Goals

• Improve the look of the “find a lawyer” app opening screen without doing a web app development cycle.
• Improve the percentage of the public who go on to the next step of the app.

RESULTS

• Updated the opening screen
• Increased users who flow onto the next step by 20% during a public outreach campaign

Background

In addition to its services to SA legal practitioners, the Law Society of South Australia (LSSA) has a public lawyer referral service (referral.lawsocietysa.asn.au). This is a web app that lets people find a qualified South Australian practitioner based on their legal needs.

The Society was running an advertising campaign to the web app to raise South Australians’ awareness of the need to use qualified lawyers for legal queries. However, there was limited budget and timeframe for improvements to the web app, and people who did reach the app, were not getting very far after arriving.

Approach

Google Analytics and Google Data Studio were used to visualise the funnel of people stepping through the app. It was identified that the biggest dropoff was the first step, which required people to select an area of law based on language not readily understood by the layperson.

Although not recommended for a standard development cycle, because of time and budget constraints in making changes to the web app itself. Google Tag Manager was used to dynamically add explanatory text to each area of law as it loads in a user’s browser, making it easier for people to know what to click.

“Tactic Lab helped us to identify how the app’s functionality could be improved using data-driven insights and turned around the actual changes without us requiring a developer. This meant not only improving the results from the campaign but that any budget that would have had to go to the developer could instead be earmarked for a more major refresh of the web app.” – Michael Esposito, The Law Society of South Australia

This increased the rate of people proceeding to the next step by a relative 20.4%, improving the effectiveness of the public outreach campaign.

The interim structure was also ready and waiting when law firms across SA started to feel the impacts of Covid-19. The Law Society responded with another public awareness campaign to drive more enquiries to the SA law firms. This time focussed on the most common legal enquiries surrounding Covid-19 including those around employment, tenancy and contract law.

The post Using Google Tag Manager to fast-track UX improvements appeared first on Tactic Lab.

Here are the default settings:

And here are the options available, so you can turn this off on your end which ensures that the data never expires.

Here’s the deal though, with Google Analytics 4 the options are much more limited:

And what’s worse, if you create a new GA4 property, Google will actually default to 2 months hoping you won’t notice:

This is as close to a middle finger from Google as you will get.

So when you’re setting up your GA4 property, make sure to at least change it to 14 months.

The real solution though is to use the BigQuery integration which is now free (and even though you pay for BigQuery storage, for most Australian websites this will be negligible).

I suspect that this severe restriction of options is to “subtly” encourage as many websites as possible to start using BigQuery. It is win-win since the BigQuery export is a great feature and a game-changer for most websites in terms of the ease of data ownership and data analysis. However it’s also quite likely that this move has something to do with Google wanting to mitigate its privacy legal risk, since it’s passing not only the data ownership but also the legal liability straight to you, dear webmaster.

The post The one setting you need to adjust in GA4 or you might lose all your data appeared first on Tactic Lab.

BigQuery is a tool that allows you to store and run analyses on large datasets without sampling, and with more control than you have inside the Google Analytics 4 interface. BigQuery has been around for a long time, but for many marketers the addition of GA4 is their first time using it.

BigQuery is a paid product, but it has very generous free quotas and even if you do surpass the quotas, the costs are a lot less than you might think. We’ve created a calculator to help you estimate your storage costs so you can see for yourself.

To use the calculator, just update the inputs and your results will automatically update in the table below. To save your results, use the Print to PDF button at the end of the article. The calculator is only an estimate but we’re trying to lean on the conservative side if anything to over-estimate rather than under-estimate your cost.

Note that this calculator is only about storage costs, there might also be query costs that depend on how much analysis you’re doing. The full breakdown is on this Google page.

Your actual costs might be different for these reasons:

• If you are sending a lot of data with each event (eg. heavy ecommerce hits), each event might take more than the 1KB we’ve conservatively estimated. You can update the third field with your current dataset size to get a more accurate estimate.
• In many world regions, the cost per GB is 2.0c not 2.3c so your actual costs may be cheaper than the above.
• Long-term storage (tables that haven’t been modified in over 90 days) is almost half price. Because Google Analytics creates a new table for each day of data, you might be paying full price only for the last 90 days of storage.

The post GA4 BigQuery Cost Estimate Calculator appeared first on Tactic Lab.

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping is a highly focused product-based ad format, that offers highly relevant products to users. It makes use of their market-leading search engine to connect users with what they want. With a continually growing ecommerce sector, this channel will continue to demonstrate its value to retailers and marketers. Google Shopping ad placements give advertisers a presence in search engine results pages for search terms that are relevant to their products and a top place in the shopping tab of the main search engine. With COVID-19 disrupting traditional markets and industries, particularly its impact on retail, commerce is positioned to become a core component of all business at a faster rate than previously projected.

If you want to skip to the cheat sheet.

Overall there are three primary elements to creating a Google Shopping campaign.
These are:

• Your Product Feed
• Google Merchant Center
• Google Ads

Ad Format

As you have probably seen in your Google searches, shopping ads are present in the search engine results page, but only for product relevant keywords that are being bid on. The shopping ads section also allows the user to navigate to an expanded shopping product list, through the shopping tab, or the ‘See’ link above the ads. The expanded platform of shopping ads also integrates filtering and sorting options, to let users narrow their search further through a series of filters such as brand, price, style, etc.

For smart shopping campaign types, the range of ad formats extends beyond the normal shopping formats to span Responsive Display ads (RSA), Youtube, Gmail, and Discover ad formats.

Merchant Center & Setting up your Product Feed

Google Merchant Center is the platform that allows you to upload and handle your product feed data and then transfer it onto your Google Ads account, which can then be used for hopping campaigns. This step then means that Google will review your products to ensure they meet their standards before being advertised on their platform.

In terms of product feed types, there are multiple ways to have your products uploaded to Google Merchant Center, allowing for flexibility depending on your situation and setup.

Although there are multiple forms in which you can provide the product information to Google Merchant Center, each will still require the same minimum product data specifications. These specification requirements can be found here.

Google Ads

When creating your campaign in Google Ads there are a number of settings that will need to be configured in order to get started, which include target locations, daily budgets, ad placements, bidding strategy, and more. Below is a list of the core settings necessary for shopping campaigns, as well as a specific list of smart shopping campaign-specific settings.

For smart shopping your options for bidding is limited to ‘maximise conversion value’ due to the automated nature of this campaign subtype. However, you can adjust your target return on ad spend (ROAS), which will help the campaign decide on how aggressive it should be in ad auctions, in order to meet your target.

Smart shopping campaigns require many of the same set up elements as a standard shopping campaign, but differ through the automation of its audience targeting and placements in order to support driving suited customers towards converting.

We know that starting a campaign on an unfamiliar channel or platform can be a daunting task, we’ve all been there at some point. However, hopefully with the use of this cheat sheet, you can get started on the right foot, with the knowledge of what information, settings, and components are needed to get that campaign going.

The post Google Shopping Cheat Sheet: Everything you need to get started appeared first on Tactic Lab.

The TL/DR is:

• Traffic that shows in Google Analytics as google/organic might also have come from other Google properties such as Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Data Studio, Google Finance, Google Maps, Google Meet, Google Play and Google Search Console.
• There is no way to differentiate between true Google Search traffic and traffic from any of the above.
• The list of services above might change.
• There’s nothing you can do about it.

Now the first thing is:

If your analytics is showing 1,000 visits from Google Organic, for most of us it probably means that 99% of them were from Google Search. But this is useful to be aware of if:

1. Your brand actually gets some visits from Google Calendar (eg. you’re a SaaS that books appointments), Google Chat (eg. people share your links) and so forth.
2. You’re seeing Google Organic traffic on a property that shouldn’t be getting it (eg. a staging website, a domain hidden from Google’s index etc) or going to a weird landing page.

Why is this happening?

The main way any digital analytics tool finds out where your traffic is coming from is by looking at the HTTP referrer. Typically it shows the full previous URL you were on before this page was loaded. For example if you click this link to go to a random Wikipedia article, the referrer will be https://tacticlab.com.au/knowledge-base/technical-marketing/your-google-organic-traffic-includes-clicks-from-other-google-properties.

Sometimes the website hides the full URL though and only lets the domain name show. For example if you search Google for embarrassing stuff, this search will be in URL (https://www.google.com.au/search?q=embarrassing+stuff) and according to the normal method the website you click on will be able to see the search keyword. Remember SEO keywords in Google Analytics reports? Those were the days… But now Google takes into account that there might be good reasons not to pass search terms to the referring website and so it doesn’t. So any click from Google search results now only shows that it came from https://www.google.com.au/ (or your local Google domain).

This means that Google Analytics will count any visit as organic if the referrer is https://www.google.com.au/.

If only clicks from Google search results gave this referrer this would be fine (except the lack of keywords). Unfortunately for marketers, lots of Google’s products use Google’s internal URL redirect. For example, if you create a link in Google calendar and then right click and copy the link URL you’ll find it’s actually https://www.google.com/url?q=YOUR-ORIGINAL-URL&sa=D&source=calendar&ust=123&usg=123.

This is Google’s internal redirect tool that it uses to track your click and then redirect you to YOUR-ORIGINAL-URL, but because this is routed through https://www.google.com/, this is the referrer Google Analytics will see and hence interpret it as Google Organic (SEO).

You can’t do anything about it. Whether someone clicks through to your website from Google Search or (say) from Google Calendar, the traffic appears as identical to all tools.

Which services does this happen to?

We did a test in October 2020 (so over time the results may change) but this is what we found:

So yes, traffic labelled google / organic is probably Google Search. But there’s a chance some of it might be from some of the others in yellow.

The post Your Google Organic traffic includes clicks from other Google properties appeared first on Tactic Lab.

Setting a goal value for each goal turns on things like:

• Goal Value / Session which is essentially a score for each session (the average of that session’s goal values). Seeting this metric for each marketing channel is a very easy way to compare their ROI.
• Page Value: how much does each pageview contribute to goal value?
• Goal value in attribution reporting which will let you see the value of each marketing channel under different attribution models.

We often see people unsure of what goal values to set though. Ideally you would work out how much each goal type is worth to your business. But sometimes you might not have this data, for example if you’re just starting out. For this we would recommend you set the goal value be equal to your maximum CPA. More on CPAs here but one benefit is that this makes it easy to see if your marketing has good ROI. If the total goal value is less than the marketing spend you know you’re hitting your CPA targets (even if you have multiple goals with different values).

If you’re not sure of your target CPA we recommend a guessing game we’ve developed below. If you don’t have much existing data it’s a subjective process, but at the very least you definitely have an intuitive feeling of what would be too much to pay for each conversion type. The guessing game will let you converge on this number:

What would you say to a CPA of $?

Your final CPA target/goal value for is $ZZZ. Click here for more info about setting/using CPAs.

The post How to assign goal values/CPA targets in Google Analytics appeared first on Tactic Lab.

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Me neither. If you actually watch Mad Men, it’s not a world any of us should want to emulate. Plus I’m too young to have worked in an age where the basic demographics of your target audience (eg. age, gender, race) were all you had to go on, and I bet you’re too young for this too. Why then would we make these factors the cornerstone of our campaigns? And yet this is something we see day in and day out.

It’s certainly true that when you are creating your business or marketing plan you should be developing target personas, as well as updating them as the direction of your business evolves (hello 2020 & beyond). But it’s usually best to think of your persona as a diving board not the destination. It helps you make your marketing messages (website, ads, emails) get specific rather than generic. But this does not mean that it’s a good idea to just apply the core demographics from your persona to ad targeting.

Let’s say you are selling a veggie subscription box. You have research showing that the people most likely to get this type of subscription are professional women in their 30s with families (note: this is made up, we have no idea if this is true). So far so good, you might develop a core persona based on this hypothetical person. But then how to implement this in, say Facebook? When we look at accounts people have built themselves we’d often see the audience defined as something “women in their 30s“, often with nothing else! This highlights why over-focussing on demographics might not be good.

What’s wrong with over-focussing on demographic targeting?

1. The above example focuses on age and gender as if that’s the most salient point about a person. But unless you think everyone in that demographic would convert (a remnant of Don Draper era targeting), all ad networks have much richer signals. In Google, someone might be searching for a veggie subscription box. In Facebook it might be available as an interest. Any of those are orders of magnitude more valuable than demographics but when you were developing your personas you probably wouldn’t have put “wants a veggie subscription box” in the description — that would be implied. So translating demographics to targeting too literally makes us more likely to stop looking for more valuable signals.
2. If like us you’re in Australia, you will probably also be experiencing limitations in advertising due to Australia’s low population compared to say USA, UK or other countries. Audience sizes being too small is something we see for Australian advertising time and time again. To go back to the Facebook example, let’s say you add an interest for veggie subscription boxes but also keep the “women in their 30s” target. What you’re telling Facebook is essentially: “of all the people interested in veggie subscription boxes, narrow this down further to women in their 30s; for anyone else don’t show the ad”. Is this really what we want to be doing?
3. Over-relying on demographics is often short-sighted in terms of your business development. It’s true that different ages, genders, races etc will convert at different rates. But if we think of our products as being primarily “for” a certain combination of the above we are much more likely to start replicating discrimination in the way our products and services are set up. Even if you remove demographics, your ad might still be served in a discriminatory manner, as this Vox video shows. Do we need to add to this ourselves?
4. Finally for some verticals, targeting by specific demographics may be against the ad platform’s terms of service and/or illegal. For example you cannot target by gender on Facebook in posting ads for jobs. Chances are your industry is not on this smaller list, yet. But maybe it will be, maybe it should be!

So how would we recommend you deal with demographics? Let’s continue with the veggie subscription box business and pretend it’s a new website and ad account.

What should you do about demographic targeting?

1. Unless your product/service offering really is restricted by age/gender/race (I bet it’s not), do not add any demographic targets from the outset but make them about the better targeting options offered by the ad platforms. In this case we might use Facebook interests, lookalike audiences, search keywords for Google and Bing, remarketing lists from your own website, custom affinity audiences in the Google Display Network and so on.
2. The main exception to this might be if your target market is so large that you really do want to restrict your audience as much as possible first so as not to burn through your cash (again that probably means you’re not advertising in Australia or have an absolute mass-market product).
3. Before turning on the ads make sure to turn your Google Analytics demographic reports on, as well as making any relevant updates to your privacy policy/user privacy controls.
4. Once the ads are running for a little bit and you have some conversion data, check your Google Analytics demographic reports to see how different values for age and gender convert compared to each other. GA does not have race as a field, we’re not fully in Black Mirror yet. Note that these reports will not include anyone for whom age + gender is unknown which may be 50% or more of your traffic. Here’s an example of how to easily see this:
   
5. If there’s a substantial difference, in Google and Microsoft ads, add bid modifiers for these demographics. Use the proportional ROI difference; for example if 18-24s convert at 75% less than the baseline, make their bid adjustment -75%. This would mean you don’t stop ads for any demographic, although the bid might be greatly reduced.
6. For Facebook ads this option doesn’t exist at the moment so you would need to (A) segment your existing ad sets by demographic or (B) update your audience definition to narrow the audience. Option A has the added advantage of being able to tailor the ad copy to the demographic (also a possibility in Google/Microsoft ads although it can be a lot of work).

Following the above steps does not guarantee that your ad campaigns will not be served in a discriminatory way. Nor does it guarantee best results. It is however how we recommend most advertisers deal with striking an appropriate balance.

The post Why you shouldn’t over-rely on basic demographic targeting options appeared first on Tactic Lab.

However, not all metrics were created equal. So whether you’re:

• Allocating marketing budgets,
• Designing new campaigns or,
• Scaling and optimising new campaigns,

CPA (or cost-per-acquisition) data needs to be in the mix.

What is a CPA?

CPA or Cost-Per-Acquisition is most commonly used to assess the performance of a campaign that’s already run with the basic calculation of how much you spent, divided by how many results you got.
E.g. $1000 spent on ads / 25 leads = a CPA of $40/lead

CPA has become so important that many of today’s ad platforms now have campaign formats based entirely around it. Today you can set a campaign to work backwards from your nominated CPA amount, putting you in total control of your ROI which is amazing right? Yes, but only if you’ve chosen the right CPA.

Why is it important to marketing budgets?

Ideally, once you’ve integrated the right CPA into your budgeting model, your campaign budget will be led by the acceptable CPA, so it’s structured to instinctively reward ROI from the outset, leading to organic growth and easier scalability.

Knowing your CPA also helps you forecast the type of results you might achieve for a certain ad spend/budget.

What’s a good target CPA for my industry?

As an agency this is still one of the most common questions we hear from new clients. The short answer is that there is unlikely to be a meaningful industry average readily available to you when it comes to CPA. Competitor research is great for many things, but your assessment of what is a viable vs non-viable CPA is usually an internal process, tied directly to your margins and ROI.

Okay, so what is a good target CPA for me then?

A good CPA target to start with, most importantly, is the one that is both realistic and affordable.

In essence, the CPA target is you or your client saying “this is as much as I’m able to spend before I get a sale.” The best place to start is by calculating what your existing CPA or revenue per lead amount is.

Your basic CPA calculation is:
cost of advertising / number of sales or leads or transactions
E.g. $1000 / 25 leads = $40 CPA

To get from your actual CPA to a CPA target you’ll need to gather some additional stats and depending on your product, these might include:

• Required volume – Do you have a target volume you need to fill? E.g. 20 course enrollments.
• Profit margin or cost of sale – How much does it cost to deliver or produce this product? How much is left over if I sell one at X price?
• Lifetime value – Is it possible that this new customer will come back? If so, you might be willing to spend a bit more to attract that new customer the first time.
• Conversion rates within your funnel – This one is important. It’s the piece of information most clients don’t have on hand in the beginning, but one that they soon start tracking because of its power. Even if it’s just an estimate, you need to factor in the realistic conversion rate of your funnel to see what your overall CPA is.

Let’s use the example of selling course enrolments. If I spend $1000 and send the sales team 25 leads, I give myself a CPA $40/lead. But how many of those leads actually converted? Most sales teams running on a CRM or database should be able to tell you they’re average conversion rate, e.g. 25%. With that knowledge, I can now calculate that it cost $40 to get each lead, but a much higher $160, to actually land each enrollment.

To finalise your target CPA, you then need to factor in the other less-tangible factors surrounding the campaign, understanding that different campaigns can and should have different CPA targets based on their unique objectives. E.g.

• Audience – Is the campaign reaching out to a broader audience or a more targeted one? There is almost always a trade-off in CPA when reaching out to new or broader audiences.
• Market share – In CPA-led campaigns, you might miss out on impressions if a competitor has set themselves a higher CPA target.
• Brand awareness – If you’re advertising this product for the first time, you might be willing to accept a higher CPA in return for great volumes.
• Campaign maturity – If it’s a new product or campaign, you need to factor in that you might go through a period of higher CPAs while your campaign matures.

Got it. I’m ready to start crunching numbers!

Great, we’ve taken some of the difficulty out by creating a free CPA Calculator.

Can I use my CPA to plan my budgets?

Yes, that’s a great way to use CPA data. We can take the same course enrolments scenario to watch this in action:

Boss: “We need 200 new enrolments to fill this course. How much budget do you think you’ll need to do that?”

Enrolments required: 200
Conversion rate of lead funnel: 25%
Leads required: 800
If we already know either of these and are happy that they’re a viable target:
CPA per lead: $40
CPA per enrolment: $160
Budget recommended: $32,000

Our CPA calculator allows you to calculate the above in a bit more detail, taking into account aspects like what % of the total revenue you’re willing to spend on marketing.

What can I do to improve a high CPA?

If you’re trying to reduce a high CPA, you first need to take a look at your channel mix and attribution setup to see which channels or parts of the funnel have the most room for improvement.

Most of the information you need should be within your Google Analytics data: channels, goals and ecommerce reports if applicable.

1. Break out the different CPAs you have. E.g. Cost per lead, vs Cost per sale
2. Break out your CPA data into channels
3. Make sure each channel is being measured according to its purpose. For example, a search campaign result and a social media post reach people at very different parts of the funnel so judging them all against the same goal will send you in the wrong direction.
4. Gather information on the conversion rates of each stage of your funnel, online and offline.

Then ask yourself these questions:

1. Can I improve my advertising? E.g. Can we optimise the ads to increase the click-through-rate?
2. Can I refine my audience targeting? E.g. use segments to see if some audiences are converting better than others.
3. Can I improve my landing page(s)?
4. Is there a barrier in the lead capture process? E.g. check form completion rates
5. Can we improve the conversion rate of the sales funnel?
6. Can we recapture lost leads/abandoned carts with remarketing ads? E.g. all things being equal, it is cheaper to convert someone that has entered a funnel than to have to find a new customer.

If these types of calculations haven’t become routine for your organisation, with 2020 bringing so many permanent changes to almost every industry, by now they should be!

The post Calculating and optimising CPA appeared first on Tactic Lab.

To use the calculator, just update the inputs and your results will automatically update in the table below. To save your results, use the Print to PDF button at the end of the article.

The post CPA Calculator appeared first on Tactic Lab.

Each year the range of self-serve, paid ad platforms grows. With variety, also comes an additional level of complexity in terms of tracking and managing your ad spend.

Logging into each specific platform to get an update on its current spend and to see if you need to adjust budgets can become a time sink when performed a few times a week. However, with the use of Google Sheets and your chosen data source (we use Supermetrics), you can create a simple way to check all your campaign spends in one place and keep them on track.

We have put together a simple budget tracker template that can be used for tracking multiple digital channels, such as Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Microsoft Ads. Our template is set up for Google Ads, Bing and Facebook, but others can be added.

The template includes:

• timeframe vs. budget tracking
• recent spend activity
• budget adjustment calculator

The template is currently formatted to use daily updated data through the google sheets Supermetrics for Google Sheets add-on. You will require a Supermetrics subscription in order to use the template.

Click here to get the template

Notes:

• To copy the template to your Google Drive, go to file, then ‘Make a Copy’. This will allow you to save the template in a designated folder in your Google Drive account.
• When creating your supermetrics queries, open up the supermetrics launcher to add a new query to match the same format as the placeholder tabs. The spend column formulas will then need to be adjusted to use the name of the new tabs for each channel.
• In order to add new ad platforms, you will need to (A) create a new tab for the new query, (B) create a new query in the Supermetrics add-on for that tab, (C) create new rows in the “Paid Channel – Budget Tracker” tab and (D) adjust the sheet names in the formulas in this new row to match your new query tab.

The post Keeping track of your marketing spend: free budget tracker appeared first on Tactic Lab.