SearchFest 2013 - Why Tagging Matters

Editor's Notes

1. Search ChurchSEO, analyticsGA TC
2. I like helping people out, answer ?s on twitter, but make sure you have me!
3. Time is such a rare thing. Knowing how to save your time, to spend it effectively, is huge. I want to help you do that.
4. You may be trying to figure out how much time and money to invest in digital marketing – how much to email, to social, to search.
5. Budget season at comcast – long, drawn out process w/ many checkpoints. Everyone needs to be able to defend their expenses and efforts. Agencies to help w/ your digital marketing efforts, internal teams, both. Need to be able to keep them honest, let the content speak for their efforts.
6. RCS is expensive. You’re creating content and value and fighting for the budget to make these things possible.
7. All have diff things that drive us.
8. Most precious & rare commodity
9. I’m not going to make you raise your right hand and repeat after me, but…
10. I want to leave you with caring about tagging.
11. My job is to show you how if you don’t put the initial investment into making sure your marketing efforts are properly tagged, you’re missing out on growing your business and on growing your traffic.
12. I’m that person who really would wake up excited about tagging. I’m excited to get to talk to you about it. Every day, I see ppl making decisions for their biz based on bad data. Makes me sad. It should make you sad too b/c the tags represent good data and good decisions.
13. You put so much time into deciding how to market your business, into actually executing your marketing efforts, then even more time into reviewing the impact of the marketing you’ve done. Then you take that information and decide how to invest more of your money and more of your time into your next efforts
14. If your data is wrong, you can’t make well-informed business decisions. Sorry, just can’t.
15. In the end, I don’t care. … I care about empowering all of you to make better business decisions tomorrow. If tagging is the way to get there, so be it.
16. I believe in: search, social,getting credit for the work I do, data can lead us to the answers, and that it should be easy.
17. Make all of your marketing decisions this simple.A prudent manager tries to minimize the risk they’re taking. Can do that by letting good data (from good tracking) help us make our decisions.
18. Do you know what sucks? When you work hard on an idea, pour your time into it, do an amazing job... and your boss takes your idea as theirs. Sucks, right?? Let’s talk about the web version of that.
19. Allocate budget & get the most conversions you can. Where are you going to invest the most?
20. Problem – Data’s from the same site. Diff btw tagging your URLs to get your data as accurate as possible and not. And this is just one small example.
21. I think most people know how to do it, but may not have seen the value. I’m always amazed by the # of companies who don’t think there’s enough value in tagging links to put the extra effort into it. Companies investing major funds into marketing efforts w/o making sure they’re properly measuring the outcome.
22. So many ways content can spread online. Drew this out to get an idea of how the same content can spread via the same channels but be tracked differently.
23. Wanted to share a few quick examples of how our own basic tagging efforts can result in getting good data you can use to make biz decisions.
24. Runs twitter acct for his company. Finds content, tweets it out.
25. Knows people using twitter site may come into GA properly by default, but knows twitter aggregators all work differently. Hootsuite source. Tweetdeck direct. And changes!
26. G&G got the exact same amount of traffic to the site, but Gal’s URLs are tagged. He can more accurately gauge the value of the time he spends on twitter. Can point to his contribution when he’s talking to his bosses.
27. If you have #s to hit for traffic, conv, assisted conv and you fail to hit those #s, you're prob going to put this time into another avenue. But if you’re looking at data from URLs that weren’t tagged, you may not realize that you’ve actually hit your numbers and twitter was incredibly successful. You’re also wasting any time spent on analysis, since it falls so short of what the actual #s look like.
28. He thinks this is enough, and if it’s all his client needs, then he’s totally fine w/ it.
29. Also works hard to get great content, but wants to get more insight into traffic from email. … Traffic comes in as he wanted – email marketing, attributed to the campaign, specific to the content, etc.
30. Gal does b/c he knows… His ANA shows more visits than Goof’s. Referral info = not hugely helpful. Direct = awful. May have a hard time justifying effort & expense for email.
31. Doesn’t need tracking parameters. Good b/c can’t add w/o messing w/ site’s ana info.
32. Let’s say doing everthing right in URL tagging. Think your info is totally accurate now? Even if you’ve gotten all the tagging right but something wrong w/ GA trackign code on your site, still screwed. Tons of ways. Here’s just one.
33. New landing pages totally customized & optimized for conversion. They don’t use the regular template.
34. Event tracking, GA link attribution, outside tools like CrazyEgg
35. There are so many things you can’t control.
36. Address everything and you can look at your data to make decisions. Use your GA reports, dig into multi-channel attribution. Do everything that’s w/In your control.
37. You control the initial spread, so make sure when you share links, they’re tagged so you can be RT’d, reshared, etc. Tag & address everything to the best of your ability, then accept that the rest is going to happen.Make it easier for people to consume your content… social share buttons. It’s only going to help you in the end.
38. Inaccurate social tracking is inevitable to some degree b/c people will share your content. Dark social isn’t a bad thing, but does impede your ability to make decisions, so how can you minimize its impact.
39. If you’re a SocMedmgr… The ppl I think will succeed @ social, long-term, are both creative & analytical. They can engage people while tracing efforts down to ROI.
40. Promised I wouldn’t talk about how to tag your links, no details on what to use as settings. Doesn’t mean I won’t give you resources to make it easier to do, though. 3 easy tools.
41. I wanted to build this.
42. URL SHORTENER!!!