How Much Mobile Traffic is my Website Receiving?

It’s no secret. The use of smartphones to access the Internet is one of the fastest growing mediums in the world today. Recent research shows one in two smartphone owners used their phones in the last 12 months to “pre-shop” or buy items.

So that’s all good and great… but how much traffic is your website receiving and how do you monitor / track this?

Mobile – why should you care?

With the rapid growth in mobile Internet usage, there’s a high likelihood that a growing percentage of your website visitors are accessing your site via their smartphone or tablet. And that means you need a mobile optimised website to maximise your conversions online.

Google Analytics mobile reports

It’s really easy to find out how much mobile traffic your website is receiving. All you need to do is go to Google Analytics and click on…

AUDIENCE > MOBILE > OVERVIEW – to see the breakdown of the devices your visitors are using to access your website.

And if your mobile traffic is greater than 10% of your total traffic then you should either get a mobile website developed or update your website to be responsive.

You can also click on the DEVICES link to see the type of mobile device your visitors are using to access your website.

Tip: If you want to see how your website currently looks on a smartphone, use a service called Browser Stack that allows you to see how your website looks on different browsers and different devices.

What’s next?

With Google’s latest push converting all Google Adwords campaigns to Enhanced Campaigns (which include mobile) and its requirement that mobile SEO rankings have mobile-optimised websites, your total mobile traffic is only going to increase.

Add to that the growth of mobile use of social media (think Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn) and not having a mobile optimised website will really give your competitors (who do) the advantage they need to take market share away from you.

To find out more, get in contact with one of our experts. Good luck!

Guide to Creating a Facebook Advertising Campaign

With more than 900 million active users on Facebook globally it’s no wonder so many businesses are realising the huge potential of Facebook Advertising. Facebook Ads allow you to promote your business, build your brand image, attract more fans for your business Page, and ultimately drive more customers for your business.

If you’re not already taking advantage of Facebook Ads in your marketing campaigns, you’d better start now before your competitors do. This step-by-step guide will help you create your first Facebook Advertising campaign. …

1. Define Your Goals

Before you even start creating your first ad, you need to decide what you want to achieve from your Facebook Advertising campaign. You can’t expect success without knowing what goals you need to achieve. Setting a clear goal will allow you to accurately measure how successful the campaign really is and take appropriate action. Some of the common goals include:

– Building your Facebook Page fan base
– Building traffic to your website
– Generating leads/conversions
– Engaging you current Facebook fans

Be specific. If your goal is building new fans for your Facebook Page, establish how many new fans you want to attract within a certain period of time as well as what the desired CPF (cost per fan) is. For example, 300 fans per week at a maximum cost of £3 per fan.

2. Choose Your Ad Type & Create New Ad

To get started, go to https://www.facebook.com/advertising/ and click ‘Create an Ad’ in the top right hand corner.

You need to choose between advertising to an external URL (your website) or to your Facebook Page (based on the goals you have set in the previous step).

When advertising to your Facebook Page, you have 3 different ad types to choose from:

1. A new ad about your company:
This is the most common type of Facebook Ad. It allows you to design your ad by combining great image and copy. To create the ad, follow these simple steps:

– Create compelling copy to promote your Facebook Page. Make sure you include a call to action in the copy.

– Choose eye catching image. This could be your logo or any other image representing what your Facebook Page has to offer.

– Choose a destination tab on your Facebook Page that people will land on after clicking on the ad.

– Review your ad design and make changes as needed.

2. Stories about friends liking ‘Your Page’:
This type of ad simply shows stories about people liking your page to their friends. The viral element of this type of ad can be very effective, especially if people see more of their Facebook Friends liking your page. There is no designing necessary as the ad is created automatically with your Facebook Page logo.

The nature of this ad requires you to have a certain number of Facebook Fans so that it can then be shown to their Facebook Friends.

3. A specific post on ‘Your Page’:
If you want to promote a specific post you have posted on your Facebook Page, this type of ad will do the trick. It’s a great way to increase the reach of your Facebook Posts (to fans & non-fans) as well as being a useful tool for engaging your existing fan base. To create this type of ad, simply select the Facebook Post you wish to promote from the drop down menu.

Advertising to an External URL
When creating new Facebook Ads linked to an external URL, the process is the same as for Ads going to your Facebook Page except for the fact that you need to enter your URL instead of your Facebook Page. Make sure you generate a unique URL via Google URL Builder so you can then track the campaign success in Google Analytics.

Remember to choose a clear headline that associates your Ad with your URL. It is advised that you tick the ‘Related Page’ box. If you tick this box, your new ad will display stories about your users Facebook Friends liking your Facebook Page as well, making the ad more personal and engaging.

3. Specify Your Facebook Ad Targeting

After your Facebook Ad is designed, it’s time to choose who you want to see your ad. The aim is to target Facebook users who are most likely to take the action you are looking for (liking your page, buying your product etc.).

Facebook Ads allow you to target specific users based on the following criteria:

– Location – by city, state, or country
– Demographics – by age range, gender, language, relationship status
– Education and work – by level of education or workplace
– Likes, interests – allowing you to target users by either pre-defined broad interests (e.g. Dancing) or by precise interests in form of specific keywords that you think best represent your key market (e.g. Ballet)

4. Choose a Pricing Option & Budget

As a last step, you are required to select payment type and budget for your Facebook Ads campaign.

You can either run the campaign continuously with a daily budget (e.g. £10 a day) or set a lifetime budget for the duration of your specific campaign.

To select a pricing type for your new ad, you first need to select the objective: ‘like my page’. If you select this objective, Facebook will show your ad to people that are most likely to ‘Like’ your Facebook page and you will be charged for impressions (CPM). This means you will be charged a specific amount each time somebody sees your ad, even if nobody clicks on the ad.

It is not recommended to use CPM pricing as a starting option for your ads because there is a danger of spending the whole budget without attracting any clicks. It’s better to test the CPM option on ads that have already been tested and have performed well in the past (i.e. ads that had high click-through-rate, CTR)

‘Click on my ad or sponsored story’

Under this pricing option, you will be charged every time someone clicks on your ad (CPC). You can set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for one click. Facebook will come up with a suggested bid range to help you set your bid. It’s advised to start between the suggested bid range to ensure your ads are displayed.

The amount you pay for a click depends on how many people are competing to show their ads to the same target audience as you are. Another important factor influencing the cost per click is CTR (click through rate) of your ad. The higher the CTR the lower the amount you need to pay for a click.

Once you’ve selected the payment option, you’re ready to finalise the ad. Simply click on the ‘Place Order’ button to get started.

Make sure you create different ads to test various types of copy, images and targeting. This will allow you to determine which advertisement works best for your audience.

Good Luck!

Strategies to Really Boost Your Business Using Social Media

This week we are looking at how businesses can drive awareness, generate sales and increase customer loyalty using social media.

1. Drive Awareness
Driving awareness requires you to reach as many relevant users as possible. Users may have strong ties to only a handful of their connections, but social media has considerably increased the reach of individual users – people have 140 connections on average, up from about 100 a year ago.

Users may not always value purchasing advice from every single one of their connections, but if friends share content, people are most likely to see it. And if the content is appealing, users are most likely to click it. This applies especially to videos.

A great way to drive awareness is to create videos that people want to share. Sharing content on Facebook or Twitter does not always feel as instinctive as liking or commenting, so the video must be compelling.

The most relevant users to seed your videos are the ones who generate the most engagement in Facebook and Twitter. These are usually the long tail of every-day users, because they know their connections personally.

2. Generate Sales
Generating sales requires that you tap into a much different social network structure.

As Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook, points out, people talk to the same 5 – 10 people 80 percent of the time. People are tightly connected to five small groups, on average, with which they share a common interest or affinity.

Influence can be so strong between these few connections that it can actually generate sales. To generate sales in social media, create very exclusive offers rather than trying to reach the masses. This way, users are incentivised to share them with their most relevant and trusted connections. Doing so will maximise your sales.

3. Increase Loyalty
Increasing loyalty is another very valuable way to leverage social media.

Promote your Facebook page and Twitter account wherever you have access to your customers. Then, provide these customers with engaging content that will start a conversation between your customers, their friends and your brand.

Since the objective here is to start a conversation, this content should be more about your customers than about you.

Getting your customers to engage with your content is crucial. It will deepen your relationship with them and increase their loyalty. It will also turn your customers into your best advocates and your most valuable assets in social media.

In short, social media can help you achieve key marketing objectives with unprecedented results. But you should not try to apply old-media strategies to social media. Instead, brands should see themselves as regular social media users, and provide valuable input to start conversations around their content. Ultimately, this will help you boost sales.

How To Measure Social Media ROI

Unless you have been living in a very deep cave for the last five years, you will be familiar with the term Social Media. It’s also likely that you will be very familiar with the concept of ROI (return on investment), as well as have a pretty good handle on how to measure it within your business on the more traditional types of investment you make.  However, do you know how to measure your Social Media ROI?

In many instances Social Media and marketing strategists constantly struggle to deliver what the ROI is of a particular Social Media campaign or worse, their Social Media efforts as a whole. The problem with this is that it’s an impossible question to answer if you don’t first set measurable and timed goals upfront. That’s right, before you even decide to dabble in Social Media, you should be asking your boss or client what s/he is expecting out of your Social Media efforts. Is it more customers? More web hits? More video views? An increase in customer satisfaction? When you know what the goals are, you can easily the success of each campaign you run.

For example, if your goal is to use campaign budget X to get Y more sales via Facebook, then your Social Media objectives are likely to be two-fold. The first – increasing the number of Facebook fans you have by X% within X time period. The second – convert new and existing customers in to new sales by X%, during the same time period.

• First take the # of Facebook fans you currently have (let’s say 1,000) and let’s say you’ve worked out that to meet your objectives you need to increase this number by 10%. That means you need to increase fans to 1,100. And let’s assume you want to do all of this within 2 weeks.
• You create a promotion and/or some other strategy to increase fans that costs you X from your budget of Y. You get 80 more fans and your total fans now stand at 1,080. You’ve increased your fans by 8%.
• Now let’s say the rest of budget Y you decide to use to drive sales by offsetting the cost of using a general 20% online promotion your company is running when customers spend $200 or more. You decide you are going to track this promotion with two separate bit.ly URLs for Facebook (one link for new and one for existing fans) so that you can tell which sales specifically came through promoting it via you Facebook fan page.
• Let’s say 80 sales in total are generated via your website and through Google Analytics you see that 16 people came from your bit.ly Facebook URLs (12 new Facebook fans and 4 existing), increasing overall sales by 20%. Now armed with the results of your campaign you can review its success and ROI against the goals you initially set.  In addition to this you can compare your Social Media ROI against more traditional marketing methods that you client / company use to establish which channels may be more effective and warrant more investment in the future, to give better returns.

This is how you can simply calculate Social Media ROI for every campaign you run. The key is to set measurable goals from the outset.

In addition to the tangible ROI you can get from your Social Media campaigns, its important to realise that there is longer-term, less tangible benefits that your brand can benefit from, such as more people spreading positive messages about a brand online within both personal and professional networks.

Remember – once you set the measurable and timed goals for each of your Social Media campaigns you will be able to effectively develop simple strategies to measure success and develop clear ROI.