally bright from the agency point of view:

• One less network supplier to deal with
• Familiarity with the new, big network player
• Billing and reporting consolidated.

Although one of these positives is also a potential pitfall:

• One less network to compare.

As you can see, a mixed bag.

It’s early days yet, but I’m worried that many in the industry have been premature in giving the merger a big thumbs up. Maybe it’s my British tendency to back the little guy, but I can see a combined Buy.at and Affiliate Window having a near monopoly in certain market verticals – a good example is broadband.

Whilst this is good for me as a part-time affiliate – I’ll be able to login to one network’s system and see all the important criteria gathered in one place – I can’t help worry about the merchants.

If you’re a merchant, there are clear benefits of being on the same networks as your competitors (access to the same affiliates), but in a monopoly situation you will have real difficulties negotiating down network fees.

Similarly, in the agency world, prospective clients often ask about conflict of interest – and will say that an agency can’t best service its interests when it represents every other company in the same market.

And while the merger is great for the networks, it isn’t for the companies they represent. In my opinion, not all merchants will be best served by the merger, and should be entitled to end their contract prematurely.

Do you agree?

(Note: I'd like to emphasise that these are very much my personal opinions, and not those of Coast Digital)

Sometimes, a Google Analytics installation doesn’t behave quite how you might expect it to, showing inconsistent data or just behaving strangely.

It isn’t always easy to see what might be causing the problem, but at Coast Digital we often come across accounts that have been set up incorrectly, or have crucial tracking code mistakes.

That’s why we’ve decided to share of the more common problems that we encounter, what the symptoms are and how best to fix them.

Problem 1: There’s no data in my Analytics account

More often than not, this is caused by missing, wrong, or incorrect tracking code.

The Google Analytics tracking code is account and profile specific, so make sure that the right code for the right account is installed on the right site.

To minimise potential problems, update the older urchin.js tracking code to the new ga.js code – or, if you’re feeling adventurous, use the upcoming asynchronous tracking code instead.

Problem 2: An overall drop of traffic from all sources

If this happens, the tracking code is probably missing from some pages on your site.

Check the traffic levels to specific pages to determine which ones are causing the trouble, and then repair them.

It’s easier to spot offending pages if they are among the most visited, but can be trickier if the tracking code is missing from a variety of less popular pages. It’s also worth checking to see whether your tracking code is missing or incorrectly set on any subdomain – we’ll cover this scenario a bit later on.

Problems with the tracking code can occur very easily if your site has a number of users who have access to your content management system (CMS) - particularly if they are able to a site where a number of users have access to the Content Management System, can revert to old versions of page content easily, or have access to the template code.

Top Tip: there is a very handy Firefox plugin called “GA?” that will show you at a glance whether a page has Analytics tracking code installed on it. Download it from the Firefox add-on site at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5631

Problem 3: No AdWords cost data is showing

This often occurs when your AdWords account is not linked to your Analytics account.

There is a manual setting that must be applied before cost data is shown.

To check that it is active, log into your AdWords account, click on the ‘My Account’ tab, and then on ‘Account Preferences’. Beneath ‘Tracking’, you will see the ‘Auto Tagging' setting’ – this should be set to ‘Yes’.

You should also check that your AdWords account is linked to the correct Analytics account – if it isn’t, no data will be collected.

Problem 4: No Keyword or Ad Group data for non-Google PPC traffic

Although AdWords can – with a single setting – share cost and campaign information with Analytics, it’s not as simple if you want to do the same with MSN/Bing, Yahoo! or another provider.

If you do want to do this, you need to make sure that each destination URL is tagged correctly, allowing it to pass keyword and campaign information to Analytics. For details on how to do this, see the earlier post in this series, ‘Tracking External Sources & Tagging URLs’.

It is worth noting that cost data from other providers cannot be passed into Analytics.

Problem 5: A drop in traffic from one PPC source

You can usually pinpoint this problem to a tagging issue. Destination URLs may have been changed without the the correct UTM parameters being appended, or there may be a problem with the PPC account – ads may have stopped running for billing reasons, for example.

Problems can easily occur where there is a number of people responsible for maintaining PPC accounts – they may make changes to advert destination URLs and keyword destination URLs, so it is important that you share your tracking techniques with the everyone concerned.

Problem 6: An entry labeled ‘(Other)’ appears in your content report

If your Analytics account is tracking more than 50,000 unique URL or page views, then all pages that don’t appear in the most popular 50,000 are bracketed together in a section called ‘other’.

One way to prevent this happening is to exclude certain dynamic parameters within your Analytics settings, group like pages together, or run filter sets to that different profiles within the account to report on different segments of data.

Problem 7: Spikes in direct traffic that coincide with bulk email sends

If this happens, it’s probably because email traffic is being reported in Analytics as ‘direct’ traffic – it’s a result of untagged links in emails.

Normally, visits from email clients like Outlook - which open a web browser when you click on a link - are registered as direct traffic. In addition, some webmail traffic - notably Hotmail and Gmail - will also be recorded as ‘referral’.

Once again, the solution is to add tags to email URLs - refer to ‘Tracking External Sources & Tagging URLs’ for details on how to do this.

Problem 8: Goals aren’t appearing

If no goals are showing up in the relevant Analytics report, make sure that your goal URLs are correct. All too frequently, we see the full URL path entered, including the http:// - you need to omit the domain name.

For example, if your goal is at the URL http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html, you should use '/thankyou.html' as your Goal URL.
 

You should also check that your ‘thank you’ page resolves to the correct address – if someone changes the location of the ‘thank you’ page, even though conversions may be coming through to your CMS, database or email inbox, they won’t appear in Analytics.

Problem 9: A significant number of referrals from your own site

A certain number of legitimate self-referrals should be accepted as ‘normal’ in an Analytics account – particularly from visitors that let 30 minutes pass before clicking on another link on site.

However, if self-referrals form a significant segment of your traffic, a number of things could be to blame:

• Missing or broken tracking code on some pages. If a popular page is missing tracking code, visitors that hit that page can subsequently be tracked as referral visitors from your own domain name. Identify these pages by looking at the content report to identify missing pages and make sure the correct tracking code is installed on them.
• Multiple domains and cross domain tracking not set up correctly. If your site spans across an external domain – such as a checkout on a third party provider’s site – tracking must be set up to pass data between the two. They both need to have the same Analytics tracking codes on, with _setAllowHash(false) and _setAllowLink(true) lines added to the code. The referral page should also have each link tagged with _link(). See Advanced Setup Process and Filters for more details.
• Multiple subdomains. If the secure area of your site sits at a subdomain, such as secure.mysite.com, the Analytics tracking code should be updated to include the line _setDomainName('.mysite.com'), to ensure that cross sub-domain tracking is enabled. Once again, see Advanced Setup Process and Filters for help.