 Hello and welcome to today's member exclusive live webinar understanding your customers digital journey. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items so you know how to participate. The presentation will last for approximately 40 minutes. You'll be able to send text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the chat box of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll collect an address as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. Unfortunately, we don't send slides to the presentation. However, the webinar will be available to watch on demand via our content hub exchange in the next couple of working days. I would now like to hand over to Kiran. He'll be today's presenter. Over to you Kiran. Hello, welcome. Thanks all for taking the time to come and join us today. We're going to be looking at understanding your customers digital journey. Well, it's interesting because actually what I've tried to do, I think all customers go on a digital journey, but increasingly I think they go on a real life journey as well. Like in the real world, remember that and as digital marketers, very often we miss a lot of what's going on. So I really want to delve into this and get you all thinking a little bit more deeply about these customer journeys and how they overlap. But before we do that, who am I? I'm Kiran Rodgers. I'm a CIM course director and speaker. I've lectured at Middlesex University on their MA course. I've got over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, both client-side, agency-side. I've worked with lots of big brands. There's just a few of them. They're not the boy with the details. I take, as you can see, a particularly cheesy selfie to which I don't apologize. That's how it comes out. I'm also the host and producer of the Digital Marketing Podcast. It's a podcast we've been doing all for nearly 10 years now through Target Internet, where I'm the digital marketing director actually. The podcast is an audience that's great. Hopefully some of you have listened to the podcast. If you haven't, we'll see how much you've had a gut full of my voice by the end of this and whether you want to listen to any more of it. We'll see more online if you want to. The whole thing with the 20-year experience is interesting, because what I've begun to see is that most of what I'm doing as a digital marketer is stuff that I've learned and discovered in the last two to three years. A lot of that experience kind of goes out of the window a little bit. I spend a lot of time in sailing. I always keep one eye on the flag so you can see what direction the wind is going on and adjusting your course and your strategies as a result of that. I think that's a lot of what today's presentation is all about. I want to delve into the evolving digital environment that we find ourselves in in 2020. I'm going to use a couple of really great studies that came out in January and February of this year that we've made use of. For those of you not familiar with them, there's a really good one done by WeAreSocial and Hootsuite. There's another one I'm going to refer to done by SimilarWeb where they've taken lots of data from lots of big data. I'm now going to make it all together to get a bit of a true picture of how people are spending their time online. I've referenced all of these sources in the actual slide. If anybody does need the actual references, they're really super useful. There's a whole ton of stuff that I didn't need to use in this presentation. In particular, I really love the WeAreSocial study because actually they produce it every year and you can begin to compare and contrast how things have shifted, which is a lot of fun in itself. If you're not convinced, you're not into data enough, that's fine. But if you like me and love a bit of data that you can compare and contrast, they're really, really good. Before we delve into that though, I want to give you all an image. You've all, I'm sure, seen the David Attenborough and similar animal documentaries. I want you to imagine either a lion or a puma stalking its prey. We've all got that, so you can imagine that. What's interesting, if you've ever watched any movies of lions or cumas or any big cat stalking its prey, what I think is amazing about them is they have this absolutely unwavering focus on their objective. Now, in the wild world, their objective is to eat whatever they're sizing up. But I think as digital marketers, there's a lot that we can learn from that. Actually having an unwavering focus on our objective, I think is a lot of what digital marketing is all about. But what I'm going to explore here is I think, particularly the digital part of the market here, is very often not looking at the right thing. Very often we think we're focused on our objective, but actually we're just looking at shadows that are cast from the real world. And if a big cat was to conduct its hunt like that, well, it would end up going hungry right because it's kind of misaligned. So just to keep that analogy in the back of your mind as we explore some of the reasons I'm going to use to justify that, I think don't get me wrong, digital is amazing and there's lots that you can measure. And a lot of the time I think we are looking at literally shadows of what's actually going on. And if we're too focused on the digital side, we're going to miss a lot. So what do we do online? Well, this is from the We Are Social Hootsuite study. And actually like 90% of our activity is watching videos online, like no surprises there. 51% of that watching video logs or vlogs if you like. 70% listening to streaming music services, 47% listening to online radio stations and 41% listening to podcasts. I think what's interesting about all of those major online activities is that they're all kind of hard to track in many respects. I know we can put tracking on videos that we've got on our website and stuff and you do get video analytics and stuff, but actually measuring through from that kind of content through to conversion does present a few challenges. But that's what the majority of people are doing. And the majority of the time isn't spent online doing activities that we would consider as marketers an actual conversion in a lot of instances. So how do we view the actual web? Well, no surprises here. This is again from the We Are Social study. 53% of the web pages that were consumed by web browsers in December of 2019 were on a mobile. That was up 8.6% on the same month in the previous year. So laptops and desktops lost a portion, but we're still using those a lot. And tablet computers definitely on the decline. I think as mobile phones just get easier to use and the screens more easily to zoom in and out and respond on various websites less than that. So we actually even have a need for a tablet computer, but they're still there. And no surprises, but it would turn out that playing games on other devices is much more entertaining than trying to browse the web on them, which clearly isn't a trend that we see any growth on. And it really doesn't surprise me because I've tried to use some of these other devices to browse in the web, but really not a great experience. Okay, so mobile is the main window that people are consuming their content through. What's interesting is when you look at this, this is taken from the similar web study and their 2020 digital trends report. Mobile has nowhere near the kind of visit duration that we see on desktop devices. So effectively, if more and more people are using mobile devices, actually our attention spans are lowering. Well, sort of. It gets complicated, doesn't it? Because actually we know that people are on multiple device journeys. I might start my journey on mobile device and switch around to a tablet or a desktop or really, if I'm honest about it, whatever device suits me to use at that moment in my time. The problem is it makes it harder for us as marketers to monitor those journeys. A lot of our tracking, a lot of the analytics tracking is very reliant on cookies. Where do those cookies get placed? Well, in specific browser cookie folders. So even just cross browser tracking is hard enough, let alone cross device. And although some of the big players, particularly Google with Chrome and Apple with Safari, have made steps to pull cross device cookies across. A lot of people are still using a lot more than one browser and a lot more than one device. The other thing I think is really interesting is this global use of voice search. And this, some of the figures here really surprised me. In some cases they're almost double what I was looking at sort of same period last year. In a globally up to 43% of users are saying they regularly use or certainly using each month voice interfaces to interact with the web. And I think that's going to cause a bit of a shift really in how people are actually using it. If you've got a lot of people using voice commands to navigate through the web, certain things like questions are going to be so much more important. And indeed the search engine optimization world is definitely responding to that. People are doing a lot more queries in natural language now. So you don't have to jump to ask Chiefs like we did years ago to start asking real life questions. Google's more than happy to handle that. And the speech assistance and speech voice assistance and voice activated devices are very, very good at interpreting our voice commands. UK is lacking a little bit lower numbers there, I thought for this study. That surprised me, like 28%. But that's still a big increase than what it was in the previous year. And the prediction is that these are only going to continue to grow. If any of you haven't used either a Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa device, definitely my recommendation is get hold of one because your audiences and consumers potentially are making use of these. I think it's great to get an idea of how they work and how useful they are. They do get used in a different way though. If we have a look at the two main players, I think again, you have to be careful with the stats because actually that earlier graph that I showed you is very much looking at all voice commands, not just specifically questions asked to these digital assistants. But these things are great and do give answers to almost every question. The question I have for you all is if a significant portion of your audience are using these devices to navigate the web, how certain are you that your analytics tracking is accurately capturing that? As far as I'm aware, these things don't need to download or make use of any JavaScript that's on your website and increasingly what the search engines are doing is they're pulling content from our websites and serving them up within the search results. But actually you could be reaching a lot of people that never even need to touch your website. You only need to look at what's happened within the travel industry, particularly with flights and hotels. They're a whole industry where I don't actually need to visit my provider's website once. I can book a flight through any flight operator all within the safe confines of my search engine. And I think increasingly as people start to find ways of using voice assistants to navigate through the web, it's going to be harder and harder to track. Now this, this is special, a little drum roll for this one. Definitely this is the – Smart Insights did this, Dr. Dave Chaffee, an amazing guy, brilliant marketer. And definitely check out Smart Insights' website. So many useful resources there, big fan of his, their work. Smart Insights did this diagram a few years ago and for me it represents a really brilliant 10,000 foot view of digital marketing. So we're all focused on content marketing. The idea is that we come up with lots of really great content, blogs, webinars, videos, infographics, audio, e-books, all that good stuff. And they get pushed into our content hub there in the middle, right? So we're publishing – I call it a content hub because in most cases this is a website but it could easily be a portal or even an app actually in today's environment. How do we get stuff or people to look at that stuff? Well from two different directions digitally actually at the moment. You've got the marketing outposts and influencer websites on the right-hand side. They'll certainly link to content that's really, really good and share that with their audiences. But then we've also got the search engines. So Bing and Google spidering through our website working out what it's about. What a lot of people do though is they're not pulling a close enough kind of a view of how much those search engines interact with and relate to those marketing outposts and influencer websites. So they are making use of data in social networks and news sites and influencer blogs and portal and partner sites to work out what's popular and what's not. So you can't – actually I don't think in today's environment – have success in one without necessarily having success in another. And we all know how important backlinks are, right? But if the search engines are only really going on account of the backlinks they're never going to be overranking stuff that's literally just happening now. So they're very much reliant on signals from elsewhere to work out what's popular and what's not. And so all these things are sending us traffic but in different ways. And it all gets measured on our analytics, say whether it's coming through from a social network or from Google or from Bing even. But we don't necessarily know how much those two kind of environments are actually interacting with one another. And I think increasingly it's really, really important. So how do we go about viewing our content and making sure that we're performing effectively? Well, one of the ways is to use a very simple marketing funnel. And this is something that we recommend to all of our marketing students. And I'm particularly fond of the funnel on the left there. This is Google's take on the marketing funnel. I'm sure you've all seen various iterations of this kind of classic sales funnel. But the way Google look at it, I think, is quite brilliant. They've taken a very customer-centric view of it. So they've broken it down into four stages. And although as marketers we know and as salespeople we know there can be many more stages within more complex sales, effectively most sales funnels break down into these four groups. So you have the C stage where very much it's inspiring and connecting with those audiences initially. You have a think stage where we're looking to inform, educate and influence. There's a do stage where we tend to want to drive action. And then there's a care stage right at the end where, well, I think the aim needs to be pampering and rewarding those customers because they've already gone through that do stage. Now when I look at people's content marketing plans, very often I see a lot of content focused around that do stage. And not enough to see think and care stages. And I think that's a mistake. I think as marketers we are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table if we do that. You see you don't just normally jump straight to the do. Normally there's a little bit of romancing and schmoozing to take a relationship analogy and probably push it too far. We'll see what you think. But you know you can't do that. You have to have that content regularly at all of the four stages because if you don't then it's hard for people to or harder for people to make the jump through those various different hoops. So I'm a big fan of making sure when I look at a content marketing plan that I've got a good amount every week or every month of see, of think, of do and of care content. And that care content is one of the most neglected areas actually all too often as marketers once we've got people to do what we want them to do on a website. So we think that's it. Job's good. Someone has this problem now. And it's such a mistake because we've got an audience of people who they actually laugh what we do enough to actually buy. And there's so much more you could do to pamper and reward those people. And what numerous studies have shown is that when you do that actually those people can become real advocates and influence the see, think, do and care stages of the user journey. So I just wanted to share that with you. It's a beautifully simple way of viewing otherwise quite complex thing when you look at the overall scheme of things. Okay. So we all have this similar problem with our content marketing. There's what the brand wants to tell people. And there's what those audiences we want to reach are actually prepared to engage with. And I think all too often those things are miles apart. So the smart money is actually on bridging this gap with a real understanding driven strategy. And for me that's kind of where this earlier diagram comes in. I'll just zoom back here. Because you see here, over on the left hand side, we should be looking at the monitoring and listening on social media and looking at participation to see what people are actually engaging with. And also looking at what content is actually getting the necessary traffic and delivering a good return on investment. So why? So we can do more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn't. And that's kind of really key to getting this balance right. I think all too often we push things that, really, I mean, just look through your last three or four emails and how much of it do you honestly think your customers would be super, super excited about? And how much of it would just be mere? You know, we don't want them to go mere. There's too much of that in the world. There's a tsunami of content out there. We want them to go, ooh, this looks really, really good. You know, this really answers what's in it for me. And I think all too often we neglect that. So the strategy I like to follow is to, you know, when I'm looking for potential customers, I like to, you know, think about who are these people and look at marketing personas and think about where might they be hanging out online and would it be appropriate for me to reach out to them there. And, you know, you literally can make use of lots of white social media outposts and online outposts where, you know, the fish that you want to catch are they're hanging out. They're chatting with friends. The thing is that they're not really there to, you know, nobody rushes to social media so you can go buy stuff. You know, they're there normally on all different networks for different reasons. But I think, you know, the strategy here is kind of leaving nice breadcrumb trails of juicy content that you've actually got on your website that actually fulfills needs that those fish have, you know, wherever they are. And to do it in a, you know, a platform native way, you know, there are certain ways to do things on Snapchat and there are certain ways to do things on Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever the channel is and you need to be well versed in those in order to get any traction. But essentially what we're doing is trying to pull them back, I think, to our hub, right, to our app or to our website. Why? Because actually these things are much better designed for, you know, positioning the customer into an environment where they can do the things that we want them to do. You know, whatever your goal is, whether it's, you know, more engagement with your website content or whether it's actual, you know, lead acquisition forms being filled out or even natural purchases being made, much, much easier for that to be used and controlled within your own website. And, you know, it's not just digital, this. You know, there's a lot of real world stuff that goes on as well. Why do I say that? Well, because actually people have got their attention on lots of non-digital things all the time. And I know, I know that, you know, a lot of them are, you know, very, very digitally driven. But that doesn't mean they're completely blind to everything else. And I just feel, I do feel quite strongly that people have thrown the baby out with a bathwater a little bit. Early on, when you were a first adopter of some of these channels, you could have tremendous success with them because there weren't enough voices, you know, shouting messages so you could get a lot of attention. I think that weighs past. Now, you know, all these places are extremely loud, extremely more challenging to get your message across, particularly if it's not aligned with what the fish are trying to catch are actually interested in the first place. And there's definitely a lot of word of mouth that's going on. So that leaves me nicely to taking a look at what some of our digital measurement systems, and particularly analytics, can't measure. There's been a massive increase in the use of ad blockers, and I don't think that's going to stop. Again, here I'm referring to the figures in the 2020. We are social, Hootsuite Report. Worldwide, like 49% of users age 16 to 64 are actually using ad blockers to block advertising. From our own experience, the younger audiences, and we do a lot of stuff at universities, teaching and training students and postgraduate students there, and for sure it does seem actually, in some cases, the instances of ad blockers can be much, much higher with certain demographic groups. But, you know, across the board, for them to be holding around 50%, it actually means that in a lot of cases, getting your message across using traditional digital advertising is becoming much more of a challenge. Why? Well, I think, in a way, marketers are kind of responsible for this. You know, we forget that all important, what the users are prepared to engage with, a lot of content providers, particularly publishers, have gone so far squeezing adverts into their content that actually becomes quite hard to see the content you were there to look at in the first place. I'm sure you can all think of examples of that. Not everybody, granted, are some sites to do it very sensitively and tread that path carefully. But I think all too often, the users are having their experience crippled by ads, and therefore just blocking them out. You know, don't do that to me, do stuff for me, kind of thing. When I'm thinking about all the different platforms that are out there, I like to think of social media platforms as parties. I share this analogy with you because I hope it's useful. I think, gosh, there's so much that we can talk about any one of these platforms. I don't want to get bogged down in that. But what I would say is that, you know, probably all of you have access to a lot of these platforms, probably all on Facebook, that doesn't necessarily mean if I wanted to reach you in a B2B context that Facebook would be the perfect place to reach you. I think that platforms are like parties. You know, we're there to, hey, be social. That's why it's called social media. And generally we're there to interact with the people that are on those platforms and some form of capacity. But it's, you know, the parties differ quite widely. The Facebook party is very different to the Twitter party. And both those places are very, very different to the LinkedIn party, you know, or Facebook, oh, Facebook would be a weird party, wouldn't it? Like, just imagine if you've got everybody in your face, everybody is attached to your Facebook profile, got them in a room. Yeah, obviously, you know, with some fizzy wine and some chocolate and some cheese and pineapple and sticks, you know, it's got to be a classy affair, right? And with all those people there. But you would have a really weird group of people from, like, school, from, like, jobs you did years ago through to, you know, aging family members that have just discovered Facebook and think it's very cool and down with the kids. And it would be quite a dysfunctional part if you did that. And I think increasingly that's why, particularly in the UK and in the West, a lot of us don't tend to be very active on Facebook because we can't particularly control, you know, what kind of environment that we're communicating with. LinkedIn is a much better example. LinkedIn is much more like a business networking party. And, you know, the norms of business networking kind of work there. So I do cringe when I see people putting cat memes and stuff on LinkedIn. It's like, oh, not really appropriate for this kind of environment, but yeah, every so often you come across it. Similar things like the Snapchat or the Instagram party. You know, when we're there, we're there to behave in certain ways and to share certain stuff with certain people. And you can't just kind of crash in with your own agenda on it. When we look at the social networks we're actually using, really interesting, isn't it? This is one I monitor every year. The growth rates in different platforms. Facebook's kind of come back, actually. They seem to be getting a lot of new kind of traffic acquisition in kind of overseas territories around Africa and Asia and what have you. But certainly there's sort of overall growth and unique visitors in millions is going on and up for sure. YouTube's a bit of a dark horse. Definitely check out the YouTube stats, and that really surprised me. But the thing that I found particularly interesting in this context is the growth in things like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and WeChat. You know, these are much more kind of private type networks. You know, those platforms aren't necessarily from mass communication to everybody. You know, you think about your own use in the UK, you know, WhatsApp's one of the big ones. Most of us have got access to it. We tend to talk with specific groups for specific reasons. It's generally quite informal. I haven't seen many, you know, business focus groups within that or certainly not within my own networks. And these platforms are growing at tremendous rate. And actually what fascinated me was last year, just over a year ago now, Mr Mark from Facebook, actually came out and said, as I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms. And that got a smackingly amazing moment for me, that the man who has numerous times been, you know, quite famously said he thought privacy was dead, now saying, actually, privacy is where it's at. So if you haven't read that kind of open letter from him, definitely to get out, it's an interesting read. And he is that on an awful lot of data. We all know that, you know. And I think what's interesting is when you look at, you know, how our behaviour is shifting. You know, we've seen this over the last four or five years. Actually the amount of social sharing that our content gets is a lot shorter. I just really wanted to throw this over to you guys, right? So when you publish a, you know, content and push it out through social media, what kind of numbers of actual social shares are people sharing it on the social platforms publicly? Do you actually get it? And I'm going to invite Ali back in so she can read out some of the results that you're sending in. So just text us through on the chat there. Ali, are you there? I am indeed. I'm just waiting for some results to come in. So I'll report back as soon as any come in. So at the moment we've had 15 to 20 and then another person has retorted five to 10 shares from Facebook. We've had another answer which is less than 100. So quite a lot of variation in there. Yeah, you get that because obviously different size audiences are going to get different numbers of shares and stuff. For those people that have shared the figures, would you say that you've seen it drop over the last few years? Like is it what it used to be? A lot of people have said very few single digits, single figures or small percentages. Yeah, and that's generally my experience. When we straw poll people it's kind of less than a handful in most cases, which is kind of frustrating, right? And just to kind of move this forward, BuzzSumo did a really interesting report on this back in 2018 where they literally monitored a lot of social sharing across their networks. And actually they found that overall the social sharing had kind of halved over like an 18 month period or so. The question that I've been exploring is has it halved or has our ability to actually measure it halved? Because actually, and here's some good news for you. I'll put it to all of you that your social content that you're pushing out there, unless it's particularly dull, is probably doing a lot, lot more for your marketing efforts than you actually realize. And I need to qualify and explore that. So one of the reasons is this growth in global chat. This is a lovely diagram that, who sweetly, our social report published where you can actually see what the most dominant chat networks are within different countries. You can see over in Asia, certainly China, it's all about WeChat. In the UK and Europe, much more about WhatsApp and America, much more about Facebook Messenger. So just hold that thought, right? So we're all kind of, definitely, there's definitely massive growth in live chat, like what, chat apps between people. The interesting thing is, and this is a great little piece of research done by GetSocial. You can get the full resource here. But they looked at the number of like social shares that were called dark sharing. It sounds a lot more sinister than it is, and some of you have listened to the podcast when you've heard us talk about this. Basically, when it comes to analytics tracking, a lot of what we want to track doesn't get tracked to the way we want it to. So for example, at the moment I step out of, you know, an HTTP or HTTPS website and start sharing messages that I found on social media with, for example, people that are on WhatsApp or Facebook or even actually just sharing stuff via SMS. I do that quite a bit with if I see cool stuff I think individuals would like. That's one of my defaults, personally. You know, those messages aren't HTTPS or HTTP, they're apps. They don't provide your website analytics with any referral information. And actually, what happens is it goes into the world's most useless, in my opinion, analytics segment, which is non-direct, which currently has not particularly good at all. Similar problems with email. If you have links in email that don't have tracking codes on them, you're going to see a similar problem. And you know, with a lot of those mobile applications as well, they're not going to provide website referral information. And so we just don't know necessarily how our stuff's being shared. So how does dark social translate into analytics? Well, the majority of it, like the actual direct traffic, is going to end up in that non-direct segment. But I'd also argue, actually, a lot of it ends up seeping through into other areas. Just because I've seen something doesn't necessarily mean I follow the link that's there. And I will follow, you know, whatever's most convenient to me in terms of device, browser, and platform. I'll follow the links as they see me. So actually, you know, stuff that you've achieved on social media can end up flowing into your organic results, your referral results, even your AdWords results, and et cetera, et cetera. The solution, I think, is to make much better use of UTM codes. And for any of you not doing this, this is a great way of better demonstrating your social media return and investment. This is the URL campaign builder from Google, just Google URL builder or Google UTM builder, and you'll find it. And here I put in the campaign source, the Facebook, the Medium of Social, and the campaign name, which is very much the blog post that I'm trying to promote there. And you see what it does is it gives you along the bottom of the screen a URL to share. Very often I'll shorten those with, you know, something like Bitly or Hourly. So it doesn't look quite so long and complicated. But we know when that gets shared via any dark social, I at least have a measure of where it originally came from. So it's very effective from that perspective. But it's still not a complete solution, because a lot of people don't do that. And actually, this is an interesting case in point. So this is from one of, well, it's a business that I've been helping for quite a few years now since I worked at an agency. And I can't share with you who the business is, but I can share this data with you. So you can see there are some quite interesting patterns. So over this February they had a jump of 85% of more users, but their revenue jumped to 523%. And you can see from the traffic graph at the top, there were two spikes, one on the 4th of February and one on the 23rd of February. And when I look at my analytics data and try and work out what's caused it, I just haven't got a clue. I mean, you know, looking at the numbers, the referral looks interesting. It's grown the most in terms of a percentage. But what's happened that's caused all these channels to go up? Well, two things actually. So I can tell you that on the 4th of February, they got some coverage on this morning, you know, that lovely ITV show. And that sent them a pure burst of traffic which converted. But the traffic came through lots of different channels. And then on the 23rd of February, something really magical happened. When I got the initial report, I thought something's gone wrong, something's broken. This can't be true because in one day, their website took nearly 40 grand worth of sales. This is from a retailer. As you can see, the average there is like about 15. So to take 40 grand in one day was phenomenal for them. And actually there, again, no evidence in the analytics where it's come from. Have we done much better on SEO? You know, that organic traffic and conversions are up? Or is it our PPC? That's hoofing it. 400% increase that those guys would be celebrating. No, it was none of those things. It was one mention in a Sunday newspaper. It drove like literally 4,000 people to a website to buy a 10 pound product. And actually that growth continued for like a week afterwards. And the reason for sharing this with you is to really make the point, look a lot of what actually happens in the real world has a massive effect on what happens digitally. And we don't know it. We're just not able to see it. So one of the most powerful things I think you can do is to start using the most powerful button. It's the most understated button in your analytics. And it's just underneath February 2018. Now you can see that little triangle I've put the red arrow to. That is the annotations drawer. You can open it up and you can add annotations. And you see here I've added an annotation to the 11th of January there for that big spike to explain what it is. And I think we all need to do this. Now this actually was a bit of a non-event actually. It drove three times the amount of traffic in one day. I couldn't understand why. It was all going towards a quite short article we wrote called What Is Google Preferred? The real world kind of story that has happened around this was there was a very popular YouTuber called Paul Logan. Logan Paul I think his name was. And he'd done a fairly awful video documenting a very sad place in Japan called Suicide Forest. I'm not going to go into that but if you want to read more about it you can see it there. As a result lots of brands associated with him wanted to distance themselves from him. And indeed Google announced that he was being removed from Google Preferred. So that came out and everybody went What Is Google Preferred? And they googled it and our web page came top. So we got massive amount of traffic from that. Now I annotated it because we need to understand what caused that. Actually in this instance it was a negative effect because it caused a load of traffic that just was not interested to convert. They came, they discovered what Google Preferred was and they left again without doing anything that I wanted them to do. And that obviously ends up diluting your numbers. But like having a measure of this and having it recorded super super useful. So what can you choose annotations to do? Well I use them to help tell data stories. Any significant offline event like good or bad, PR news, TV coverage, trade shows, an event you speak at, store openings, change of agency, you can have it like annotate that for sure. Any significant sales events online. Every email newsletter you're doing annotate it because you begin to learn actually when stuff happens in one channel it has knock-on effects in lots of others. So make use of those. And you can also make use of Bitly analytics. I'm a big fan of Bitly and we tend to use this. Again you can see here the degree of how much our own social media sharing. I only use Bitly links for social media sharing. And anything up to 18 to 90% of our traction that we get happens through dark social and you can see evidence of it there. So definitely worth using that because it gives you a bit more of a measure of it. And then finally, I just want to open your eyes to some of the cool tools that are now available. If you haven't already, definitely take a look at Facebook attribution. If you go to business.facebook.com when you logged into your website and you can see it there. Open up the big mega menu. It's there in attribution. You have to set it up and it takes a couple of days to get some meaningful data. But there's some very cool stuff that you can do with it. So it actually gives you some really flexible attribution models to play around with. So here I've chosen even credit across 28-day click or visit and 28-day impression. So what does that mean? So if you click or visit my website over a 28-day period and if they've been shown any advertising on Facebook within a 28-day period, this will track kind of what they end up doing. And what I love about it is it gives you, if you're doing any significant advertising on Facebook or Instagram or even if you've just experimented with that, you might have discovered it doesn't really do what we want it to do, especially when you're looking at your Google Analytics results. And actually this gives you another way of looking at it. So we did some campaigns for this particular brand in the run-up to Christmas. We spent just around 600 quid on the Facebook and Instagram advertising for them. And in Analytics, last click attribution, it looked like that, it generated 614 pounds. So like I've made 14 quid, but I've got all my costs to take out of that. So it was a bit of an embarrassment really, I think, maybe we'll knock that on the head and not bother. But actually when you look at it from a wider attribution model and measure a little bit broadly, and this is using Facebook's attribution modeling, you can see there that actually that 600-pound spend actually resulted in nearly five and a half grand worth of actual sales. The difference is, and why the difference? Well, this is looking much broader. Anybody that got reached by those campaigns, what did they actually eventually go on to do? And look at loads and figures, you go, oh, do you know what? This is good. You see, particularly anything display-related happens quite early on within the user journey. Very often they will come and convert when it suits them at a later date. And your standard analytics tracking won't pick that up. And just to show you some of the other aspects of this, and make no bones about it, check it out. I haven't been able to show you everything here, but you can see how other channels are interacting on a wider attribution model as well. It's super, super interesting. I love the fact that you actually get multi-device conversion parts as well. So here we're able to see that 25% of the conversions on desktops actually occurred after people had interacted with our ads on their mobile devices, which is hugely exciting. And you start getting stuff like that. And so now I can start to play around with, okay, if we do more, what's the end result? Does it grow the sales and conversion? Don't forget, you can look at multi-channel funnel and wider attribution models within Google Analytics if you dig into the reports. Big fans that target internet as the GA multi-channel funnel report. You get a lovely overview where you can see, you know, for everybody that converted which channels did they touch. And also you can do that model comparison between first interaction, last interactions. Well worth doing that. But you know, even this doesn't have a view on how many people have shown my adverts in Facebook. It's kind of classic really with all these attribution tools. I find whoever the tool provider is, it tends to benefit them and make them a little bit good. So obviously Google Analytics is particularly good for, you know, seeing how Google Organic and Google Ads traffic performs. They've kind of got that thing up. But I think, you know, we all need to, as marketers, take things a little bit wider. So just to wrap up, I've got some awesome planning resources and measurement stuff here. There's a little bit of a model. I'm not going to go into it too much detail, but I think some of the best practices or marketers should focus on that. Like see their target clearly. Remember my lion and my puma stalking its prey. You know, you're all looking at your business objectives daily and have you aligned your marketing objectives with those business objectives. And when those change, are you changing tactics and changing tactics and reviewing everything you're doing. And it's just a simple, like dashboard. Anybody could build this. You could do this on the back of an envelope if you really wanted to or, you know, Google Spreadsheets or, you know, any of the online tools. If you wanted to. Where actually every week you're looking at the percentage contribution different channels are actually making overall and also looking at some of that good old fashioned last click data as well to really get a steer on how the channels are all interacting with one another. And if you do this and you're annotating a lot of the real world events that are inevitably massively impacting on what's happening on your digital channels you really can kind of adjust and focus. You're looking at the actual prey that you're after and not just some of the digital shadows that get cast by real world events. If you want to get more on this, have a look at the TargetInternet.com digital hyphen strategy hyphen measurement hyphen framework. You can go there and there's a whole article on this. You can read in detail how you go about doing it. And that's it. Just about in time. So that's kind of everything that I wanted to say. I've also, I've thrown in here, at the podcast, I've also thrown in here a link to our digital marketing toolkit which is a list of, oh gosh, over 50 of our favourite digital marketing tools to help you navigate the digital landscape and do lots of cool stuff. But I'll throw it to you. Has anybody got any questions? Thanks very much, Kieran. So we're now going to answer questions that have been submitted. As a reminder, you can still submit your questions by the chat box in the attendee control panel. So our first question is a nice general one for you, Kieran. What is the most valuable KPI to measure for a social media campaign? I can't answer that because it depends what you're trying to achieve. It depends, depending on what I want to achieve will depend what I want to actually measure. But, you know, I'll bring you back to this and this is why we encourage marketers to map this out. So, you know, here I've got my primary business goals and objectives. I've set up some marketing objectives with it within that. And then I'll pick the various digital channels and real world channels that I'm going to use to hit that objective. And then based on what that objective is, I'm going to pick out, you know, what those all important KPI's are. You know, for some of you, if you're a brand, it's going to be much more about engagement. You're not necessarily selling direct to the consumer. But if you're, you know, if you are, you know, you might have some, you know, hard and fast metrics in there. I love to look at that percentage contribution, which really comes from, I'll give back a couple, that multi-channel funnel report. You just go into the multi-channel funnel overview and you can get those percentages because it does tell you a lot on how these things are interplaying. But, you know, equally, I might keep an eye on, you know, some of these reports depending on what my strategy is and how I'm going about doing it. I'm a bit of a cop-out, I know. But that's the only way, like, you've got to ask, look, what are we measuring is one thing, but why are we measuring it? It's the more important question that comes out. Well, what are we trying to achieve? And it all comes back to see your target clearly and hit it until you hit it, like, you know, mark it like a lion or a puma a lot more. Perfect. Thanks very much. And we've had another question about analytics, specifically for voice search, which you mentioned at the beginning of the presentation. What level of analytics or tracking is available for voice search at this point? I don't know of much, to be honest, because in order for your analytics to work, it has to fire JavaScript on your website. And, you know, more often than not, the voice search results are being pulled off of your website and being displayed on someone else's website. So, you know, you're not going to get much of a response now. So, you know what, we should throw that open. Has anybody got any, because I don't know, I've not come across it, voice is hard to measure, right? Has anybody got any leads on that? Has anybody suggested anything? I will let you know if anyone does. Thanks very much for that. Yeah, absolutely. So, I know this is something that you feel very passionate about, last-click attribution. And someone's asked, are there any resources that you would recommend to understand a bit more about last-click attribution and attribution models in general? Avinash Koushak. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, but he's a genius. He is a genius. And he does a thing called Occam's Razor. That's O-C-C-A-M-R-A-Z-O-R. Occam's Razor. It's his blog. He's brilliant. He's an absolute genius with this. And he's actually Google's analytics evangelist. And, like, study his... I mean, his blogs are a... They're a zen-like wildlife, in my opinion, but they're really, really good. I can't recommend him highly enough. And it actually... It was him that came up with the see-think-do-care model. You know, he's brilliant at taking complex things and making them much, much simpler. But, you know, he's got some great resources on the evils of last-click attribution. I say that a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Last-click attribution definitely has its place, and I use that a lot. But it's not the only show in town, and there is other data that you need to look at. You know, if you just follow last-click, you will inevitably end up funneling a lot more money and resources into what are kind of classic goal-hanging channels. You know, like, I think, like, paper-click. Sorry, guys, if you do that, but it is quite easy to get results in that, because it's the first thing that appears underneath the customer's fat, lazy thumbs. You know, what's wrong with this? It's become an effort to flick down the screen. And we're in a lot of cases, which is just... You know, if it's going to... If the advert is going to give me what I need, I'll just click on it. So, yeah. And also, affiliate marketing is terrible as a goal-hanging and just hoover up people that we're going to buy anyway. So, you know, keeping a broader eye on your KPIs and seeing how stuff looks from a first-click analysis. You know, all of these attribution models can be quite confusing. You think, oh, which one's right? Well, they're all right. They all have their place. They're all measuring different things, though. So, spend time with Avinash and learn more about that. And obviously, you can listen to the digital marketing focus. I think it's going to be a thing we'll be covering a lot more over the coming months as well. Perfect. Great stuff. And someone else has asked about taking these insights that you learned from the customer's digital journey and applying them to the business as a whole. Do you have any advice for kind of sharing insights that are taken from the digital journey with the organization and helping to build strategies based on that rather than vice versa? I think annotate. Annotate more because you'll begin to take your data and you can tell a story with it. You know, I think all too often we're shoving what look like very compelling and very convincing analytics graphs and charts in front of lots of people who really don't necessarily know what they're looking at. And it's very easy to think, you know, which way's up and which way's down. But if that's your only view, you know, you're missing a big picture. Annotate a lot. You know, when you create annotations you will begin to see patterns in your data. You know, especially when you start to annotate offline, like real world events as well. Honestly, you'll be really shocked and surprised. You know, I worked with one organization that, you know, funnily enough, their emails did amazingly well once every three months. Why? Because actually there was a guy on a different team sending out a two, 300,000 mail shop to, you know, committed customers. But the digital team were never looking at that. In fact, it went down like a French kiss to the family reunion when I highlighted the fact that we just had a massive mail shop gone up. Maybe it was what David over in the CRM team was doing. He was like, oh, no. So, you know, taking more of an holistic view. I think also, like talking to your customers, but we don't do that enough. You know, how many of you are spending time, you know, go and spend some time with the customer service guys, listening to, you know, what the customers are actually talking about and speaking to people at conferences and stuff. I know it's all a little bit anecdotal, but I can give you a real steer as well. All too often, we're stuck in our digital ivory town. It's not really talking to anybody. You know, graphs and charts and numbers don't necessarily fill in the gaps. They don't answer the why. And it's the why that I think, and to come back to the question, it's the why that moves people. It's the why that creates change. You know, if you can answer that that's the art to it. Perfect. And then we've got a really practical question here. So someone's asked, they have a client who can track really well up to the point at which prospective customers they can inquire by phone. And to link revenue back to the source require a lot of work, but they're getting a sense from this presentation that it really is worth doing. Absolutely. Holy moly. It would change the world on fire with that one. There's a couple of things that you can do, like definitely check out telephone tracking like unique telephone numbers. There's some really clever systems out there that will enable you to, you know, set up trackers. If you've got telephone numbers on your website and those telephone numbers make the phones ring and result in leads and stuff, then, you know, get that tracking in place because then we can start to draw together what's happening in the digital perspective to what's happening in the real world. And this is a classic example, but you know, I'm more and more, business has this. We've just become blind to it because we all think we're very digital and clever and we've got lots of compelling graphs and charts. But if those graphs and charts aren't measuring a lot of what's going on, we are, we're making some crazy, crazy blind decisions, you know, almost just making a guess at it in a lot of instances. So any effort you can do to tie that closer together. But yeah, check out, there's a lot, I'm not going to recommend any one particular service, but there's lots of cool tracking services and whatever they'll recycle, you know, anything up to a dozen different numbers so that they know, you know, where those numbers have come from. Although it does create a few problems because then the number might change on the website and stuff, you just have to get with it as you can't have it always. Great stuff. And then another question related to that. So we've got a question for someone who's, who use distributors to make their sales. So the majority of sales go through these distributors, which make it hard to track sales as a KPI. So do you have any advice for them on how they can measure effectiveness without seeing the sales through their own website? Yeah, so it is hard, isn't it? Because actually you're probably pointing towards other people's websites and you probably don't have access to their analytics. So one of the things I'd suggest to you, you can use, you know, UTM codes aren't going to be any good for you, particularly because they're just going to put data and useful insights into your, you know, your third parties that you're referring onto their website. And then you go into the website's analytics. If you can't access that, it's kind of not very useful. But if you take the URL that you're pointing to, so let's say I'm working, for example, I might be working with Boots, for example, and a lot of our sales, and I've worked with, like, beauty brands who, you know, sell a lot of stuff directly through Boots. If we're linking to stuff on their website through our social media channels, use a shortened URL, like Bitly, that shortnet. And actually if you create that Bitly link in a, like, create an account with Bitly, sign in and create the link that way. You always get a record of all the Bitly links that you've created. And also if you log in, you start to see for all of your Bitly links how many clicks they've got. So at least now I can begin to measure how much traffic has gone through to Boots or Superdrug or, you know, wherever it is that I'm sending the traffic through to. That can help. Also, you can do, like, partnership marketing with them where you maybe have a joint, like, competition and, you know, your terms and conditions agree to, like, share data. That can help give a little bit of insight. But I think the, you know, the shortened URL tracking, making use of Bitly analytics is so underused. Oh, and if you're curious about, like, yes, you can actually use this to track how your competitors' social media campaigns are going. It's one of my favourite hacks. If you want to take any of your competitors' shortened URLs that they've shortened on, on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, LinkedIn, if they're using a Bitly link, you can literally copy that link, paste it into your address bar, and before you hit return on the browser, put a little plus on the end of it and you get a view of how much traffic that Bitly link got. It's a great little hack and actually quite useful for the benchmark. The only downside is you only get 30 days' worth of, like, last 30 days' worth of data. But that's super useful as well. I think if you not use that hack, check it out, it's interesting, but yes, it does mean they can do that with your links as well. That's why a lot of marketers choose to use things like hourly and why because they do hide that data a little bit more. Great stuff. Thanks very much. You talked at the beginning of the presentation about the customer journey, particularly in different stages. The care stage is something that we've been asked about in the questions. So someone's asked a new given example of the care stage that might be most appropriate. Just think about people that have bought your product. They've done whatever the thing is that matters to you, that thing that you're aligning everything with. What could you do to make their journey better, more fun, more interesting? I've had some great examples of this where I bought a digital SLR camera and I spent weeks comparing and contrasting different models and different brands. I eventually bought the thing. I went through to a thank you page that didn't just say thanks. Like a lot of them do. There's so much you can do with your thanks pages for converting a product or even when people just sign up for your email. Very often the designers just put up a little JavaScript message for thanks. It's like, whoa, what did that even happen? Do stuff on that page that's going to enhance the journey, manage expectations for the digital SLR camera? I got a brilliant thanks page which said, your product is going to be dispatched while you're waiting for it to arrive. Here's some crazy, brilliant stuff you can do with it. I had a load of videos on that page showing me all the features because they know what people like. Once I've got my hands on that tool I will not pick up the manual and read it from cover to cover. I will just jump in and start using it. They recognise, gosh, here's an opportunity to look from his product. I was all over it for three days waiting for that to come as a great example. Think about that from your own customer journey. They've signed up or they've agreed to do things. How could you make that better? What's great about this? It didn't cost you anything just a bit of time and effort to put some stuff and resources together to make people realise, oh my God, I'm so glad that I did the thing I did with these guys Brilliant, thanks very much. Just to finish this up, we only have a few minutes left we just had a couple of people asking to revisit some of the points that you mentioned specifically the name of the attribution expert that you mentioned and also if you could give a quick reminder on how to annotate on Google Analytics and exactly where you find this then that would be great. Absolutely, absolutely. The attribution analytics genius is Avanash Kuzhik. I don't know if I write this out but I'll share it with everybody. Avanash, I think I'll double check if I've got that right because it's not an easy name to spell. Hang on for two seconds and let's just see if I can give you here we go, Avanash Kuzhik I'm going to share with you. So if you go to k-a-u-s-h-i-k dot net you can find out all about Avanash there. I'm going to share with my colleagues back at the CIM the link to this. I could share that with everybody. I'll be really, really good. Yes, no problem at all. And then in terms of I'll come back into my presentation in terms of the annotations obviously let's just jump back to that slide. Basically under every single graph in analytics you've got a little triangular window I'm going to find it when I want it. Let me just jump to any. Here we go. You're in analytics. Right in the middle of the screen underneath that graph where it says February 2018 you will see a little gray triangle and in a lot of the reports like it's just hidden if you see that there just underneath the 14th, 15th of February that little gray, it's so understated it's untrue and it's so powerful just click on that and open it up. Wherever there's one of these graphs you'll get that within your analytics and the trick to it is when you create an annotation you can actually choose to just go up to the little on the right hand side here just above my email address you can see the plus create new annotation that's all you need to click. You have to tell it the date that you're annotating and when you do that because here I've annotated the 11th of January that date in there, that's where that little annotation goes. So a lot of the time when you're looking at your data the only because that drawer is closed up I can't see the annotation, I can see them as little speech marks on the actual date graph line there that shows me gosh there's an annotation here to explain something that happened that we need to track and monitor that's how it's done if you check in the Google Analytics Help just search for annotations it will tell you a lot more about it and you can make them private or public if you make them private only people logged in on your analytics login will see them you can make them public everybody with access to the analytics and that's super super useful they actually reduce all that nonsense every week that we get when we've done a month a month comparison report and something's not what we expected and all hell breaks loose when we try and work out well what's changed, what's different, why are things up or down you'll just know because you've annotated all worth going through all of your emails over the last six months annotating every single one the day they went out with email, colon, short snappy abbreviation of the subject line honestly that one step can really help you to see some of the impact because guess what people don't click on your emails necessarily a lot of us will see there's an email, o'clock something's going on and come back slightly later when it's more convenient to us because when we're in an email we're just trying to get through all the email there's so much of it we've got time to follow up everything but we'll clock it and come back later either through Organic or direct to the website or what have you and that's where these really have their power because they can show you what's actually going on correlation correlation is such a powerful thing that's fantastic, thanks so much Kieran so unfortunately that's all we have time for today but I'd like to say a big thank you to Kieran for presenting this webinar and thank you very much to everyone for attending today once you leave today's webinar we appreciate your presentation and we would appreciate it if you would provide your feedback as a further reminder today this webinar is CPD eligible by submitting your CPD record you not only keep your learning and development up to date but you could achieve our prestigious charted marketer status you can also find out more about this on myCIM or through getting in touch with our membership team today on behalf of CIM thank you very much for joining us today and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day