Profitable Connections

Helping You Grow Online

Project Tag: Metrics

  • Digital Marketing

    Digital Marketing

    Marketing Leads

    Marketing Leads are a company’s potential customers.

    How does your business get its customers? Do you have a sign? Do you give people a business card? Do you make posts on local Facebook Communities. These are all examples of Lead Generation. Lead Generation is what companies do to increase or maintain sales and can be done through many methods.

    Sales Leads are generated by gathering data about potential customers and using that data to create lists. A lawn service that sends post cards to houses in zip codes that fit their potential service area is using this method of generating leads.

    Digital Marketing uses the internet as a low cost way to generate and to maintain customers or leads, because one of the things that computers are really good at is maintaining a database of information. Most of the services on the internet rely on data collection and marketing. This is done through a variety of channels such as social media, web searches, forums, advertising platforms, and blogs. Leads are either Converted into sales or may, after going through a series of temperature swings, fade away.

    • Hot leads are where the customer has the budget, the authority, and the need for your product or service.
    • Warm leads are where your customer is interested but is missing some of the requirements needed for the lead to become hot.
    • Cold leads are the ones that are missing a key component and will be for some time. These are leads that are worth keeping in contact with as they are still potential customers and may get hot any time.

    Even for people that have more work than they can handle, it is still a good idea to think about how you manage leads. It is hard to know how things will go in the future and having a good understanding of who and where your customers are will go a long way in making it easier to sleep at night.

    Digital Marketing is an entire world of methods and services used to generate and manage leads. It consists of several basic parts.

    • SEO
    • Social Media
    • Digital Advertising

    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating a company website that works for search engine companies with the goal of attracting relevant leads.
    • Social Media are websites and applications that enable individuals and organizations to create, share content, and to participate in social networking.
    • Digital Advertising platforms allow one to place a variety of advertising campaigns across multiple sites and applications.

    These parts work together to create a system for creating, managing, and converting leads to sales. A good online marketing campaign will combine many systems and methods to produce relevant leads from each of these parts.

  • Tracking Pixels

    Tracking Pixels

    Did you know you are being watched? Every internet search and every website you visit is being tracked, studied, and tabulated on a graph somewhere.

    What you click on and what you clicked on before you clicked is recorded.

    It’s a little creepy, but it’s not you they are interested in. They are much more interested in your behavior and what makes you spend money. Your actions are a data point in a much larger picture.

    Tracking Pixels are small transparent images that are not meant to be seen, but are meant to be downloaded. These images are usually hosted by analytic companies. During the download process the server gains key information about the user, the most important of which is the IP address.

    IP addresses are a bit like your spleen in that everyone has one, but very few people know what it is. For the purposes of explaining web beacons, you just need to know that IP addresses are unique eight digit numbers used to provide your connection to the internet. Because it is unique, it can also be used to track your connection to the internet. It is owned by your internet service provider and assigned to your router. You will have this number for a length of time, depending on your provider.

    Now that you something about IP addresses, here is a basic summary of how tracking pixels work.

    The user opens an e-mail or a web page. When this happens, the program you used to read this information, called a client, reads a series of instructions on the remote computer, called a server. The client follows the instructions and downloads all the images needed for it to display properly. A Tracking Pixel is a small clear image file that is downloaded by the client. It is invisible, because it’s only purpose is to be downloaded.

    Your client isn’t downloading the Tracking Pixel from the site you are visiting. It is downloading it from a data collection site. Through this download, the tracking server gains the following information.

    • IP address
    • Operating System
    • Browser
    • Device
    • Screen Size

    As you click through the internet, your browser will download Tracking Pixels. The tracking server logs your IP address, along with all the other information. It does this each time it sees a download. This allows tracking companies to compile information around an IP address.

    It doesn’t know your name or what your Starbucks order is, but it does have a snapshot of your behavior. Digital Marketing companies use this data to create fancy presentations with graphs that show information about website traffic.

    The data can be used by marketing companies to show their customers a breakdown of the sites internet traffic. They might provide a pie chart showing the number of returning visitors and the number of unique visitors. They can show what relevant sales data was clicked on next. They might show a map describing where the traffic is coming from. A presentation might include a slide showing a bar graph comparing browsers and how the site looks on the top one. It can do the same for mobile devices.

    Tracking Pixels are not restricted to websites. Their use can be included in any service that requires the user to download a image. One area where they are used extensively is email, where the system works in much the same way.

  • Web Beacons

    Web Beacons

    Web Beacons are a method of collecting user data, primarily from web and email.

    Web Beacons come in different forms such as Tracking Pixels, Framing, and Java Script Tags. They all work by downloading a piece of unique code from a data collection server that builds a profile of the user across multiple websites sites, email, and social media platforms. This can be used to show a variety of information about the user, such as:

    • IP address
    • Operating System
    • Browser
    • Device
    • Screen Size

    This information is then used to show useful marketing data to the site owner, allowing them to make informed decisions about their digital marketing.

  • Customer Engagements

    Customer Engagements

    Customer Engagement is the communication between a business and its customers.

    In Digital Marketing, Customer Engagement can come in the form of Social Media comments, Subscriptions, and sharing. Customer content, such as product or service reviews are also a large part of Customer Engagement.

  • Web Cookies

    Web Cookies

    Web Cookies are a type of code where bits of information are exchanged between a web browser and a client for a variety of uses. The data exchange is small and is used to provide information about the user to the server.

    The idea for Web Cookies came from the term Magic Cookie. A Magic Cookie is something programmers use to exchange a kind of identification token. A client downloads it from a server. The code is small and contains a unique number. This number is read when the client exchanges the Cookie with the server. You can think of it like like a valet service. When you hand your car keys to the valet, the person hands you a ticket, which has a unique number on it. The number is used to identify the ticket you are holding to your keys and your car. This exchange provides a lot of programming solutions in an elegant and easy to use way, which is how something becomes magic in the computer world.

    Web Cookies use the same concept and applies it to web pages. Websites use cookies for a variety of purposes, and they come in two basic flavors.

    • Session Cookies: Session Cookies only last while the user has the browser open and are deleted when it is closed. This cookie is used to store information the user has entered and to track which pages the user accessed within the website.
    • Persistent cookie: A Persistent Cookie’s expiration date is set by the web developer that created it. These cookies usually last across multiple sessions and is most often use to track the client web browsing.

    Cookies are used for a variety of purposes on the web, and this is a basic explanation of how they work. Persistent Cookies are of particular interest for marketing because they provide valuable data of user browsing habits.

  • Frequency

    Frequency

    Frequency is the number of times content is shown to the same person.

    Presenting content to the same person multiple times is something that advertisers do regularly across many different types of media. Many digital marketing platforms track frequency, use it to build brand awareness, and to expose customers to your content in a way that helps them remember it. Frequency has a sweet spot. If the number is too low, your marketing plan will not be effective as it could be. If the number is too high, you are wasting money on people that have already been exposed to your content.

    Frequency is calculated by taking the amount of Impressions and dividing them by Reach.

  • Reach

    Reach

    Reach is the number of times content is displayed to different people.

    It shows how effective your content is at reaching new people. It doesn’t show that any of these people actually clicked on your content, but it is a good measure of how successful your content is at being displayed to various users.

  • Impressions

    Impressions

    Impressions are the number of times a particular content is displayed.

    Each time this post shows up in your feed, it will raise the Impression number for this post by one. You don’t even have to click on it. It doesn’t even matter if you are the only person to see it, and you see it five times.

    It’s a number that shows that your content is being displayed in various feeds. It does not show the number unique visitors or the number of visitors that actually clicked on the content.

  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)

    Click-Through Rate (CTR)

    Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown, multiplied by 100.

    This number is a percentage that is used to show how effective an ad is at getting a customer to click on it. The higher the percentage, the more effective the ad is at getting customers to make that initial click.