The report reveals a significant underinvestment in paid social channels, with advertisers reaching only 59% of their potential, suggesting an opportunity to nearly double spend for profitable returns.  

Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Meta and TikTok emerge as leaders in paid social success, with Meta boasting the highest relative Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Notably, TikTok stands out for new customer acquisition, outpacing other channels in driving new conversions.  
• Snapchat’s major update has catapulted it as a growth channel worth watching, with a remarkable 504% increase in ROAS year-over-year.  
• The report highlights a widespread issue in the industry: the underrepresentation of impressions-led channels by Google Analytics and ad platforms’ own attribution models. This discrepancy emphasizes the need for standardized measurement methods to accurately report performance.  

Now is the time to reassess your investment in paid social, explore the potential of emerging channels like Snapchat, and adopt reliable measurement methods to navigate the complex digital marketing landscape effectively. 

For a deep dive into these insights and to leverage them for your digital strategy, download the full Fospha State of eCommerce Report Q1 2024. Embrace the data-driven insights to refine your approach, optimize spend across platforms, and drive your eCommerce brand towards profitable growth.  

30-second summary:

• Fair data collection is when people are willing to share segments of their digital selves without giving away the whole picture
• Google’s data empire seems to backfire on its presence in Europe as Italy  joined France and Austria in ruling that Google Analytics is overstepping boundaries
• Whispers soon became shouts when the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA) found that Google wasn’t in fact doing enough to mask these IP addresses, meaning users could be easily identified
• What impact will this have on the SEO marketing industry and will more countries join this revolt?

Think of your online data like pieces of a jigsaw. All assembled, these make a crystal clear picture of you – your IP address, interests, name, and so on. Look at one or two pieces at a time though, and you can’t get much from it.

This is what is considered fair data collection. You’re willing to share segments of yourself, but not the whole picture.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is partly about making sure businesses like Google don’t get enough individual pieces to see the whole of you. This is also why their Analytics service is getting some bad press at the moment, particularly in Europe. 

The service is used to track both quantitative and qualitative information about people on a website, such as how many active users there are and what their gender may be. Financial information like revenue or advertising ROI is also available if relevant to your website. In terms of user data, there is not enough to identify someone specifically, but there is enough to help businesses understand their demographics.

However, Italy recently joined France and Austria in ruling that Google Analytics is overstepping the boundaries of ‘fair collection’ and breaching GDPR rules.

While Google does anonymize data to a certain extent, there were always whispers that the IP addresses of users were easily accessible. These whispers soon became shouts when the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA) found that Google wasn’t in fact doing enough to mask these IP addresses, meaning users could be easily identified.

At this point, the empire of technology they’ve built is almost working against the search giant. When they collect so much data, those jigsaw pieces start to pile up quickly and when they have all the tools to put the jigsaw together, that’s when countries like Italy have to put their foot down.   

The argument of Italy, and soon to be many other regions, is that Google simply has too much information that isn’t masked properly. This is far beyond the typical fingerprints, people leave as they use the internet. As the data used on Google Analytics must travel through servers on American soil, they also consider this a further violation – citing the 2020 Schrems II ruling in particular. 

A lot of questions still remain. How will this affect the SEO industry in these countries? With GA4 still a fair way off, should business owners put in place a different solution? Which other countries will follow suit – Japan, California, or any other EU country?

I’ve teamed up with Laura from Ruler Analytics to bring you some tips and facts to help you both understand, and deal with, what’s going on.

Move to GA4, the sooner the better

Google Analytics is set for change. As of July 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer be available. What exactly Google Analytics 4 will finally look like is uncertain at this point. 

But what we do know is that you need to create a GA4 account sooner rather than later. 

By setting it up now, you’ll have the historic data you need to apply new tools and features too down the line.

Remember, Google Analytics 4 will only offer you data retention for 14 months. Setting up GA4 now and learning how to use the platform will pay dividends in the future and keep you prepared for the change. 

Even though the cookie death is in 2024, move away now

Invest in first-party cookies. As we saw with iOS 14.5, advertisers like Google and Facebook are hugely impacted when it comes to data tracking with third-party cookies.

First-party cookies are cookies that you own, that live on your website. The data you collect and create is your own. And that means you have unbiased data that can’t be removed at a whim’s notice.

Data autonomy, while still respecting GDPR rules, is absolutely paramount for marketers. 

Manage the trust of your customers but also collect the data you need to create personalized, trackable customer journeys. 

Once the cornerstone of paid advertising, third-party cookies will soon be redundant with platforms like Facebook and Google scrambling to create a replacement that still works for their advertising models.

Stop relying on Google Analytics for more than web analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics platform. And a really good one at that too.

What Google Analytics is not, is a visitor-level revenue analytics tool. 

That means you can’t access data like: 

• Individual full customer journeys
• Accurate marketing source 
• Closed revenue or pipeline generation 

But as Google is continually looked upon unfavorably from a data protection standpoint, it’s possible that we might see more countries fight against it. 

To prepare for this, you need to sort your data. 

Look at the tools you’re currently using and how you can make your tools work smarter for you.  

Google Analytics will continue to be a great tool for understanding your website analytics. While it might see tighter restrictions on the data it uses and shares, you should still get access to general website metrics. So, when it comes to accurately track users from your website and connecting them to closed leads and revenue, you need to be looking elsewhere.

Marketing attribution is one such tool that can help. It uses first-party cookies on your website meaning you have total autonomy over your data. 

Summary

To wrap up, the next steps are clear. How we use data is changing. And more importantly, how tech giants like Google are being regulated on data is changing as well. 

To get ahead of it, set up a Google Analytics 4 account first and foremost. Next, look at what data you’re collecting and how you’re collecting it. Revaluate your data-capturing journey and practices. 

If you are tracking data like lead conversions, or crave more insight on touchpoint data, then you need to reevaluate your marketing tech stack.

Be prepared for the fact that you might lose insight into website visitor data and start looking for alternatives to make sure you continue to feed your tools the data they need.

Matthew Rogers is Head of Campaign Management at the top Manchester-based digital market agency Add People and has over 14 years of marketing experience. You can follow him on LinkedIn here. He is also a long-standing member of the Click Z Collective Advisory Board.

Laura Caveney is Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics. Laura has over 6 years of experience in delivering end-to-end marketing campaigns and discusses the trials and tribulations marketers face day to day on her LinkedIn channel.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30-second summary:

• Account-based marketing (ABM) helps build a personal bond with your target audience, assuring them that you understand their unique wants and needs
• ABM is considered the most financially successful marketing approach by 97 percent of businesses
• ABM can be used in conjunction with inbound marketing for maximum effectiveness, which ties into an effective SEO strategy
• Use SEO keywords to learn what your target audience is looking for and attract interest from all levels of a business
• SEO analytics – especially insights into consumer interests, behavior, and preferences – aid the construction of an effective account-based marketing strategy

Priorities in business marketing have drastically shifted in the online age. Throwing enough mud at the wall, hoping that at least some of it will stick, is now an outdated approach. Consumers are savvy, seeking to be wooed by products and services that meet their unique needs.

Naturally, this means that an effective marketing campaign will fish in shallow waters instead of casting a wide net into the ocean. Any business with serious intentions to capture a captive and loyal audience should take the account-based marketing (ABM) approach – and SEO can be essential to such a strategy.

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

With so many different types of marketing packages available to businesses in 2022, it can be tricky to keep on top of all the different terminology. However, one of the most essential and successful modern approaches is account-based marketing (ABM).

ABM revolves around pinpointing a precise marketing target, such as a unique business – or even a department within a major company – and tailoring a promotional campaign, especially to them. In many cases, that involves breaking down your campaign step-by-step.

Let’s imagine that your business revolves around manufacturing protective cellphone covers. You may sell these covers to high street stores as generic items, but you feel that your business would be taken to the next level by teaming with a cellphone manufacturer. If you could get a contract with Samsung, for example, maybe your cellphone cover will be pushed as a must-have accessory to accompany the latest Galaxy handset.

In this instance, you would need to tailor a unique approach to exactly what Samsung are looking for in a collaborator. You cannot just send the same pitch that you would to Target, asking them to sell the item – a supermarket is just interested in whether they can buy cheap and sell higher, turning a profit on a product that is always in demand.

If you’re going to forge a long-term and successful relationship with Samsung, you’ll need to prove to them why your cellphone cover is the best on the market – better than your competitors, better than any other product the business currently uses, and how you’ll meet expectations going forward. All of this needs to be achieved through a marketing campaign that is impossible to ignore for your targeted account.

How does ABM benefit a business?

There are countless reasons to adopt an account-based marketing approach for your business. These include:

• Building a substantial profile of your target audience through extensive research, providing an invaluable platform
• Rapidly earning the trust of a client base, enhancing your chances of loyalty and a long-term working relationship
• Reducing wasted time spent on managing inappropriate or inefficient marketing leads
• A simple analysis of the performance and ROI of any campaign – the results will be comparatively black and white
• Keeping sales funnels tight – there will be no need to continually cajole and encourage consumers to complete their conversion as they are in the bag
• Enhanced reputation within your industry – you’ll earn a standing as a business that knows exactly what your audience wants

Notably, ABM is often very effective when aimed at global businesses that employ teams in multiple countries. These companies are often dealing with more complex supply chain issues, and are looking for a supplier who understands their needs and can be relied upon to meet them regularly. Prove your worth to such clients, and you’ll reap substantial financial rewards.

Is ABM the same as inbound marketing?

Account-based marketing is not quite the same as inbound marketing, but it could be considered a companion approach. If you’re going to make the most of ABM, keep at least one eye on your inbound marketing strategy.

For the uninitiated, inbound marketing involves laying bait for your potential consumers and waiting for them to come to you. We’ll shortly discuss how SEO aids ABM in greater detail, and inbound marketing will factor heavily into this. The online presence of your business, most notably blogs and social media accounts, will frequently be discovered through organic internet searches.

However, the core difference is that ABM is active whereas inbound marketing is passive. Both approaches involve appealing to the core interests of your target audience, but with ABM, you’ll be approaching the consumers in question. Let’s return to our example of creating cellphone protectors for Samsung products.

You could create content that will potentially attract their attention – blogs with titles like ‘This is the perfect protective barrier for a Galaxy S22’ and infographics on how and why your product will benefit users. This will take a long time to see results, though – and even then, you’ll need to ensure that the right employee from the right department at the right company gets in touch. ABM means reaching that employee yourself.

Overall, there is definitely a place for inbound and account-based marketing under the same umbrella – often working side by side. Both approaches will show potential consumers that you understand, and care about their interests. Just know that an ABM strategy is likelier to yield an immediate investment return. 97 percent of businesses claim to see greater results from ABM than any other marketing approach.

How to use SEO as part of an ABM strategy

We’ve buried the lede for long enough. It’s time to discuss how SEO can work in perfect harmony with ABM to create optimum campaigns that will yield business results. SEO and ABM share five fundamental links that should be embraced to see success. These learnings can be applied to any ABM campaign, no matter how large or small the client may be.

SEO performance reveals the core interests of your target audience

SEO and keywords are intrinsically linked – there is no getting away from that. This can benefit your ABM strategy, though. By focusing on the crux of your SEO strategy, you’ll gain an ever-greater insight into what your potential clients value most.

Understanding what keywords are performing best is critical to making the most of your SEO strategy – and, by extension, understanding who to target for an ABM campaign. Using Google Analytics, you can investigate how visitors to your site respond to keywords. If you’ve paid for a plum keyword, you’ll be expecting a conversion after a user interacts with it. Watch to see if users bounce from the page that is connected to the keyword or stick around and interact. Keep an eye on your Google Quality Score too, as this should be steadily improving with effective use of keywords.

If your keywords are failing to generate traction, this suggests they’re not as important to your target audience as you suspected. This suggests that your choice of keywords – and by extension, your macro and micro-copy – is not resonating with the specific needs of your target audience.

It’s better to learn this before you attempt to build an ABM campaign around inefficient keywords. You only get one chance to make a first impression, after all, and a reputation as an irrelevant offering is anathema to successful account-based marketing. Use SEO to practice and road test your use of keywords to perfect your choices – short- and long-tail alike – before approaching a potential ABM client.

If your keywords are performing, however, it’s all good news. You now have an idea of what seems to matter most to your audience. You can then bring these features into your ABM approach. If ‘free trial’ is performing well, you can write to a business offering an exclusive trial of a software package that lasts a month rather than the standard two weeks. Alternatively, if a particular adjective that describes your product or service gains traction, focus heavily on this when marketing.

Social media marketing is particularly effective once you have a core understanding of keyword performance. Once you know what keywords are likeliest to yield success, you can head to Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and start applying PPC campaigns to business pages. This will go hand in hand with ABM, as social media campaigns will allow you to tailor your target audience and do all you can reach only the most receptive of eyes.

SEO opens doors to your target audience

It can sometimes be challenging to decide where to pitch a marketing campaign, especially in a B2B setting. It makes sense that you’ll try to win over the hearts and minds of decision-makers, as these are people that will ultimately control the purse strings of a company account.

Before building your ABM strategy around occupants of the C-Suite, remember that CEOs and financial controllers lack time to pore over the value proposition of a product or service. They’ll ultimately sign off on a purchase based on the recommendation of their staffing teams. Each of these employees will have different priorities based on their unique roles. This is where SEO comes into play.

Promises of free or discounted services will attract the interest of financial departments, who will welcome any opportunity to improve the bottom line of a business. Support and administrative staff will be more concerned with how the product or service will resolve any common pain points, especially if they’re labor-saving. Managers are likeliest to respond well to any promises of improved performance and higher productivity levels from their subordinates.

By addressing these varied priorities in your SEO strategy, you’ll attract the attention of a wide array of business employees. Launching an ABM strategy aimed straight at the head of a company after laying these foundations means that you’re much likelier to see success. If a business leader asks their team if they are familiar with your offering, they’ll respond positively.

If you can use SEO to pinpoint a particular individual or business interested in your offering, the world of ABM is your oyster. Imagine that you notice significant traffic from a local business, and their offering is aligned with what you are looking to market. Clearly, you are attracting the attention of this business. You need to reel in the catch, now that you have successfully baited the hook.

SEO generates new ABM leads

In an ideal world, you will identify your ABM targets early on and enjoy roaring success with every campaign. Sadly, none of us do business in a perfect world. It’s unlikely you’ll hit the bullseye every time, especially when starting with ABM. You’ll always need to keep at least one eye on your next campaign target.

If your business has a solid SEO strategy, you’ll be tracking a great deal of data – most notably, who is visiting your website and how they’re behaving once they arrive. This is where ABM and inbound marketing start to co-exist. If your content is piquing the curiosity of consumers or other businesses, build a profile of these visitors.

Is this aligned with what you consider your existing target audience to be? If not, you have a new stream of potential clients to aim an ABM approach to. Something about what you have to offer is attracting attention. Use Google Analytics to dig a little deeper into this – sign into your dimensions and metrics summaries, and review reports that summarize page views, bounce rates, and sessions durations. Use these analytics to learn what is attracting the greatest attention.

Once you have this data, you can identify where these visits are coming from (more on that anon) and start approaching potential leads for an ABM campaign. Your content marketing has already done most of the heavy lifting, and these SEO-generated leads are low-hanging fruit. Pluck them with your ABM approach, and turn this potential client into a returning, long-term client.

SEO reveals the buyer journey of your target audience

As discussed, SEO and ABM combine to identify the perfect buyer persona. However, getting in touch with the right person is only half the battle. You also need to understand how this individual prefers to complete a transaction. The average B2B purchase encompasses four stages.

Use SEO to learn how you can appeal to your target audience through these steps, reinforcing promises of trust, value for money, and exemplary performance throughout. That means reviewing where your core web traffic is coming from and building a profile of who is visiting. Is your site more popular with local searches, or do you appear to have an international audience? Is your traffic spread across the globe, or do you appear to be particularly popular in certain regions, such as Eastern Europe or Western Asia? What pages are attracting more clicks than others, and does this mean that you should shift your primary SEO focus and use different keywords? Take each of these learnings and apply them to your conversion funnel, tailoring the experience to what appears to be an increasingly promising set of leads.

SEO analytics provide insight into ABM campaigns

Above all, you should use the results of your Google Analytics to build a tailored, account-based marketing campaign that ticks every box for your potential buyer. This will offer the greatest chance of success for a conversion.

Now, your mileage will vary on what metrics merit the most significant investigation. Every business will have varying priorities, while disparate industries will also attract unique customer behaviors. Examples of analytics to embrace include:

• Does the user visit your website through a desktop computer or a mobile appliance? Should you develop an app and push this as part of your marketing approach, declaring it the most convenient way to do business?
• Which channel does the potential customer use most to visit and interact with you? Do they come to your site via Google, or are they spending more time on a particular social media platform? Focus your ABM energy on whichever channel appears to delight the user most
• Study user behavior once they are on your website. If they are spending prolonged periods on Page A and bouncing from Page B, you should tailor your ABM around the former – though consider adjusting the content of the latter (one more note)

Of course, knowing is only half the battle here. You’ll also need to take these educational opportunities and put them into practice. The first step of this creating audience clusters in Google Analytics and targeting different groups for different stages of the sales funnel.

In an ideal world, you’ll be able to use Google Analytics to identify regular visitors from a particular business. Sign into your Analytics account and select Audience, Technology then Network. From here, you can see the ISPs of who has been visiting your site – and with the aid of a little detective work (and, if we’re being realistic, a paid tool like Leadfeeder or something that suits your business best) you’ll uncover who has been visiting your site.

Let’s consider an ideal case scenario here, returning to our previous ABM business example. Imagine that you have clustered a group that spends several minutes at a time browsing your website, including the product pages, but never attempt to make a conversion. Research informs you that they all appear to be hailing from Samsung HQ in your country.

That sounds like you have the perfect lead-in for a targeted ABM campaign. You know that a number of people at Samsung know who you are, and what you do. This provides the ideal opportunity to introduce yourself as a business contact and seek to open a dialogue about how your two companies could work together.

Ultimately, SEO analytics are a goldmine for all marketing opportunities – including ABM. If effective SEO is the foundation of a successful business, consider account-based marketing the flair and finesse that helps you build and expand a business empire.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK. He can be found on Twitter @jdwn.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30-second summary:

• The search landscape is very dynamic and almost impossible to stay abreast of
• While an SEO and search marketer’s email inbox can be overwhelming, it can also be a powerhouse that helps you stay in the loop of industry developments and keep an eye on the competition
• These must-have, free Google email alerts will notify you when your site traffic drops or spikes, when your site is hacked, or when there’s a manual penalty applied to your site

SEO and search marketing are challenging because they’re scattered all over the place. Setting up email notifications is the best way to be on top of everything. Some essential email alerts include reputation monitoring alerts, competitors’ social media activity, new backlinks, and more. In fact, Google offers email alerts on both Google Analytics and Search Console which is an absolute need for any website owner. I’ll cover all the essentials you need to set up!

Why are email alerts beneficial?

Speaking of setting up a separate email inbox, it is not a bad idea to keep this archive separate from your business emails. But it is a good idea to add that inbox to your smartphone mail app to be able to keep an eye while on the go.

• Email alerts are hard to miss: I love dashboards that consolidate multiple sources of data under one roof but life gets too fast too often and I can neglect my dashboard for weeks in a row. An email notification is unavoidable. Even if there’s no time to read an email, I can quickly scan it while scrolling through new emails and immediately see if it needs my attention right away.
• Emails get archived: This creates an ever-growing database of everything that has ever been happening with my site. I can search my archive any time to see what happened when and attribute any traffic changes to some alert
• Email operators can be free: You can set up a free inbox at Gmail in seconds and continue using it for free for years until you run out of free space.

Google Analytics alerts

Getting notified of declining traffic is key for your ongoing organic visibility. It is the fundamental step behind a crucial SEO task called SEO maintenance. 

Google Analytics offers a custom alerts feature allowing you to get notified if anything weird is happening with your traffic.

How do you do this?

Login to your Google Analytics dashboard > Customization > Custom Alerts > Click “Manage custom alerts” > Click “NEW ALERT”

1. Traffic drop alerts in Google Analytics

There are various ways you can set up traffic drop alerts in Google Analytics. Here’s the most basic one. Set up your criteria that will trigger an email alert, for example:

• Set up traffic source to “Google”
• Set up your trigger: For the sake of simplicity I just set it to notify me anytime my organic traffic drops below an unusual level

Source: Screenshot from the author

Don’t forget to check the box that says “Send me an email when this alert triggers” to receive an email notification once your traffic drops below a certain level.

You can also set up a certain percentage of the loss – this way you won’t have to modify your threshold as your traffic grows.

Source: Screenshot from the author

2. Referral or direct traffic spike alert

If any of your content assets is going viral, you want to know about that to be able to monitor the progress, help it spread even further, or reply to comments.

Likewise, if your product was mentioned by a social media influencer and suddenly everyone starts typing in your name to go buy from you, you should know immediately.

This is why this alert is a good idea to create.

For this alert, you can exclude Google from the sources of traffic to keep organic growth and declines from skewing your numbers:

Source: Screenshot from the author

3. Revenue drop alert

Finally, if you have Google Analytics for ecommerce set up, make sure to create this alert.

For this one, I keep traffic to all sources and choose “Revenue” in the “Ecommerce” section of the drop down. Again, you can set the percentage of the loss. 

Take some time to estimate the threshold you want to be notified of. Keep in mind your slower days (weekends) or months and note those “normal” revenue declines.

Source: Screenshot from the author 

There are also several more web analytics solutions, many of which also offer email notifications, so it doesn’t have to be Google Analytics.

4. Lower load time alert

Google Analytics records how long your page loads and reports on the metric allowing you to identify slower pages. Ever since site speed became a ranking factor, keeping an eye on your page load time has been crucial. 

You can get notified by Google Analytics when your page average load time suddenly drops, so your dev team can quickly diagnose:

Source: Screenshot from the author 

Google Search Console alerts

Google’s Search Console will send you email alerts of important changes or issues by default. You won’t need to set those up. All you need is to verify your site with Google’s Search Console (here’s how).

Search Console will immediately notify you of three important events:

5. Malware alert

When your site is hacked, you want to know immediately because it is a potential reputation crisis or any private data leak.

Google’s malware alerts are invaluable. If you needed a reason to verify your site with Search Console, this is the one. Google’s malware notifications are the fastest and the most accurate on the market. And they are free!

Source: Screenshot from the author 

Monitoring your own website changes is also a good idea since you will be immediately notified if any code or text is injected on your pages so you can fix and avoid getting your site into Google’s “hacked sites” list.

6. Internal errors alert

If Google notices an unusual spike in indexation issues or internal errors, you will get an email from Search Console.

Source: Screenshot from the author 

There are a few more monitoring solutions that will alert you as soon as your site is down or broken. Even though those are not marketing alerts, I recommend looking at those too.

7. Manual penalty alert

If you get a manual penalty, Google will send you an email alert for you to be able to quickly fix an issue. While I hope you’ll never get any of these, it gives you a certain peace of mind knowing that you’ll get notified if anything happens.

Conclusion

Getting notified is the best way to fix issues quickly to avoid lasting damage. Keep alerted of traffic drops, site attacks, competitors’ social media activity, new links, and more.

Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30-second summary:

• To ensure organic visibility for your seasonal pages, start creating, optimizing, and analyzing them now
• Start creating, organizing, and scheduling seasonal content assets now for a head-start when it’s time to start focusing on driving sales
• Evaluate your past seasonal content performance to be able to recycle, update, and possibly even expand them into standalone projects
• Research your competitive tactics to evaluate how they utilize seasonality in their digital marketing strategy
• Create a detailed editorial calendar to plan out all assignments and deadlines to “catch” the rising interest in seasonal content and deals

Summer is a slow season for many businesses, especially those in a B2B niche. If things are a bit slow for you now, here’s an idea – Use these quiet months to turn your next big season into a huge boost for your business. Here is how you can start preparing for your next big seasonal content marketing campaign now:

1. Check your seasonal rankings now

Do you have a page (or pages) offering seasonal deals, gift ideas, and special offers? The demand for this type of content may be seasonal but its rankings should be permanent. That’s why I always advise against removing these pages or even delinking them throughout the site.

You want those pages to always be accessed by Google for your rankings to be there when the searches start climbing.

If you cannot find your site ranking for your target seasonal queries, it is time to set them up even if the actual season is still months ahead.

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Furthermore, Spyfu offers a comprehensive analysis of all SERP movements for you to identify important patterns and spot a competitor that was doing the best job retaining their organic visibility for seasonal search queries:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Read more about this feature here.

When it comes to SEO, seasonality can be tricky but it definitely needs to be planned ahead as organic SEO takes time to yield results.

2. Start creating seasonal assets (content and social)

Your high season is going to be a busy time for you and your team, so while planning your upcoming campaigns, start creating (and even scheduling) your content assets beforehand.

When brainstorming seasons content ideas, I always turn to Text Optimizer that does a great job suggesting related concepts and angles to focus on:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

The tool relies on semantic analysis.

Content marketing involves a lot of channels, so the more you are prepared, the easier (and more productive) your seasonal campaign will turn out to be.

Furthermore, there are a few cross-channel content marketing tools that can help create and organize your seasonal content. For example, Boosted by Lightricks allows you to easily create festive videos in multiple formats:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

This way you can create content assets that will fit all of your channels. There’s also a handy Brand Kit feature allowing you to maintain a consistent visual identity throughout all your assets:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

The app is available on iPhone and Android for free. You can choose to upgrade for $4.99 per month. I for one have been using the free tier (and the above screenshots are taken when using the free version of the app).

The platform also offers a list of seasonal content ideas and hashtags to make your campaign even more effective.

There are a few more video creation apps out there but I don’t think any of them let you access so many great features for free.

Another great content creation tool that gives you lots of free features for free is, of course, Canva. I’ve been using Canva for free for as long as I can remember without ever having to upgrade.

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Here’s the guide on planning a Christmas marketing campaign.

3. Evaluate your past seasonal campaign performance

If you were publicizing any seasonal content over the years, find all of it to:

• Explore an opportunity for an update (“Can I reuse this asset this year?” as well as “How can I make it better?”)
• Evaluate how effective it was in attracting traffic as well as turning those clicks into conversions

Google Analytics offers an easy way to identify landing pages that did the best job attracting traffic during any period:

• Go to the Acquisition report and select one channel (for example, “social” or “organic search”)
• Select the date range of your seasonal campaign from the last year
• (Optionally) Check the box “Compare” and select “Previous year” from the drop-down
• Click “Landing page” tab in the chart below:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

This gives you an at-a-glance report of the highest traffic page from your previous campaigns. You can further narrow it down by using word filters (for example, type “blog” there to see your best performing seasonal content).

To analyze conversions, you can use Google Analytics goals and funnels. Another tool I am using to closely monitor incoming traffic and its conversions is Finteza. Because it makes it incredibly easy to narrow the data down to identify which traffic source is sending traffic and how well it converts as compared to other pages.

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Read more about Finteza’s conversion funnels here. Finteza costs $25 a month and there’s a 30-day trial available for you to play with the tool before committing.

4. Consider starting a tradition

If any of those previous content assets turned particularly successful, consider expanding that idea into a new project! We all remember the overwhelming success of “Elf Yourself”, Ask Santa, and NORAD mini-projects that were able to engage (and convert) thousands of people year over year.

 A separate (single-page) site will be easier to brand and promote without causing any strong associations with your main business. If you need some inspiration, check out Namify:

Source: Namify

5. Look what your competitors did (or didn’t)

Competitive analysis is important because it motivates a business owner to do more and do it better. Therefore I always include competitive analysis in any of my marketing planning.

There are plenty of ways to research your competitors and what they are doing. My first step is always checking Ahrefs and what other search queries they are ranking for:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Ahrefs is the only platform in the industry that also offers an estimate of traffic each search query sends. Here’s how they calculate it. Ahrefs lowest tier is $99 per month but it is definitely a must-have tool if you are doing SEO.

Similar Web is another nice tool for competitive research. I like looking at their “Referral Traffic” report to identify which sites are sending traffic to my competitors:

Source: Similar Web

This basic report is available for free.

It is also a good idea to set up Google Alerts to be modified when your competitors are doing something new.

6. Create your editorial calendar

Every year people seem to start preparing for big holidays earlier. It is not unusual to spot a Holiday-centric social media ad in October. This can actually cause both excitement and irritation.

So the important question remains: When should I start publishing seasonal content?

This may depend from niche to niche, so I always suggest typing your target seasonal search query into Google Trends:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

It also helps to compare several of your target search queries. For example, in this niche the demand seems to be pretty consistent over the years:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

When it comes to organizing and scheduling your content assets, there are a few great calendar plugins to choose from. I mostly use CoSchedule because it allows me to also schedule those updates to your social media channels as well as assign certain content assets to various contributors. 

CoSchedule costs $29 per month. It supports scheduling to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. I prefer the tool because it combines on-site content planning (assigning content assets to be written) and social media scheduling. This allows me to create a very well-aligned content marketing campaign and makes it easy to organize editorial workflow across many channels.

Instagram also offers a helpful guide on planning your seasonal content strategy here:

Source: Screenshot created by the author

Conclusion

Seasonal planning is a great way to make the most of those seasonal interest spikes and build more sales. The earlier you start preparing for your big season, the more time you have to handle an increased amount of sales. Good luck!

Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

30-second summary:

• A traffic drop doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong – in most cases, it is natural
• All sites have experienced a decline in traffic throughout their lifetime which can be explained by seasonality, loss of PPC budget, and many other factors
• When it comes to organic search traffic decline, it is often caused by stagnant content, the emergence of new competitors, or loss of backlinks
• To diagnose a traffic drop, identify which traffic source is declining, then find which pages have lost traffic
• It is important to avoid hasty decisions, take your time exploring whether you lost any positions and which pages replaced yours
• Try to evaluate why this shift has happened and how you may fix it

Have you ever checked your analytics and saw a sudden or gradual organic traffic drop? Who hasn’t? If there’s one common thing in just about any marketing strategy: All of us have dealt with organic traffic decrease on many occasions. Any website out there has seen traffic dips, often even regularly.

How to deal with an organic traffic drop when you see something like this inside your Google Analytics?

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Here are four well-defined steps to take when diagnosing a traffic drop:

Step 1: Check which traffic source was effected

This is an obvious one but too many people automatically assume it’s Google organic traffic that has dropped.

So make sure it hasn’t been PPC traffic that has exhausted your budget. This happens more than you think!

So assuming, it is an organic traffic drop, let’s go on checking:

Step 2: Which page has dropped?

To quickly find out which pages dropped, navigate to your Google Analytics account Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels. Click “Organic” there and in the date range, check “Compare to” and in the drop-down select “Previous period”:

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Now scroll down and click the “Landing pages” tab to see all your pages and how their traffic of this week compares to the previous week.

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

No need to scroll a lot here. If you see a traffic dip, chances are, your higher-ranking page or pages were affected. So look at the top of the list.

Now, most importantly, if all your pages took a hit, that’s a good reason to worry. This may be an indicator of a site being affected by a recent Google Update or even a penalty (the latter is much less common these days). This article lists a few good ways to research whether there was an update and how to evaluate whether you may have been affected.

A more common scenario is that you will see some pages dropping. Others will remain intact or even start gaining in traffic. This is a good indicator you shouldn’t be worried about any possible action from Google. Most pages go up and down search engine result pages all the time. 

Now, you grab the list of declining URLs and research them further.

Step 3: Was there any impact on rankings?

It is not such a rare thing: We see a gradual decline in traffic without any obvious impact on rankings. This can be explained by two possible reasons:

• People just don’t search for that query that much anymore. This was very common in 2020 when searching patterns shifted dramatically. And this can still be the case for seasonal queries (think “costumes,” “ski gear”, “swimsuits,” etc.)
• Search engine result pages have added a new search element that steals attention and clicks.

So how do you diagnose if your rankings drop?

This question is harder to answer these days. If you are monitoring your rankings, an obvious step here would be to go check there. 

Google’s Search Console is another platform to check but it is not easy to quickly diagnose the ranking drop there. The tool is a little behind in showing data. Still, if you give it some time, you can analyze your rankings thereby using “Compare” tab within the “Performance” section of the reports:

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Once you choose your date range, scroll down to your data and filter it by the “Position difference” column.

Mind that all you need to note here is lost or declined first-page ranking because your second-page rankings wouldn’t have driven traffic to lose anyway. So again, breathe.

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Instead, you can filter Search Console data by “Previous positions” to see, for example, lost #1 rankings:

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Another – probably smarter – way to diagnose hit queries is to judge by traffic. Search console shows the number of clicks each query is sending and how it compares to what it used to send. If Google is not the only search engine you are concerned about, using Finteza you can spot search queries that are sending less traffic than they used to:

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April, 2021)

Finteza’s default search keyword report consolidates data from all search engines you appear in. You do need it running for some time to accumulate this data. It is easy to integrate.

Finteza is paid (costs  $25 per 100,000 unique users a month) but it is the only web analytics solution that still offers reliable keyword data.

For a better understanding of what is going with your organic traffic, I suggest using all of the above (and more) methods. Again, with search personalization and localization, it is very hard to understand where you are gaining (or losing) from, so combining data from multiple sources is the key.

Step 4: Identify why these ranking dropped

Here comes another tedious part in our analysis. More often than not, your rankings may fluctuate or drop due to Google finding a better page to rank. This may happen because:

• Your query deserves freshness and there is a fresher page that was boosted on top of yours. If this is the case, you’d have got used to fluctuations by now.
• Your competitor created a better page that has better backlinks.
• You have lost some important backlinks which has led to losing some equity

Your position monitoring solution may give you some clues as to which page has overcome you in SERPs. Most rank monitoring platforms come with “SERP tracking” feature that grabs a snapshot of your important SERPs on a regular basis.

You can monitor your target SERP movements for you, for example:

Source: SE Ranking

For high-search-volume queries, SpyFu is keeping a record of key SERP movements:

Image source: Spyfu

To make it easy to spot your lost backlinks that may have accounted for declined positions, use link monitoring tools. They keep a record of when exactly each link was lost, and so make it easy for you to evaluate if this is what may have had an impact on your rankings and organic traffic:

Source: LinkChecker.pro

When you know which page is replacing you in search results, try to find why. There can be an array of reasons, including the most common ones (as well as the combination of such): 

• Fresher content
• Better (longer, higher-quality, more visual, more in-depth, etc.) content. Here’s how to analyze and improve.
• Better optimized content
• More semantically relevant content. Here’s how to diagnose and improve.
• Better (and yes, more) backlinks. Here’s a list to find and compare backlinks
• More trusted content (May be connected to backlinks but also authorship)
• Better referenced internally. Here’s how to analyze to improve

Conclusion

Keeping your traffic in control is beyond your powers. What you can do is to keep an eye (building a dashboard would make it easier and more consistent) as well as create a well-set routine for analyzing a possible dip.

When you see organic traffic decline or dip, it doesn’t usually mean that your site is under any kind of filter or penalty (which is most often assumed). In most cases, this is a perfectly natural ongoing SERP fluctuation. Stay calm and carefully analyze what has changed (and why). Don’t rush to take any action or fix anything until you check various data sources and take time to come up with a strategic plan. And most importantly: Just breathe!

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

30-second summary:

• Analyzing and understanding website data helps enhance potential sales and conversions
• Google Analytics records the exit rate of specific website pages, helping you pinpoint exactly where users abandon your sales filter
• Google Tag Manager can help identify if users are leaving forms uncompleted, leaving you tantalizingly close to conversion without sticking the landing
• Recording and analyzing common user search terms on a website will reveal if consumers are seeking services they are willing to pay for but you do not provide
• Search analysis tools will shine a light on any underutilized and under-monetized website pages, helping you make the most of your PPC budget

In the age of online marketing and data intelligence, every click matters. Traffic is a great metric for the potential success of your business, after all. Alas, traffic means little without conversions. A brick-and-mortar store that sees plenty of footfall but fails to make sufficient sales will be considered a failed business model. The online world is no different. Without conversions, a website is just an expensive – and ultimately unsuccessful – advertising campaign.

A conversion is the completion of any pre-determined action on a website. This could be downloading free content in exchange for joining a mailing list or interacting with the site through social media or a contact form. The gold standard of conversions will always be sales, though. If your product or service is not turning a profit, something needs to change.

By studying and understanding website data, you can pinpoint missed opportunities for sales on your site. Utilizing tools and software, you’ll understand what visitors are looking for and why they bounce without converting.

Data to review

Here are four core KPIs that should be studied to understand why visitors leave your site without making a conversion. By mastering and understanding this data, you can make any necessary adjustments to your website and marketing strategy – potentially reaping financial rewards.

1. Google Analytics exit pages

The exit page of a website, which is tracked on Google Analytics, is the last interaction a user has with your website before terminating a session. Google Analytics records exit pages as a percentage, referring to this as an exit rate.

In an ideal world, the most popular exit page on any website will be the thank you page after completing a conversion. At this stage, the user has concluded their business to the satisfaction of all parties.

If you notice a high exit rate on a different page, it merits investigation. Something about this page is deterring visitors from converting. Ergo, this exit page is potentially responsible for missed sales.

Be aware that an exit rate is not the same as a bounce rate. Bounce rate relates to users that leave a site without any interaction. Exit pages are recorded when users begin the journey toward conversion but fail to complete the process.

By understanding which pages on your website have the highest exit rate, you can improve your sales. Take a look at this page and consider why users are not completing a conversion. Potential explanations include:

• An unclear or weak call to action
• A lengthy sales funnel with too many steps
• Insufficient information about your product or service, failing to convince the user to convert – or too much data, confusing a user and causing them to lose interest
• Lack of preferred payment options (that is, ewallets – not everybody likes to use their credit card online)

Tweak this exit page to improve user experience and convince users to conclude a conversion. This is easier if one page of your website, in particular, has a high exit rate. If exit pages are equally spread throughout your site, it may be worth considering a complete overhaul and refresh of the content.

2. Google Tag Manager

The internet has brought a lot of good to the world, but enhancing patience is not among these benefits. With so much competition out there, users are unlikely to tolerate any kind of interface issues when attempting to complete a conversion. You can use Google Tag Manager to identify these issues.

Form completion is arguably the best use of GTM. If you study the analytics of a form and find that it is frequently being abandoned before completion, something is amiss. You had the user on the end of your hook – they would not have started to fill in the form otherwise. Unfortunately, something made them change their mind and you missed out on a sale.

Use the GTM debugging mode to ensure that a technical hitch was not to blame. If this is the case, it’s time to look inward. Some of the common reasons for users to abandon forms before completion include:

• The form is just too long and cumbersome! Slow and steady may win a race, but it bores the life out of online consumers
• Unnecessary questions. If you’re not selling age-restricted products or services, don’t ask for a user’s date of birth. Unless it’s relevant to the product, do not ask for clarification of gender or race
• Pop-up advertising. Unfortunately, you may be standing trial for the sins of other sites here – previous experiences elsewhere may tarnish a user’s view of all online forms
• Lack of assurance about the safety and security of any data that will be provided. Make it clear that you are not in the business is selling personal information to other businesses
• Lack of mobile device compatibility. Over half of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets. Ensure your form is not fiddly and persnickety to complete on such a device

Source: Google Tag Manager

Using GTM to gain insights into why forms remain uncompleted can be an easy fix, and potentially turn half-completed questionnaires into successful conversions. Don’t miss out on a possible sale for something as prosaic as a needlessly complicated sign-up process.

3. Search records

As we touched upon previously, consumers want to feel understood by a business. The modern visitor to a website will ideally not wish to search to find what they’re looking for. Visitors want to find everything they need before their eyes and to see that your product or service will resolve a particular pain point.

If users are making use of the search function, configure the site to record search terms. This provides the perfect opportunity to study what your potential customers are seeking – and presumably not finding – on your site. If they located what they were looking for, they would likely have completed a conversion.

Understanding what users are searching for means that you can improve and enhance your offering to apply these missing services. Alternatively, it may just reveal that your copy needs a little updating. Check whether users are using terminology that does not match up with keywords used on your site. This is an easy fix with a content refresh and reduces the frustration of being so near but yet so far from a conversion.

This will also have a welcome side-effect of potentially bolstering your SERP standing. Google is moving toward a model of enhanced search equity, which makes your use of copy all the more important. It will be very welcome for a website’s page ranking – and conversion potential – to stand or fall on quality and relevance of content, as opposed to restrictive technical obstacles.

4. Traffic value

To paraphrase George Orwell, “all website traffic is equal, but some traffic is more equal than others.” Some pages on your website will inevitably demonstrate greater potential for sales and conversions. Investing in a search analysis tool can aid you in identifying these pages so you can focus your financial outlay on them. Google Trends can also be an invaluable ally here.

Your website will likely utilize at least one cost-per-conversion model, such as Google Ads. You may be using several, with Facebook Ads (which includes Instagram Ads) and even Microsoft Advertising providing plentiful leads to conversions. While PPC business models are constantly evolving, some tactics are evergreen.

Perhaps the most critical of these is identifying which pages on your site have potential that is not being maximized. By undertaking SEO analysis, you will gain a greater understanding of what users are looking for online. In learning this, you may realize that you are placing too much of a marketing budget on one page when judicious use of keywords on another may yield greater results.

For example, it’s always tempting to place all of your financial muscle on a completion page. We have discussed already how users are looking for a brief and practical conversion funnel. Do not overlook the potential to educate and entertain before pushing for conversion, though. If you embrace – and more importantly, perfect – content marketing, you will convince users to click through to a conversion page after learning more about your offering. This enhances your traffic stats, potentially building brand loyalty in the process.

What next?

Now that you are aware of these metrics, use them to calculate your conversions. That’s easily done – just divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors, then multiply the total by 100. How does that number look to you?

If you feel that your conversion rate is lacking in any of these metrics, there are steps that you can take to improve it. These include:

• Simplifying any forms and streamlining your sales filter
• Improve and simplify the copy on pages with a high exit rate
• Considering adding a pop-up with a renewed CTA – or even the promise of a discount or freebie – when a user tries to close a common exit page
• Review your search records and ensure your offering matches consumer needs and expectations
• Keep up to date with search trends and ensure you are monetizing the right pages on your website

Follow these steps and you’ll potentially see your conversions soar. Few things are more frustrating than missing out on a sale that came enticingly close. These minor improvements will not take much work but could make a real difference to your bottom line.

FAQ

What is a website conversion?

Any website will contain a range of actions for visitors to complete. This could be signing up for a newsletter mailing list, sharing a post on personal social media channels, making a query through a contact form, or ideally making a purchase. If a visitor to your website completes this action, it is considered a conversion. The number of people that do so compared to your traffic quantity is referred to as a conversion rate.

What is a good conversion rate for a website?

This depends on a range of factors, including your industry and your anticipated return on investment. A website that operates on a cost-per-conversion model, such as Google Ads, needs a higher conversion rate to turn a substantial profit. The average conversion rate on this platform is circa three percent. What matters most is that you are seeing a return on your investment – and that your conversion rate continues to grow, not shrink.

How to increase the conversion rate on a website?

The most effective way to increase a conversion rate is to make the process as fast and simple as possible for consumers. Create a superior user experience by making it obvious what a visitor needs to do to convert, and by removing any unnecessary steps from the resulting filter. Every additional action you ask of a user gives them another opportunity to lose patience and walk away.

How to calculate a website conversion rate?

There is a simple formula for calculating the conversion rate of your website. Track your conversions over a set period, divide this by the number of visits to the website in this time, then multiple the total by 100. For example, a website that enjoys 700 conversions from 12,500 visitors over 30 days has a monthly conversion rate of 5.6%.

How to set up conversion rate tracking on your website?

Any website must track conversions to ensure optimum efficiency and return on investment. Major platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads have in-built tracking facilities. Learn how to utilize these tools and turn the data to your advantage.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK.

30-second summary:

• Affiliate marketers can use Google Analytics to do the following – Google Event Tracking to monitor on-site engagements, Google Dashboards for analyzing user behavior, and build custom Audiences for improving audience retargeting.
• As an affiliate marketer, Google Analytics does not provide you with off-site tracking, so you can’t see what actions a person performs on a merchant site after leaving your website.
• With server-side tracking and Google Analytics, you can monitor an entire affiliate funnel through one platform. Advantages include the ability to create lookalike audiences based on people who made a purchase, run improved retargeting campaigns, and export lookalike data across multiple ad platforms.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights for anyone managing a website. In this article, I will discuss how to use Google Analytics for your affiliate marketing campaigns. I will then show you how to use third-party tools to provide you with additional insights to generate more revenue from your existing traffic and make better use of your ad budget.

How marketers currently use Google Analytics for affiliate tracking

If you are using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads as your primary customer acquisition channel, your profit margins are directly tied to ad costs. Any edge you gain that improves your ROAS will provide you with a competitive advantage in the ad auction.

There are three primary levers of a PPC campaign, the ad copy, the audience targeting, and the landing page experience. The insights you gain through Google Analytics can help you improve audience targeting and the landing page experience.

Google Event Tracking allows you to track outbound clicks on affiliate links. Once set up, the dashboard is accessible through Behavior > Events. If you know the average conversion rate for a product, you can assign each click a value by setting up Goal Values.

You then need to make modifications to the GA tracking code or add a special configuration to your GTM tag. This article covers event tracking in more detail.

With Google Event Tracking, you can monitor your assumed profit margins for a campaign through Google Analytics. Of course, these figures are far from accurate.

When implemented effectively, Goal Values provide you with a theoretical model for predicting your campaign’s profitability. However, it does not reflect your actual sales. To access this data, you need to log in to your affiliate dashboard, check the sales, and see if the predicted profit margins align with the real results. Moreover, affiliate platforms provide differing levels of insights. That means you might only get a “gross sale value” that covers sales from all traffic, as opposed to traffic from one website.

The second thing most affiliate marketers will do is review the information provided through Google Analytics dashboards to monitor what people are doing on their landing pages. For example, you might monitor how far down a page people scroll, how much time they spend on the page, the bounce rate, and more. You can also see the number of affiliate link outbound clicks.

You can run A/B tests and other experiments to check how your actions impact the CTR to affiliate links. You can adjust the position of affiliate links and the placement of the products you are promoting to improve CTR.

Insights gained from Google Analytics provide you with essential data to test your assumptions. You can use this data to improve the landing page experience and boost your CTR.

Any improvements you make to the landing page experience can and should improve your ROAS.

The final thing you can do is use Google Analytics to improve your initial targeting. If you are tracking who clicked on the affiliate link, you can create a refined lookalike audience for Google AdWords through Google Analytics. The following guide discusses audience targeting and Similar Audiences.

Any improvement to your targeting will give you an edge in the ad auction.

What are the limitations of Google Analytics for affiliate tracking?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring the on-site activities of your visitors. As a business owner that controls an entire funnel, you can place your Google Analytics tag across your site, including the checkout page where the transaction actually takes place. Therefore, Google Analytics provides you with all the data you might conceivably need to monitor and optimize a funnel.

Rather than relying on assumed transaction values, you can monitor everything through one or more Google Analytics dashboards. Unfortunately, as an affiliate marketer, since you can’t place your GA tag on the merchant “thank you” page, Google Analytics fails to provide you with these insights. You are forced to jump between your affiliate programs, the ads platform, and Google Analytics to monitor how your PPC campaigns are performing. 

I discussed why you couldn’t use GA Event Tracking for the final stages of an affiliate funnel. It is an inconvenience that prevents the real attribution of transactions to an ad click. 

This issue impacts your marketing at two crucial levels, which will inevitably increase your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and your ability to automate your campaign targeting and optimization:

1. Your entire audience is blended into general “buckets,” which prevents you from displaying relevant ads according to the users’ positions in the funnel.
2. You can’t build lookalike audiences of your best possible “customers” because you don’t know who’s done what. 

While these two factors will undoubtedly reduce your profit margins, they will also undermine your long-term business objectives and ability to compete on the ad auction.

The final inconvenience you’ll face is that you can’t share custom audiences generated through Google Analytics across other ad platforms. To be fair, Google Analytics was never designed to provide off-site analytics tracking. However, as an affiliate marketer, enriching your Google Analytics data with off-site conversion data can bring a lot of value to your business. I’ll discuss how off-site tracking works in the next section.

How offline conversion tracking works

Offline conversion tracking ties actions taken by users on your site and actions taken on sites or systems outside the reach of the initial site’s Google Analytics tag. The most common methods for implementing off-site analytics tracking are through server-side tracking API (also known as postback tracking) and manual data / CSV upload.

Out of the two options, JavaScript tracking is the simplest method to implement. However, strict browser privacy settings and AdBlocks have made this method increasingly unreliable. Moreover, with JavaScript, there are further restrictions like browser memory, shortened cookie runtimes, and denial of access to session storage.

With server-side tracking, unique click ID data is passed during the outbound click and is then sent back via a server-side URL. The unique click ID value is the common denominator that links a click from your website to actions on a separate site.

The data flow is managed through a postback URL. In the following blog post, I share technical information about how postback URLs work and why they’re important.

The main benefit of server side tracking is that it is not affected by ad blockers, ITP, ETP.

As an affiliate marketer, off-site marketing analytics provides you with a complete overview of your marketing funnel. You can track an off-site purchase. With this data, you get the same insights and advantages as a business where the end sale is made on their site.

An additional advantage of off-site tracking is that you can sync conversion data across multiple channels/ platforms and then use this data to create custom audiences. You can, therefore, test your marketing funnel utilizing cheaper traffic sources, then use the data to build lookalike audiences for ads on Facebook or Google, for example.

Unfortunately, not all ad platforms support off-site tracking. Google introduced off-site tracking in 2013. Bing Ads introduced the service in 2017, while social media platforms such as Twitter and TikTok have yet to provide a suitable solution for affiliate marketers.

Solutions for offsite tracking

Offsite tracking has multiple advantages for people operating in the affiliate marketing niche. That’s not to say that it’s not without problems. You need a lot of technical knowledge to set up a system to connect data from a browser to the server-side.

Google Analytics provides an extensive API that enables developers to implement server-side tracking. There are three primary methods for implementing off-site tracking:

1. Google Analytics API: Requires the highest level of development skills. However, the Google Analytics API provides programmers with the best potential for complete server-side tracking.
2. Google Tag Manager: A High level of technical skills. Google Tag Manager will only allow you to effectively track off-site actions if you can add Google Tags to the merchant’s site.
3. Third-Party Affiliate Tracking Software: Plug & play solutions that connect Google Analytics and other Ads marketplaces (Bing, Facebook, and other platforms).

Due to the ever-evolving data and analytics space, developing and keeping up with the constant changes requires a significant investment of time and resources. Large companies might choose to invest in a custom in-house solution for off-site tracking. However, solutions that utilize the Google Analytics API are too expensive for most affiliate marketers.

Affiliate tracking software like AnyTrack.io, a company that I founded, provides a native server-side tracking integration with Google Analytics, Bing Ads, and other ad networks. It’s certainly a lot easier than hiring a developer to create a custom solution.

On balance, regardless of your approach, the limitations of offsite tracking are outweighed by the sizable benefits. That is, assuming you want to optimize your marketing funnel and increase your ROAS.

Integrating Google Analytics With Offsite Tracking

Implementing Google Analytics with offsite tracking software like AnyTrack.io is straightforward. Google Analytics already provides the standard dashboards for tracking visitor flow across a site from landing page to conversion.

When you integrate offsite tracking, you are, fundamentally, just gaining the same type of data as someone who manages an entire funnel across a single site would see. The benefit is that you get access to data you can use to improve your ROAS.

Case Study

One of our clients, Cliverse.com, has six websites in the pet care industry. Most of the traffic to their sites comes from organic search. They were facing a data challenge that you may be familiar with; they found it difficult to understand what products were converting and from which pages those conversions were occurring.

In addition, PPC ads were more expensive than needed. For example, they were running retargeting ads to people who had purchased an affiliate product suggesting they make a purchase. With better data, they could improve ROAS.

Using AnyTrack.io, Cliverse could finally see from what page, and which link on a page was generating the conversions. Through analyzing the data, Cliverse was able to increase revenue by 30% thanks to page optimization. Because they have the complete picture, they are now able to run paid media campaigns to their site with full confidence.

Conclusion

Bridging the gap between your google analytics data and affiliate network conversions is the optimal way to improve your position at the ad auction. With a full overview of your affiliate funnel, you gain actionable insights on what triggers conversions and generates sales. It’s a vital edge that can help improve your ROAS.

In this guide, I showed you three ways to use Google Analytics as an affiliate marketer. You can use Google Event Tracking to monitor people who click on your affiliate links. With Goal Values set up, you can track your campaigns’ probable results. Moreover, you can run retargeting campaigns and create Custom Audiences for future ad campaigns.

Through the Google Analytics dashboards, you can gain insights into your site visitors’ actions. You can use these insights to validate the assumptions you make when running conversion optimization tests.

While Google Analytics is a powerful tool, you can’t see what actions people take when they leave your site. If you integrate off-site tracking, you get access to this data. Most third-party tools, such as the one we created, allow you to use Google Analytics to get a complete overview of your affiliate marketing funnel.

As an affiliate marketer, off-site tracking combined with Google Analytics provides you with valuable insights that can help you improve your ROAS. Follow the steps shared in this guide to see the results for yourself.

Laurent Malka is Co-founder of AnyTrack.io, a plug & play conversion tracking platform. He can be found on Twitter @laurent_malka.

30-second summary:

• Google Analytics is an important web analytics tool from Google used in digital marketing.
• Many digital marketers and website owners use it to track and measure the performance of their websites.
• There are a lot of Google Analytics features that perform different functions. All working towards helping you get the best of your website.
• However, there are some Google Analytics features that are underrated. Many digital marketers don’t recognize them and what they are capable of doing to improve the performance of their website.
• This piece will highlight seven of them and how they can be helpful to you.

Google Analytics is a web analytics product from Google that has helped a lot of digital marketers and website owners ascertain the performance of their website. Approximately 29 million websites use it as an analytics tool. A lot of Google Analytics features are only known to a few digital marketers. Many people rush to it to check how page views they got over a period of time or how many conversations they got. To these people, that’s only what this great tool can for them – the basics. But it’s far beyond that.

There are some features it has which can help improve the performance of your website but are underrated.

Are you hearing this for the first time? Don’t worry that’s why I’m here and this piece will discuss seven of them and how they can be helpful to your site.

1. Custom alert

This Google Analytics feature can be located when you log into your report and tap on the ‘customization’ drop-down menu. When set up, you will be alerted through emails when there is a change in your traffic or behavior of your website.

This could be on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For a beginner who is curious to grow his traffic or conversion, it is simple to keep your eye on it. Another crucial function of a custom alert is to automatically notify you of trends in your data.

This could be tracking and informing you in real-time about the events on your website be it positive or negative. The advantage here is that you can fix any negative development before it becomes obvious. You can follow the screenshot below to set up your custom alert. 

2. Channel groupings

It’s easy to manage the traffic source to your website with channel groupings feature. This feature is on default on your analytics report and it organizes and groups your common source of traffic. 

For instance, you launched an ad campaign on Facebook, and Instagram as social media tactics to grow your small business,  the channels grouping will allow you to compare and analyze the performance of each of the traffic channels.

 For a marketer to want to be more specific with his traffic channel, you can create custom channels grouping and apply it to your report.

 Its effect will be seen in how your data display but won’t change the data itself. To make use of channels grouping on your GA, when you sign in to your report and locate admin at the bottom left. Click on it and you will list of features which channel groupings are one of.

3. Behavior flow

When users visit your website, they move from one page or event to another in an attempt to achieve their desire which may be to get help through your content. It is a visual representation that can help you understand how your audience interacts with your site, the content they enjoy, and the ones that turn them off.

 The behavior flow of your site simply displays the node, the connections to pages on your website, and exit. After consuming your content, do your audiences click on another link to learn more? Or do they bounce because they aren’t satisfied? 

This increases your bounce rate and a clear indication that you need to work on that particular content. Below is a screenshot of the behavior flow from my blog.

4. Ecommerce tracking

For those who want to start an ecommerce business or those already in the field. Tracking the performance of your ecommerce website is possible with ecommerce tracking feature on GA. 

As a merchant who sells on Shopify or BigCommerce, you’ll want to know where your high-paying customers come from, how they interact with the products you have in your store, and which product converts more.

 With the knowledge of this, you can identify the location of customers that make you smile when you remember the number of sales you have made, the products they like, and things to fix to continue to be ahead of your competitors. 

Below is how to set up ecommerce  tracking on GA

• Sign in to your report on GA
• Click on Admin on the bottom left and you will be in a new window
• Click on ecommerce  settings
• Enable ecommerce  
• Enable enhanced ecommerce  reporting and save
• The final step is to set up your tracking code. Learn how to do it here.

Once your ecommerce site is being tracked on GA, you will gain insight into the following metrics on your dashboard; unique purchases, revenue, quantity, conversion rate, average order revenue, etc.

5. Demographic

Some digital marketers don’t know the importance of analyzing the demography of users who visit their websites.  Age, sex, and interest category of your audience are key metrics that should matter to you. 

You can use them to make decisions that can improve the performance of your website. Take, for instance, you run a small business website on women’s clothing, and your demography metrics show that 80% of your visitors in the last month were male within the age range of 18 and 24.

That’s a red flag that you’re targeting the wrong audience. A female clothing line business should have more female visitors. Also, the age range of 18 and 24 are mostly young people who are either schooling or unemployment. Hence won’t have much money to spend on clothes. Below is how you can locate the demographic metrics in your GA.

6. Site speed report

Speed is one of the key factors Google considers when ranking your website. It even became more obvious with the introduction of Accelerated Mobile Page, AMP. Not paying attention to this one of the SEO mistakes you make. Google Analytics tracks the load time of your web pages.

The aim is to give you reasons to learn how to improve the speed of your website. A web page that loads slowly is a turn off for your audiences. Nobody wants to wait for a long time for a page to load when there are many web pages competing for their attention.

 It can increase the bounce rate of your website or even cost you sales if you sell online. Site speed is an indicator of a healthy site, hence the need to learn how to make it happen.

7. UTM parameters

To some digital marketers and small businesses, this might be the first time of hearing this marketing acronym. Don’t be confused, UTM simply stands for Urchin Tracking Modules. They are codes you add at the end of your URL. This is crucial if you run ad campaigns for your business. 

For example, if you run an ad campaign on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn and made a lot of sales, you won’t know which of the social media platforms drove more sales to you. 

The only way to know that is if you add campaign parameters to your URLs which is tracked on GA. For every user who clicked on the URL, the parameter is sent to Google  Analytics. The goal is to identify the platform in which the campaign performed better and intensify your strategy on it to make more sales next time. 

Wrapping up

The performance of your website should be of utmost importance to you as a digital marketer,  small business or someone who earns passive income online. Google Analytics has all it takes to keep your site healthy all the time. 

Google Analytics features factored in all aspects of your website be it blog, ecommerce, or any other kind of website.

Yours is to take your time to identify these features, explore them, make use of them and you will be surprised at how they can keep your website at its best all the time.

Chuks Chukwuemeka is a content creator, blogger, digital marketer, and founder of DepreneurDigest.com, an online business blog.

30-second summary:

• Your content marketing may sound like a success story, until your CEO asks, “Is all this effort and spending really paying off?”
• You’re doing a great job if you’re one of the 39 % of marketers who are successfully tracking the ROI of their content marketing, if not, there’s a long way to go.
• Evaldas Mockus, Director of SEO at Omnisend helps you pick content marketing metrics that matter for your business.
• More on Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) content, and their respective goals.

You’re publishing content, traffic is picking up, your posts look amazing, and subscribers are opening your emails. It sounds like a content marketing team success story – until your CEO asks:

Is all this effort and spending really paying off?

You’re doing a great job if you’re one of the 39 % of marketers who are successfully tracking the ROI of their content marketing – everyone should be doing this!

But there’s no point in tracking data if you’re unable to access a document with content result numbers that are clear and easily understandable. I’m here to help you pick the metrics that matter for your business.

Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) content have different goals respectively, which means you need to differentiate your existing and new content for each funnel stage and find the right metrics for them.

To build a detailed metrics dashboard, you need access to Google Analytics (GA), Google Search Console (GSC), and Facebook Pixel.

ToFu key content marketing metrics

The main goals for ToFu content:

• Awareness – you need to reach new audiences and attract a steady stream of new visitors to grow your business
• Branding initiatives – spreading your company name and mission with easily recognizable branding helps you to build authority in your niche.

Depending on your business and historical data you can also have other goals.

Even after reaching these goals, you still need to focus on your buyer persona. You’ll be lying to yourself and your stakeholders if you’re selling software for marketing agency management, but your ToFu content is focused only on traffic growth which is not related to your business.

I can bet that it would be almost impossible to convert those visitors into paying customers.

To understand how you’re performing with your content marketing activities on ToFu, track these metrics:

• New visits – the formula is simple – more marketing activities equals more traffic. GA
• Percentage of new visitors – try to keep a good balance here. The average percentage of new visitors on site is 68%, if your number is extremely high or low, you need to identify the reasons why. GA
• New direct visitors – this number shows that people know your brand and are actively looking for you. This is often your most profitable ‘organic’ traffic source. GA
• Branded Search – how many people come via a branded search. This metric shows the success of all your marketing efforts. Sometimes it’s not the best product that wins but the best-known one that wins. GSC
• Pixeled audience – build your audience for remarketing purposes. Facebook pixel

These five metrics alone can easily show if you’re going in the right direction, especially when you compare historical data and map it to your activities.

Additional drill-down metrics like content bounce rate, pages/visits, and average session length can help you to understand the quality of your blog content and user behavior. But there is no need to focus on these on a weekly basis.

MoFu key content marketing metrics

The biggest challenge in the middle of the funnel is to convert “problem aware” prospects into leads. At this stage, you’re mainly focusing on two goals: driving visitors back to your site and converting visitors into leads.

You need to deliver leads for your nurturing campaigns. Brands that are the most effective at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost, according to Forrester Research.

To understand if you’re doing a great job on MoFu, follow these metrics:

• Visitor recency – how frequently do visitors come back to your site? If visitors are coming back pretty often, this is a good sign that your content quality is top-notch and satisfies their particular needs. If your visitor recency number is too low, then you need to focus on two different aspects – 1. Improving your content quality and 2. Building links to your website so you get a better ranking in SERP. GA
• Returning direct visitors – these are returning visitors who are actively looking for you again. Finding ways to get new visitors to keep coming back to your site with fresh, engaging, and relevant content will boost interest and keep people coming back for more. GA
• Leads generated: how many leads are you generating? This part can be a little more complicated. First, you need to describe exactly how you’re acquiring leads, and secondly, you’ll need to set up Goal tracking in GA.

Remember that you know your business better than anyone else. If you wish to delve deeper, you can always add other metrics like: growth of retargeting lists, blog banners click percentage or even the number of social shares.

BoFu key content marketing metrics

Only a few buyers will move directly to purchase simply from reading an amazing article. B2B brands should track the customer journey throughout the whole funnel, from the very first website visit to conversions such as offer registrations.

Of course, the main goal at BoFu is to convert those leads you’ve captured earlier into loyal customers.

The main metrics to track here include:

• Conversions – this is the primary number out of all your metrics.
• How many visitors leave your offer/demo page – You need to be constantly working on offer/demo page improvements. If you can see that a high percentage of visitors are leaving these pages without taking any action, there’s a good chance that by optimizing these pages, you can give your conversion rate a solid boost.
• Content that is generating customers – This is not a metric, but understanding what types of content is responsible for getting customers will help you to prioritize your upcoming content topics. Also, your PPC team can help to bring more traffic for these pages immediately.

It is time to build your report

Big data and a ton of different metrics can be intimidating, and often a waste of your precious time. As we’ve seen, with just three-four key metrics on each stage of the funnel, you can accurately gauge the direction of your content marketing efforts.

The selected metrics are just the beginning. For a true analysis, you need to understand what these numbers mean and which actions influence improvements throughout the funnel.

When you have accumulated a couple of months’ worth of data, you will start to see patterns and it will become easier to plan your new activities. Now, you can begin to understand exactly where to optimize, and when.

Imagine – that after working hard for two months, you see a big increase in your ToFu metrics. Traffic is growing, your brand searches volume is skyrocketing, but your conversions rate is constantly going down. Only by getting all of your data in place will you be able to see the patterns clearly, and find a solution to bring only relevant traffic that converts.

Evaldas Mockus is Director of SEO at Omnisend.