Palo Alto, CA, October 10, 2011: Position² Inc., a US based provider of Search and Digital Marketing services, offers its Digital Marketing Support Services to marketers.

Who is this Service for and Why Does it Matter?

This service offering is for marketing managers who want to use their time efficiently and effectively. Most marketers use a combination of agencies and/or internal teams to manage their online marketing requirements. Their time is spent on briefing multiple teams for their various requirements and then collating all the varied outputs together to make sense of it all.

Position²’s Digital Marketing Support now takes away the pain of multiple briefs and coordination related inefficiencies. With end-to-end capabilities in digital marketing and a team that is committed to delivering 100% all the time – the Position² team can take care of all digital marketing support requirements. Position² has processes and systems in place to deliver quality assets in quick time.

What does the Digital Marketing Support service cover?

• Creative Services: The design team leverages the interactive nature of the web to create highly immersive pieces of communication that are memorable, build brands and get results. It includes the design of attention grabbing custom email templates, flash presentations, attractive web banners and high performance landing pages, microsites & websites.
• Media Services: The Position² media team identifies the optimal mix of media vehicles for target audiences. Leveraging strong media partnerships, the team ensures the best value for the budget.
• Email Services: End-to-end Email Campaign Management service assists in every step. From defining objectives, identifying lists, data cleansing/management and designing assets, to choosing delivery platforms, rigorous testing, regular monitoring, and continuous optimization with consolidated reporting.
• Analytics & Reporting Services: The services includes auditing, implementing tools and processes for measuring campaign outcomes and building custom dashboards and reports for actionable insights.

To learn more about Digital Marketing Support Services, please visit http://www.position2.com/dms/

About Position²

Position² is a leading Search & Social Media marketing firm that delivers continuous growth for its customers through the proprietary ‘Surround & Intent Marketing’ methodology. Position² leverages the expertise and knowledge it gains from offering services to design unique product offerings that fulfill need gaps. Position² works with leading global brands that include Lenovo, Acer, Lyris and growing companies like Freedom Financial and Serious Materials, to name a few.

Position² was founded in 2006 with funding from Accel Venture Partners, and has offices in Palo Alto, Bangalore and Mumbai. Position² is a certified agency with Google, Yahoo, Bing and is also part of the Google Adwords advisory council.

Position²’s flagship product is Position² Brand Monitor™, a platform that allows users to listen, discover and engage with social media conversations in real time.

Position² was founded with a vision to leverage technology to offer search and social media marketing solutions that deliver performance with consistency and predictability. The team includes over a 100 professionals across functions that include client management, marketing, creative services, technology development, search and social media marketing. Position² also provides expertise in online marketing solutions: SEO, PPC, Media and Advertising.

Contact Information

Mary Ann Johnson
Marketing Coordinator
Position², Inc.
366 Cambridge Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94306

Phone: 650-618-8900

Email: mediarelations@position2.com
http://www.position2.com/

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

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Segmentation is a feature offered by many web analytics tools. It allows grouping of website visitors based on certain common characteristics. Some examples of segments are:

• Visitors coming from paid search campaigns
• Visitors spending more than ‘x’ minutes on the site
• Visitors who download a product brochure, etc.

Segmentation leads to deeper insights about our web site visitors. In the words of Avinash Kaushik it helps us in becoming Analytics Ninjas!

The Position² Analytics Team segmented website traffic for one of our clients based on certain pre-defined criteria. This client offers privacy and security certification and compliance services for websites. Here is what we found:

Problem Statement

The client’s website was receiving a very high number of visits but their conversion numbers were extremely low.

Analysis

We started by defining a conversion on the site. To count as a conversion (lead), a visitor needs to sign up to ‘know more’ about the services provided. Rather than just looking at the aggregate traffic we segmented it as follows:

1. Visits by Source (Referring Sites were sending 81% of the traffic)
2. Conversions by Source (Paid Search traffic was the major contributor with 95% conversions)

We followed it up with a segmentation of visits by intent, using the ‘advanced segmentation’ feature of Google Analytics, and discovered that all referral visits can be classified into three C’s

1. Credential Verifying Visits: Verifying member site credentials.
2. Complaint Visits: Complaints about member sites regarding privacy violations
3. Content Visits: Visits related to site content

Visitors under categories 1 and 2 visited pages containing specific keywords in the URL (which were not present in URLs of other pages). This fact was used while creating the ‘advanced segments.’

We compared these segments on the basis of their ‘content engagement metrics:’

• Average Time on Site
• Pages Per Visit
• Website Bounce Rate
• Percentage of Returning Visitors

From this graph, it is clear that ‘Credential Verifying Visits’ fared poorly on all metrics as compared to ‘Content’ and ‘Complaint’ visits:

Inferences

• Referring Sites bring in 81% of the traffic, but these visitors do not convert, as they mostly visit to
• Verify the credentials of other sites
• File a privacy violation complaint
• More than 95% of conversions came from PPC campaigns, which account for just 0.2% of total traffic.

Based on these findings, the client immediately saw the value of increasing their spend on PPC campaigns as that is where they got the most conversions from.

Segmentation based on user intent helps you drill deeper into where your most important traffic comes from, enabling you to focus your efforts on the traffic that matters the most to you.

Contributed by Ravi Shukla, Analytics Team

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All products have a demand cycle of their own. Understanding this becomes important when making marketing decisions. Sales reports may give marketing teams plenty of data on seasonality and demand trends, but they may miss out on an important KPI in the online context – the amount of interaction a visitor has with a site before converting.

The way customers interact with a site is very complex. A visitor might search for a product, click on a PPC ad, enter your site, visit your competitor’s site, then come back to compare prices, postpone decision making, and come back after two weeks to complete the purchase.

At Position², we call this the Holy Grail of Web Analytics.

Google Analytics provides two metrics as part of their Ecommerce Reports – the ‘Days to Purchase’ and ‘Visits to Purchase’ reports. These pan-session metrics tell us how many visits have occurred (and days elapsed) since someone’s first visit, until a purchase action took place. You can get a good understanding of your customers’ behavior by analyzing these reports.

A Closer Look

To illustrate, let’s look at one of our clients in the manufacturing sector.

    

Less than half of the purchases occurred on the same day as the first visit, and almost 38% of them took place after 5 visits or more. This suggests a long sales cycle with multiple interactions with the site before conversion.

While this in itself is good to know, it is not actionable. What a marketer really needs to know is which customers convert on Day 1 and which ones need more handholding and cajoling before they convert.

The Next Step

We segmented the above data and looked at time to convert across different acquisition sources.

A look at ‘Days to Purchase’ data across sources shows that the site average has been influenced by ‘Direct’ visitors. More than 70% of PPC visitors converted with 48 hours, indicating a strong PPC strategy that targeted the right audience with the right communication. Direct visitors usually take the longest time to convert, whether they are existing customers or visitors from offline campaigns.

In contrast, the ‘Visits to Purchase’ data for PPC does not look as advantageous. Almost 44% of purchases ocurred after 3 or more visits. This could imply a not-so-attractive offer, or a Landing Page (LP) that does not work very positively with visitors. The numbers stack up very well, though, for Organic visitors, with 65% of sales occurring over 1 or 2 visits.

Delving Deeper

We went on and broke down the search visitors by keyword type to see if there was a difference in behavior for brand keyword visitors.

As expected, the brand keyword visitors converted much faster. The next logical step was to segment data by visitor source.
Interestingly, the Non-Brand visitors for both PPC and Organic took a longer time to convert, with one-third of Non-Brand PPC visitors requiring more than 9 visits to convert. One promising solution was to analyze the ‘Top Content’ of this set and design a separate landing page that addressed them better. Ideally, we would test this new LP against the existing one to compare their performance. Another possible recommendation would be to capture the visitor’s email ID in a form and send reminder emailers or enticing offers.

Conclusion

The above analysis reveals a cycle of first time visitors entering the site through PPC non-brand keywords and returning several times before converting. Since these visitors know the brand name from multiple visits, they use organic search (Segment-organic return visitor using brand keywords), or type the URL directly into the browser (Segment- PPC return visitor using brand keywords, or Direct visitor if the campaign cookie is deleted), to make the purchase.

This knowledge gets us closer to the Holy Grail in terms of better understanding our customers, and significantly provides us with actionable information to help win them over.

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Position² is delighted to announce the launch of a one-time free Google Analytics Implementation Audit Package. The audit evaluates the current Google Analytics set up for a corporate website and provides a score. Apart from the score, companies will also receive a report with recommendations on how to improve their analytics setup. This includes fixes involving advanced configurations.

Speaking about this package, Divya Krishnan, Manager Analytics Group at Position² said, “The need to launch such a package was felt when we realized that every one of our clients for online marketing services needed initial help in setting up Google Analytics either afresh, or in the form of tweaks to ensure data was being collected accurately. This is key for a company to measure ROI on all online marketing initiatives. While Google Analytics is free and easy to install – one needs to get expert help to really leverage it to the fullest.”

According to Vinod Nambiar, Head of Global Delivery at Position², “Our team works across platforms like Google Analytics, Webtrends, Omniture, and Clicktracks. They are well versed with the latest techniques and contribute regularly through articles in this space. Web analytics is a key service that is part of our Marketing Services offering which also include creative production, search and media.”

The Google Analytics audit covers code accuracy, multi-domain and sub domain tracking, tracking events and virtual pages and other custom implementations including ecommerce tracking. This service is being launched for a limited time and will be free for the first 25 requests till December 31, 2010.

To apply, fill up the request form here.

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Here is something really cool that we came across late last week. Google Analytics has introduced a new feature called “In-Page Analytics” under “Content” report though it is still in the BETA.

It provides insight on how visitors navigate on a given website page by visually displaying clicks on every link inside a bubble. In the earlier navigation report it was not possible for us to visualize visitors’ behavior and it was a cumbersome manual process that we used. In addition one can apply Advanced Segments and keyword filters to this report for effective comparative study of various traffic types. e.g.: Total traffic vs. Direct Traffic and traffic by keyword. This is much better than the site overlay report. Though this is still in BETA, we can expect this to be widely used by Analysts in the coming days.

“This is something one can find in Crazy Egg, so we have a strong feeling that the “Google Analytics” team was inspired by it!”

This is a quick note; do look out for a detailed analysis, once we start playing around with this feature.

Google Analytics In-Page Analytics Preview:



Contributed by Sasthi Sarma, Analytics Team, Position²

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Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as, “the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so businesses can better understand the complex interactions between Web visitor actions and Web site offers, as well as leverage that insight for increased customer loyalty and sales.” Simply put, Web Analytics provides information about users of your website on the internet.

Web Analytics helps you understand the user’s experience on your website. Using this information, you can make modifications to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you get more website traffic. It not only gives information about the number of visitors to the site but gives a world of useful information like time every individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, and much more.

SEO importance of Web Analytics

The question here is how does Web Analytics help SEO? Here are some of the ways in which web analytics can influence your SEO campaign:

• Visitors to the site: The very basic of information, this tells you how many visitors came to your site in a given month. You can also compare the data with past information to see how the traffic to your website is growing over a period of time. You can identify trends and seasonality of visitors to your site. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.

• Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website.

• Domains that bring in traffic: Also called referrers, this is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.

• Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.

• Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.

There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.

Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:

In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.

If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through a Web Analytics solution, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.

Contributed by Sudeep Rao

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The reason why Google Analytics (GA) is sought after is that you can track website traffic for a complete process defined in an online business model. One can set the ultimate target as the goal for GA tracking and GA will track every step of the process until the defined goal.

However, the problem is that GA does not reprocess historical data.  GA will only start to track goal conversion data from the day you set the goal in GA. Nevertheless, here is a simple way to track goal conversions without setting goals in GA for historical data as well. To do this, here are some conditions:

1) You should tag your entire website by the proper Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). At any rate, pages from the landing page to the goal conversion page must have the proper GATC.

2) Here are two examples:

Case I:

The URL of the goal conversion page should be different from the other pages.

Example of unique URLs are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

Here the URL from the Sign up Form to the Final Goal Page has unique URLs: ‘www.mysite.com/sign_up.html’

The ideal path should be as follows:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/thanksone.html

Case II:

The page title should be different for each step despite the unique URLs.

The page name is mentioned between title tags of the page e.g. <title> Page Name </title>. For example, you can check the website www.position2.com where the home page is titled:

<title> Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Company – Position2 </title>

Therefore, the steps to take for different page names are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – Your Air Ticket

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – Registration Form

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – Thanks for signing up!

Here is how you can get goal conversion values in GA:

1) Go for Advanced Segments

2) Create new segment ‘Goal Conversion’ for Case I above. Use the thank you page request URI ‘/thanksone.html’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

For Case II, use the page title of the thank you page ‘Thanks for signing up!’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

3) Choose two segments such as the one from Default Segment and another from Goal Conversion. Apply it to the report.

4) You will see the output as:

Here you can clearly see that out of 1,123 visits, 67 visits were converted. We found 98% accuracy of achieving goal conversion numbers through the Advanced Segments approach. You can apply this segmentation to all reports excluding goal-reporting suit.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav

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Since 1995 when ‘e-commerce’ started becoming mainstream, entire industries that are wholly web-based have emerged, and traditional businesses have turned to the Web for an ever increasing contribution to their revenues.

It is estimated that more than 94% of America’s active users have a broadband connection to the Web. Consumers now reflexively go online to window-shop, educate themselves, and generally spend more of their waking hours surfing the web.

It’s imperative for every business to follow and understand their target customers’ online behavior. These businesses have to then structure their online presence and their off-line, traditional processes to meet the needs of their customers.

To achieve these objectives, decision makers are increasingly adopting Web Analytics. On March 20, 2007, a Google search for “web analytics” + definition displayed 642,000 results and 21 months later, December 31st, 2008, it returned 138,000,000 results: 21,395% growth! This is but one base level indicator of the rapid rise and widespread recognition of Web Analytics as vital for better business decisions and strategy.

Simply put, Web Analytics, through the rigorous mining and analysis of data, better understands and improves the experiences of visitors to a site. This deeper understanding helps achieve desired outcomes such as greater engagement with a brand or company, or higher revenues by perhaps identifying what flavor of “online merchandising” leads customers to transact more business on a certain Web page.

The early, rudimentary practice of tracking online visitors using server log files or by embedding JavaScript code on sites constituted the data gathering and the beginnings of a new revolution called Web Analytics.

Web Analytics often involves the effortless collection of online data. Lord Kelvin said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it!” Once you set some basic tags for your site, all visitors’ information can get tracked on any of a number of web analytics tools.

Compared to other channels and media, data about online business, visitors, and transactions is generally readily available at minimal cost and within a short duration—often on a real-time basis. Businesses can react rapidly to positive and negative trends, seize opportunities and quickly ward off threats.

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