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What Agencies Need To Know About Universal Analytics

damion — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:23:33 +0000

Universal Analytics is the new iteration of Google Analytics, and it’s an absolute game changer. It moves analytics beyond the limits of website data, which is a huge leap and is the biggest change to the analytics industry we’ve ever seen.

In this post, I’m going to look at this change from a couple of different angles, including how it affects digital agencies. I’ll also sketch out a brief workflow to demonstrate how agencies should be kitting up their clients with Universal Analytics in the short and medium terms.

A History Lesson

To help illustrate the change and what it means, let’s recap on what the “old” Google Analytics does.

Historically, Google Analytics has worked by stitching together different elements of a visit to a website. It knows your referrer data (the referring site, campaign or search engine you came from.) It knows your landing page, and it knows the pages you view before you leave the site.

It’s about a beginning, a middle and an end of a visit. It’s purely based on the session.

There’s an additional layer of cookie-based tracking, which enables Google Analytics to determine whether you’re a new or returning visitor, or whether visits equate to unique visitors. This layer is an interpretation of that raw, session-based data. It’s an enhancement, nothing else.

Hacking The Envelope

What’s happened with traditional Google Analytics is that we’ve had to hack stuff together like Virtual Pageviews, Events and Custom Variables to make basic analytics more useful. Over time, we’ve reached the limits of the envelope on what a purely pageview-based analysis can really do. Websites are more sophisticated and have more features and functions than standard pageviews allow.

At the same time, users have got more sophisticated too. They use multiple devices to connect with our brand and its website, switching between multiple browsers, mobile apps, and social channels.

It’s this double-direction movement that’s made Universal Analytics necessary. The old method doesn’t fit the new model… and so, the method has to change.

New Model, New Method

Universal Analytics is a new method of tackling an increasingly complex problem. It moves us to a user-centric view, with the ability to track across sessions and to individual people.

Here’s a summary of the main changes:

Instead of sessions, it stitches together interactions across devices and platforms, and does so over a customisable time window
Offline conversions can be tracked; think in-store spend, loyalty card usage, or on-site support resolution
Bring in any custom data you can think of: CRM, logged-in users, customer profiling data, author types, anything…

We’re only just scratching the surface of how Universal Analytics can be used, and it’s very early days. But even from this basic, semi-conceptual data, you can see how it potentially changes everything, moving digital analytics into completely new territory.

The Agency Position

Agencies, in particular, need to be aware of how all this applies to their client base.

Given that an agency’s clients are usually from a variety of different industries, with different online/offline/mobile priorities and technologies, there’s a substantial need to be capable and adaptable, and to make sure that the right analytics solution gets applied.

That’s not an easy task.

Right now, the best course of action for agencies is to enable Universal Analytics across their client base, with a view to implementing custom solutions further down the track. New developments and experiments are happening daily, so I’d recommend setting up now to take advantage of new tracking features when they happen.

Workflow

At the time of writing, you can’t directly migrate from the current, “old” Google Analytics over to the new version. The best thing to do is to run them in tandem, moving to Google Tag Manager and installing Universal Analytics on a new account.

Here’s a rough workflow:

Sign up for Google Tag Manager (start here)
Add the Google Tag Manager code just after the opening tag on all pages
Configure Google Tag Manager adding existing Google Analytics, AdWords and other tags
Remove old code snippets relating to tags you’ve just consolidated
Create new Analytics property under Universal Analytics (instructions here)
Configure Tag Manager for the new Universal tracking code

Running the two tracking codes in tandem means that your clients are getting the benefit of the new tracking, while preserving the legacy data collected under the existing tracking code.

(There’s also a secondary benefit, in moving to Google Tag Manager. It’s a faster, slicker way of adding marketing and other tags, and it should be a core part of every agency’s workflow.)

Mid-Kaboom

Ultimately, agencies have a huge opportunity here: my gaining experience across multiple industries and client setups, they can become field leaders in a new digital area that’s currently mid-kaboom.

And that’s always a good place for an agency to be!

Want more like this?

I now also blog at Data Runs Deep, which is solely about web analytics.

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The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery – A Shortcut To Awesome

damion — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:03:17 +0000

One of the problems that people often have with Google Analytics is leveraging the customised side of the tool — the advanced segments, custom dashboards, and custom reports.

While it’s easy to get your head around how these function and how they’re built, aligning this to the actual objective (in other words, linking the “what do we want” to the “how do we do it”) can be tricky.

Step forth the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery, which is a centralised Google-endorsed repository of custom segments, reports and dashboards that can be added right into your account.

It’s a very cool selection, and although you might need to do a little digging to find what you’re looking for, there’s definitely some good stuff there.

Here are a couple of picks to get you started:

Efficiency of Visitor Acquisition – a bang-up awesome report on all traffic sources for multi-channel marketers

Mobile Ecommerce Dashboard - super-important if you’re pushing out a mobile version of an ecommerce site

Evaluate Sitelinks – compare interaction between organic and paid sitelinks

But don’t take my word for it — jump in and see what you can find in there. And don’t forget, a tweak or two to make a custom report even more custom for your business is allowed :)

I’m hoping that Google will keep updating this with new stuff as people develop it. It’s a great resource, which will only get better the more content it contains.

Why I Love Remarketing, And Why You Will Too

damion — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 02:47:57 +0000

Remarketing is the name given to online advertising that is targeted to a specific set of visitors to your site. It’s a very smart way of delivering targeted ad messages: instead of targeting your ads based on demographic, you’re targeting based on behaviour among users that are already aware of your brand.

In many ways, this is just how all display advertising should be. Businesses get better click-through-rates, publishers get more revenue from ad clicks, and consumers get ads that are directly relevant to their interests.

Remarketing (sometimes called Retargeting) has been around in Google AdWords for years, but it’s recently made the sideways step into Google Analytics. As well as simplifying the process to get remarketing campaigns up and running, the integration with Google Analytics gives you a lot of power in isolating user segments to remarket to.

Even better, you can build remarketing campaigns around your existing goal conversions to help drive transactions, leads, and other positive outcomes.

Before we start, you’ll need the following:

Admin-level access to a Google Analytics account
An active AdWords account, to which you have Admin access
AdWords linked to Google Analytics
Ideally, a designer on hand to create some snazzy ad creative

So let’s get started. Head to Admin, and select Remarketing Lists from the top menu:

In the next screen, click on New Remarketing List and you’ll see the following options to build up a list of people to target:

All of my site visitors – great for developing brand awareness or to push a specific campaign
Visitors who visited a certain section of my site – if someone’s been on the /Ferrari/ section of your site, target them with ads relating to Ferrari test drives
Visitors who completed a conversion goal – if someone’s purchased from you, they might be interested in purchasing more
Visitor Segments

The last option, Visitor Segments, requires a bit of manual gruntwork to get built, but that’s the one I recommend you use. It gives the absolute highest level of targeting possible, which ultimately gives you better bang for your buck.

Let’s say that we have a very simple microsite, where the homepage is a landing page and a successful signup triggers a pageview to submission.htm.

If we want to target people that arrive on the landing page but don’t signup, here’s how the filter would look:

By using the “Include Start” and “Exclude Finish” we’re using simple rules to specify who we want to remarket to. It’s an incredibly clear-cut way of isolating certain types of visitor, but it’s only scratching the surface: we might want to further segment by adding user location and serving them city or state-specific ad content.

The sky’s the limit, and that’s before we look at Sequence Filters which allow you to map out specific steps that people complete to qualify for certain ads to be displayed. It’s a crazy level of sophistication and personalisation.

Save and exit the Filter screen, then specify which AdWords campaign you’re hooking up to this experiment, then hit Save.

Next up, you’ll need to make one change to your Google Analytics code:

FROM

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js';

For the final setup stage, head over to AdWords and create a new campaign selecting Remarketing as the Type:

Once you’ve created the campaign, select Change Display Settings and then specify your Remarketing List (which should automatically appear after being set up in Google Analytics):

Save on out of this, and your remarketing campaign is good to go.

Of course, the fun doesn’t stop there. Here are some ideas for making the most of your remarketing campaigns:

Pay attention to the path you send remarketing prospects on. The right mix of targeting, ad creative, landing page and purchase pathways is hard to find, so experiment
To accurately monitor effectiveness, consider running a standard Display campaign alongside your remarketing. We’d expect to see a higher conversion rate for the remarketing campaign; if we don’t, why?
Change up your ad creative regularly. We get “banner blindness” after we’ve seen an ad a few times, so we’re more likely to tune it out. Regularly rotate images, calls to action and creative to keep things fresh.
Regularly optimise campaign bids, placements, and all creative elements. Test, test, and test again!

We’re really only just scratching the surface with remarketing; believe me, it’s going to be big.

Publishers will always back ad programmes that give them maximum revenue, and given this it’s no coincidence that Google is pushing remarketing so heavily.

And as with any nascent marketing platform, it’s currently quite under-subscribed which means that you can expect to be paying less per click than more competitive ad channels. And that’s always a good thing.

How Android Users Can Find Each Other At Rainbow Serpent

damion — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:02:00 +0000

The Rainbow Serpent Festival starts this weekend, and one of the things that always brings is multi-hour missions in the blazing sun trying to find people. Descriptions of campsite locations can have hugely variable accuracy, as can maps drawn with mud on the back of a newspaper and pinned to a wall in the info tent.

Thankfully, if you’ve got an Android, and your mates have an Android too, then finding each other at Rainbow Serpent is about to get a whole lot easier.

There are two steps to this. The way it works is that you SMS your campsite location to your friend, who then uses Maps to find you. SMSing your location requires installing an app, and finding you with Maps requires downloading the local area to your handset before leaving Melbourne.

What that means is that if you’ve got one person going up Friday and four people going up separately Saturday, the Friday person needs the app to send the location, and the other four all need to have the map of the area downloaded to their device.

The app transmits your location; the downloaded map gets others to it.

Make sense?

So let’s go…

1) Download a map of the local area to your device

Google Maps on Android lets you download an area’s map to your handset. This removes the need for a data connection to see where you are which is handy, since most of the Rainbow site doesn’t have a reliable data connection.

The first thing to do is to find Jack Smiths Lane, Lexton in Maps, and Star it.

This link will take you to the location; if you access that link on your handset then starring it is dead simple; you can also star it on a desktop computer and, provided you’re signed-in to your Google Account, it should sync to your phone.

As a sidetrack, Google’s map is heaps out of date compared to Bing’s, which shows internal roads, toilet blocks, and that dam with the sign saying “No Swimming” where there’s always someone swimming and cars going past with people looking and thinking “yuck”:

Anyway. Okay, so you’ve got the festival location starred. Now go and find it in Maps, either by selecting it from Starred Places, or by panning west from Melbourne past Ballarat until you sort of find it (the star will appear!)

Tap the three-dot Options button in the bottom right corner, and select Make Available Offline.

You can then select the area you want downloaded to your device. Being a ninja, I’ve decided to download everything from Ballarat onwards so I don’t use up a heap of data navigating my way to the festival:

Note the Estimated Size; it’s best to do this on a Wifi connection rather than over 3G.

Once you’ve done that (it might take a while depending on how much of the entire continent of Australia you’re downloading), it’s time to move on to Step 2.

Note that you will have to do this if you want to find your friends.

2) Install an ugly but incredibly useful GPS app

Go here and get GPS Coordinates from the Google Play store.

It’s ugly as. But it works very well, and it’s free.

Here’s what it does: you whip out your phone, fire up the app and providing you have a clear view of the sky, it’ll tell you your current GPS Coordinates (OMG! So THAT’S why the app is called what it is!)

Do this at your campsite, and the app locks the coordinates. Hit the “Share Coordinates” button and select SMS, then trot up toward the foot of Granite Hill where you’ll definitely get a signal, and SMS it to your mates.

That’s right — it doesn’t require any data connection. Just an SMS connection, which is easy to get close to the mountain (and at various patches around the site too.)

(Note that sharing via other options, including Via Google Maps, requires a data connection. SMS is a good workaround since it doesn’t need data, and you can wait till you get a signal to send the SMS without the coordinates changing.)

When someone sends you their coordinates like this (and yep, you might need to hang at the mountain for the SMS to come in), just copy-paste the coordinates into Maps’ search box, and you should see their campsite location straight away.

3) Wait for your mates to arrive

…and if they do, raise a glass, I mean a plastic beaker, to this blog post for making everything work so totally awesomely.

I thought I might throw this together after having explained it to a couple of folk this week.

No guarantees that finding your friends will be easier, and no guarantees that it’ll actually work, but until there’s site-wide super-fast internet access for the whole festival (and let’s skirt around whether that’s a wonderful or a dreadful idea) this is about as good as it’s going to get.

(I’ve no idea about iPhones, but I’m sure something similar will work; let me know in the comments if there’s a similar way of doing it.)

Why 2013 Will Be The Year Of Analytics

damion — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 03:28:20 +0000

Okay, I’m biased. I work in Analytics, so you’ll forgive any sort of frothy postulation that the future is all going to be about something that happens to be straight in front of my face.

And hopefully you’ll also forgive yet-another-post-title-with-2013-in-the-title, because I know there’s an awful lot of them about. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be tuning-out everything with titles like “4,094 Marketing Predictions For 2013″ or “The Top Ten Trends In Digital For 2013″.

So I only pester you with one thought, and it’s more of a projection than a prediction: 2013 is going to be the year that web analytics takes a quantum leap.

There’s a perfect storm out there at the moment; we’ve got a confluence of change in behaviour, platform and tools.

Behave Yourselves At The Back

Firstly, behaviour. People are happier using the web to research purchases than ever before. They’re using product review sites, forums, social media, YouTube, and everything else in between to research projects.

“Big deal,” I hear you say, “we’ve been doing that for years.” True, but I believe we’ve reached a tipping point where the majority of people are now doing this, not just the cluey few. That tipping-over into majority territory means that the educated, savvy and nimble customer isn’t the exception, but the rule.

What this means, then, is that customer journeys are a whole lot more intricate; which, of course, means there’s more data to analyse, and to analyse meaningfully.

Mind The Gap Between The Platforms

Secondly: platform. Users are now almost universally cross-device, to some degree or another. Australia, as we’re often told, has one of the highest rates of smartphone adoption in the world, and I’d expect that after the sales data from Christmas is smoothed out, we’ll also see very high levels of tablet ownership (which we can only expect to increase with low-price Nexus models and the iPad mini.)

Again, the trans-device consumer isn’t the niche audience they were even 12 months ago. It’s reasonable to expect that many customers will research on their phone, refine on their tablet, and close on their desktop computer; and, by the end of 2013 we might reach another tipping point, where this suddenly becomes the behaviour of an established majority rather than a nerdgasming minority.

Again, this means a whole heap of data to analyse, and doing so cross-platform means we’re going to have to move beyond the session and into Visitor Analytics.

More Power

Finally: tools. Google Analytics has changed tremendously over the last few years, bringing in advanced features and functionality that give us new and smart ways to analyse data. One of these in particular is Attribution Modelling, which is the process of understanding how channels co-conspire to drive conversions. Google Analytics is about to get a fast, funky and free Attribution Modelling feature built on the existing (and dazzlingly useful) multi-channel conversions.

Attribution Modelling is going to take centre stage in 2013, particularly as it feeds right into bottom-line channel reporting, and also fuels Remarketing campaigns (another potential killer app that’s baked right into Google Analytics, making GA not just an observation platform but an active output platform.)

Beyond this… well, there are bundles of new features on the way. We’re in for some big GA changes, folks.

And, of course, other tools. Content metrics from Squeeze are about to get insanely bigger and better. Funnel analysis from Paditrack is free and wonderfully actionable. Everywhere, startups are forming with one central goal: to help people understand data better. Bloody excellent, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Enter The Intersection

Like I said, it’s a perfect storm. Having that intersection of behaviour, platforms and tools gives the audience the freedom and the flexibility to interact with brands on terms of their own choosing, and gives marketers the ability to understand their audience like never before.

It’s not just me with this dizzy utopian take on it; here’s what Avinash Kaushik had to say this week:

Google Analytics is set to go through an almost unprecedented amount of evolution. My postulation is that by this time next year the tool will be almost unrecognizable.

My favorite is Visitor Analytics, and visitor level segmentation that will be pervasive throughout the product. This is insanely cool.

In fact, the post on Avinash’s blog from which the above quote was lifted makes a very good point: there are new features on the horizon, but make sure you’ve got your basic and intermediate-level stuff covered off first.

So there we go. My apologies, once again, for a 2013 post but I hope it was reasonably inoffensive.

It’s high time that web analytics moved away from a stock reporting function, and with the new features comes a new position that should see it involved at more touchpoints within an organisation.

And that, of course, can only be a good thing.

The Fake Jetstar Facebook Page Shows Brands Need To Be Vigilant

damion — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:51:48 +0000

Australian low-cost airline Jetstar has fallen victim to a Facebook brand hijack, with a fake page cropping up in the last few days. Customers were posting on what they thought was the genuine Jetstar Facebook page, and the prankster or pranksters responded to customer service issues in a manner that can only be described as, well, rather cheeky:

There are other examples on Flickr, but you get the idea. Respond to a legitimate consumer enquiry, in the manner of a social media manager, and ruffle feathers while “holding a mirror” to Jetstar’s customer service reputation. Or whatever.

Jetstar, for their part, appeared to exercise due diligence on this, messaging the owner of the Flickr page with this:

Meanwhile, (the real) Jetstar went public and acknowledged that there was an impostor in their midst:

And, as of this morning anyway, there’s no sign of the fake profile. It’s not appearing in search, and the only links I was able to find for it now redirect to the legit Jetstar page.

It seems, then, the storm has been weathered and the damage has been withstood. Sarcasm had its moment in the limelight, the brand was largely untarnished, and a bundle of new people now probably Like the official page, even if they thought they were liking the fake.

That said, what can we learn from the whole situation?

The Facebook Flaw

It appears as though despite Jetstar owning the “Jetstar Australia” Page, there’s nothing to stop anyone else registering under the same name. As such, creating a spoof profile would have been rather easy.

Indeed, a search on “Jetstar Australia” turfs up quite a few profiles, none of which appear to belong to the brand:

Those profiles are all more or less bare, and you might say that a reasonably intelligent individual would realise when they’re looking at a dud.

However, anything that creates dissonance around a brand is a problem. Consider this screengrab of a search on Facebook for Bunnings:

Again, you’re going to realise you’re looking at a bunch of disparate and often unofficial things, but is it a bad thing that Facebook even allows these to appear?

Media Coverage

Jetstar’s biggest problem might have been the news story that jumped up around it.

We all know how keen the media is to bag a domestic airline, and we also know that journalism in the digital age (pardon me while I wash my mouth out with Drano for using that phrase) is more like churnalism, where quick-win, bright-burning stories with short shelf lives are favoured for their pageview-fuel.

However, it didn’t blow up all that big. News.com.au reported it quite quickly after it surfaced (leaving some to speculate that the journalist might have been responsible) but for the most part, this was a fairly quiet kerfuffle.

Vigilance

So what can we say about the whole situation now that the dust appears to have settled?

Here are some thoughts…

Facebook needs to roll out a Verified Page feature, even if it’s a paid inclusion at the top of the search results. Brands will want to be able to stamp out this problem completely, and a thousand bucks a month for a verified profile is more valuable to a brand than the hours spent trying to undo damage
We might see a gap emerging for “Facebook Reputation Management”, where consultants and agencies create dud profiles that all link to the brand’s main presence and, via manipulated Likes or EdgeRank or something similar, have them all ranking alongside the main brand page in the first cluster of search results. Of course, this won’t be necessary if…
Facebook deshittifies their search experience. Finding even an official brand presence can be a pain if your quest starts with the Facebook Search box. A more sensible and democratic way of filtering search results, based on what a user is likely to be looking for, is good for everyone

And on the whole, I think Jetstar did a pretty good job of dealing with this. They acknowledged the problem publicly, and didn’t try to hide it; they contacted the owner of the fake profile; and, by the looks of it at least, they opened up the discussion channels with Facebook early, and got a resolution.

It’s easy to see how this could have been much, much worse for Jetstar. We may not love flying with them, but their social media team deserves some kudos for stopping this from becoming a much bigger, and nastier, story.

AANA: Brands Must Check Facebook Pages Once Per Day

damion — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:45:35 +0000

You may recall that back in August, the Advertising Standards Bureau ruled that Australian businesses are responsible for what the public write on their Facebook pages, prompted by claims that user-generated content on the Smirnoff Australia page had effectively constituted a breach of advertising guidelines.

Initially the industry pulled a collective confused expression, but now we’ve got something a step further to contend with: The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) has released best practice guidelines for managing Facebook Pages, and a key recommendation of those guidelines is that Pages should be monitored once every 24 hours.

You may be about to point out that as far as traditional definitions are concerned, social media isn’t really advertising, and user-generated posts in particular are not, strictly speaking, a brand-controlled message. The AANA have, perhaps rather conveniently, changed their definition of Advertising, acknowledging that “much marketing communication today constitutes a dialogue with consumers rather than the traditional one-way, ‘paid for’, advertising message.”

If that sounds like something from the pre-digital age trying to apply itself to the digital age, it’s because it is.

You might also say that asking brands to check their Facebook pages daily is common sense. But wait, it gets commoner:

The ‘best practice’ guidelines advise brand owners to monitor their social media sites in the hours immediately following a brand communication [...] and thereafter at least once every 24 hours during the normal working week. It also advises brand owners whose social media communities are likely to be particularly active at weekends and on public holidays to monitor periodically during these periods also. (AANA Press release).

To be fair, the guidelines (which you can read in full here) contain a lot of advice and, while it’s easy for us on our digital marketing ivory towers to scoff at “teh noobs,” as I believe the kids say, if you’re an organisation dependent on the AANA’s advice to illuminate the way, then it illuminates quite a lot. There’s even a suggestion of workflow-related best practice, including profanity filters, and conflict escalation.

The catch is that where workflow and actual tactics are concerned, the AANA ain’t got nuthin’. There’s no actionable steps to take, no processes to follow, and no real advice on how the hell this should all be managed. Any brand that finds itself caught in a shitstorm will see little if any benefit in referring back to these guidelines. More to the point, for a beshitstormed brand to say, “hey we followed these Guidelines” is indefensible.

This, I guess, it the main problem here — there simply isn’t enough depth. You have to question the value of scant guidelines that will be a priori to any organisation that’s been active on Facebook for more than an hour and a half.

To make matters all the more complicated, the advice to monitor and check regularly applies to other sites other than Facebook; consider yourselves also liable for anything on LinkedIn, MySpace, Reddit(!), YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia(!!!), Twitter, Mobile Apps(!?), Web Apps(!??), IM, SMS, MMS, display advertising, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram.

So now it’s a problem not just of a lack of depth, but a vastly increased breadth. This is going to be awfully difficult to manage.

Which is a shame, because the domestic industry really does need some advice on how to implement best practice given the rather particular requirements of the Advertising Standards Board. We need some guidance on how to manage this from a tactical point of view, by using industry-standard measurement and management tools. For the AANA’s advice to include nary a nod to a humble Google Alert, it all adds up to a dangerously scant set of confusing and vague bulletpoints.

Field Trip, Google and the Future of Augmented Reality

damion — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:55:53 +0000

You’d be right in thinking that the title of this post is a bit of a departure from the stuff I usually tap out here. That’s because this post is actually little more than sharing a link, but I wanted to share it in such a way as it wouldn’t decay as fast as it would if share on the standard ol’ social channels.

The link is this post from The Atlantic, and it’s all about Field Trip, Google’s new app that pushes notifications about places of interest that are close to your phone-determined location. It’s incredibly neat, because the stuff it manages to push to you is quirky, leftfield, and generally a bit different.

As far as I know, the app isn’t yet available on the Play Store but you can find the apk by searching the internets. And by golly, it’s worth hunting down and installing.

There’s not a busting amount of information for Australia yet; for Melbourne, I keep getting gig notifications that aren’t entirely relevant (plus, just because I’m stuck in traffic close to a venue doesn’t mean I want to come back in 72 hours to hear some music.) Outside this, the notifications on architect-designed buildings, quirky shops and hidden art galleries are neat. Even if you don’t want to act on some information, it’s nice to be in the know.

It all changed on a recent trip to Sydney when on an early train, Field Trip faded out Spotify to tell me, via the standard android speech interface, that the train station through which I was passing was used as a movie set for 1985′s Day Of The Dead. Then Spotify faded back in.

And this, I guess, is one of the things that John Hanke talks about wanting to achieve in the article in The Atlantic. It’s about giving you the sort of information you won’t get from a guidebook or map, but something your clued-up, pop-culture-obsessed, quirky hipster mate would lean over and tell you.

And I think that functions as a reminder that despite fears of Augmented Reality being fuzzied by ads, it’s usable and fun functionality that’s going to drive its adoption.

Google Tag Manager: Moving IT Away From Digital Marketing

damion — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:39:22 +0000

We’ve been expecting Google to release some new marketing-y products, and the first one to come to light has landed: Google Tag Manager.

It’s a neat prospect: instead of having to ask IT to add tracking code for various analytics and marketing services, it acts as a central console for all the tracking codes you might be using.

Instead of multiple code snippets for Analytics, AdWords Conversion Tracking, and AdSense (to name three examples), all IT needs to do is to install one piece of code that communicates with Google Tag Manager.

The good part: when you decide to add some extra tracking or other tag, you make the change at Google Tag Manager’s web interface, instead of at the code-on-a-page level.

Clever, yes? Here’s Google’s vid showing how straightforward it is:

As well as removing the need to bug IT folk to make changes, the other main benefit here is speed. The more tags and scripts you’re using, the longer it can take a page to load — particularly for us lot in Australia, where flaky connections (*cough* TPG *cough*) to the rest of the planet can fall over if it so happens that the tag is calling a US or European server. Which is, like, always. By consolidating the call to Google’s datacentres only, the whole process is heaps more reliable.

It’s early days, but I can already see how this is going to be incredibly useful. Larger businesses with IT departments that are often resistant to change will be big winners here, but at the SME level it also opens things up for marketers to be more confident with adding new tracking services so they don’t “break anything.”

And let’s not forget businesses that rely on agencies for this sort of thing; adding a new tracking code will no longer require development or support hours to be eaten up. It’s all a lot more graceful.

I’m a big fan of simplicity, but also of clever complexity (even when I have difficulty understanding it.) There’s a neat article at Online-Behavior.com that lays out some of the more advanced features including Rules, which set parameters for the tag to be fired. This could be the killer app here: controlling when certain tracking occurs could be incredibly useful for those managing multiple campaigns.

This is definitely one to watch. When Google launches a product dedicated to site speed and marketing simplicity, the industry listens.

How Not To Do An EDM Unsubscribe Process: Everyday Rewards

damion — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:18:15 +0000

I’ve ranted before about email marketing, and I’m going to rant about it again. It’s an integral part of the marketing mix, and remains the best way of leveraging relationships with existing clients.

It’s about nurturing, we all chorus, not acquisition. You spend all this money on display and search and social and outdoor, and email is one of the bets ways of communicating with your audience on an engaged, relevant, and opt-in basis.

Except, of course, when it isn’t.

Don’t Let Them Hit Spam

One of the bigger problems that EDM faces is the Spam button on webmail services. Hotmail and Gmail work collaboratively, so the more people that mark your message as spam, the less likely the message is to reach everybody else.

It’s like a collective, crowdsourced quality metric and what it means is, in plain English, that you don’t want people clicking the spam button.

We also know that many people click the spam button instead of unsubscribing or, in dreadful cases, when they can’t unsubscribe by any other means. This is particularly damaging, given that every time one of your business’ EDMs is tagged as spam is potentially reducing its chances of reaching legitimate opt-ins.

The wisdom runs, then, that you want to make it easy for people to unscubscribe, so they’re not forced to mark your emails as spam. That’s wisdom. That’s how it should be done.

Let’s Trainwreck!

Step forth Everyday Rewards, which is a loyalty and discount scheme operated by Woolworths throughout Australia. I’d noticed that the frequency of their emails was on the up, and I didn’t recall opting-in to increased contact, so I did the groovy thing and clicked the Unsubscribe link.

Here’s what I got:

That’s a shiny total of 20 individual checkboxes! Plus a captcha! Plus, reconfirming my email address despite it no doubt being hashed within the long and complex URL that’s loaded!

And, do note that the whole page takes two screenshots just to show what’s on there. I’m no expert on UX, but I’d hazard a guess that if a page requires two largeish-monitor screens to fill with clicks in checkboxes, the page is too long.

My Hoopjumping Hell

I went through all this, and got the following message:

Ehh. Okay, maybe I got the Captcha wrong. I’m fallible, because I’m human (which ironically is precisely what the Captcha is trying to determine.) Also, I know that sometimes pages hit with multiple requests might serve the wrong Captcha to the wrong user, or something.

Let’s click all the damn boxes again, but this time I’m grabbing a screenie of the Captcha and seeing what happens:

Okay. That’s totally tseb2, right? Click the image above for slightly embiggened until you agree with me.

Here’s what happened:

The page hung for about 90 seconds. Then this happened:

“This portlet is unavailable!!!” Just great!

Before we get onto the absolute trainwreck of the whole experience, how terrible is that final fail page? I’m assuming that a Portlet is something of which many make up a Portal but that’s the edumacated guess of someone that works “in the industry”.

What are normal people going to make of this? Nothing, is what — they’ll head back to their email and spam the message, if they haven’t already.

Picking Through Roadkill

Let’s look at what’s wrong here.

Twenty checkboxes is too many. About nineteen too many, in fact. This is dreadful for accessibility, as well as for general UX.

Captchas should stop fake actions, not make legitimate actions more difficult. You place a Captcha somewhere because bots are signing up and causing extra load on your servers, or polluting your forum, or spamming blog comments. You don’t put one where users are trying to carry out legitimate functions related to their membership of your site.

Captchas should bloody work. Especially if a failed Captcha-solve resets the entire form and users have to start all over again.

If it’s not easy, it’s sneaky. This is where the real problem lies. EDM might be the only way that a consumer touches your organisation digitally. If the sum total of these mini-experiences leads a consumer to conclude that a brand is deliberately making it hard to unsubscribe because, well, it wants to keep marketing to you whether you want it to nor not — then that’s a negative brand sentiment right there. You’ve turned what you thought was a positive into a negative.

Seriously You Guys

Iiiiit’s 2012. Email marketing has been around for not too far off 20 years. It’s fine for businesses to want to keep customer data for remarketing purposes, but this isn’t playing by the rules.

There’s no place for an unsubscribe process like this — stuff should just work, and it shouldn’t make regular users jump through a load of hoops just to accomplish something desperately simple (and which other platforms and businesses are able to complete with a single click.)

So is it just me? Or is Woolies being deliberately awkward with this unsubscribe process, in the hope that consumers will give up trying to change their email preferences and placidly allow repeat brand messages through their door?