Data Driven Daily Tip 225 - Attention marketers and small business owners, Google has changed the way we need to track Mobile App Analytics. What The Ef Google? Why do you keep changing things on us? Google's newest change (without telling anyone), is how to set up analytics tracking on mobile applications. Out with the old Google Analytics SDK, and in with the new "Firebase" Product and Firebase SDK. The bad news - your old Google Analytics mobile app data is kind of irrelevant and you should set things up in Firebase. The good news - Firebase looks WAY better than the old Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, as it features "events," "conversions," "audiences," "user properties," but even better... Firebase features A/B Testing and Experiments. AND, don't worry, this is all accessible through your Google Analytics Account. It does mean you'll have to set up a Firebase Account though, and do the integration yourself. This video shows you how to get started, add your developer to get the SDK in the app, and integrate Firebase with Google Analytics. Here are the general steps to setting up Mobile Application Analytics Tracking within Google Firebase integrated with Google Analytics. 1. Open Google Analytics and go to Property View, Create New Property, click on LEARN MORE about Firebase. 2. Click - Get started with Google Analytics app reporting. 3. Create an account. Go to firebase.google.com to create a Firebase account and download the corresponding SDK. To learn how to use the SDK in your app, refer to the Firebase documentation on Google Developers. 4. Add your developers to your account. 5. Download and install the SDK to your app. "Click Dashboard." 6. Link Firebase back to Google Analytics.

Data Driven Daily Tip 224. Attention marketers and small business owners. If you own an eCommerce website and are selling products regularly online, you need to have eCommerce tracking set up in Google Analytics. This is typically super simple to do with Google Analytics, but sometimes there's some additional coding required on your website so that the data flows properly. Luckily, for WordPress Woocommerce merchants and website owners, this process is made super simple by the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration Plug-in. Follow the steps outlined in this video and you'll be good to go to start tracking your transactions, revenue and eCommerce conversion rate in Google Analytics. You want this set up correctly because it will also allow you to make Data Driven Marketing decisions related to how many transactions and purchases your marketing efforts are generating for you, such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Email Marketing and SEO. The Step-by-Step Process Outlined In The Video Is Below, Thanks To OM4.com.au. Go to Google Analytics, click on your website, then click on Admin, View, Ecommerce Settings then configure the following: Set “Enable Ecommerce” to On. Set “Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting” to On. Save, then click on “View Settings” Set the “Currency displayed as” setting to match your WooCommerce currency. Save your Analytics View settings. Return to your WordPress dashboard, and install and activate the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration plugin. This free plugin is written by WooCommerce core developers, and allows WooCommerce to send your transaction/sales data across to Analytics. Go to the WordPress Dashboard, WooCommerce, Settings, Integration, Google Analytics and configure the following settings: enter your UA-ID (you can find this in Google Analytics, Admin, Property, Property Settings. DON’T enable standard tracking (this is already added via GADWP plugin in step 2 above) Tick “Enable Universal Analytics” Tick “Purchase Transactions” Tick “Add to Cart Events” Tick “Enable Enhanced eCommerce” Save the plugin’s settings

Data Driven Daily Tip 223: Attention marketers and small business owners. Stop wasting time thinking about how often you should send email blasts to your contacts. Instead, just get started. Step 1 is to create a free Mailchimp.com account if you don't already have one. Step 2 is to log in and connect it to your Gmail or GSuite account. This can easily get hundreds of contacts that you already have permission to email into your account. This audio explains how! Don't worry, I'll be always posting more on how to grow and nurture your lists via email marketing. This is just to help you build momentum and move in the right direction. Once your lists are created, you can start thinking about what kinds of content to build that will resonate with each of your lists or tags (more to come on tags), and then test your frequency and content.

I've started to write quite a bit about all the different things I really like about the new Google Ads platform. One new feature with the ad creation that this video walks you through is, Google Ads has added: 1. A third headline, meaning now you have 90 characters in your headlines instead of 60. 2. A second description line, meaning now you have 180 characters in your descriptions instead of 90. This is important because if you are running old campaigns that have only two headlines or only one description, your quality score will be bypassed by your competitors that are taking advantage of this extra copywriting space. Not only does this extra room to write give marketers a chance to get across more of their value proposition, but it really helps your quality score, meaning you could outrank your competitors without having to bid as high as them. Google has made this change without really announcing it, so we wanted to bring it to your attention.

I'm a huge fan of the new Google Ads. It's the replacement to the old Google Adwords. This podcast takes an in-depth look at what's like to start to set up a campaign now. Some things that have changed / improved include: Ad goals/objectives (huge for relevancy), audience targeting (the best feature), and the ability to set sitelink extensions from the start of a campaign (this improves quality score).

Don't worry, you're not alone. You're clearly smart. You're a successful small business owner OR an extremely intelligent marketer at an emerging brand or mid-size company, possibly the director of marketing, VP of Marketing or even VP of IT - but you don't exactly know what Google Webmaster Tools is. It's fine. That's why we're here. You wonder - is it the same as Google Analytics? Is it the same is Google Search Console? WTF? Why does Google have so many tools? Let me help. This podcast explains! :)

It's not every day you find watershed improvements in your web data that you can immediately attribute back to 1-3 simple action items you recently took on your website, but since we're constantly tweaking and testing, it just happened to us, and we feel the need to share it with you right away. Now, to many of you already familiar with the impact of Page Speed Load Time on SEO Rankings (which goes along with Optimization for Mobile Web), this won't come as a surprise. But, in our true style, we don't just believe all we read. We test, we analyze and we make data driven decisions. So, here's what we did to improve our website's engagement levels by 95% OVERNIGHT. 1. We eliminated some unneeded content on our long scroll homepage. Data showed us originally that the wide format, long scroll homepage was most effective to lower bounce rate, increase pages per visit and average session duration, all of which increase conversions, but when content isn't being looked at our clicked on (insights we gained from heatmapping data), it needs to go. Seriously. It needs to go because getting rid of it minimizes the amount of images and words that the webpage needs to load, and increases the Page Speed Load Time, which keeps search engines, and most importantly, VISITORS, happy and engaged. 2. We changed a hero image with words at the top of our homepage to JUST WORDS. We got rid of the image. The image wasn't relevant anymore to our business, and we didn't have a replacement, so we said "screw it, let's see if this works," - well it has, to the tune of a 95% better bounce rate. Now, we've also recommended moving background imagery based on data. Moving background imagery takes up far more bandwidth than even imagery, so this may seem counterintuitive based on other blog posts and reports, but remember, data has to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Every website is different, loads a different amount of content, main navigation items, images, and has a different target audience. However, regardless of vertical, we know that if your website is loading slowly or has a high bounce rate, implementing #2 on our list will help. 3. We removed a "preloader." A "preloader" is a fancy graphic that shows before the page loads. We are immediately going to all of our clients with preloaders and sending them this post. This is typically something easy to turn off. It's one more thing that the server doesn't have to load (making the page load faster), and as we all know, every split second that a user has to wait in order to see what they came for increases the chances that they'll bounce. Not only have the web engagement numbers been extremely more positive since these changes, but even more leads have come through our website forms, which is what we all need, right?

Business owners and CEOs have asked me for years (more than a decade), how they can get to the top of Google Search Engine Results pages for keywords related to their business, services and products. This is constantly changing, but through practitioner-ship and analyzing data (a fancy way of saying trial and error), I have data driven proof that says two things are working extremely well in achieving the goal that all SEO Companies and all businesses strive for: 1. Creating content every day. Here's how. 2. Posting every day on a verified Google My Business Listing. 3. Posting content every day on a YouTube Channel. Listen in for the details.

If Facebook Ads aren't working for your Service Based business, then you're doing it wrong. Period. We've been running Lead Generation ads for our clients with Service Based businesses, targeting their exact audience based on Facebook Job Title Targeting, and it's working. There's a specific type of ad in Facebook that's actually called a Lead Generation Ad. This is working better than running a traditional ad and expecting the user to click through to a landing page to submit their information via the "old fashioned Hubspot way" for example. Why? Because the data shows more and more Facebook users are on their mobile devices, and simply will not wait for web pages to load that take them outside the Facebook App to external websites. Gone are the days of expecting the user to click through to a landing page, although you should still build them and test the traditional ads against these lead gen ads, just to be sure! This episode walks you through how to create a lead generation ad in Facebook.

Let's say you're planning a family vacation. You've obviously searched on Google countless times for cruise lines, hotels in Orlando, or even attractions in Jacksonville. Then, when taking a break from your vacation planning, have you ever watched a YouTube video, say on how to fix your car, how to unclog your sink, or even simply watched Football highlights or EllenTube? Stay with me. If not, let's just say for the sake of this blog post that you have. So in all of this internet activity, have you noticed that you've started to see ads for family vacation destinations that have NOTHING to do with Football highlights, or unclogging your sink? In other words, your Google Search History is now being reflected in your YouTube video leisure time. Google owns both platforms, and has figured out a way to make this extremely effective marketing happen. In happens within Google Ads (the new Google Adwords) and it allows you to run video ads on YouTube in any number of ways.