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Some descriptionDarren McSherry is Group Marketing Manager at Shelbourne Motors Ltd and has nearly 13 years marketing experience. In his current role Darren is responsible for all aspects of group/digital marketing across the seven brands/businesses at Shelbourne Motors. Previously, Darren was Group Media Manager at Lookers PLC/Charles Hurst working on regional/national marketing and has former experience working in IT, manufacturing and the Public sector. A new member of CIM, Darren holds a BA (Hons) in Marketing and is now working towards Chartered status.

"What you can measure you can manage", an opening line at the recent Google Immersion event covering Google Analytics, YouTube and the broader Google product suite. As marketing professionals we all know the importance of business objectives and their alignment and measurement against the marketing strategy. That said, what is your online measurement plan? How much do you understand your customers’ online behaviour? What intelligence is gleamed from your website and online campaigns? I will explore my top 3 tips for starting out on Google Analytics to help understand online consumer engagement on your website.

1). Measurement and goals

An intuitive feature of Google analytics is goals and events, and this is a great place to start on analytics. Here you will find 4 goal templates; revenue, acquisition, inquiry and engagement. A further 'custom' option is available for bespoke reporting. Sample goals: product detail pages or post submission 'contact us' forms on your website.  To help understand online behaviour, conversion, and campaign efficiency, you must have Google online goals.  To compliment goals also see Google events.

2). Custom report dashboards

Dashboards are another great feature, essentially they allow you to create and configure key online reporting dashboards across the website for different team members across the business. Consider, what does the company Director, the general manager, the sales manager, the marketing manager need to see?  From there, each report can be made relevant to each person for detailed online insights, and scheduled to arrive in their inbox either daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly - you decide. 

3). Traffic measurement and campaign builder

I highly recommend that all internal company IP addresses are entered into the 'filters' section under Google analytics admin; this will remove all website visits from internal staff and therefore remove the artificial inflation of visitor traffic, goals, metrics and reporting.  For accurate measurement of all campaigns an essential tool is 'Google URL builder', which is an excellent resource for tracking campaign URLs for online campaigns, as it seamlessly reports into your Google analytics account under 'campaigns'. It is important to note that clear and relevant naming of all campaigns on the URL builder for 'campaign source', 'medium' and 'name' means ease of reference on analytics during, and post, campaign.

YouTube:

As the second largest search engine in the world, it's very easy to see the appeal of incorporating YouTube into your marketing strategy, but how? What are the opportunities? I will look at my top 3 tips for YouTube.

1). Biggest is not always best

When considering video content for your audience(s), marketers don't need Stephen Spielberg sets or budgets. On the contrary, some of the very best and most successful videos are low budget and importantly resonate with their intended audience on many different levels. A great example, the 'dollar share club', cost $3000 dollars and generated over 12,000 new customers by day 2 of online release. Production? $200. Location? Company warehouse. Time invested? 2 days. Know your product, know your audience, and reach out in a relevant and innovative way. 

2). Call to actions

Once your video is ready, a great tool to engage with your audience is YouTube annotations. Essentially annotations are clickable text overlays on your YouTube video to effectively promote viewer engagement, give more information, and aid in navigation to say a custom landing page on your website. To enable a click through to your own website from your video you will need to validate your website ownership to enable this feature.

3). YouTube Advertising & video remarketing

Now you have your video(s) and your annotations complete, it time to consider going to market. YouTube offers varying advertising opportunities, but two that stand out for me are 'remarketing', and 'skippable' ad formats.  YouTube remarketing allows you to remarket to anyone who has viewed any of your videos up to 550 days previously, which is particularly good if you have video content with already high levels of views. Skippables are a great way to reach out to relevant conquest business; essentially it is a 5 second pre-roll before your audience watches their intended video. Naturally the first 5 seconds of your promoted video is crucial, but nonetheless it presents an opportunity for branding and/or tactical advertising. Targeting can be applied on a regional basis as campaign settings permit targeting by specific location or radius .It must be noted that to advertise on YouTube you will need to link it with your Google Adwords account.

Other great Google product assets to check out are Google Consumer Barometer and Google Trends.

For more Google analytics and consumer insights/search trends: