Case Study: Using Google Analytics to Transform PUMA’s e-Commerce Site from Novice to Professional

ABOUT PUMA

For over 65 years, PUMA has been one of the world’s leading sports brands.  PUMA designs, develops, sells, and markets athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories to men, women, and the youth markets.  PUMA is well known for its history of marketing fast product designs for some of the fastest athlete’s on the planet.  PUMA also offers performance and sport-inspired lifestyle products in categories such as Football, Running, Training, Golf, and Motorsport. (PUMA, n.d.).   

PUMA owns multiple brick-and-mortar storefronts across the world as well as an online e-commerce site that is used to interact with its shoppers and learn more about its consumer demand.  However, like any brand, PUMA faced some challenges when it came to its online presence.

THE CHALLENGE

PUMA faced several challenges when it came to its brand website.  The first of these challenges was that PUMA traditionally separated its website into two different parts.  When a shopper arrived at the PUMA website, he or she had to choose between two links to enter the site: the “World of PUMA” or “Start Shopping.”  The first link or section of the website focused on brand identity.  This section of the website focused more on lifestyle images rather than product details.  The second part of the website was used for online shopping. (Demery, 2014).  Consumers found this particular website structure to be confusing.  PUMA wanted to find a way to make its website more user–friendly and in turn, help its website visitors more easily achieve their goals.

PUMA has a wide range of products that can be found and purchased all over the world.  As we know, different geographical locations require different marketing strategies and tactics.  PUMA wanted to find ways to use its website to gain insights into both content and product popularity to drive marketing strategy, understand what content is engaging customers and contributing to regional sales, and to improve online conversion and customer experience by optimizing the website. (Google, n.d.).

THE SOLUTION

PUMA strategically partnered with the Virginia-based digital agency and Certified Partner of Google Analytics, Viget Labs.  Viget Labs installed Google Analytics on PUMA’s website to help the brand gain a better understanding of its website visitor behavior, optimize the brand’s website for a better user experience, and engaged and convert website visitors into sales. (Google, n.d.). 

PUMA and Viget Labs started out by performing website tests and using Custom Variables in Google Analytics to segment visitors based on the test particular test variation they saw. (Google, n.d.).  This allowed PUMA and Viget Labs to compare how each test variation affected visitor ability to complete a variety of pre-determined goals and micro-conversions.

PUMA and Viget Labs also used Google Analytic profiles and custom fields to create a holistic view of PUMA’s website and a separate, targeted view of each category on the PUMA website.  They used advanced features such as Event Tracking to measure interaction with the different page elements and Advance Segments to isolate visitors based on geographical region. (Google, n.d.).

PUMA and Viget Labs launched a constant flow of campaign initiatives on PUMA’s website.  Each campaign leveraged global and region-specific campaigns through CMS functionality like homepage panels, promotional sub-panels, sweepstakes, and surveys.  PUMA launched custom designed landing pages alongside the categories that used the CMS to curate and manage campaign-specific content.  (Demery, 2014).

In addition, PUMA and Viget Labs also used Google Analytics to determine the number of people who were accessing the PUMA website through their mobile device and the content they were searching for on their mobile device.  Based on these findings, a phased approach mobile effort was launched.  Users were provided with a mobile store finder feature that gave users the functionality to search for nearby PUMA stores based on their location and were given CMS driven content from each of PUMA’s website categories. (Demery, 2014).

THE RESULTS

Ongoing analysis and vigorous A/B testing enabled Viget Labs to better understand PUMA’s website’s visitor’s behavior and optimized PUMA’s website accordingly.  Because of this, website visitors had a better user experience and completed more of PUMA’s key performance indicators.  The optimization efforts have created a more intuitive flow and surfaced more engaging content.   

As a result, PUMA’s online order rates increased by 7.1 percent.  Website visitors spent twice as long on the site interacting with the PUMA brand than they did before the implementation of Google Analytics.  Key regions saw nearly 50 percent growth in engagement and website visits.  Lastly, PUMA also saw an 84 percent increase in conversions among its mobile users. (Google, n.d.).

ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

Google Analytics has clearly helped PUMA achieve its goals when it came to developing a better user brand experience, segmenting content based on user’s geographical location, and engaging and converting visitors into sales.  However, like any website or online tool, you can’t just set it and forget it.  Brands such as PUMA must continue to engage consumers with new content offers and continue to leverage and review Google Analytics to ensure they are getting the most of their online presence.  Thankfully, it looks like PUMA has taken note of this best practice and is striving to implement it. 

Below is a popup PUMA’s website visitors receive after moving beyond the website’s home page. 

As you can see, PUMA is working to engage consumers by giving them the opportunity to register for the brand’s e-newsletter.  Once users register and select their gender profile, they receive new product announcements, exclusive offers, PUMA athlete news, and event invites directly to their mailbox. 

PUMA is more than likely (or should I say hopefully) using Google Analytics Event Goals to track when a person completes this particular form as well as other various content offers on its site.  This will alert PUMA to the users that are most actively engaged with its brand.  However, as we know, a consumer can still be actively engaged with a brand, but not want to receive its e-newsletter.  PUMA can still determine who these people are by setting up events based on a specific webpage a user lands on (such as a payment page), the duration a user spends on a brand’s website, or even the number of pages a user visits on the site.  For example, pretend Google Analytics determines that a particular website visitor has returned to its site 5 times in the last 2 weeks to view a particular product.  Google Analytics’ events can alert PUMA marketers of this occurrence and in turn trigger a push, limited-time promotional offer to hopefully convert the repeat website visitor from a window shopper to a sale. 

Google Analytics will continue to gain knowledge and insight on its website visitors as they continue to interact and engage with PUMA’s website and content offers.  PUMA is more than likely (or should I said again, hopefully) collecting this data to personalize a user’s experience on the brand website.  For example, pretend I have interacted with PUMA’s website in the past.  Let’s say I looked to the brand to purchase women’s running shoes.  PUMA should at the very least be able to determine that I’m a female, who is interested in running shoes, and that I live in Pittsburgh, PA.  Therefore, PUMA could use this information to segment me into a particular target market and show me promotional offers on cold-weather, women’s running gear as opposed to men’s golf shorts.

However, this isn’t the only thing PUMA could/should be using Google Analytics for.  PUMA could also use its Google Analytics to determine who is abandoning what products in their virtual shopping carts and remarketing these products to the specific users.  If PUMA realizes that a particular product is abandoned far more than other PUMA branded products, PUMA may consider slashing prices on this particular product to see if it helps generate more sales.

PUMA could also use Google Analytics to determine what keywords people are utilizing to search for its products and begin to leverage those keywords for SEO purposes and/or to build more relevant Google AdWords campaigns. 

In the end, when a brand such as PUMA utilizes and leverages Google Analytics for its marketing efforts, the possibilities of what the brand can accomplish is almost endless.  Google Analytics gives brands the information they need to make smarter, more insightful marketing decisions that will generate additional brand revenue – after all, isn’t that always the ultimate end goal?

References

Demery, P. (2014, May 20). How Puma Is Improving Sales Operations Through e-commerce. Retrieved from InternetRetailer: https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/05/20/how-puma-improving-sales-operations-through-e-commerce

Google. (n.d.). PUMA Kicks Up Order Rate 7% with Insights from Google Analytics and Viget. Retrieved from Google Analytics: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/analytics/customers/pdfs/puma.pdf

PUMA. (n.d.). PUMA. Retrieved from PUMA: http://us.puma.com/en_US/home?locale=en_US&mktID=PL:Brand%20Marketing:Puma.com-CatchAllPage:United%20States-en&plinkID=Brand

Can I have some privacy, please?!

In recent years, Google implemented a new privacy policy and terms of service that unified its 70 separate privacy policies and extended them across most of Google’s various service offerings. (Mediati, n.d.).  As a result of this consolidation, all of your Google account data lives in a single data base that every Google service can access.  In other words, all of the data you stored in Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, the Google Search Engine, and more can be accessed by and all of Google’s services.  Google insists that this change was made to benefit users for that it will provide them with faster searches and more relevant ads. (Vincent, 2015).  Google also states that it collects this data to help protect users from malware, phasing, and other suspicious activity. (Google, n.d.).  Furthermore, Google promises users that it does not share information with advertisers in ways that personally identifies them unless the users give permission. (Google, n.d.).  However, advocacy groups fear that users will lose control over the personal data that they shared with Google and that the cost outweighs the benefits. 

According to a recent Pew study, 93 percent of people think it’s important to control access to their personal information and 90 percent care about the type of information that is collected about them.  However only 9 percent feel they have “a lot” of control over it. (Madden, 2015).

Google understands its users concerns.  Therefore, in response, Google built numerous security tools to help keep users information secure and safe, while also putting them in control of it. 

One of the first things users can do is become knowledgeable about the information Google actually stored on you.  Google is very transparent about the data it has on file.  Users can do this by visiting the Google Dashboard at google.com/dashboard and logging in with their Google account.  Users are encouraged to click through the various services and to review the information Google is storing.  It’s recommended that users then clear any information from Google’s database that they no longer want associated with their Google account.

Another thing Google users can do to help protect their privacy is clearing their web browsing history.  According to Google, the company saves information about user’s web activity, including pages they visit and Google searches.  Over time, Google may use additional information about a user’s activity to allow Google to deliver a better search experience to users. (Mediati, n.d.).  Google collects this information by placing a browser cookie on your pages.  Users can turn this off by visiting google.com/history and clicking, “Remove all web history” and clicking “ok” on the next screen.  However, by doing this, users should be aware that they giving up their search engine personalization and both search results and ads will be less tailored to the user’s preferences.

With that being said, Google tracks your data to serve users with personalized ads based on their search queries and/or on the content of your Gmail messages.  Find this invasive?  Don’t worry!  You can disable this tracking by visiting “Google’s Ad Preferences” page and in the left-hand column, clicking on the “Opt out” button.  Users should be particularly mindful of this tip as they prepare for the holiday season.  If you share a computer with a significant other or children, Google ads could accidently giveaway what you are planning on buying, or did buy for your loved ones!

So what happens if you want to remove some, but not all, of your personal data from Google?  What if you want to keep your personalized search inquires and personalized ads in tact but don’t want to necessarily ruin your Christmas gift giving surprise?  Luckily, Google has a solution for this as well.  You’ll want to head over to Google Takeout, which allows you to download a copy of all the data stored in the various Google services.  Once there you can download the data for all of Google’s supported services or you can pick and choose the data you want to download.  Once you have made your selection and chose what you want to download, click the “Create Archive” button at the bottom of the page.  After downloading the archive, you are able to delete the data from each of the individual Google services. (Mediati, n.d.).  This is a bit of a manual process, but again, it’s up to you to determine what your privacy is worth.

Lastly, for those who don’t want Google to store anything about them, you can always completely remove your Google account.  Deleting your Google account means losing all of the information associated with it, including your Gmail, search engine queries, personalized ads, anything you stored in Google Docs, your blog, places you visited using Google Maps and more.  To do this, Google users will want to visit their “Account Settings” page, scroll to the bottom, and under services, click “Close entire account and delete all services and info associated with it.”  On the next page, users will be asked to confirm that they want to delete this account, enter their password, and click “Delete Google Account.”

But is anything ever really deleted from the internet?  Or better yet, is data ever really 100 percent secure?

We all know the answer to these questions is “no.”  We know that nothing is ever fully deleted from the internet and hackers have broken into many sites that have claimed to be of the upmost security in the past.  Remember when hackers broke into Sony Pictures and released the film The Interview or broke into various government websites and government official’s emails?  It happens!  And it’s nothing new to us.  Furthermore, today’s generation also knows that in order to utilize Google’s search engine, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, etc. we are doing so at a price.  We must give Google (and the same goes for other sites) our data in exchange for these free services.  But does it make it ok?  In my opinion, it’s the nature of the beast.  It’s a price us users must pay in exchange for convenience.  If users feel that the privacy and security of their personal data outweighs the cost or need for convenience, they have the option to “unplug” and not use these free services.  However, as time goes on and technology evolves, I believe that users are going to find it harder and harder to “unplug.”

References

Google. (n.d.). Does Google Sell My Personal Information? Retrieved from Google: https://privacy.google.com/#google-information

Google. (n.d.). What Does Google Do With the Data It Collects? Retrieved from Google: https://privacy.google.com/#google-data

Madden, M. a. (2015, May 20). Americans’ Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance. Retrieved from PewResearch Center: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacy-security-and-surveillance/

Mediati, N. (n.d.). Google Privacy Checklist: What to Do Before Google's Privacy Policy Changes on March 1. Retrieved from PC World: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250950/google_privacy_checklist_what_to_do_before_googles_privacy_policy_changes_on_march_1.html

Vincent, J. (2015, June 1). Google Shows What It Knows About Us In New Privacy Hub. Retrieved from The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/1/8696705/google-privacy-settings-hub-my-account

Google Analytics VS. KISSMetrics

Google Analytics is one of the industry’s most popular web analytic tools in today’s market place.  However, it’s not the only solution available and certainly is not the perfect solution for everyone.  Therefore, in today’s blog post we will be reviewing both the Google Analytics and KISSMetrics’ web analytics solutions as well as comparing and contrasting both platforms.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytic tools for search engine optimization and marketing purposes.  Google Analytics is a free service to anyone with a Google account and is the most widely used web analytics service on the internet. (Rouse, n.d.).  It’s important to note that Google Analytics also has a Premium version that provides higher data limits, more custom variables, a service level agreement, and dedicated support team.  Pricing starts at $150,000/year.  Premium versions are only recommended for extremely popular websites. (Actual Metrics, n.d.). 

Google Analytics provides marketers with a wealth of information.  By utilizing Google Analytics, marketers an determine;

·         How many people visited your site recently and if they are unique or repeat visitors

·         How often repeat visitors come to your site

·         How visitors are getting to your site, whether its referrals, ads, direct traffic, links, or email

·         What sites are referring traffic to your website

·         Where the people who are viewing your website are located geographically (by country)

·         How your site is faring on social networks

·         Your bounce rate or in other words, the number of visitors that are leaving your site without viewing any additional pages

·         The average time someone spends viewing your site

·         The kind of browsers viewers are using to get to your site

Google Analytic users can also set up goals, events, and other customer reports to get a more accurate or in-depth picture of the goals or metrics that they are trying to track.  However, with so many reporting capabilities available, it’s recommended that marketers don’t overwhelm themselves with reporting goals.  Instead, they should align their tracking goals with their brand, organization, or departmental goals.  A golden rule of thumb to determine if a report is worth your time is to figure out how you will use the information.  If the report won’t directly affect your business, it’s probably a waste of time and left alone.  In other words, if you don’t use it – lose it!

Another perk of utilizing Google Analytics is its ability to link with your Google AdWords account to help you analyze customer activity on your website after an ad click of impression.  Marketers find this feature extremely useful because they can import Google Analytic goals and transactions into AdWords as conversions, view Google Analytics site engagement data in AdWords, create remarketing lists in Google Analytics to use in AdWords that will allow them to target specific audiences, and automatically view AdWords click, cost, and engagement in Google Analytics. (Google, n.d.).

KISSMetrics

KISSMetrics takes a different approach to web analytics.  While Google Analytics emphasizes things like page views, referrals, and search analytics, KISSMetrics focuses more on monitoring each visitor as a customer and shows how a person views and uses your website as well as how much revenue each visitor brings to your site. (Angeles, 2014).  KISSMetrics has 3 tiered pricing plans that cost users between $150 and $500 a month. (Chau, 2009).

KISSMetrics is a paid analytics platform that is primarily aimed at helping small and medium size businesses make better decisions and increase their sales as online retailers.  According to Sara Angeles from Business News Daily, KISSMetrics lets you go back in time and track customers from their first visit to your website and all the actions they take thereafter.  You can learn how they were referred to your website, the products they viewed and added to their wish list or shopping cart, when they registered for an account, and if and when they made a purchase.

This type of data is extremely valuable when helping marketers learn how they can influence customer’s purchasing decisions and what type of call-to-actions drive conversion for customers who have not yet made a purchase.

In addition, users will notice major differences between KISSMetrics and Google Analytics.  Some of these metrics include historical data, multiplatform tracking, revenue analytics, and events.

•       Historical data.  Unlike Google Analytics, KISSMetrics is designed to help marketers with an e-commerce site figure out what works and what doesn’t.  As stated above, KISSMetrics allows marketers to go back to the first time a visitor ever came to the website and follow their buying process from start to finish.
•             Multiplatform tracking.  KISSMetrics also allows marketers to track visitors regardless of what device they use.  Instead of segmenting visitors by their visit, KISSMetrics maintains a customer profile for each individual visitor.  This record will remain in place no matter how frequent or infrequently the visitor comes to the e-commerce site.
•             Revenue Analytics.  KISSMetrics tells marketers where their high-revenue customers are coming from so they can drive more profitable customers to their website.  The referral revenue feature is somewhat like Google Analytics in the sense that it can tell whether the source is coming from direct visits, Google Searches, social networks, or other traffic sources.  The difference is that KISSMetrics reports include the total revenue per referrer, average revenue per person, and the lifetime value of each referrer.
•       Events.  An event is a user interaction or user activity that a marketer wants to record.  An event can be something as simple as putting something in a shopping cart or event watching a video.  Events in KISSMetrics is very similar to the events you find in Google Analytics.  The main difference is that KISSMetrics will only report the events you set up and asked to be alerted about. (Chau, 2009).  Marketers can also name these events whatever they choose, making it more easily recognizable for future viewing purposes.  However, the downside to this is that if someone else should ever fill that marketer’s position in the company, the naming convention may not be as obvious or easy to recognize as it would be in Google Analytics.

As mentioned above, KISSMetrics was developed for and works best on e-commerce sites.  KISSMetrics would not be the type of web-tracking tool you will want to use on something like a marketing blog.  

References

Actual Metrics. (n.d.). Google Analytics Pricing. Retrieved from ActualMetrics: http://www.actualmetrics.com/google-analytics-price/

Angeles, S. (2014, March 19). 3 Google Analytics Alternatives (and Why You Should Use Them). Retrieved from Business News Daily: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6090-google-analytics-alternatives.html

Chau, R. (2009, January 01). Basics of KISSMetrics. Retrieved from Why Measure That: http://www.whymeasurethat.com/2014/01/09/basics-of-kissmetrics/

Google. (n.d.). Link Google Analytics and AdWords. Retrieved from Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704341?hl=en

Rouse, M. (n.d.). Google Analytics Definition. Retrieved from Search Business Analytics: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/Google-Analytics

So you decided to market your brand on social media. Now what?

In today’s world there are so many social media platforms out there for consumers to choose from and spend their time on. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit are just some examples of the social media platforms available to consumers today. So the question is, should a brand adopt only one platform as its main or primary channel? If so, how does a marketer decide what platform to use? Or is it ok for brands to use multiple social media platforms? And if they do, how do they decide where to allocate their marketing resources?

Social media can be fun, demanding, confusing, rewarding, and time consuming. Therefore it’s essential that marketers choose the not only the right social media platform for their audience, but the correct marketing mix for their brand messages. In this blog article, we’ll discover if it is ok for brands to utilize multiple social media channels, how to choose the best social media channels for your brand, and take a look at a real-life example of how a marketer determined a social media marketing mix for their brand.

Can brands utilize multiple social media platforms? 

According to a 2014 Pew Research study, more than 90 percent of brands are using two or more social networks. 100 percent of the brands in the home goods category were using multiple channels and 86 percent of the apparel industry is using four channels. Some brands even take it a step further and have multiple accounts that serve different business needs on each of these networks.

For example, Nike has separate Facebook pages for each of its product categories including golf, snowboarding, the Nike FuelBand, football, and more. Nike also has a separate Facebook page for customer service related inquires. This helps Nike keep customer complaints off of the pages it utilizes for its marketing communication efforts.

So now that we understand that we can utilize multiple social media channels, the question becomes, how do we decide what channels to use?

Choosing social media platforms

According to social media expert Scott Levy, it’s important to select the platforms that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience as well as the type of media that is best suited for your brand. Therefore, marketers should always start out by taking a look at their target market and determine what social media channels they utilize in their everyday lives. Once marketers determine what social media channels their audience spends their time on, they then need to strategically look at these social media networks and determine which social media channels make sense for the type of content the brand will be pushing to its audience.

Putting what we learned into action 

For example, let’s take a look at small company out of Pittsburgh, PA called fi360.  fi360 helps its clients gather, grow, and protect assets through better investment and business decision-making. fi360 provides innovative solutions to financial services providers, including the AIF® and AIFA® designation programs, the fi360 Toolkit™ software, and fi360 Fiduciary Score®.

fi360 relies heavily on content marketing. Each month fi360 produces numerous content offers such as podcasts, webinars, and white papers. Some of the content is kept behind gated landing pages, others are not. fi360 hopes to utilize social media marketing to fill the top of the marketing and sales funnel and draw people to its various content offers. After a user views a content offer, they are automatically put into an automated marketing campaign.

So what social media sites should fi360 utilize to complete their goal? First we need to take a look at fi360’s target audience. fi360’s target audience is comprised of the following demographics:

Gender 

76.41% of all financial advisors are male, therefore the male gender will be fi360’s focus.

Age

A majority of today’s financial advisors fall into the 35 – 49 and 50 – 64 age brackets and will be the focus of fi360’s target market.

Income

The average income for financial advisors is $75,320.  Therefore, fi360’s target audience is considered high-income.

Region

fi360’s targets financial advisors all across the United States. However, the top 10 states with the most financial advisors are in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. This target market is evenly dispersed across both urban and the suburb markets.

Education

61.34% of financial advisors highest level of obtained education is a bachelor degree. 28.28% have obtain a master’s degree. Therefore, fi360’s target audience is considered highly educated.

Marital Status

fi360’s target audience will primarily be married or divorced.

Race

fi360’s target market is primarily made up of the Caucasian race.

At this point we have an understanding for how fi360 wants to utilize social media and who their target audience is. Therefore, it’s time to take a look at various social media platforms and determine if they are a fit for fi360’s marketing mix.

3 social media channels that maybe a great fit for fi360 are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. 

Facebook 

71% of adult internet users use Facebook. 66% of male social media users use Facebook. 71% of these male Facebook users are Caucasian. 73% of users are between the age of 30 – 49 and 63% are between the ages of 50 – 64. Moreover, 74% have an income of $50k - $75k per year.  57% of Facebook users completed some college education.  Facebook is great if you are looking to build a community presence or want to reach as broad of a network as possible.

LinkedIn

28% of adult internet users use LinkedIn. The site is particularly popular among college graduates and those who are employed with a higher-income. 44% of LinkedIn users have an income of $75k+ and a majority of the users are men in the 50 – 65 age demographic. LinkedIn is the only social media platform where those ages 30 – 64 are more like to be users than those ages 18 – 29.  LinkedIn is perfect for sharing job-postings, company descriptions, and branded content.

Twitter

23% of online adults currently use Twitter, a significant increase compared to the 18% who did in 2013. In the past year, Twitter has seen a significant increase among a number of demographic groups, including: men, Caucasians, those who are 65 years and older, those who live in households with an annual income of $50k or more, college graduates, and urbanites. Currently, college educated males who earn $50k or more and live in urban areas are the primary users of Twitter.  Twitter is typically a great for information junkies that are searching for topic based news or timely insights.  Many industry conferences also utilize Twitter to help facilitate conversations between attendees.

Social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are not a great fit for fi360. Instagram is very visual and a better fit for the lifestyle, food, fashion, and luxury brand sites. fi360 does not produce much visual content and the older male demographic is less likely to utilize these social media platforms. Therefore, fi360 could make better use of its time elsewhere.

I hope this blog article contributed to your understanding of how to choose the right social media sites for your brand!  

Referral Traffic: Learning where your website visitors come from

Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.  When someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.  In other words, a referral is like a recommendation from one website to another.  Referral traffic comes from all across the web.  If you have a website that is optimized for quality content, you should see a healthy mixture of social, paid, and organic traffic.  Google Anayltics helps you view these referrals and learn how customers are finding your website as well as what they do once they get there. 

Google finds referral traffic to be beneficial because it adds legitimacy or trust flow to a website.  Trust Flow is a number from 0 – 100 that shows how trustworthy a site is based on how many other trustworthy sites point back to it.  For reference, Mashable has a trust flow of 77 where a smaller, personal blog may only be in the 20’s.  However, the more sites link back to the blog, that trust flow will begins to rise along with the search engine ranking.  More trust, the more Google’s algorithm views a trust as a legit source. 

Marketers should particularly be interested in referral traffic because it can be a strong indicator of which external sources are most valuable in helping your business achieve its goals.  For example, marketers may take a look at their referral traffic coming from the brand’s Facebook page to determine if the content they are posting on Facebook is actually bringing additional traffic to the brand’s website or if their time is better spent elsewhere.

But exactly how is referral traffic tracked?  According to Richard Bashara, referral traffic is tracked and passed via the HTTP referrer.  This refer identifies where a user came from and where they are currently on your site.  When someone click on a link to your site, the browser sends a request to your server.  The request includes a field with data about the last place the person visited Google Analytics then captures this data and reports it to you as a referral domain.

Now that you understand what referral traffic is, I encourage you to take a look at your referral traffic.  Does it seem low?  Is there room for improvement?  The good news is there are several, fairly easy, things you can do to increase your website’s referral traffic and increase your search engine ranking in the process, including:

• Linking back to your website from your brand’s social media sites.  According to new data, Facebook surpassed Google as the leading source of referral traffic in June and July of 2015. (Beck, 2015).  Furthermore, as of December 2014, 31.24% of all referral traffic was from social media, compared to only 22.71% the previous year. 
• Guest blogging on other industry blogs.  Write content in your industry niche and link back to your brand’s website or other content that is relevant to the topic at hand.
• Strategically comment on blogs.  Position yourself as a thought-leader.  Add additional value to other industry blogs by sharing your knowledge and linking back to your brand’s website where viewers can read more on the particular topic or learn how your solutions can benefit them. 
• Leverage partner sites.  Industry trade-shows and conferences will usually allow you to advertise your company’s website when sponsoring an event or in exchange for placing a URL on your website as well.  Take advantage of these opportunities if it makes sense to do so.

I hope this blog post helps you navigate and increase your website’s referral traffic.  However, before I leave, I wanted to include a quick, 6 minute video from Kissmetrics that takes a deeper dive into referral traffic.  I believe this video will further help educate you on the somewhat complex topic of referral traffic.

Bounce Rate: An Important Statistic to Every Digital Marketer

Consumers today are active and engaged.  They seek out information when they need it and don’t have time in their day to be interrupted with unsolicited sales pitches.  Therefore, a brand’s website is arguably one of the most important marketing communication channels a marketer can leverage today.  So as marketers, it’s our job to make sure our websites are performing to the best of its abilities.  But exactly how can we do this?  It all starts with web analytics!  

One of the most important web analytics a marketer should focus on is bounce rates.  A bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without viewing any other pages on your website.  Bounce rates are an important metric for marketers to understand because high bounce rates mean that the visitor either didn’t find what he/she was looking for or that your webpage was too difficult you use.  A high bounce rate is significant since it indicates that your website visitors aren’t looking for additional content on your website, clicking on your calls-to-action, or converting into leads and/or sales.

But what exactly what qualifies as a high bounce rate?  The average bounce rate per website changes based on the type of brand website.  Below are some good benchmark averages to use for each type of website’s bounce rate.

Type of Website	Average Bounce Rate
Content Websites	40 – 60 percent
Lead Generation Websites	30 – 50 percent
Blogs	70 – 98 percent
Retail Sites	20 – 40 percent
Service Sites	10 – 30 percent
Landing Pages	70 – 90 percent

If you’re average bounce rate is 65%, this means that 65% of the people who come to your website leave after only viewing the page they entered on, whether it was your homepage or an internal page.  If your website’s bounce rate is significantly higher than the benchmark rate listed above, there are several things you can do to lower your bounce rate, including:

• Improve your content’s readability.  Bold and enlarge headlines, utilize bullet points, use graphics to break up text, and bold keywords. 
• Create a compelling call-to-action.  Your call to action should be clearly written and able to spot in 3 seconds or less. 
• Add links.  Link out to other content on your site that is relevant to users.
• Make sure your website is mobile friendly.  Put your website to the test with Google’s mobile friendly test tool.  If your website is not mobile responsive, those viewing it from a mobile device will likely bounce off your website.
• Speed up page load times.  Set external links to open in new windows and do not let ads distract the viewer.  Place ads to the sides and avoid self-loading multimedia ads as well as pop-up ads.  Also stay-a-way from third-party content and widgets as they weigh down the site and increase load time.  
• Provide good content.  Content should be tailored to intended visitors, be well written have a concise call to action, and provide obvious next step.

Note that the list above is not all-inclusive.  In fact, it barely scratches the surface of things marketers can do to improve their bounce rate.  However, I’d like to leave you with a tip of advice from freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast Kristi Hines who states that if you can’t keep visitors on your site, the best you can do is ensure they return time and time again by giving them accessible links to your website through social media, newsletters, and other online properties.  A viewer may leave your website but become a fan of you on social media, bringing them back time and time again!