Source: Invesp

Source: Salesforce

Source: Uberflip

Internet users were just starting to use high-speed broadband access, instead of that slow dial-up. Gone were the days of waiting. We could download a whole song in 10 minutes!

Fast forward to 2012: Computers are even more polished, and the Internet is faster. Ten years ago, Internet usage was more of a leisure — today, it’s practically as important as water or oxygen.

Via Mashable

Buckle your seat belts, marketers, and have your moustache comb firmly on hand, because 2013 is set to bring more facial hair, smaller houses and the rise of ‘celery stalkers’ – but more on them later.

One of the world’s leading trendspotters, Marian Salzman, employs a process of pattern recognition that has launched or popularised concepts such a ‘metrosexual’ and ‘singleton’. Salzman, who is CEO of Havas PR North America, is releasing a new book detailing more than 150 predictions of what is set to be hot and trendy, called, What’s Next? What to Expect in 2013.

So what else does this year have in store? Vacations will be swapped for wellness holidays to get plastic surgery, attend fertility clinics or receive dental care. We’ll see a rise in ‘copreneurship’ – couples who go into business together and people are going to delay entering the workforce and will opt to stay in school, take non-paying internships and use ‘life as their classroom’.

Economics is also set to go a bit alternative, with Salzman predicting bartering will become more popular as well as new trends like ‘freecycling’ (giving away unwanted clothes to prevent them ending up in landfill) and ‘freeganism’ (reclaiming and eating discarded food). Money is also going to be far less important as we move through the rest of the year – people will just want enough to be comfortable.

One of the biggest, and less bizarre, trends that Salzman predicts is that we will all simply start slowing down and rethinking quality of life with interests predicted to grow in trends like slow cooking and eating, slow courtships, and slow travel.

“We’ve become used to faster internet, faster service and faster results, not least because waiting for anything now feels like a waste of precious time,” says Salzman.

She also says we are filling in the time that is being spared by all of our time saving devices and we need to break the cycle.

“In the time that’s saved, we get extra capacity to pack in a few more compelling, engaging, must-do activities, especially with mobile devices that deliver on-the-go ways to fill that time: social media, email, news, games, movies and video clips. It all seems perfectly normal and logical and important until something happens to break the pattern, change the pace and create a different perspective: a vacation, illness, unemployment or maybe a life-changing insight from a book or a movie, or a global economic crisis.

“Now that normal life packs every moment with calls on attention, distraction and fast-paced entertainment, the quest in 2013 and beyond is for unstressed, unpressured, uncluttered space and time to relax and breathe,” says Salzman.

Dr Brigid van Wanrooy, a workplace researcher at Sydney University, says this trend to slow down has come just in time for Australians.

“I’m all for ‘slow’. Taking the time to engage in the things that should be important, things that, for many, our working hours cut into. We’ve got some of the longest working hours among full-time employees in OECD countries and we’ve accumulated 128 million days of untaken leave.

“Whether as a society we can adopt a slow approach to life remains to be seen but any brand that can help us do so could be riding a trend to their benefit,” van Wanrooy says.

A new ‘trigger word’ will also make an appearance in the fashion and style industries. ‘Native’ is predicted to appear a lot more across lifestyle brands, with a push towards consumers wanting to get in touch with their roots and people wanting to go back to an authentic look (this is where the facial hair comes in) and natural clothes made by artisans from people’s hometown.

“It’s no coincidence that ‘native’ is now becoming a trigger word in fashion and style. As modern life accelerates into a future that gets more virtual with every passing year, consumers are increasingly experiencing a sense of rootlessness. As growing numbers of us move jobs, cities and even countries, fewer people feel that they belong in any particular place. We ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and mostly hear a life itinerary: ‘I was born in A, but we moved to B and I went to highschool in C and college in D, then I got a job in E’,” says  Salzman.

As for those celery stalkers, be prepared. Salzman predicts the rise of people who pounce on food conversations to move closer to other people in virtual conversations. So stay alert foodies. You have been warned.

via Demandforce.

• B2B marketers consider SEO twice as effective as PPC or social media for lead generation
• Marketing spend for SEO, PPC and social media will continue to rise in 2013
• Contrary to market perception, Social Media for B2B is just as prolific as it is for B2C
• 39% of B2B marketers generate leads using Facebook
• 43% of B2C marketers generate leads using Twitter
• Measurement of SEO, PPC and Social Media continues to be a challenge for all marketers

Source: GetARealDegree.com

Google Analytics provides a means of measuring what your site is trying to achieve online. Take a step back and reflect on what your business objectives are and what actions you want visitors to perform on your site. By defining your goals in Google Analytics in terms of these website actions, you will have specific, quantifiable measures with which to gauge the success of your online efforts.

Google Analytics tracks these actions as conversions. We typically talk of conversions as being:

• Macro conversions – Those actions that directly increase revenue or leads and drive performance, such as making a purchase on an ecommerce site; and
• Micro conversions – Those actions which are good indicators of performance but do not by themselves generate revenue, such as signing up for a newsletter, viewing a video or sharing content on social media

If we think about the aim of SEO (aside from achieving top rankings for your target keywords) as driving qualified consumer traffic to your site in order to generate sales or sales leads for your business, you start to clearly see where you are headed with your analysis. We are interested not only in the traffic that is arriving at your site, but also in the quality of this traffic, as measured by the conversion rate.

Let’s take a look now at a high-level approach to analysing your SEO performance in Google Analytics…

 

PLEASE NOTE: This article is concerned with assessing the performance of an SEO campaign. All analysis presented relates only to that segment of traffic generated from organic search.

Look for trends in your traffic over time

Reviewing trends in your organic traffic over time will provide far greater insight into SEO performance than a single metric like total visits. Looking at trends provides much needed context to your results.

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Some things to think about when analysing this report:

• How does the data look? Is there an upward trend or downward trend in organic visits over time?
• Is there a significant proportion of organic visits coming from new visitors? Effective SEO campaigns should be successful at driving new visitors to your site.

We can refine our analysis even further by comparing results across two time periods:

Providing context around your results leads to better analysis:

• Has SEO driven more or less visits to your site when compared to last year? Has your organic traffic performed in the manner you would expect based on your SEO spend between the two periods?
• How have the other site usage metrics performed across the two periods? Is your site receiving more new visitors than the previous year? And what about bounce rate? Are there improvements here? Does this correlate to web design updates you have made to your site within the same timeframe?

Where is your traffic coming from?

Understanding where your traffic is coming from can tell you a lot about the strength of your SEO as well as providing inspiration for future optimisation efforts.

1. Which search engines are generating the most traffic?

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Report Notes

• Viewing: Source

Ideally, the proportion of traffic your site receives from each search engine should roughly equate to the market share held by the engine. Google controls more than 90% of the search market in Australia so we would expect the dominance seen in the table above. Optimising your site for Google is the hardest but will ultimately bring you the most benefit in terms of traffic and profit. Where results differ significantly to what you would expect, it may mean that the search engine in question is not indexing your site or providing consistent exposure for your site – all of which points to the need to customise your SEO strategy for this particular search engine.

2. Which regions are generating the most traffic?

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic 
Report Notes

• Viewing: Region

Geography will most likely have an impact on the performance of your SEO campaign. Are there regions generating traffic to your site that you hadn’t considered previously? Are these regions providing quality traffic, in the sense that the bounce rate reflects a degree of engagement with the site? Can you optimise your site to cater for these visitors and in doing so generate further conversions and online revenue?

What keywords are delivering the best performance?

1. What are the top keywords driving people to your site?

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Report Notes

• Viewing: Keyword
• Metrics Explorer: Goal Set 1

The keywords driving the most traffic to your site are not necessarily the same keywords generating revenue or value for your business. Where keywords drive traffic but not conversions, look to the landing pages where traffic from these keywords arrive. Perhaps the content is inconsistent both with the keyword and with what consumers are expecting to find from their search?

2. What are the top converting keywords?

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Report Notes

• Viewing: Keyword
• Metrics Explorer: Goal Set 1
• Advanced Segment: Visits with Conversions

TIP: Utilise Advanced Segments to focus your analysis on the segment of organic traffic which produced conversions

I encourage you to try this out with your own Google Analytics account. I think you will be surprised at how different these two lists can look. Are there keywords you did not expect to see converting? Are you optimising for these in your SEO campaign?

We could refine our results even further by excluding branded keywords from the analysis using Advanced Filters. In fact this would provide a much more accurate picture of how successful your SEO campaign has been at expanding the exposure of your site to consumers not already familiar with your company.

Analyse the performance of your micro conversions

Only a small percentage of your traffic will convert. And here I’m talking about visitors performing the action which you have designated as your macro conversion…The reason for which your website exists…The action which directly increases revenue or leads for your business.

Google Analytics Navigation: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Report Notes

• Viewing: Keyword
• Metrics Explorer: Goal Set 1

The remaining traffic, the percentage that did not convert at your macro goal, is still valuable. Actions that these visitors take may result in the prospect returning at a later date to make a purchase. We call these actions micro conversions and I cannot stress how important it is to track these within your Google Analytics account alongside your macro conversions. It will give you an excellent impression of the bigger picture and an appreciation of the other actions consumers are completing on your site which contribute to the overall success of your business online.

Is SEO driving direct conversions? What about assisted conversions?

Direct conversions result when a marketing channel drives traffic to your site (in our case organic search) and these visitors convert straight away. Not all traffic will immediately convert though. And just because something did not convert or generate revenue does not make it worthless. In those instances where organic search does not appear to be generating direct conversions, investigate whether this channel is playing a role higher up in the buying process.

Google Analytics Navigation: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions

Report Notes

• Viewing: Basic Channel Grouping

This report may be quite revealing. Organic search could be contributing to conversion performance in a much greater capacity than first thought. Or perhaps there are other channels which have been hidden previously, that are playing a significant assist role and could be worth leveraging further.

High-level analysis is a good place to start when assessing your SEO performance. But real insight is gained by digging deeper into your data set. Look for features which characterise your successful traffic and promote these. Try and identify why segments of your traffic did not convert and make changes to your site optimisation. Start analysing today and improve your SEO performance with the information you find.

Source: Webprofits