Parris Wells PR: August 2017

Interestingly, I have been tasked with brainstorming ideas on how we can give our company the “cool” factor that you see with major businesses in the beauty market. In my research and brainstorming, I have selected a few major businesses that provide their customers and potential customers with engaging content that transcends the “sales model” and treats the consumer like a friend with whom they share inside scoops, tips and tricks, relational posts, and more. The businesses I have chosen to use as inspiration are as follows: Clinique, Glossier, Benefit Cosmetics, Color Pop Cosmetics, and Urban Decay.

For this exercise, I will examine Benefit Cosmetics, a makeup line that is sold through the ecommerce channel, as well as in stores like Sephora and Ulta. My apologies ahead of time for choosing a potentially female isolated brand; these businesses are currently top of mind.

Social media advertisements and Google AdWords are the milk and honey for Benefit Cosmetics. Particularly social media ads as this brand is focused primarily on providing as much valuable content for their social media audience as their resources allow.

In our lesson from this week, Professor T elaborates on the benefits of Facebook advertisements with the following excerpt: “this newer platform includes psychographic information—attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles” (Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, 2017).

For a company like Benefit Cosmetics, that is focused on making their brand a lifestyle rather than just a line of products (for instance, they call all of their followers “Benebabes” to create a cult-like following), Facebook Ads allow Benefit to create more accurately targeted advertisements that will fall into the newsfeeds of similar-minded social media users.

To provide a more tangible example, Benefit created a Facebook Live series called “Tipsy Tricks” in which they sip wine and discuss the latest product launches, how to use particular products, when to use particular products, and more. This original concept is a perfect social media post to boost on page or promote through the use of a Facebook ad; this content does not directly promote a product or service, but rather, it provides a usefulness and engagement with the audience that is invaluable. In our readings this week, Michael Greenberg (2009) says the following: “social marketing efforts need to be driven by content, not vice versa. Without content, there is not a whole lot to talk about.”

[https://www.facebook.com/benefitcosmetics/videos/10154845809588148/]

Benefit Cosmetics. (2017, August 24). Tipsy tricks 8/24. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/benefitcosmetics/videos/10154845809588148/

My argument for Benefit Cosmetics using Google AdWords is that this would be far too expensive of a venture due to the high competition for traditional keyword advertisements, unless they were get really elaborate with their long tail keywords. I did see that Benefit had an ad under the keyword “Benefit Cosmetics,” which you can see below for reference.

Google. (2017, August 30). “Benefit cosmetics”. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?q=benefit+cosmetics&oq=benefit+cosmetics&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i60l3j0l2.1769j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

However, Benefit products do show up in the Google Shopping Campaigns on google search for some of their keywords, or at least the keywords I guessed they would use based on their recent product launches like “contour stick,” “brow pencil,” “bronzer,” etc. The products link to the Ulta shop from which you can purchase products. My guess is that Benefit contributes to ad spend for Ulta to promote their products online; but I may be wrong.

Here is a sample of the shopping ad:

Google. (2017, August 30). “Contour stick”. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?q=contour+stick&oq=contour+stick&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0j0i20k1j0l2.3470.10567.0.10705.28.21.2.0.0.0.250.2122.0j11j3.14.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..12.16.2132.6..35i39k1j0i67k1.6B0qlwosTU8

Shopping ads are a great way to attract qualified leads. According to Google, you can “use shopping campaigns to promote your online and local inventory, boost traffic to your website or local store, and find better qualified leads” (Google for Retail, n.d.).

References

Benefit Cosmetics. (2017, August 24). Tipsy tricks 8/24. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/benefitcosmetics/videos/10154845809588148/

Google for Retail. (n.d.). Shopping Campaigns. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/retail/solutions/shopping-campaigns/#?modal_active=none

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. Retrieved from http://multichannelmerchant.com/marketing/content-is-king-of-social-marketing/

Reed College of Media. West Virginia University. (2017). Week 3 lesson: social media analytics & advertising channels. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_88807_1&content_id=_4063425_1&framesetWrapped=true

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Metric Identification: Conversion

The second metric I would like to analyze is the conversion metric under the conversion metric category. Conversion metrics, though commonly associated with ecommerce strategy, are very applicable throughout your site.

Conversion metrics essentially represent any action you want a site visitor to complete while on browsing your website. Duct Tape Marketing (n.d.) provides a comprehensive list of potential conversion measurements, which I found very helpful for this exercise:

Purchase a specific product or service.
Book a consult.
Request more information.
Sign up for email updates or a free offer.
Free trial signups.
Whitepaper or ebook downloads.

The following examples I will provide for this assignment come from my current professional experience at ZO Skin Health, and my interaction with Hubspot content on a regular basis. The latter content will be an assumption of the conversion goals and analytics and is not based on actual data.

Real World Example #1

At ZO Skin Health, I am responsible for all social media and public relations efforts for the business. Prior to my hiring at ZO, social media was a branding necessity rather than a potential revenue contribution; there was no knowledge of the fiscal contributions from social media and there was no marketing strategy to drive sales.

Google Analytics has been an invaluable tool for me in this position to prove that social media can provide a noticeable source of revenue, which not only proves that my presence as the Social Media Marketing Specialist is a positive ROI, but that allocating resources to social media marketing is a positive ROI. Google Analytics is helping me keep my job.

Google Analytics allows me to track revenue contributions from social media and determine the ecommerce conversion rate for social media either for industry comparison or compared to other aspects of acquisition on site (i.e. email marketing, organic SEO, PPC, and more).

To provide an example, after conducting a couple of Facebook Lives over the past few months, I pulled a Google Analytics report to determine if there was a spike in website traffic on the day of the Facebook Live. I then pulled a GA report to examine whether the conversion rates on Facebook were higher during these Facebook Lives, and they were. So I allocated more resources towards coordinating and executing Facebook Lives as the ROI was positive for this social effort.

Real World Example #2

A completely different use of the conversion rate metric for on site analytics can be exemplified by the Hubspot marketing automation platform.

Hubspot is notorious for their powerful education resources, which provides the brand with a unique value proposition for customers and potential customers. This information is so valuable that they determined to provide free, downloadable eBooks to anyone willing to input their contact information (their inbound marketing efforts are amazing, I recommend you interact with Hubspot to see what I mean).

Hudson, E. (2017, August 23). 7 digital marketing strategies that work: a complete guide. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/digital-strategy-guide

The “Featured Download” popup on the bottom of the screen leads you to the landing page featured below. Hubspot is guaranteed tracking the conversion rate of this pop-up. What does this mean?

Hubspot. (n.d.). The beginner’s guide to digital marketing for small businesses. Retrieved from https://offers.hubspot.com/beginners-guide-to-digital-marketing?hsCtaTracking=22f16398-15e0-43b2-9691-3dba8e7e967c%7C6afc42d9-b9eb-4e19-8a4f-f5c47d77cea3

It means that they have established a goal within their web analytics platform that tracks a visitors’ click on the “download now” button on the pop-up to the landing page featured below, to the subsequent download confirmation page. This goal will produce a total completed downloads metric and a goal percentage conversion rate metric based on traffic to the landing page.

If Hubspot is unhappy with their goal percentage conversion rate, they can A/B test the landing page until they find a sweet spot. This metric allows Hubspot to maximize downloads and ultimately augment their contact list for potential sales leads for future contact.

References

Duct Tape Marketing. (n.d.). 3 Simple Steps to Determining Your Website's Conversion Rates. Retrieved from https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/conversion-rates/

Hudson, E. (2017, August 23). 7 digital marketing strategies that work: a complete guide. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/digital-strategy-guide

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Metric Identification: Event

One of the metrics I chose to examine for this week’s assignment is the event metric in the foundational metric category.

According to the Analytics Help page, the events metric in Google Analytics “are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or screen load” (Analytics Help, 2017). As I mentioned in discussion this week, event tracking can aid businesses in tracking CTA’s or Call to Actions that can increase conversion rates.

However, event metric tracking on Google Analytics can track any independent web asset. While this includes CTA tracking, it also includes: “...downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays” (Analytics Help, 2017).

The event metric on your analytics platform contains three sub-values that essentially provide guidelines for measuring your designated event. The sub-values are: category, action and label. These sub-values are effectively defined by Moz (Henry, 2010) and summarized, below:

Category: the designated name for the information you want to track
Action: defined action that you want to track
Label: additional, optional defined actions that you want to supplement the primary action

This information means little without real world examples to elucidate application.

Real World Example #1

Avinash Kaushik provides a helpful example of leveraging events in analytics by examining the car customization flash module on the Toyota website in his textbook Web Analytics 2.0 (2010).

I am going to use the live Toyota custom build module to assist me in describing this event metric example. Below, you will find a snapshot of the current Toyota customization module, which is different from the example in our textbook. I will conduct this analysis using the Toyota Corolla model.

Toyota. (2017). Your build 2018 Corolla iM. Retrieved from https://www.toyota.com/configurator/#!/build/step/model:engine-transmission/year/2018/series/corollaim/model/6273

The object in this scenario is the model of the car, so the 2018 Corolla iM. So the category of this event could be called “2018 Corolla iM Customization.”

The action in this scenario would be the features of the customization. See below for a visual representation of the event action:

Toyota. (2017). Your build 2018 Corolla iM: “action”. Retrieved from https://www.toyota.com/configurator/#!/build/step/model:engine-transmission/year/2018/series/corollaim/model/6273

Lastly, the label of this event would be the options for each feature of customization. This will allow Toyota to further track this event, determining how many events are completed for each option provided for customization. A visual representation of the options for this customization module can be found below:

Toyota. (2017). Your build 2018 Corolla iM: “labels”. Retrieved from https://www.toyota.com/configurator/#!/build/step/model:engine-transmission/year/2018/series/corollaim/model/6273

The collection of this event data by Toyota could be best visualized by the following table that I created based on the example by Kaushik (2010):

Category / Object	Action	Label
Car Model	Engine	Manual transmission, variable transmission
	Colors	Barcelona Red Metallic, Black Sand Pearl, Classic Silver Metallic....

This data collection, though extensive in its setup requirements, provides ample data that is of high value for Toyota.

From the events tracking feature of Google Analytics, Toyota can determine the percentages of selections in customization. For instance, if the Toyota marketing team wants to create a commercial for their 2019 Corolla model and they want to maximize efficiency, they can pull from the 2018 Corolla model data from these events to determine the colors with the highest event completions and cross-reference that data with in-store sales to choose the color of car for their commercial.

Tracking event data, in this situation in particular, can also help Toyota to diagnose which options in the customization are low performing, and remove those options moving forward to increase the ROI and decrease spend.

Real World Example #2

The second example I have to examine the efficacy of event metrics is the tracking of CTA’s or Calls to Action on a designated page of your site.

If we take the Southern Living magazine website as an example, we can test which CTA (circled, below) draws the most traffic and/or the most conversions.

Southern Living Magazine. (2017). Southern Living Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.southernliving.com/

As you can see, there are two CTA’s with slightly different verbiage and different placement on the site. If Southern Living is tracking their CTA efficacy with events, they will be able to determine which CTA hosts the highest traffic and the highest conversions.

If, Southern Living Magazine were to see low traffic on the CTA located in the top right hand corner of their website, they could rearrange the CTA to a different spot and determine which location bodes the highest success rate. This would require ongoing tracking, however, it could help to boost subscriptions to the magazine, which boosts sales and helps the company to grow.

References

Analytics Support. (2017). About events. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?hl=en

Henry, C. (2010, May 18). Google Analytics event tracking to monitor calls to action. Retrieved from https://moz.com/blog/google-analytics-event-tracking-to-monitor-calls-to-action

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0. Wiley Publishing Inc. Indianapolis, IN.

Southern Living Magazine. (2017). Southern Living Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.southernliving.com/

Toyota. (2017). Your build 2018 Corolla iM. Retrieved from https://www.toyota.com/configurator/#!/build/step/model:engine-transmission/year/2018/series/corollaim/model/6273

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Online Presence

Just today I had a great conversation with a contact from a platform called Meltwater, which is a media and social media intelligence company that monitors mentions from billions of online conversations. They recently integrated Google Analytics into their platform to monitor the efficacy of media and social media mentions on overall website metrics.

The reason I mention this is because all of my PR and social media efforts, while contributing to brand visibility and notoriety, are frankly a toss-up on ROI and efficacy without tangible metrics to measure how these referral sources contribute to website traffic and, in my case, ecommerce sales.

Web analytics allow me to determine whether our online presence is making an impact with potential customers, customers, and brand advocates. For instance, if we have a feature article with Refinery29 orchestrated by deskside PR activities, and we had no web analytics platform to analyze website traffic, it could be easy to swoon at the digital magazine’s 16M unique visitors per month. With web analytics, we can determine how much actual interest Refinery29 users have about ZO Skin Health products, in particular, by measuring the traffic from that particular article and subsequently the ecommerce sales from that article. The truth: only fractions of that 16M UVM actually reach our site.

Insights

Web analytics will also provide businesses with the metrics to answer pre-determined goals set by business objectives, as so eloquently stated by Avinash Kaushik in his article Web Analytics 101 (2010).

To get more specific, you can attain demographic information about the actual traffic to your website compared to your business’ target market segmentation, from where your traffic comes from categorically based on referral source, what this traffic does on your website, and how that traffic converts or doesn’t convert on your site.

Analytical data I have found extremely valuable in my career thus far from web analytics platforms are things like traffic and goal conversion rates from social media and PR mentions. I compile this data and track month-to-month to determine progress from efforts, adjusting when my targets are not hit. I then compare these metrics to average industry metrics to determine how we measure up. This gives me a competitive analysis to see where we stand in the industry at large.

Since web analytic data is so comprehensive, accurate, and real time, it is easy to fall into the pitfalls of “cringing” at any drop in metrics (I’m guilty), but I think Search Engine Watch phrases this tendency very well in an old article: “Nothing is worse than a web analyst that “cries wolf” over every little hiccup in a conversion rate... calculating standard deviation is an easy way to determine whether the change you see in absolute numbers is statistically significant” (Przyklenk, 2012).

My argument is that analytical tools provide significant data for business insights only when holistically analyzed.

Business Decisions

I think businesses need to set goals for the month ahead based on a summation and subsequent analysis of data acquired from web analytics the previous month. Did the business’ digital presence achieve the targets set for measuring KPI’s? If this is not the case, were efforts exerted to A/B test all data that could be A/B tested? If A/B testing was not performed, this needs to be executed in order to exhaust all strategy to determine whether the goal is achievable. If A/B testing has been conducted and a strategy still isn’t working, then this is the time to leverage the existing data (conversion rates, goal achievements, sales, email signups, etc.) set a different, achievable goals for the following month. This strategy can also be implemented on a larger scale for yearly goals, 5-year goals, and more.

The data provided by web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, is very tangible data. It is difficult if impossible to refute tangible data. While the same data may have alternate explanations, it cannot have alternate outcomes. For instance, a drop in sales from $50K to $30K can be explained by a poor website renovation or a lack of email campaign distributions, or a variety of other factors, you cannot refute the fact that sales have dropped by $20K.

In Lesson 1, Professor T. said the following: “...when things are trackable, it creates a new mentality for a company – one that is fueled by both the possibilities of web analytics and the demand for accountability among advertising clients” (Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, 2017). Tangible data is a dream for businesses, in my experience.

References

Kaushik, A. (2010, April 19). Web analytics 101: definitions: goals, metrics, KPI’s, Dimensions, Targets. [PDF].

Przyklenk, G. (2012, October 12). 5 Ways to Make Web Analytics Data More Insightful. Retrieved from https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2217270/5-ways-to-make-web-analytics-data-more-insightful

Reed College of Media. West Virginia University. (2017, August). Week 1 Lesson: Intro to Web Analytics and the Basics of Web Analytics. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_88807_1&content_id=_4063421_1&framesetWrapped=true

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