Take a stroll through the latest marketing blogs, and you’ll quickly get dizzy. All those metrics. All those acronyms! BR, CPA, CPC, PV, SEO … Metrics reports sometimes look more like a launch sequence at NASA than something for those of us who got Bachelor’s of the Arts degrees for the sole purpose of avoiding math and science classes.

All you really want to know:

Are my efforts working?
What could I do better?
Am I getting my money’s worth?

As it happens, digital marketing metrics are a lot like your high school reunion. You can breeze in, say, “howdy” to your oldest BFFs and breeze right back out. Or, you can come early, eat all the munchies, get the lowdown on Sandy’s 5 divorces and Steve’s bypass surgeries, and be the last to leave. Marketing metrics are as deep as you want to go.

It pays to start with the most critical performance indicators. Then, add to your regular metrics reporting as you get a handle on which are most critical to your operations. Here are the basic essentials you always need to stay on top of.

Website Traffic

Whether you’re a global e-commerce site or just a local mom & pop shop, you have to know how many people are visiting your website. Also, know how many visitors are new and how many are returns. Depending on what you sell and the average length of time your customers tend to take to make purchase decisions, visitor return rates often translate directly into conversions (sales). But knowing your new visitor numbers as well tells you how well your marketing efforts are working. Actual numbers are less important than growing numbers. One hundred visitors in March is good if you only had 78 in February. Three thousand visitors is terrible if you had 8,800 the month before. To account for seasonal fluctuations, year-over-year metrics is more of a growth indicator than month-over-month. But track both.

Bounce Rates

Website traffic metrics tells you if you’re getting people there. Bounce rates tell you if you’re keeping them there. Interested shoppers tend to stay awhile and consume a fair portion of your content, represented by low bounce rates. High bounce rates mean they came, saw, and split. This is usually an indication that you aren’t giving them what they came for. The thing about bounce rates is, high bounce rates don’t just affect your customers; Google sees those bounce rates and lowers your search ranking. That makes it harder to get people back on your site next time. You can usually improve bounce rates by offering high-quality, highly-informative, highly-relevant content on your site. Why are you reading this? You came because you saw the title and needed to know what metrics to track. You stayed because we’re actually answering your question. That should be the goal with your own website, too.

Are these the only metrics you should track? No! This is merely a good starting point for getting on top of your metrics. Once you have a handle on who’s coming to your website, how long they’re staying, and what it takes to get them to sign up or buy your stuff, you can add to your metrics tracking to dig even deeper into your digital marketing health. Unlike Sandy’s divorces and Steve’s bypass surgeries, there’s info there you can really use.

Need some help? The Get Smart Group are pros in digital marketing, and we provide the metrics reporting to back up those claims. If all you hear from your current marketing guys is, “Yeah, it’s working,” then look deeper. With state-of-the–art CRM tools and trendsetting metrics reporting, we give you the numbers to prove our efforts translate into sales. The only thing you have to lose is missed opportunities!

The world wide web is a pretty turbulent ocean. And, sometimes, it can be difficult to find your way. There are things that can help, sure, but one of the best tools for cutting through the waves today is remarketing. It makes sure people don’t forget you once they’ve used your website or your mobile app. If they visit and don’t buy anything, remarketing can show potential customers ads related to products they looked at as they travel around more than 2 billion websites on their different devices.

See? Powerful.

Remarketing keeps your brand top-of-mind for customers who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase and increases your brand exposure to your target audience. It has higher conversion and click-through rates than typical display ads.

See? Powerful.

You can even create specific remarketing lists to hyper-target your audiences. Remarket broadly to site visitors, but differently to site visitors who created a shopping cart, but then abandoned it. Create yet another remarketing target for previous customers, to turn them into repeat customers.

See? Powerful.

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of marketing partners will want to upcharge to manage remarketing efforts for you. At The Get Smart Group, we don’t believe in that. We believe remarketing is so important – so powerful – that we don’t want you to be without it. So, we build it in as a crucial piece of your online marketing plan.

Are you ready to take the plunge into online marketing? Don’t just dip a toe in – you’ll be disappointed with the results. If you really want to market your business online, you need to do it the right way. And that means including your remarketing audience in your online marketing mix. But you’ll need someone to see you through – the waters can get a little choppy. That’s where we come in. The Get Smart Group: Your trusty online lifeguards.

Think about all the things you do differently today than just a few years ago:

• When you listen to music in your car, do you listen to traditional radio, or connect your phone with Bluetooth so you can hear your favorite playlist?
• When you need to search for something online, do you type in your query, or do you simply ask your computer or phone to find what you’re looking for?
• When it’s time for bed, do you walk around the house making sure the lights are off and everything is locked up tight, or do you tell your voice-activated smart home it’s time for bed so it can take care of everything itself?

The point being, even if you aren’t using all of these things – they’re all possible. Technology is rapidly changing the way we live – and it’s changing the way we run our businesses, too. It’s helping us be more efficient while meeting our customer’s needs – especially machine learning.

Machine learning is really just a new way of tackling old problems, by teaching computers to learn on their own to solve problems. In marketing, we leverage machine learning to automatically update keywords to match new website content, for example. It frees up your time while helping ensure you don’t miss any important opportunities.

Machine learning is also crucial to efficient online ad buying. Manually adjusting bids can really eat up a lot of time – time that’s better spent on activities that are more important to your business. New tools allow us to set bids for each individual auction, bidding millions of times a day so we can get the ad placements that are within budget and make the most sense for your business. No human could ever achieve that.

It’s all really just a high-tech way of helping you make smart business decisions based on data. But if it sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. You have a friend in the business who gets it, and who’d be more than happy to give you a hand. Contact us today!

For businesses, do-it-yourself online reputation management is like herding cats. No matter what you try to do, your reputation seems to be running in ten thousand different directions. A yellow one runs left and just when you grab it, a calico one darts between your legs. Turn around to chase it, and the rest of the group takes off.

Before you know it, you’re all tied up in knots, and your online reputation is a mess. To add to the frustration, your competitors don’t seem to be facing the same problem. When you look them up online, all their reputation “cats” seem to be marching in a nice, orderly row.

So. What gives?

Well, it sounds like your competition has discovered the important trick of working with a pro. Someone who understands the ins-and-outs of getting those cats to march in a line, and has the tools to do it. Luckily, now you can, too!

At The Get Smart Group, we can help you deploy our proven system to manage your online reputation, and boost your SEO in the process. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

Customer reviews – the drivers of your online reputation – weigh heavily on consumer buying decisions. In fact, just one negative review can make up to 22 percent of potential buyers reconsider buying from YOU. Increase that to three negative reviews, and you’ve lost about 59 percent of your potential customers. Pile on more bad reviews and your pool of potential customers continues to shrink.

Once those bad reviews exist, there isn’t a lot you can do about them. It’s unlikely they’ll go away. If you can, you should reach out publicly (and professionally!) to the customer who left it and try to resolve the issue. But the absolute best course of action is to provide excellent customer service and get those customers to leave positive reviews. That’s what our system helps you do. Ask for reviews. Manage potentially negative reviews with service recovery. And put your business at the top of the reputation management mountain.

Yes, it’s a tall mountain. But The Get Smart Group can help you get to the top – with all of your cats.

Have you ever considered how your ad color/branding color choices affect lead capture for better or for worse?

At The Get Smart Group, we consider color choices very carefully. Certain colors can stimulate certain emotions. One can use specific colors to target particular demographics, increasing engagement and sales amongst those in that targeted buyer segment.

This topic is a reminder of one of the most famous (or infamous) examples of the consequence of color in marketing:

Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and legendary (or notorious) public relations pioneer (or propagandist) saved/made unknown amounts of money for Lucky Strike Cigarettes back in the 1930’s by convincing American women through various publicity stunts (anonymously funded by Lucky Strike) that smoking was hip for ladies and that a certain shade of green was fashionable and hip at a time when said shade of green had been thought of as just the opposite.

Bernays, with the help of his friends in high places, endeavored to create the positive buzz surrounding that certain shade of green because it was the brand’s color and money had already been spent on packaging in that color. To discard the packaging would have been to discard the money paid for that packaging.

Ed’s understanding of “crowd psychology” and his efforts in that Lucky campaign started a green fad and a smoking trend among women of the era, nationally and perhaps even beyond – all in the name of saving money/making money for his employer.

Our suggestion is not that one needs to generate buzz around unpopular colors or fabricate social trends out of thin air, the point is simply to take heed of the power of color and social trends in regards to any contemporary marketing strategy.

Another example:

Do you think that a certain (115 year old) American motorcycle company would enjoy the success that it does today if instead of capitalizing on an assumed outlaw image, said company changed its colors, logo, and promotional materials in such a way that contravened the desperado image and departed from the brand’s celebrated history? You get the point…

So consider your own brand, your own history, your own customers – and your desired customers and their values. As younger generations grow into adults, professionals, and homeowners, you need to find ways to reach them whilst staying true to your company’s history, values, and niche.

It can be a delicate balance, but with solid branding and the right marketing (ever important color selection falls under both of these umbrellas) your business could someday celebrate a centennial.

Call The Get Smart Group for a FREE 30 minute marketing consultation. We want to help you forge your identity.