Tips & Tricks – Cyfe

6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021

Pratik Dholakiya — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 10:33:43 +0000

Content marketing is one of the best channels for increasing engagement and ROI, no doubt about that. And, one of the most important ways to measure and improve your content marketing is through metrics.

While the usual content marketing metrics such as leads, sales, and traffic can be useful in providing an overall measure of the performance of your content, these metrics are not enough if you want to go more granular.

There are lots of other content marketing metrics that can help you to gauge your content better. You can get deeper, useful insights about the quality of your content, the best channels for distribution, and engagement.

The content marketing metrics mentioned in this guide serve towards the ultimate goal of content marketing, which is generating leads, sales, and traffic. If you are interested in learning about these underrated, yet useful content marketing KPIs, then read on. You’ll find some super-helpful unique content marketing metrics that can help you improve your content marketing ROI.

1. Backlinks

A backlink is when an external website adds a link to your site. Backlinks are considered as one of the top three ranking factors by Google. This is because backlinks are an indicator of the quality of your content.

Backlinks indicate to Google that your content is well received by other publishers, especially when the linking domain is a high-authority one. More backlinks to a piece of content tells Google that other publishers in your industry are recommending your content to their audience. This is why backlinks can be a great metric for measuring your content quality.

Apart from the number of backlinks, you should also look for the quality of the backlinks that you get. For example, even one backlink from a high domain authority website probably indicates that the piece of content is very valuable.

When you create high quality and valuable content, more and more external domains will be willing to add a link to your content. The outreach efforts of your marketing team will yield better results when you are promoting a high-quality piece of content.

For example, by publishing an infographic on the topic of on-page SEO, Backlinko was able to generate 6730 backlinks to it. Simply using an online infographics maker, you too can generate numerous backlinks and up your content game.

Hence, we can say that the number and quality of backlinks can be an excellent content marketing metric that you must consider using to get better results with your content marketing.

Understanding and analyzing the sentiment of your content can be very difficult to do manually and thus sentiment analysis tools can be of great help.

2. User Sentiment

The success of your content marketing is primarily governed by how your audience is perceiving it. Metrics like shares, likes, and comments can help understand this. However, if you want to know in-depth, then sentiment analysis can be a great metric to use.

Sentiment analysis is the process of computationally deriving opinions about your content by using the opinions expressed by your audience after consuming your content.

Understanding and analyzing the sentiment of your content can be very difficult to do manually and thus sentiment analysis tools can be of great help.

Source

Using social listening and sentiment analysis tools, you will be able to understand exactly how your audience feels about your content. Do they find it up to the mark? Do they find your content valuable enough? Which content marketing channels do they prefer?

You can use sentiment analysis tools to measure the quality of your content by using user reviews, comments, and survey results as inputs for these tools.

For instance, you can analyse the common sentiments of your users towards your email newsletter. You can gather the data through a quick survey. If you find that the polarity of the analysis is more on the negative side, you can think about ways to improve the quality of your newsletter. You can do the same for your social media content as well.

A great example of this would be sentiment analysis done on the company, American Multinational Conglomerate. Through the sentiment analysis on their social media profiles, they were able to gain useful insights such as getting to know the best social media channel that is preferred by their users.

The Finnish outdoor equipment company Suunto used sentiment analysis to understand the overall polarity of the user-generated content that was being put out for their new product launch. This helped them to do some quick damage control.

3. Content Downloads

If you have any content upgrades, downloads, or lead magnets to offer on your website, then these too can be a means of measuring your content marketing. This is because your users probably have to fill a form, give their email addresses, or other contact information in exchange for downloading the content. This shows the interest and eagerness of the user to consume your content.

For example, suppose that you offer a template or a swipe file as a content upgrade from your blog post. Then the number of downloads for this content upgrade can be a great indicator of the quality of your blog content.

Similarly, you can also measure your middle-of-funnel content this way. If you are offering case studies as downloads from your site, you can use the number of case study downloads to measure your content in this part of the funnel.

4. Active Email Subscribers

If you have an active email newsletter where you share your weekly content wisdom, then the number of new email list sign-ups and active email subscribers is also an important metric that you must consider.

Think about the last email newsletter you signed up for. Most probably you signed up because they had something valuable to offer you in return for your email id. The same goes for you as well.

When your content is worthy and useful, you’ll automatically see an increasing number of email subscribers. You’ll also notice increased open rates, lesser unsubscribe requests, and more active email subscribers.

5. Average Time on Page

You might perform SEO, use catchy headlines, or even use paid advertising to bring in the traffic to your website. But how many of these visitors are actually enjoying and finding value in your content?

This is why website traffic should not be your only content marketing metric. Apart from measuring the website traffic, you should also look at the average time on the page of your website visitors. You can use Google Analytics to find this data. You can find it under Reports > Behaviour.

When users spend more time on your page, it indicates that they are going through your entire content instead of simply skimming through it.

A great example of this would be the Wista blog. They found a 260% increase in their dwell time by adding video to their content. This is an indication of the fact that time-on-site or dwell time is an effective way to measure the quality and likeability of your content.

Average time on the page also indicates that the content is something that the user is exactly looking for. In other words, we can say that your content is matching the search intent of your website visitor.

Apart from the overall average time on page, you can also gauge the quality of individual pieces of content by measuring the time on page for each of your content pages. If you find any pages with comparatively lower dwell time, then you can think about revamping it.

6. On-Site Behaviour

Apart from measuring the traffic and the time spent on your website’s pages, you should also consider measuring your visitors’ on-site behavior. You can do this by using heatmaps.

Heatmaps essentially give you an idea about which parts of your website are the visitors interacting with. For example, through heatmaps, you can see if many users are highlighting a particular paragraph or quotation. Using this as a metric, you can improve all your content.

Using heatmap record sessions, you can get extremely beneficial information about your content. You can see what your visitors are reading the most and where they are scrolling.

You can also see what elements of your content are they engaging the most with. Is it an embedded video? Graphics and illustrations? Tools? Call to action?

Using these insights from heatmap record sessions, you can find the strengths and weaknesses of your content and thus improve your overall content marketing game.

The project management solution Taskworld saw a 40% increase in their conversions by using heatmaps!

Final Thoughts

Finally, we can summarize by saying that if you want to spruce up your content marketing, then you should look beyond the usual metrics. All the metrics mentioned in this article are useful, yet underrated.

Using these content marketing metrics, you can gain insights that you probably do not know until now. This can be transformational in improving the quality of your content and the ROI you gain from it.

Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content & data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Digital PR.

The post 6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021 appeared first on Cyfe.

SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics

Michael Keenan — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 11:13:21 +0000

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said the great father of business management, Peter Drucker.

Truer words were never said. No matter your industry or role, tracking SEO KPIs, analytics, and data is a crucial component to success.

They tell you whether your efforts in marketing, sales, UX, and customer service are working effectively, how you can improve your strategies, what your competitors are doing, and other external influences on the market.

But which are the best KPIs to measure? And how do you ensure your analytics data is actionable? We turn to experts in search engine marketing to share their thoughts on evaluating SEO KPIs.

Keep reading to uncover their top 20 SEO KPIs tracking tips.

1. Conversion rates are king

That’s according to Vinny La Barbera, founder and CEO of imForza, a full-service agency based out of El Segundo, CA. He says: “Conversion rate and top mediums for conversions tell you the most and affect your company’s bottom line more than anything else.

“You can set up specific alerts on these meaningful KPIs so that you’re notified whenever there’s any type of unusual data. This helps you recognize and spot trends almost before they happen and plan for future ones more proactively.”

2. Track keyword ranking positions

After conversions, freelance search engine optimization consultant, Brett Bastello focuses on monitoring keyword ranking positions. He explains why:

“I like to track keyword ranking positions, both the number of keywords ranking and at what position. This is important because, based off historical conversion rate data from the client, we are about to loosely gauge how much profit or loss is obtainable with a shift in ranking positions.”

3. Bounce rates help you improve your pages

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your web page rather than stick around to view other pages on your website.

Rebecca Stickle of WebpageFX advises how measuring bounce rates “provides a great opportunity to go back and revise a web page to keep more people on your site, especially if it has high amounts of traffic as well as a high bounce rate.”

Curtis Boyd, CEO and founder of Future Solutions Media, also advocates measuring bounce rates: “It really shows you whether your web page’s presentation is off. Depending on which keyword or paid source brought visitors to the page, their expectations are always different.

Looking at bounce rate, you can effectively tailor landing pages and your service offering pages in hopes of enhancing sales conversion goals.”

4. Drive organic traffic using keywords

Anna Daugherty, product marketing manager at Sincro, shares her SEO strategy for raising organic traffic via relevant content:

“I check AuthorityLabs to see where my chosen keywords are ranking. These rankings help me determine which keywords need more attention through content or outreach.”

“If I want more organic traffic for a certain search query, I will devise a content marketing plan for that keyword. This involves establishing a few pieces of content around that keyword (blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, etc.), creating those pieces, publishing them over a few weeks’ time, and performing outreach and distribution.”

5. Tracking exit percentage improves sales

Exit percentage is the number of page views divided by the number of exits on a page. Here’s why (and how) Aaron Watters, CEO of Leadhub, tracks this KPI:

“If the exit percentage is higher on one page than on others, that tells us that the UX is lacking. We then take action by making front-end changes designed to keep the user on the website longer and promote sales.

“You can improve exit percentages by adding similar products on the page, restructuring the layout, and adding information you feel is more relevant to the prospective buyer.”

6. Monitoring website traffic reveals the overall health of your SEO

“Monitoring website traffic helps you determine if there’s something drastically wrong with the website, such as the server going down,” says Brian Thackson, content writer at WebMechanix.

“The next most important marketing KPI to monitor is leads. This lets you know if our SEO efforts are actually creating revenue for the client (hint: they want to know that too!). You also want to determine if there is something you did recently that is really paying off and performing well. If you can uncover this, it’ll help drive strategy in the future.”

7. Three core KPIs are needed to tell the whole story of SEO results

Tim Lavelle of U.S Interactive Media identifies these KPIs as Keyword Rankings, Organic Traffic Statistics, and Organic Conversation Rates. He explains these in detail below:

“SEO MUST be guided by comprehensive keyword research and a specific keyword targeting strategy. Keyword rankings must be tracked for each of the terms identified as being relevant to the campaign. Without tracking keyword rankings, it’s impossible to tell how well SEO is working, especially since Google Analytics’ introduction of organic keyword encryption.

He concludes that: “At the end of the day, SEO is not about rankings or visits, it’s about revenue. SEO campaigns that aren’t effectively measuring organic conversions (including dollar-pegged conversions) can’t prove that they’re providing positive SEO ROI.

What do C-level executives want to get out of their SEO reports? Simple: ROI (Profit/Cost).”

8. Monitor rankings weekly to grow authority and attract new leads

“Competitors run campaigns and improve their sites regularly,” explains Randy Milanovic, entrepreneur, author, and blogger of online marketing, SEO, and social engagement. “We also know that Google and Bing update their Algorithms constantly. And, people change their search patterns.”

“As a result, no matter how well a site ranked yesterday, nothing will keep it top search more easily than maintaining activity and monitoring rankings weekly. To achieve this, keep an eye on keyword rankings, tweak content to leverage changing search patterns, and continuously deploy new blogs and offers on topic to grow authority and attract new prospects.”

9. Create SEO goals based on what you need to accomplish

“If an SEO metric is not attached to an immediate marketing or business goal, there’s no point wasting hours looking at analytics,” says Josh Ledgard of KickoffLabs. “Tools like KISSmetrics and Google Analytics are good for deep dives, but using a KPI dashboard, daily updates, or system alerts can be a time-saver and help make your most important metrics more accessible to you and your team.”

While Rebecca Stickler, content writer at WebpageFX, advises how, “These organizational goals will depend on your business model (for example, eCommerce sites should focus on sales KPIs, while B2B companies should focus on new leads), but should give you a clear picture of how well your site is performing overall.”

Marcus Miller, head of search and digital marketing at Bowler Hat, concurs: “If you understand your business’ goals and ensure you’re reporting on all major and micro goals in Google Analytics, you can ensure you have the data to analyze across each step of the buying cycle.”

10. Make KPI tracking and measuring goals simple

“Tracking and measuring goals should stay as simple as it needs to be,” urges Rob Watson, digital marketing consultant at Click to Sale.

He explains this further: “If you’re a relatively low-traffic site, there is probably no point in creating complicated multi-step funnels, which don’t yield much data. For example, on a freelance consultant’s site, you could simply measure how many people come to the contact page and how many of those convert into inquiries.

Whereas on an established e-commerce site with a lot of traffic, you would need more in-depth analysis to break down the steps in the sales process and see where people are dropping out.”

11. Set up alerts to spot issues as they arrive

“Nothing’s worse than reading the analytics of a site and discovering an issue that began occurring some time ago,” says Orun Bhulyan, founder at Agency Undone. “Weeks or even months go by with many issues lurking in the background, undiscovered. Unfortunately, this is the norm in most companies’ analytics suites.

“This can be resolved by setting up alerts. Google Analytics alerts can be triggered when a particular KPI changes drastically and unexpectedly. And the best part is you can configure these alerts to send to emails, notifying you of changes in real-time.”

12. Data isn’t always immediately actionable

Rather, “data highlights something that needs investigating, and then an action emerges from that,” says Joel Stein, search and media manager at award-winning Manchester agency Code Computerlove.

“For example, if the bounce rate has suddenly increased on a specific page, I’d be testing the load speed of the page and looking for other potential issues that could have caused this.

“Reporting isn’t just about churning out some numbers – it’s about spotting data insights and opportunities for improvement, learning from successes, and mapping out a list of actions off the back of this.”

13. It’s not always necessary to track KPIs on a daily basis

A lot of SEO strategists follow daily metrics like a hawk. But is this always wise?

James Rice, head of SEO at Picked says, “doing so might cause you to panic or make a knee-jerk reaction, and it’s important to remember that SEO is at heart about investment for medium-to-long-term performance.

“Weekly reporting is fine (though I’d say monthly is best), and on that basis, you should check organic traffic by landing page, as well as the contribution of organic traffic to the bottom line. Those two key metrics (growth and profit) are ultimately the only ones that will always be under scrutiny, so focus on them above all else.”

14. Compare SEO campaign data month vs. month presents a bigger picture

“You get a better picture of the ongoing status of the sites SEO performance,” advises Sam Raife, offsite strategy manager at Blueclaw, a search marketing agency. He continues, “this way you can monitor the increase of traffic, revenue and rankings as the campaign is being delivered.

“Any changes you need to make can be identified with enough time to make small but positive increases. This might be something small like adjusting the target niche slightly or focusing on specific products because they are performing better.

Anything less than a month on month comparison and you run the risk of reading too quickly into data that is being affected by external factors you can’t control”

15. Leverage A/B testing to action data

“Actionable analytics often begins with an action. These often take the form of A/B testing,” explains Andrew Nevelos, department head of SEO at WebMD.

Andrew expands on how he uses A/B testing: “We use tools such as Optimizely to randomly serve two different versions of the page. We are always trying to draw a correlation or better yet causation between the action we have taken or not taken and a change in the KPIs we monitor.

The analytics should be a tool to test and guide your optimization effort rather than stand-alone source information.”

16. Ensure Google Analytics is configured properly

This tip comes from Tim Lavelle, director of SEO & social media at US Interactive Media.

He expands: “You need to make sure that Google Analytics is collecting data from every page on the site and that you’re collecting the right types of data using things like: advanced segments to separate out traffic to certain pages from certain; filters to remove internal traffic; annotations to mark when major SEO updates are rolled out to the site; event tracking and specific goals to measure conversion behaviors at the granular level (clicks on specific buttons, form submissions, cart abandonment, purchases, etc.).”

17. Keep tabs on your competitors through the competitor rankings KPI

Knowing how your competitors’ sites and blogs are ranking helps you spot trends, assess the market, and sharpen your competitive edge. Dan Shure, co-owner of Evolving SEO, elaborates:

“We like to keep an eye on how competitors are doing in search. If our client slips, but competitors slip as well, we know maybe it’s turbulence in that keywords space in general. If we see competitors slowly gaining in the ranks, it can alert us to something they are doing we may want to know about and stay on top of.”

18. Generate a total “link power” rather than count links for content

“We don’t count the number of links because we’ve found that simply getting links doesn’t correlate well with rank increases,” advises Niaw de Leon, senior marketing lead and SEO specialist at Azeus Convene.

She continues: “Instead, we came up with a total “link power” for the backlinks we generate. That way, even if we only built one link but with high authority, then we get a high link power, which means that our link building is in a healthy state.”

19. Start with a Google search when looking at the customer journey

Martin Milanov, marketing manager at Tavex Gold&Exchange, focuses on measuring core keywords, keyword phrases performance measurement, visitor bounce rate per channel, and time on page. When it comes to the customer journey, he advises how:

”Starting with a Google Search ensures you can provide relevant high-quality content and unique business proposition for each stack of keywords. This will not only provide better user experiences, but it is the main way (par quality backlinks) to achieve higher trust, and by proxy, ranking in SERPs.”

20. Use analytics to make data actionable

“Creating insights from analytics is key to changing data so it has context and meaning,” informs Mae Demdam, vice president of marketing strategy at Digital Edge.

She gives the following example: “If the bounce rate is high on a particular landing page with little to no content, analyze the landing page and see where continuous improvements can be made. Create more content, add images or interesting information, and monitor that landing page in analytics to watch for improvements.”

Your Turn

We hope these KPI and data analytics tips have inspired you to make better use of your data and level up your SEO and marketing efforts. But we’re curious – can you add to the list? If you’re up for the challenge, comment with your tip below!

Michael Keenan

Michael is a SaaS Marketer and SEO living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Through storytelling and data-driven content, his focus is providing valuable insight and advice on issues that prospects and customers care most about. He’s inspired by learning people’s stories, climbing mountains, and traveling with his partner and Xoloitzcuintli.

The post SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics appeared first on Cyfe.

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

Michael Keenan — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:00:00 +0000

If you want to speed up data collection and save time reporting, then you must understand and use Zapier with your Cyfe account.

Zapier is an easy online automation tool, but it can be challenging to know the best apps to connect to.

But don’t let that discourage you. Zapier is really simple to set up, and we’ve put together a list of the top Zaps you can use with Cyfe today.

Here’s everything you’ll learn in this guide:

What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation tool that connects thousands of web apps, such as WooCommerce, CallRail, Slack, and more. If you have an app to connect to your Cyfe dashboard, and Cyfe doesn’t currently support it, you can use Zapier to send data between them without any coding or developers.

Building a workflow takes just a few clicks, so that you can get started right away.

Three terms you should know before moving forward:

Zap. A Zap is a workflow between your apps. For example, you could have a Zap that updates new orders from WooCommerce to a clients data dashboard. Zaps are made up of a trigger and one or more actions.
Trigger. A trigger is the event that starts a Zap.
Action. An action is the event that completes that Zap.

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Whether you’re new to Zapier or using it for the first time with Cyfe, let’s walk through how you’d create a Zap.

Say you want to send WooCommerce data to an eCommerce dashboard in your Cyfe account.

Here’s what the set up looks like:

After you sign in to your WooCommerce account, edit the Push Value in Cyfe box. You’ll notice the following form.

The difference when using Zapier and Cyfe is pulling the API endpoint for your widget. To get this URL:

Log into your Cyfe account.
Click Add Widget in the top left-hand corner.
Type Push API in the search bar.
Add Push API widget, then click Configure Widget.
Copy URL in the API Endpoint box.

Add that URL to the API Endpoint box in your Zap. Adjust the name, metric value, color, type, and connotation.

Once you fill out in the form, which takes five minutes tops, turn on the Zap, and that’s it. Zapier will start sending data from the app to your Cyfe dashboard.

Curious what apps Zapier works with? There are thousands to search through, or try out these popular Zaps today to get started.

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

Here are the top Cyfe and Zapier use cases you can get started with today.

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

CallRail tracks phone calls for your marketing campaigns, but if you want to track call volume in an easy-to-understand graph, connect CallRail to Cyfe. With Zapier, you can automatically send new calls to your Cyfe dashboard each time you get a new call.

Want to connect CallRail to Cyfe? Get started now with this template.

Other popular metrics you can track when connecting CallRail to Cyfe are:

Phones call completed
New company created
Form captured
Session tracker created
SMS received
Phone call marketing as spam
SMS sent

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

Want to build out your database with sales leads? Connect Cyfe with HubSpot to track when a new contact is added to your HubSpot database. Determine what campaigns are working and which aren’t, so you can make smarter business decisions for client’s.

Want to connect HubSpot and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track using HubSpot and Cyfe are:

New Deal
Email subscriptions timeline
New Form submission
New engagement
New calendar task
Contact recently updated or created

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

If you want to make customer support more efficient, you must keep track of new tickets over time. Connect Freshdesk to Cyfe using Zapier to automatically update your dashboard each time a new ticket is created in Freshdesk.

Want to connect FreshDesk and Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Freshbooks and Cyfe are:

New contact
Update ticket
Update contact

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

Digital Ocean is a simple, fast, and scalable SSD cloud virtual server that you can deploy in seconds. If your company stores a lot of data, you can see when new backups are created.

Want to connect DigitalOcean and Cyfe? Get started now.

Other popular metrics you can track with DigitalOcean and Cyfe are:

New snapshot
New droplet
New SSH key

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

Want to know how your WooCommerce orders are coming long? Whether you’re tracking their count or value, use the WooCommerce integration to help. Whenever you have a new order, Zapier will send the updated value to your Cyfe dashboard.

Connect WooCommerce and Cyfe now with this template. It’s free to create your Zap.

Other eCommerce metrics you can track using WooCommerce and Cyfe are:

Coupon events (created, updated, deleted, etc.)
Product events
Customer events
Order events
Subscription events

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

Do you use Pipedrive to speed up your sales pipeline and be more efficient? Connect Pipedrive to Cyfe to track long-term dealings and more. Whenever you receive a new deal in Pipedrive, this Zap will update the value in your Cyfe dashboard.

Want to connect Pipedrive with Cyfe? Use this free template.

Other popular metrics you can track connecting Pipedrive and Cyfe are:

New activity
New person
Updated deal stage
Organization matching filter
Person matching filter
Deal matching filter

7. Track new Magento orders over time

Monitor new orders from your eCommerce store and understand your business growth by connecting Magento to Cyfe. When you use this Zap, you can push a value to Cyfe each time you receive a new Magento order, and more.

Connect Magento to your Cyfe account with this free Zap template.

Other metrics you can track from your Magento store are:

New sales order shipment
New credit memo
New customer
New sales order invoice

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

Stay updated on your marketing campaigns by using the ActiveCampaign Cyfe integration. Once activated, you can keep track of new contacts and more all in one place.

Connect ActiveCampaign to Cyfe with this free Zap template.

Other popular metrics you can track using ActiveCampaign and Cyfe are:

New campaign link click
New deal note
New campaign opens
New campaign unsubscribe
New deal task

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

If you want to keep track of your Gravity Forms activity, you can set up an integration with Cyfe through Zapier. This Zap will push each form and survey submission you get on Gravity Forms to a Cyfe dashboard so you can monitor sign-up trends.

Connect Gravity Forms and Cyfe with this free template.

How to Use Push by Zapier

Push by Zapier is a Google Chrome extension that lets you perform Zaps from anywhere on the internet.

Need to log work time, add a phone number to your contact list, create a document, save a website, start a timer or run any other tedious task fast? Push by Zapier is the quickest way to do them and hundreds of other tasks you want.

It works in three steps:

Install Zapier’s Chrome extension.

2. Sign in to your Zapier account

Click Make a Push Zap!

4. Build the Zap to automate the task you want.

5. Click the button in the Zapier Chrome extension whenever you want to run the workflow.

For more help on how to use Push by Zapier, read this help doc by Zapier.

Final thoughts

Using Zapier with Cyfe isn’t complicated. You just need to figure out what metrics to monitor, grab the API endpoint when creating a widget, and fill out the necessary information to build the Zap. Once you turn a Zap one, it handles all your tedious tasks in reporting, so you can focus on more meaningful work in your business.

Michael Keenan

The post Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users appeared first on Cyfe.

6 Ways to Use Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Serge Bezborodov — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:33:54 +0000

Crawl budget optimization has always been at the centre of all SEO efforts. And why not! If your pages exceed your site’s crawl budget, search engines will not index the balance, severely affecting your site’s performance on the SERP.

So, if you have a huge website (like an ecommerce site), just added new content, or many redirects on your site, you have a reason to be concerned about your crawl budget.

Of the many strategies used to optimize crawl budget, log file data is the most underutilized tool that can offer a wealth of insights to assist you in your SEO efforts. It can help you find orphaned pages, reveal tag-related problems, identify indexability issues, and see how bots crawled the website and where crawl budget was spent/wasted. What’s more? A regular log file analysis can help you detect a shift to the mobile-first index by looking at the specific bot user agent.

Regardless of technical updates you conduct on your website, server logs show how they are perceived by search bots. This helps SEO professionals fix issues based on real data, not just on hypothesis.

Read on to know more about log files and how log file analysis can improve your SEO efforts.

What Is a Log File?

A server log file is essentially a file output from the web server consisting of a record of all the requests (hits) that the server has received, including pages, images, and JS files. Simply put, a log file is a pile of juicy data that gives you an unfiltered view of the traffic to your website.

Source: https://www.suganthan.com/blog/seo-tips/#Bonus_tip_Log_file_Analysis

So, when a user enters a URL, the browser translates it into three parts. Say, we have a URL – https://jetoctopus.com/security

Protocol (https://)
Server name (jetoctopus.com)
File name (security)

The server name is converted into an IP address. This allows a connection between the browser and the web server. When an HTTP Get request is sent to the web server with the HTML being returned to the browser. This is interpreted in the form of the page seen on your screen. Each of these requests is recorded as a ‘hit’ in the log file.

Thus, this file carries every request made to your hosting web server. All you need to do is export the data and use it to improve your site’s SEO.

Depending on the hosting solution or server you use, log files are usually stored automatically and are available for a certain time period. Hence, they are available to technical teams and webmasters. They can be easily downloaded or exported in the .log file format using a log file analysis tool.

How Can Log File Analysis Help Optimize Crawl Budget?

The log file can help you analyze search engine bot activity by offering valuable information that’s otherwise unavailable through a regular site crawl. Since log file analysis offers real insights pertaining to search engine crawlers, it answers the top concerns on an SEO professional’s mind.

Am I spending my crawl budget optimally?
Which web pages are yet to be crawled by Google?
Are there any accessibility errors I am unaware of?
Are there any areas of crawl deficiency that need to be addressed?

Uncovering these insights and more can help you adjust your SEO strategy, allowing the search bots to find the pages that matter the most.

Using Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of webpages a search engine bot crawls each time it visits your website. Google defines crawl budget as –

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/01/what-crawl-budget-means-for-googlebot.html

At times, you may have created new content and have no budget left. This will prevent Google or any other search engine from indexing and crawling these pages. Hence, it is critical to monitor where you are spending your crawl budget using log file analysis. Here’s a handy Log File Analysis checklist to follow along.

Know What to Expect from Log File Analysis

As I mentioned earlier, a log file is a juicy gigantic pile of data. If you overindulge, you can easily lose track of what you are truly trying to use it for – optimizing your crawl budget! As a result, it’s critical to know what to expect from a log file and what not to.

You can use log file for –

Locating spider traps. Log files can give you insights into how search engine bots are crawling your website.
Identifying static resources that are being crawled too much.
Identifying spam content. If a spammer or hacker has placed a bunch of spam pages on your site, clicks on those pages will be recorded in the log file.
Identifying broken links. Broken links, whether external or internal, can bring down your site authority and ruin your crawl budget. A peek into the log file can quickly reveal such busted links.
Spotting 404 and 500 errors. A log file can help show you the faulty server responses which even Google Search Console (GSC) may miss at times.

You don’t need a log file for –

Tracking conversions. You don’t need a log file to track conversions. Though it’s feasible, I wouldn’t recommend that. You have several other tools for that.
Tracking and analyzing location data. Though a log file can help you with this, most analytics software can help you accomplish this task with ease.
Tracking click paths. Again this can be achieved with a lot less work using analytics software like Google Analytics.

1. Identify Where Your Crawl Budget Is Being Wasted

Several factors, namely accessible URLs with parameters, hacked pages, soft-error pages, on-site duplicate content, and spam content among negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing. Such factors can drain your crawl budget, delaying the discovery of good content on your site.

A log file analysis can help you identify the reasons for the wasted crawl budget and take the necessary steps to manage them.

Source: https://jetoctopus.com/product/a52-logs-analyzer.html

Crawler found 580K indexable pages on a website of which only 197K pages were in the website structure and frequently crawled by bots. There are 3,7M orphaned pages that aren’t reachable through links but visited by bot. Without a doubt, the crawl budget is wasted here. This is a widespread issue among big websites with a history of redesigns and migrations. Such issues can be easily identified using server log file analysis.

2. Determine Whether Priority Pages Are Being Crawled

Google or any other search engine crawling pages that are of low-value is a waste of your crawl budget. Use the data in log files to analyze whether or not your high-value pages are being visited.

For instance, if your site’s objective is generating leads, your homepage, services page, Contact Us page, and blog should have a high ‘Number of Events’. Similarly, an ecommerce site would prioritize their category and key product pages along with the above-mentioned ones.

3. Eliminate Page Errors

Reviewing your site crawl helps you find unresponsive pages that may have 301, 400, or 500 errors. A log file analysis can help you take a look at each of these pages which can then be fixed or redirected, allowing the search bots to crawl into the right locations.

This simple step will help search engines find your webpages, thereby optimizing your crawl budget.

4. Improve Website Indexability

Indexing is when a search bot crawls your website and enters data about it in its index or search engine database. It goes without saying, if your website isn’t indexed, the search engine bots will be unable to rank it in the SERP.

Though GSC’s URL Inspection tool offers crawl and indexing data, it’s not as detailed as that provided by log file analysis. Your page’s indexability is impacted by several factors, including ‘noindex’ meta tags and canonical tags. Use a crawling tool in combination with the log file data to determine disparities between crawled and indexed pages.

Using this data, consider the following steps to improve your crawl efficiency.

Make sure Your GSC parameter settings are up to date.
Check if there are any important pages included as non-indexable pages.
Add disallow paths in your robots.txt file. This will prevent the pages from being crawled, saving your crawl budget for priority pages.
Add relevant noindex and canonical tags to indicate their level of importance to search engines. However, noindex tags do not work well in case of multimedia resources, namely videos and PDF files. In such cases, you can count on robot.txt.
Spot disallowed pages that are being crawled by search bots.

5. Reduce the Negative Impact of Site Migration

If you are planning a website migration to a new CMS, log file analysis can help you get rid of the inevitable errors and bugs encountered during the process. Post the site migration, log file analysis allows you to keep an eye on crawl stats, ensuring that the search bots are crawling the new site’s pages.

Combining crawls with the log data can throw light on the pages search engine bots aren’t crawling and orphaned pages (pages not linked internally). These insights can help you boost your crawl budget.

6. Keep a Check on the Site’s Technical Health

Usually, search professionals get to know about the crawlers introduced by search engines through GSC when there’s a change in their organic traffic. Further, developers don’t have much understanding of technical terms, namely tags, site indexation, and canonicals.

A detailed study of the log files can tackle this issue, allowing you proactively fix SEO problems on the go.

A Few Other Points to Bear in Mind

Check the Robot.txt Settings

Robot.txt is a file that tells crawlers not to crawl certain pages. However, it’s important that this file is set up correctly, failing which you encounter crawl and indexation issues.

‘Pages cannot be crawled due to robot.txt restriction,’ is one of the most common errors encountered in Google Search Console. Such errors can be easily identified and eliminated using server logs which provide a list of robots.txt directives. The data clearly indicates the URLs that are blocked or non-blocked by robots.txt.

Check the Number of Pages Getting Bot Visits versus Those Getting SEO traffic

More often than not, websites having multiple pages have a limited number of pages getting real SEO traffic. A bulk of the balance webpages are low in terms of SEO value. Identify such pages and delete the ones that don’t get traffic to your site. This will hugely improve your site’s indexation.

Invest in a Suitable Log Analysis Tool

Log file analysis isn’t a part of your regular SEO reporting. Therefore, it requires you to manually go through the data to understand the trends. But the data available to you is huge, remember?

Imagine this scenario. You have a website with approximately 6000 a day. If each of these visitors visits at least 12 pages, you will have log file entries for 72 thousand records. That’s a whole lot of work for anyone using the Excel sheet.

All this work of analyzing logs can be managed effortlessly by an effective log analyzer tool. These automated tools can help you comb through your log files and procure data on the same platform as your SEO reporting. This will help you see how bots access your site and whether or not your crawl budget is being spent efficiently.

Check out how these tools overlap crawl data with logs to offer interesting insights pertaining to the crawl ratio. Such insights can help you tone the SEO strategy and optimize your crawl budget.

Summing Up

Log file analysis is rarely touched upon by an average SEO professional. But that’s what is the difference between merely guessing and precisely knowing how search engine crawlers behave on your website. Don’t miss out on the wealth of data and insights available through a simple log file analysis.

Use the tips and strategies shared in this post to spy on the bots and up your SEO game.

Serge Bezborodov

Serge Bezborodov is co-founder and CTO of JetOctopus. He is a tech SEO and log files nerd with 10+years of experience in programming. Serge is a data-driven SEO evangelist. He regularly shares insights from 4.5 bln crawled pages, 45 bln. log lines on DigitalOlympus, TechSEOboost, BrightonSEO conferences and via TTT community. Get him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post 6 Ways to Use Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget appeared first on Cyfe.

Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data

Michael Keenan — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 07:26:00 +0000

Whether you’re the founder of your own one-person agency, or a marketing manager at a 5,000+ person organization, the strategy behind your data insights could improve both your decision-making process and marketing campaigns — which makes prioritizing collect and analysis more critical and challenging.

So what should you focus on to help grow your business?

In this article, we’ll look at why data insights are important, how you can observe and make sense of your data, and some key examples of actionable insights for small businesses.

What are data insights?

Data insights refer to the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data related to your company and its clients. The goal is simple: make better decisions. A good data management and analysis strategy help companies monitor the health of critical systems, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about data insights, they usually referring to three core components:

Data: think about what happens when you go on Facebook. When you log into the app, you allow it to collect information about: where you live, articles you read, places you’ve been, where you went to collect, and other sensitive information. It can even send you push notifications each time you get a comment or reaction. Every time you use Facebook, it sends this unstructured data to a warehouse or database in the form of numbers and text.

Analytics: So what does Facebook does with all this information? With the help of data insights tools, the social media giant will break your information down into smaller groups to create a detailed buyer persona of you. Facebook can then understand how and why you behave the way you do. They can tell from the data that you’re getting married or planning to buy a house based on your actions in the app.

Insights: Now that Facebook better understands you, they can send personalized offers to you and other customers similar to you. The platform can now send targeted messages about new homes to buy in your area, or offers for low mortgage rates. Actionable insights are what you learn from data collected, and how your business can use it to improve an objective.

Why are data insights important?

74% of companies say they want to be “data-driven,” according to a Forrester report, but only 29% are actually successful at connecting analytics to insight. Data will be the largest area of spending for companies as they attempt to become more data-driven. If your business is going to survive, you need a strategy for the future. You have marketing, social media, web analytics, sales, and support. Staying up-to-date with reliable information on your growth is not easy tasks. Data insights can give you a clear overview of what’s happening across your business. And see everything in one place with a data visualization tool like Cyfe.

With easy access and visibility to data, it’s easier to process the information and make smarter decisions, faster. Teams can see key metrics into how your company is performing, how successful campaigns are, where your best customers are coming from, and so much more. A smart data strategy can help companies of all sizes improve their bottom line, especially small businesses that need to do more with less.

Four tips for pulling insights from data

1. Accurately display information in a data visualization platform

When showing key metrics from your data analysis, keep your x and y-axis points in proportion. Otherwise, you have a graph that misrepresents the data.

The example below shows interest rates between 2008 and 2012, and while the graph on the right makes the metrics look the same, the graph on the left shows a more accurate picture of what happened.

The right side shows static activity, but the left side truncates the y-axis to represent 3.140% through 3.154%. While the numbers do increase over the four-year time frame, the amount of the increase is insignificant. But at a quick glance, the chart on the left looks like rates skyrocketed.

Data insights can tell a different story based on their visual presentation. Aim to find a technology that collects your data sources and displays them in a clean and accurate way.

2. Identify the right patterns in data sets

As marketers or data scientists, we gather data so we can find patterns in it. Most commonly, numbers trending upwards or similarities between two sets of numbers. Often we spot patterns in a table presentation, or, you can visualize it in a chart such as line graphs, scatter plots, or a time series.

One common pattern to look for when visualizing data is trending quality.

Spotting trends refers to a number that is increasing or decreasing — for example, data on pageviews in your Google Analytics account.

In this case, the numbers are increasing week-by-week, so this is an upward trend. It shows the underlying asset is working. For example, if this is a blog post on your website, you’ll want to create content around similar topics. The uptrend can mean readers are interested.

Now consider this data about organic search traffic from Jan 1st until Jan 25th.

In this case, the number of organic entrances is decreasing week by week, indicating a downtrend. This could mean an algorithm update impacted your rankings, or you need to optimize decaying content.

We analyze data to help make predictions and decisions about a business objective. Look for correlations between uptrends and downtrends and why they exist, so you can better understand and prepare for future situations.

3. Look at the correct time frames

Timing is everything. Errors can occur when business owners look at a quick slice of data and make assumptions without taking into account historical trends. A “slice” could be a month, quarter, or a year, however, you want to look back in time to get a clear picture of what’s happening.

Looking at historical data can provide insight into how your business has reacted to different variables such as economic cycles, seasonality, and market trends. These data points are analyzed for trends or patterns that may align with current conditions so you can make a smarter decision based on fact.

To view historical data, use a data visualization tool that lets you access different time frames easily. When presenting the analysis, you can reference historical trends and tell a more cohesive story for the data.

4. Avoid measuring averages and totals

Consider this: if you calculate the average net worth of everyone in a bar one night and Bill Gates walks in. That number is going to skew upward dramatically. This is where averages can get dangerous. Data points such as these may produce a correlation you want to see, but once Bill leaves the room, you’re going to have a much different story to tell.

Try to stand clear of feel-good metrics like Total Followers or Average Time on Page. These only give you half the picture. To see the full picture, you want to measure percent changes and point lifts depending on what data you’re presenting.

Four key data insight examples for small businesses

1. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Customer acquisition refers to the process of gaining new customers for your business. Customer acquisition costs are the cost associated with finding and convincing a customer to buy your product or service. This includes marketing costs, advertising spend, employee salaries, overhead, and commissions or bonuses.

What it costs to acquire a customer helps determine the overall profitability of your business. Some businesses are not profitable after a customers first purchase; it may take multiple purchases to go green. You want to keep track of this data to see what campaigns work and which don’t. If CAC is high, it could mean your targeting or ideal customer profile is off.

To calculate customer acquisition costs, take your total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers in a given time frame. Track any changes in CAC monthly or quarterly to see where you can improve your strategy.

2. Buying habits

Buying habits are commonly overlooked as a metric for small business owners. However, understanding how and why your customers buy is important. When you understand your customers, you can create more effective advertising campaigns, tailor marketing communications, and improve the communications strategy for your business.

To better understand customers buying habits, ask yourself the following questions:

Where do your customers shop?
How frequently do they buy?
What channels do they prefer to chat on?
What are their buying preferences?
Why do they buy your products or services?

Another data point to observe is: are the products customers frequently buy your most profitable items or are they your loss leaders? If you’re only reselling your loss leader products or services over and over, you’re not going to be in business very long. Understanding this may help you adjust your mindset and start focusing on pushing your customers to your more profitable products and services.

3. Average ticket price

Average ticket price is a great metric to track when pulling insights from data. It covers the average total of every ticket or order placed over a period of time. Even if you have a ton of traffic and a high conversion rate, if your average ticket price is low, it’ll be hard to stay in the green.

To improve average ticket price, you can use upselling techniques to encourage customers or clients to buy more. For example, you can offer complementary products at a checkout page if you’re an eCommerce store. If you’re an agency, you can upsell a Messenger bot with your Facebook ads campaigns. Lifting your average ticket price

4. Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

The Marketing Originated Customer Percentage refers to how much new business is a direct result of your marketing efforts. To calculate it, take all the new customers you received in a given period, and look back at which ones started with a lead that marketing generated. You can use a marketing analytics tool such as HubSpot to track every channel and touchpoint a lead has before they buy.

The average percentage can be between 20 – 40% for the average sales team. If you have a lot of lead generation from marketing, it can be more between 40 – 80%. An alternative way to look at this is calculating based on revenue. It all depends on how you want to look at your business.

Finding the truth in data insights

While the above examples show some of the common ways data insights are found and used, it’s certainly not all of them. Always remember two things one, if you think your data insights look off or too good to be true, they most likely are. The second is to use an all-in-one business dashboard to show clean, structured data that’s easy to understand. Good data visualization can lower your chances of misrepresenting and interpreting data insights, which results in poor decision making in your business. Don’t waste time looking at inaccurate data insights. Getting comfortable around the right business intelligence analytics helps you and your team discover the truth faster, more accurately, and with a lot less fuss. This way, you can be confident in the actions you decide to take that are informed by non-biased data insights.

Michael Keenan

The post Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data appeared first on Cyfe.

9 Landing Page Metrics: How To Track Landing Page Performance

Michael Keenan — Wed, 27 May 2020 06:00:36 +0000

Most marketers know that the most important landing page metric is conversions. You can spend tons of time and resources creating the perfect page, so you want to show your marketing ROI. But did you know there are other critical landing page KPIs you can improve to boost conversions, too?

In this article, we’re going to look at nine different landing page metrics, where to find them in your analytics, and cover how they can boost your marketing strategy and improve conversion rates.

Nine landing page metrics to track and improve conversions

1. Traffic source

In website analytics, including Google Analytics, a traffic source shows where your landing page gets traffic from. For example, if someone finds your page through a search query, the source is organic search. If your conversion rate is low, it could be because you’re getting traffic from the wrong channels.

Evaluating which channels bring in high-converting website visitors can help you better optimize your page and drive more conversions. Here are some examples of traffic sources to watch:

Direct traffic: people who directly typed your URL into their browser to go directly to your landing page.
Referral traffic: people who find your landing page by clicking a link on another website or source.
Social media traffic: people who find their way to your landing page from a social media post or profile. You can sort by which social network.
Organic traffic: people who found your landing page from search queries on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Email traffic: people who clicked a link in one of your email marketing campaigns and landed on your page.
Pay per click traffic: people who clicked on PPC ads (typically in search engine results) to get to your landing page.

In Google Analytics, you can data on your traffic sources in Acquisition → All Traffic → Source/Medium.

2. Landing page views

Landing page views, or pageviews, show you how many times your landing page has been seen by a visitor. When pulling up this metric, you can also find out when people visit more often and see what events drove more views. If you’re running PPC ads to your landing page, you can use this information to set specific times when ads will be delivered to help boost traffic and landing page success.

To pull this report in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once you reach All Pages, you can tap into specific landing pages and pull up the data.

3. Return vs new visitors

The difference between new and return visitors is pretty straightforward. Regardless, it’s often the most overlooked user engagement metric for landing pages.

Say the goal your lead generation campaign is to generate new leads for your business. For this campaign you’re giving away downloadable content — like an eBook or whitepaper — in exchange for visitors information. If return customers are converting on the page, you may have a good conversion rate, but you won’t have a great funnel to nurture.

To get the data for this metric in Google Analytics, head over to Audience → Behavior → New vs. Returning.

4. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is one of the most important landing page metrics. It refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website before visiting a second page. Most marketing campaigns run paid traffic to a dedicated landing page, where a person fills out their information and clicks through to a landing page. That would count as a second page visited.

A high bounce rate can mean three things:

Your audience doesn’t match with the page and doesn’t engage with it.
Your content is of low quality. There’s nothing keeping people around.
Visitors find what they are looking for and exit the page.

To find bounce rates in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once in All Pages, choose the desired landing page to pull the report.

A good bounce rate for landing pages falls into three categories:

Excellent: range between 26 and 40 percent.
Average: range between 41 and 55 percent.
Decent: range between 56 and 70 percent.

Anything higher than 70 percent for a specific landing page for lead generation (not a blog, news, or events) is considered poor. If you’re seeing bounce rates in below average, you may want to work on your conversion rate optimization, or redesign the campaign completely.

5. Average time on Page

Average time on page is the average of time all users spend on your page. The sole purpose of this landing page metric is referencing if your content is good or not — similar to the bounce rate. The longer people spend on your page, the higher your conversion rates can be.

Pulling this data is the same as finding your bounce rate. Navigate to Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. Once in All Pages, choose the desired landing page to pull the report.

6. Conversion value

Conversion value is the number you assign to a specific conversion on your landing page. This typically represents the future income a lead brings your business.

Tracking conversion value shouldn’t be viewed alone in your marketing campaign. You want to monitor as relates to your traffic source, cost per conversion, and new vs. returning leads (amongst others). The benefit of allocating conversion value is to help you optimize and report return on ad spend (ROAS).

7. Form abandonment

Whether you’re optimizing a page for an e-commerce site or a paid digital marketing campaign, you want to track form abandonment. Form abandonment is the number or percentage of people who started filling out the required information on your landing page, then left.

This can happen for a number of reasons. Maybe your form is too much or too sensitive for potential leads.

If you want to improve conversion rates, make sure the information you’re asking for matches the perceived value of your offer. Ask yourself, “Would I provide my phone number for an eBook on data dashboards?”. If the answer is no, then you should probably remove it from your form.

For any marketing campaign, A/B test different forms. When you go to perform a landing page analysis, you can uncover what information people are willing to give, and adjust your fields accordingly.

8. Cost per conversion

Another big landing page metric to monitor is the cost per conversion. Cost per conversion is how much it costs to acquire a new lead. Although you want to increase conversions on your page, you don’t want to drive the cost up to do so.

The equation for cost per conversion is simple: take the total cost of traffic generated to your page divided by the number of conversions. For example, say your ad campaign costs $200 for 100 views. At the end of the campaign, you got 5 conversions. Using this formula you’d see $200/5 = $40. Your cost per conversion is $40.

9. Lead to customer percentage

One of the key metrics you want to measure for landing pages is lead to customer rate. How many leads from each landing page and went on to become a paying customer?

Say you work to improve conversions on your landing page. You check your analytics account and it shows your reaching the target audience, more people are signing up for your offer. But if you don’t turn those lead into customers, your conversion rate is a vanity metric.

Sometimes, landing page optimization goes beyond the key metrics. It may involve changing your offer, targeting a new audience, or reevaluating your sales approach. Lead to customer rate can provide that type of insights for your business so you can make smarter decisions.

Good conversion rates vary depending on your industry and offer, where it falls in your sales and conversion funnel, and the quality of leads being generated. In general, you should expect to see between 5-10% lead to customer rate.

FAQs: Landing page metrics

How do you measure landing page success?

Landing page success is different for each marketing campaign. However, you can focus on key landing page metrics including:

Conversion rate
Form abandonment rate
Cost per conversion
Bounce rate
Lead to customer rate

What are the most important Google Analytics metrics?

Here are five important Google Analytics metrics you want to track your landing page:

Traffic source
Pageviews
New vs. returning users
Average time on page
Bounce rate

What is a landing page in Google Analytics?

A landing page in Google Analytics is the first page viewed in a session. When checking your Google Analytics reports, a landing page is how someone entered your website.

Making the most of your landing page metrics

To run any successful outbound or inbound marketing campaign, you want to track metrics that matter. If you want to improve your conversion rates and make an impact on your business, track the above nine landing page metrics.

Connect your Google Analytics to Cyfe to easily track and improve on key landing page metrics all in one place. It’s free to get started.

Michael Keenan

The post 9 Landing Page Metrics: How To Track Landing Page Performance appeared first on Cyfe.

5 Best Practices For Connecting Remote Sales and Marketing Teams

Pratik Dholakiya — Wed, 20 May 2020 04:50:28 +0000

In most companies, sales and marketing teams don’t collaborate efficiently. They don’t have access to each other’s data, nor do they fully understand each other’s roles and responsibilities. This arrangement has many downsides, including:

Longer buying cycles
Poor campaign deliverability
Lower ROI
Loss of business revenue (upwards of 10% or more annually)

What’s more, disorganization between the two teams can breed a toxic environment that hampers productivity and work satisfaction. According to CSO Insights, companies with adaptable sales and marketing processes witness 10.2% more sales reps achieving their targets.

Besides, they can extract 208% more value from marketing, with 108% less friction. However, that would be harder to achieve now that everyone is working in a remote environment.

Ensuring remote readiness is a challenge; HBR reports that 52% of remote employees feel their colleagues mistreat them and leave them out in important matters of work.

So, if your company is seeking to reap the benefits of a remote sales and marketing alignment, it is necessary to restructure the two teams to facilitate better workflow between them. Here are five best practices to follow:

1. Have unified buyer personas

The end goal of both the teams is the same, i.e., to target, nurture, and convert as many consumers as possible. However, if you ask each department the definition of their target customers, you are bound to find some variation.

This gap often leads to situations where sales and marketing invest time and resources on those who are not necessarily their prospects. The point is that both departments have the same target audience, and they need to be reminded repeatedly.

Therefore, it is necessary to develop and communicate accurate and uniform buyer personas across the company. Understanding your ideal customers well is vital to drive product/service development, content creation, sales follow up, and everything else relating to customer management.

Simply put: your remote sales reps will become more adept at connecting with the target audience, and the marketing team will be better informed as to who it wants the content to reach.

2. Systematize lead scoring

Remote sales and marketing teams must have an ongoing conversation about qualifying criteria. They should have one process for lead scoring and evaluation. That is where Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) enter the picture.

These terms represent the goals of each team. Therefore, while defining them, marketers should ask questions like:

How much did the target customer engage with a particular eBook?
How many times did they interact with it?

Similarly, sales reps should find answers to:

What do their prospects need?
Can they afford your business offering?
What other solutions/competitors are they considering?

If the two teams don’t define these terms in the same way, their leads are highly likely to be scored incorrectly, resulting in many missed opportunities for your business.

Remote working often increases lapses in communication between and within teams. Therefore, it is essential to define the terms accurately to eliminate any confusion and convert MQLs to SQLs easily.

3. Put a Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) in place

If you don’t have an SLA between sales and marketing yet, now is the time to make one. An SLA is a contract that details what both departments have to do to boost business revenue together. A typical SLA comprises:

a. Individual goals of sales and marketing teams

For example, marketing personnel may need to provide a specific number of leads to their sales counterparts every month, and the sales team may be required to follow up on those leads within a particular period.

b. Resources needed by both parties to do their job

What do both teams need from each other to be successful? Consulting on sales pitches? Weekly status reports? Important documents that could give an overview of client pain points?

c. Sales and marketing SPOCs

A remote working arrangement requires every employee to communicate clearly and proactively. Therefore, appoint one person from each team to ensure a smooth flow of information.

d. Way forward when targets are not achieved

If the monthly or quarterly goals of sales and marketing teams are somehow not met, document how each of them will move forward to make up for potential lost revenues.

With an SLA in place, both the teams can support each other based on clear, numerical goals. It eliminates the possibility of “blame game” (a common issue among remote workers) and shifts the focus on what needs to be done by every sales rep and marketer in your company.

4. Facilitate the sharing of information with an integrated CRM

Sales reps spend a considerable part of their day glued to their company’s CRM, while the marketers stick to their marketing automation software. As a result, it becomes difficult to know the progress being made daily, which in turn causes significant communication and information gaps.

An integrated CRM will allow both the teams to function easily. Marketers will have access to all the leads being pursued by the sales team. Any target customer moves through various stages such as cold lead, warm lead, opportunity, and others, depending on how much interaction they have had with the business.

With this information, marketers can help the sales teams tailor prospect conversations accordingly via email drip campaigns, lead magnets, paid advertising, and more.

Similarly, by adding information surrounding the lead’s likes, dislikes, and concerns to the CRM, sales reps can help their marketing counterparts in aligning their resources (e.g., newsletters or social media) with new insights.

For example, if the sales team observes a surge in GDPR compliance-related queries in March, then your marketers can produce more blogs on GDPR around Feb-March and promote them extensively via the company newsletter.

That way, leads will only receive relevant content from your company, and will thus be more inclined towards doing business with you.

5. Promote clear communication lines

If you want your remote sales reps and marketers to develop honest working relationships with each other, you must promote the use of tools such as Slack, Zoom, or Google Meet aggressively. Ensure the two teams catch up once every week or 14 days.

These status meetings will help them stay on top of each other’s progress, discuss MQLs and SQLs, identify new opportunities and content needs, brainstorm lead generation ideas and campaign concepts, and more together.

Alternatively, through remote work, it is easier than ever for marketing to join client or prospect calls with their sales counterparts to get an understanding of what content and messaging resonates with the buyer personas.

Besides, deploy collaboration tools such as Asana, Ryver, Trello, or Basecamp to enable both teams to schedule, assign, and track tasks efficiently.

Summing it up

Sales and marketing alignment is vital for business success; however, many companies struggle to implement a strategy that enables both the teams to work in sync. Therefore, start with the basics: set buyer personas and goals to be achieved to convert prospects.

Implement processes and tools that enable your remote teams to do their job. Almost 90% of companies that put collaborative sales and marketing efforts report an exponential in lead conversion. When your sales and marketing teams work together, more can be accomplished.

Pratik Dholakiya

The post 5 Best Practices For Connecting Remote Sales and Marketing Teams appeared first on Cyfe.

Small Business Analytics: 4 Ugly Truths and 6 Best Practices

Michael Keenan — Wed, 13 May 2020 06:00:27 +0000

Small business analytics is the silent driver of successful companies today. Every owner knows their work impacts the bottom line — spikes in traffic, more sales — but they don’t always know what’s making the most impact and why.

The problem is, there’s so much data available today it can be overwhelming for a small business owner. Wrangling data takes the right tools, the right metrics, and the right application to build a sustainable long-term business.

To lessen the burden of small business data analytics, we’ve put together a guide below that discusses four ugly truths (and how to fix them), plus, six best practices you can use to understand the health of your small business and make more informed, strategic decisions.

If you’re short on time, click to a section that interests you the most:

4 ugly truths about small business analytics

With the amount of data that’s available to you, it’s easy to misunderstand and misuse it. And if you don’t jump on specific mistakes early, it can negatively impact your bottom line. Below are some common issues around small business analytics and how you can overcome them.

1. Small business owners know they should be using data, but they don't.

Many business owners decide to focus on revenue-generating activities like lead generation or advertising. Analytics has become something owners fear because of lack of time, resources, technical knowledge, etc. The truth is, data wrangling is profitable once you get over the learning curve. Once it’s set up, you can start making more strategic decisions for your business and grow revenue.

For example, Don Marler, a street food vendor, achieved a 30% revenue boost by tapping into his customer’s geographic data. The data already lived in his Facebook Business account. At the time, Facebook Messenger policies were changing and Don had to find a new way to connect with customers. Using this new geographic data, he was able to create a new marketing channel for his food cart and drive more revenue for the small business.

Data wrangling tips:

Think like Nike and Just Do It! Spend time each week looking at your business’s analytics to understand the health of the business, and where you can improve whether it be in customer acquisition, expenses, or paid ads. When you own your business intelligence data, you can make better decisions and make more profit.

2. Most small businesses don’t have the right reporting tools in place.

To say there are a hundred different free reporting tools may be an understatement. Yes, you can use spreadsheets to manage your business data — but they often lead to human error, less informed insights, and can limit what data you act on.

Tools tips:

Update your toolkit. Any new business should set aside a budget to track and measure their data.
Choose free reporting tools. Spreadsheets are free. But so is a Cyfe dashboard. You can link up to any data source from finance to sales and marketing softwares, and create a dashboard in minutes.

3. You’re looking at the wrong metrics

Whether you’re a start up, local business, or e-commerce store owner, it’s critical that you identify, track, and improve the right metrics. If you do, you’ll get a clear picture of when you’re adding value to your business and when you’re not.

More often than not, small business analytics focuses on vanity metrics: Facebook Likes or Instagram followers. This extends outside of social media. You could consider revenue a vanity metric if it’s not matched up against how much the company loses. A vanity metric will only tell you half the story.

Metrics tips:

Set key performance indicators that are easy to understand and access. You can pull data from your Google Analytics or sales system. More on what to track later in this article.
Track metrics that lead to insights. Social following doesn’t help you understand how good your onboarding is, or how to personalize the customer experience.
Don’t track totals. For example, total revenue. To see the full picture, you should measure things like customer engagement, percentage of conversions, customer satisfaction, etc.

4. You’ve stopped asking why.

Data doesn’t live in a vacuum. Metrics are usually dependent on each other, for example, say your email click-through rates were up last month, and so we’re your profits. You could report the reason profits were up was because you ran a great email marketing campaign. If that’s the case, you should continue to improve on your email marketing efforts.

Take the extra steps to question your data. To properly validate your claim, you want to support it with a story that explains the how and why behind your success.

6 small business data analytics best practices

Now that we’ve covered the common issues most small business owners face, let’s get into what small business analytics metrics you should track to improve performance.

1. Pay attention to trends

A trend quantifies and explains data patterns over time. It can be an upward or downwards shift in your data set overtime. The goal is to predict what might happen to your business in the future. Armed with this knowledge you can take actions to support good trends and fix bad ones.

You can track trends day-by-day, week-by-week, monthly or quarterly. Whatever time frame works best for your business. Since trends are formed over time, you’ll have to set up your analytics first, wait within the given time period, then compare over time.

Top trends to focus on for small businesses:

Traffic source: A traffic source report shows you an overview of where people came from before landing on your website. It’s commonly found in your Google Analytics account. For example, a “direct source” would be someone who visited your site by typing in your URL. An “organic source” is Google or another search engine. You want to track traffic sources so you can optimize the channels bringing you the most traffic over time.
Keyword rankings: To know how people are finding you in search engines, you should track keyword rankings. You can then tell what content is performing well, and if you should improve it or not. Plus what topics you should create content on.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV): Customer lifetime value is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the relationship of your average customer. You can break these up into segments depending on how many different customer groups you have. Knowing CLTV can help your business focus on acquiring the most profitable and best fit customers for your business.

2. Monitor more than just website traffic

Website traffic refers to people who visit your website. It’s measured in visits, or sessions, and is a standard way to measure how good you are at attracting leads. But just measuring website traffic isn’t the only thing you want to measure as a small business. You also want to look at:

How long people stay on your site. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have if no one stays for more than a few seconds. Look at bounce rate and time on page to determine how people interact with your site.
What percentage of visitors convert. Whether you’re an e-commerce business or brick-n-mortar, you have a goal for site visitors. It can be buying a product, signing up for a mailing list, grabbing a coupon. You want to track how many people convert on your website. This will help you determine if your messaging or product offering is effective or not.

Identifying the metrics above, along with demographic data in Google Analytics, can help you figure out who’s actually visiting your site. You could then create better offers, adjust your marketing tactics, and improve your website for conversions. The possibilities are endless once you have good data in place.

3. Oversee cost of customer acquisition

Do you know how much it costs to get a new customer?

The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is determined by dividing all the costs spent on getting a new customer by the number of new ones in a period of time. For example, if you spent $1,500 on marketing in January and acquired 10 new customers, your CAC is $150.

Remember customer lifetime value (CLTV) from above? Well, say your CLTV is $1,100 and you spend $150 to acquire one, that’s a win for your business.

When you evaluate CAC and CLTV of different customer groups, you can see who your most profitable customers are. Now you can focus on the most rewarding ones rather than customers who cut into your profits.

4. Use data to monitor content engagement

Content is a great way to drive new business. The goal is to draw people to your company by offering tips and insights on issues they care most about. You attract an audience, then convert them into customers over time.

Just like any other form of marketing, you want to measure your content engagement to see how effective it is. Here are a few examples of content engagement metrics to track for your small business:

Sign-ups: Chances are you’re using content to drive people in from search or social. When someone visits your page, you want to give them the option to sign up for a subscriber list. Today that list can be e-mail, Messenger, or SMS. You can embed a sign-up form directly on your site with a call-to-action that explains why they should join your list.
Click-through rates (CTR): When you send a message to your list, you want to know how many people act on it. Measuring click-through rates can tell you what type of content works for your audience, and which don’t. The higher the CTR, the better.
Social shares: Fewer metrics can express your content’s strength than people sharing it with their network on social media. This is different than social engagement, for example, likes and comments. Look at how many people re-posted your content on their feed.

Monitor those trends and which pieces of content or pages are performing best and worst to help you understand what is most impactful and which content to avoid.

5. Keep track of financials

Financials are the painful necessity of small businesses. Some find it boring, while others enjoy the pain. While we recommend working with an accountant to support your financial health, some financial metrics you can track are:

Income: Without any revenue or income, you don’t have a business. You can’t buy supplies, or pay your team. Track income on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. And compare it to how you were doing the last period. It’s an easy number to track, think, what are your total sales?
Expenses: You want to know what it costs to operate your business. If your expenses are too high and income too low, you won’t be in business very long. Expenses can include any tools, softwares, ad spend, employee, etc that cuts into revenue. It’s how you determine if you are profitable or not.
Cash flow: Negative cash flow plagues many small businesses. You can’t just have money in your business checking account, you need to have a positive cash flow. The ideal cash flow is 2:1 assets to liabilities. If you’re below 1:1, it means you don’t have enough money to operate.
Aging accounts receivable: An aging accounts receivable can be shocking for businesses who invoice customers. It reports on unpaid customer invoices and is used to identify cash flow problems. For example, if one customer pays in 30 days, but 3 other clients pay over 90 to 120 days, you’ll have a cash flow problem. You now know to charge late payment fees or drop clients who don’t pay on time.

6. Make your data accessible

If your data is not accessible and easy to find, you won’t get much insight from it. Here are some guidelines to make your data easier to understand and present.

Present your business analytics on mobile. With teams becoming more dispersed, make sure data is accessible by everyone, at any time — whether it’s in a meeting, on a plane, or on the beach.
Make data easy to share. All your data should live in one place. That way you can share insights with teams, clients, or vendors via link or click of button. This includes simple export features so you can save and store specific files over time.
Invest in real-time monitoring. A good data dashboard will give viewers live updates of your most important metrics. Whether it be website traffic, online sales, or active sales funnels.
Auto-send reports to stakeholders. Some people don’t want to log into an analytics dashboard — and that’s okay. With Cyfe, you can create reports based on specific information and set a time to send them to yourself and other team members.

Making the most of your business intelligence as a small business

Now that you have some insight into managing small business analytics, the ball is in your court. Taking control of your data can benefit your business long into the future — and help drive more revenue. From there, you can really dive into business intelligence and take your business to the next level.

Michael Keenan

The post Small Business Analytics: 4 Ugly Truths and 6 Best Practices appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Monitor Your Sales KPIs & Motivate Your Sales Team

Michael Keenan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 07:00:36 +0000

Sales KPIs – key performance indicators – are your business’ superpower for success and growth. They deliver important intelligence about all aspects of your sales cycle, helping you and your team:

identify your prospects
qualify leads
discover the best ways to connect with leads
manage objections
identify pain points and provide solutions
deliver products and services
manage your follow up and maintain relationships

Needless to say, keeping a close eye on your sales KPIs can mean the difference between a record year and closing the doors.

But what are the best KPIs to monitor? And how can you ensure your sales team is motivated to smash their goals? Here we’ll discuss the most important KPIs to measure for sales success.

Top 9 sales KPIs to measure in 2020

1. New Leads or Opportunities

It’s an obvious but important KPI which needs consistent monitoring. Tracking new leads tells you:

how many leads you’re getting
where your leads are coming from
when to focus your advertising activity
how your sales team are contributing to the growth of the business
who’s achieving their quota
the percentage of your team meeting their quota
if your quota is too high or too low

A sales dashboard in Cyfe is a highly-effective way to keep track of new leads (and many other KPIs). It uses real-time data and metrics from your business’ customer databases – Shopify, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, etc. – to monitor opportunities as they come in. No more trawling through reams of data, save time and money by streamlining and automating this task.

2. Sales Volume by Location

If you want to understand where the demand for your product is highest and lowest, monitoring Sales Volume by Location (in-store or online) is the ticket.

Comparing sales volumes across different locations sharpens your team’s activity. For example, your findings could tell you where to execute campaigns or which regions would benefit from new product enhancements. So you can supercharge sales by focusing on the best actions in the right locations.

As with tracking new opportunities, monitoring this KPI is much easier with a dashboard that can consolidate all your data in one place. That way you can easily compare Sales Volume by Location and share it with your team swiftly for valuable insights.

3. Lead Conversion Rate

The all-important question: how many leads are converting in sales? Tracking this metric helps you:

measure the effectiveness of your pitches
tweak your sales process to target more qualified leads
understand more about the prospects who convert
create a proven plan for future customer acquisition
target your ideal customers

To measure Lead Conversion Rate, pick a period you want to measure and run a report of leads generated in that time. Next, run a report of leads converted within that period. Then divide the leads converted by the leads generated to get your conversion rate. How you complete this task may change depending on the CRM software you use.

4. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue

This is actually two essential sales KPIs in one. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue tells you how successful your business is (or isn’t) by identifying how close you are to meeting your forecasted revenue.

If you discover that your forecasted revenue is way below your actual revenue, it’s time to take action. Review more detailed sales KPIs to understand where losses may be occurring in your forecasting process or sales cycle.

To monitor and measure this KPI, start by setting up a specific time frame in which to review your revenue stream. This could mean year-over-year, but also quarterly, monthly, or weekly. No matter your decided time breakdown, you must get a handle on how much revenue you’re projecting vs. how much you’re really earning. Otherwise, your business decisions will be for naught.

5. Sales Cycle Length

Analyzing Sales Cycle Length for individual reps shows you how effective a rep is in comparison to their colleagues. This empowers you to provide extra training and goal setting for the right staff to improve their performance.

But a quick sales cycle might not always be good for business. For example, you may find that your shortest sales cycle is generating dissatisfied customers. In this case, you might consider how lengthening the sales cycle can boost customer happiness.

Using a dashboard to monitor Sales Cycle Length ensures all the data you need is in one place and is easily accessible. That way, you can quickly gain valuable insights and share what you’ve learned with the team in an easy-to-understand way.

6. Employee Satisfaction

Often overlooked, but critical as work-related stress has been deemed the health epidemic of the 21st century by the World Health Organization.

Poor employee wellbeing is as bad for the individual as it is for business. These are the people on the front lines speaking and working with your customers and potential clients. They are the face of the products and services you wish to sell, so keeping them pleased is in your best interest.

The good news is that employee motivation and satisfaction are measurable and entirely relevant sales KPIs.

One way to gauge employee satisfaction is through feedback. You could ask your employees to rank their job satisfaction from 1 – 10 and follow up with qualifying questions to find out what’s making them unhappy or happy. Comparing these results with your goals will paint a picture of your overall employee happiness while highlighting factors you need to work to improve your staff’s wellbeing.

7. Competitor Pricing

An awareness of your competitors’ pricing is a great asset for a competitive strategy. For example, if you discover that your prices are around the same, you could implement a price-match strategy that ensures your customers get the best deals, giving your business a competitive edge.

Price monitoring can be executed via a web scraping tool or a parser. They give you the ability to gather live pricing data at intervals of your choosing. All you need to do is identify your competition and products that would present the best data points. Then determine how frequently you’d like to monitor competitor prices for scraping.

Next, gather your relevant product URLs and import them into your scraping or parser tool. Then you’re all set to analyze the data to help you achieve that pricing sweet spot to encourage sales and customer loyalty.

8. Customer Engagement (after the sale)

Build customer loyalty and keep them coming back for more. This can be achieved by monitoring the Customer Engagement KPI.

Customer engagement metrics could be:

Social engagement (number of likes, shares, reactions, retweets, etc.)
Email engagement (open rates, click-through rates, etc.)
Activity time (the total time a customer spends interacting with your service or brand)
Visit frequency (how often a customer uses your service or visits your website)

Collaborating with Marketing will help you gather and understand this data. These metrics help you to familiarize yourself with the type of people who buy your products or services. So you can continually refine your offerings and engagement strategies to give your customers exactly what they want.

9. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics to track for growing sales teams. It tells a company how much revenue they can expect from one customer through its business relationship.

Here’s a quick and easy way to calculate CLV for your business:

The longer a customer buys from a company, the greater their lifetime value becomes. You can use this metric to identify which customer segments are most valuable for the company.

Motivating your sales team like a boss

Okay, you’re the boss already. But do you know how to effectively motivate your sales team to meet their goals? Spoiler alert: you don’t need to be a dictator.

Here are our top takeaways on creating a positive work environment that fosters motivation as well as autonomy, commitment, and teamwork.

1. Ensure transparency

Keeping all your performance and sales data to yourself doesn’t create a sense of unity or teamwork. Instead, you need to adopt a transparent policy when it comes to sales and individual performance. This:

Helps staff keep on top of their performance
Helps them prepare for appraisals
Creates healthy competition between your sales team

All of which boosts your team’s motivation organically.

We recommend creating a sales team dashboard which can be made accessible to all your reps. This tracks the most important sales KPIs for each of your reps.

You can then use the new Cyfe Goals feature (which you can learn more about on our website) to set the quotas for each salesperson. That way, your sales team can see exactly how close they are to reaching their quota or even their personal goals in real-time.

2. Use alerts

An Alert can be a notification text message or email that is sent to a salesperson once a certain threshold is met (such as X number of calls made) within your sales dashboard. This function is available at Cyfe and you can learn more about it in our article: Get More From Your Business Intelligence Analytics With Alerts.

Alerts are ninja motivators. What better way to let your team members know that they’re close to hitting their daily quota? Or that they’ve surpassed their quota? Alerting your team of their performance keeps their goals front-of-mind, encouraging them to work harder towards specific achievements.

3. Leverage contests

Sales contests are another great way to keep your sales team motivated and performing at their best. Here are a couple of ideas for contests that you can run utilizing your sales dashboard.

Simple daily sales contest

Set a target goal for all your team members and the first to reach that goal for the day wins. It’s important to set a realistic goal, but also one that won’t likely be reached until later in the day. You can monitor all progress directly from your sales dashboard.

First to reach their daily quota contest

With daily goals set up for each salesperson, you can make a simple contest for the first person to hit their quota for the day. They all need to get there (that’s the purpose of the quota after all), but if you can push them to reach their quota early, everything that they accomplish the rest of the day is just a bonus!

PRO TIP: Make sure to have a prize that your sales team actually wants to win. Nothing kills a contest faster than a reward that no one really cares about.

Using these sales KPIs for sales success

Become a leader that knows the best sales KPIs to monitor, how to set progressive goals, and how to effectively motivate your reps. The reward is a sales team who view you as a hero because you consistently help them smash their targets, get excellent feedback and have a positive impact on the business.

Michael Keenan

The post How to Monitor Your Sales KPIs & Motivate Your Sales Team appeared first on Cyfe.

10 Best Practices in Preparing Data for Analysis

Michael Keenan — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 08:00:01 +0000

Whether you’re a marketing manager at a big company and manage data, or a solopreneur managing multiple clients’ data at once, you need to prepare data for analysis.

A good approach to data preparation can help you generate new insights, find connections between your data, make smarter business decisions, and so much more.

Here are ten practical best practices you can use to make preparing data for analysis easier.

1. Set a clear goal

The level of impact you can have when analyzing your data is dependent on setting the right goals. Goal setting is a good way to reflect and think about what you’d like to get out of your data. It also helps streamline analysis when you’re tackling a huge batch of data.

When setting goals for your data, you need to define a problem statement. For any outcomes to succeed, the reason must stem from a problem describing the reason for change and a way to measure success.

For example, a SaaS company saw that the blog conversion rate was lower than it should be (problem), suggesting issues with poorly optimized contact forms and bad content (symptoms). The solution, in this case, could be to analyze conversion metrics on high-goal completion pages, and compare it to declining ones.

Goals are strategic and aspirational, they tend to have a much higher impact over time. The more organized your approach for preparing data for analysis is, the easier it’ll be to solve problems at a faster rate. It also keeps your data team on the same page and helps you carry out work in measurable strides that get results.

2. Prioritize data visualization

When preparing data for analysis, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers without considering the final presentation or even the data analysis review. Presentation or visualization matters, because this is how you, your team, and others view and interpret the data.

Here are a few tips on deciding the best visualizations when preparing data for analysis:

Choose the right format to communicate the main purpose. One size does not fit all. Carefully decide on the best graphs, charts, and layout to tell your story and answer questions generated by the data.
Use color cues to help tell your story. Colors can be tricky, but finding a good balance on your board can help highlight and accentuate key information.
Use sizing to indicate value. You can alter the size of certain data points to stress importance. For example, net revenue or sales closed on a sales dashboard will be bigger than X

The wrong type of visualization may result in a skewed perception of the data or even eliminate certain questions from being asked, let alone answered. You want to make sure your future data is easy to navigate. Take the time to consider visualization when preparing data for analysis.

3. Don't ignore issues outside the scope of data

Sometimes there will be other measures beyond digital performance that come into play. It’s all too easy to allow data to inform every business decision, leaving gut instinct and ethical trailing behind in the dust. While data is used to make more informed decisions, it’s never a good idea to only rely on numbers without considering outside factors.

When preparing data for analysis it’s best to think of data as a motivator or influencer without final decision-making power. There may be ethical, cultural, or philosophical issues at play that may take precedence over pure data analysis. Be sensitive to these potential pain points to best understand how they may influence your final results.

4. Automate data entry to reduce human error

It’s possible you can make a mistake in basic data entry. Entering or merging information in the wrong row or column or adding an accidental zero at the end of a number are all common human errors when preparing data for analysis.

The answer? Automated data entry. These solutions can increase speed and accuracy, making sure your operations are never slowed down because of a backlog or human error. When it comes to data analysis, any process that minimizes the risk of human error is a huge positive. Always look for ways to boost efficiencies and save time.

5. Analyze a large enough sample

The size of your sample dictates the amount of information you have, which in turn, determines the credibility and precision of your data set. While you can get away with working up analytics for a small group, they tend to produce more outliers with weaker correlation. The larger the sample you have, the more information — which in turn, means less uncertainty.

There are two ways to approach this best practice: one, wait until you have a bigger data set. Two, look at smaller data sets over longer periods of time. You can make more clear comparisons by looking over specific timeframes such as year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter.

6. Use consistent and organized naming standards

If your naming conventions are slightly askew, you can throw your whole data set off. Set up a simplified naming convention system before diving deep into analysis. Use terms that are clear and that will make sense to those with whom you plan to share your analysis.

Make sure everyone is aware of your naming conventions so that no one is guessing their meaning or making up their own. While seemingly simple, this is the kind of disorganization that often wreaks havoc on data analysis.

7. Beware of duplication

This may seem like a no-brainer, but data duplication is a common mistake people make when preparing data for analysis. Duplicating one input will inaccurately skew your data, resulting in corrupt predictions and poor decision-making. Be certain to “dedupe” your data in the preparation stages to be sure to remove any traces of duplication that may affect your data set.

8. Clean dirty data

When preparing for analysis, take the time to cleanse and clean your data. Excel-type formulas and macros can help identify errors in data that might make it corrupt. In addition to duplicate data, you want to identify outliers, incorrect data, missing data, or data that simply does not make logical sense.

Here are so ways you can clean your data in an Excel sheet:

Eliminate extra space.
Treat all blank cells.
Remove duplicates.
Convert text-based numbers in numerical.
Highlight errors.
Create a consistent spelling case (Lower/Upper/Proper)
Change Text to Lower/Upper/Proper Case.
Make sure everything is spelt right.
Delete all formatting.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to clean data fast and automatically. You’ll have to learn the basics, get in there and get your hands dirty.

9. Make data connectivity simple

If you’re working with any business data set, you probably have information coming in from various sources. You want to be certain that your spreadsheet or dashboard is pulling data from the correct source or sources and that the data is compatible with your data collection software.

Multiple data sources mean that there are many more chances for error. To avoid this, know your sources and manage them upfront when preparing data for analysis. This way you can aim to avoid any unnecessary surprises down the road.

Essentially you need to be sure that your computer is playing nicely with all of the data and with the computer or software that is housing the original data. Connectivity is key and you want to keep these data connectivity relationships as simple as possible.

10. Make sure your data is updated

Using outdated data could happen if there’s a problem with your data source integration or inputting. Pay close attention to timelines if you’re tracking and examining real-time data. Make sure you check all data is up to date across your platforms and you’re consistently pulling data from the same timeframe.

An easier way to prepare data

While there’s not much that’s especially easy about preparing data for analysis, there are tools to help safely and accurately automate much of the data preparation and integration process.

Luckily advanced all-in-one online business dashboards like Cyfe exist to eliminate most of the manual data preparation necessary for a fully-functional data review and report.

Michael Keenan

The post 10 Best Practices in Preparing Data for Analysis appeared first on Cyfe.

Tips & Tricks – Cyfe

6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021

Table of Contents

1. Backlinks

2. User Sentiment

3. Content Downloads

4. Active Email Subscribers

5. Average Time on Page

6. On-Site Behaviour

Final Thoughts

Pratik Dholakiya

SEO KPIs: 20 Expert Tips for Tracking SEO Metrics

Table of Contents

1. Conversion rates are king

2. Track keyword ranking positions

3. Bounce rates help you improve your pages

4. Drive organic traffic using keywords

5. Tracking exit percentage improves sales

6. Monitoring website traffic reveals the overall health of your SEO

7. Three core KPIs are needed to tell the whole story of SEO results

8. Monitor rankings weekly to grow authority and attract new leads

9. Create SEO goals based on what you need to accomplish

10. Make KPI tracking and measuring goals simple

11. Set up alerts to spot issues as they arrive

12. Data isn’t always immediately actionable

13. It’s not always necessary to track KPIs on a daily basis

14. Compare SEO campaign data month vs. month presents a bigger picture

15. Leverage A/B testing to action data

16. Ensure Google Analytics is configured properly

17. Keep tabs on your competitors through the competitor rankings KPI

18. Generate a total “link power” rather than count links for content

19. Start with a Google search when looking at the customer journey

20. Use analytics to make data actionable

Your Turn

Michael Keenan

Zapier Integration: The Easy Guide for Cyfe Users

Table of Contents

What is Zapier?

How Zapier integrations work with Cyfe

Top 9 Cyfe + Zapier integrations

1. Track the number of new CallRail phone calls over time

2. Track number of new HubSpot contacts over time

3. Track new Freshdesk tickets

4. Track New Backups in DigitalOcean

5. Update values in Cyfe on new orders on WooCommerce

6. Add new Pipedrive deals to Cyfe

7. Track new Magento orders over time

8. Track new ActiveCampaign contacts over time

9. Track new form submissions on Gravity Forms

How to Use Push by Zapier

Final thoughts

Michael Keenan

6 Ways to Use Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Table of Contents

What Is a Log File?

How Can Log File Analysis Help Optimize Crawl Budget?

Using Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Know What to Expect from Log File Analysis

1. Identify Where Your Crawl Budget Is Being Wasted

2. Determine Whether Priority Pages Are Being Crawled

3. Eliminate Page Errors

4. Improve Website Indexability

5. Reduce the Negative Impact of Site Migration

6. Keep a Check on the Site’s Technical Health

A Few Other Points to Bear in Mind

Check the Robot.txt Settings

Check the Number of Pages Getting Bot Visits versus Those Getting SEO traffic

Invest in a Suitable Log Analysis Tool

Summing Up

Serge Bezborodov

Data Insights: How to Extract Insights from Data

Table of Contents

What are data insights?

Why are data insights important?

Four tips for pulling insights from data

1. Accurately display information in a data visualization platform

2. Identify the right patterns in data sets

3. Look at the correct time frames

4. Avoid measuring averages and totals

Four key data insight examples for small businesses