Category: Articles

Getting used to new software takes time, especially in this case, considering that Google Analytics 4 presents an entirely different interface and configuration to UA. This is most certainly why Google made this announcement in advance, to allow businesses still using the UA tool to migrate and get used to the latest version. It is also worth noting that GA4 doesn’t provide any historical data you’ve tracked in Universal Analytics, which adds another good reason why you should start migrating to GA4 since data continuity and reporting are paramount to your business.

Some of the main tools integrated with Google Analytics 4

Event-based data model

Probably the most significant change in the software, Google Analytics 4 introduces an event-based model that offers flexibility in the way we collect data while also providing a new set of reports based on the model.

With Google Analytics Universal, businesses relied on “sessions”, which accounted for a more fragmented model since it only collected data in limited slots. Also, it only worked with specific and predefined information categories, making custom-type data much more challenging to obtain. But now, since everything can be an event, there’s a broader opportunity to understand and compare client behaviour through different custom-type data across various platforms.

Operation across platforms

Previous to GA4, businesses required different tools to analyse both website and app data separately; this made it difficult to obtain a global picture of its user traffic. But now, GA4 added a new kind of property that merges app and web data for reporting and analysis.

Thanks to this update, if you have users coming to you through different platforms, you can now use a single set of data to know which marketing channels are acquiring more visitors and conversions.

No need to rely on cookies

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, a lot has changed in the last decade regarding digital marketing; this includes an ever-growing emphasis on user privacy.

Big tech companies, such as Apple, have started to develop a first-privacy policy, which is why Safari started blocking all third-party cookies in 2020. So it comes as no surprise that Google also announced that they will do the same in 2023 for Chrome.

With GA4, Google is moving away from a cookies-dependent model, no longer needing to store IP addresses for its functionality and looking to be more compliant with today’s international privacy standards.

Audience Triggers

This is a cool feature and lets brands set conditions for a user to move from one audience group to another (like they’ve bought into a specific product category). Then you can better personalise the ad experience, offering complimentary/similar products across the display, video and discovery placements and bring them back to shop more with you.

More Sophisticated insights

GA4 promised a more modernised way of collecting and organising data. Still, the most important thing for businesses is “how” to use this data. Advanced AI learning has been applied in Google Analytics 4 to generate sophisticated predictive insights about user behaviour and conversions, pivotal to improving your marketing.

Integrations

GA4 brings deeper integrations with other Google products, such as Google Ads, allowing you to optimise marketing campaigns by using data to build custom audiences that are more relevant to your marketing objectives and utilising Google Optimise for AB testing

Adobe Analytics Workspace

GA4 Drag and Drop

You can chat with the team at LION Digital and we can help you set up on GA4

We had a good chat with a colleague at our first Shopify Plus Partner meetup who was developing a Shopify Plus site for their client. They noted GA4 setup they had to do was quite complex and time-consuming as event-tracking needed to be configured, including eCommerce tracking, and Data Studio reports needs to be rebuilt. Took him a good 3 hours that he was keen not to repeat. Thankfully we’ve got a bunch of skilled specialists to help you set up GA4 and we can connect this to our Digital ROI Dashboard to help you get the insights you need, and look at your Channel Action Plans.

Article by

Dimas Ibarra –
Digital Marketing Executive

HOW TO CREATE CONSISTENT RESULTS COMING OUT OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

LION stands for Leaders In Our Niche, and we are a team of seasoned and passionate eCommerce marketing specialists driven by performance and focused on providing an exceptional client experience.

We’ll be sharing practical tips that you can take away and immediately apply. We want you to be able to get consistent results coming out of the holiday season! 

2021 was a unique year for businesses – retail sales were crashing before picking up steam this October, and the economy was in decline up until that point. This sudden reversal in buying behaviour and business trends highlight the importance of identifying potential areas of growth and capitalizing on opportunities this 2022.

So, how do you do this? When conducting an annual performance review we look at overall performance across five key metrics (per channel): Sessions, Conversion Rate, Transactions, Average Transaction Value, and Revenue.

Why these metrics? Because you can simplify the formula for generating revenue to this equation:

Sessions x Conversion Rate x Average Transaction Value = Revenue

Improve the performance of a single metric, and you improve your overall revenue by the same amount.

To start increasing your revenue, the first step would be to conduct a channel analysis. This is where you compare the annual performance of each channel, with the goal of identifying the percentage of users driven to a channel versus the percentage of revenue generated for each channel.

The results should be similar for all the channels – any significant differences may indicate opportunities for optimization. For example, a high number of sessions with low revenue generated would indicate a problem with conversion, or a potential issue with tracking.

Channel Performance Average Month (Past 12)

In the example we used, we combined the Organic and Paid channels to measure the “Search” Channel. Why? Because users don’t choose what type of search they do – they just “search”.

You then measure the performance for the past 12 months in order to get a picture of what the average month looks like, and once calculated, there are 2 ways to proceed:

Conducting a Month on Month Analysis

This is done by comparing the performance of each month vs. the average month, with the goal of identifying the cause for the significant differences in traffic or revenue.

By extracting this data, this can be presented in ways that can be easier to understand, or with complex data sets to further identify potential issues.

Benchmarking vs competitors using other important eCommerce Metrics

It is important to measure how your business is performing, but if you really want to keep improving, you should look at your competitors’ data, and compare them with yours in these metrics:

New Vs Repeat Visitors / Revenue

This is used to identify the quality of traffic and any potential issues with conversion.

Repeat Purchase Rate

Can be used to measure traffic, but is mainly used to determine consumer loyalty and the quality of post-purchase marketing and services.

Days / Sessions to Purchase

The number of days or sessions it takes before a consumer makes their first purchase. This is useful for planning out re-engagement opportunities or remarketing campaigns.

Path to Purchase

Most consumers don’t purchase during their first visit to a site – they often visit multiple times prior to making their first purchase. This metric is useful for optimizing your campaigns and identifying the most effective platforms to reach your target customers.

Channel Efficiency

This is computed by getting your total online revenue divided by the amount spent on marketing that channel. The channels which have greater scores are deemed to be more efficient, and are useful for determining channel performance and which ones to spend more on.

Analysing your performance is important to continuous success in the eCommerce industry. This allows you to identify opportunities, optimize resource allocation, and steer your business towards success. 

Want to supercharge your business and implement a measurable strategy?

At LION Digital, we create analytics on a personal level called LION view – a dashboard that collects all your company data and makes your year-end performance review easier and much more comprehensive. This completely customisable, all-in-one and simple-to-use platform gives you an overview of eCommerce channels and metrics, Keywords rankings, Google Search Console data, our 90 day activity plan and your marketing calendar all in one convenient location.

Article by

Christopher Inch – Head of Strategy

Chris is a specialist in eCommerce with over 14 years of experience in Digital & eCommerce Strategy, including Search Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing Automation and Web Development.

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Let’s face it, SEO is full of cryptic, unusual words and terms that might confuse anyone entering the field. But just like in any other fast-developing profession, in SEO it is important to communicate in the language of SEO Analysts. You don’t need to memorise the exhaustive list of all the field related words in one sitting though, for the beginning, it’s enough to know the very basics. Here’s our guide of the most common SEO words and terms to help you get started!

Advanced search operators –  additional features and commands that can be typed into the search bar to make the query more specific.

Anchor text – a piece of text that links to another page.

Backlinks (or “inbound links”) – links from one website page that point to another website page.

Black Hat SEO – SEO practices that violate Google’s guidelines.

Bots (also known as “crawlers” or “spiders”) – the program that crawls the Internet, finds the content and assesses its quality to place it on the search results.

Cache – a saved static version of a web page that helps to not access the website’s database for every query and thus avoids time-consuming operations.

Channel – different types of media and means to attract attention and traffic, such as organic search, email marketing, social media.

Cloaking – displaying content to search engine bots differently than to real users of the website.

Crawling – the process of finding pages on your website through search engine bots and processing them. It’s the first step in the process of your pages showing on the search engine results page.

Crawl budget – the number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on a website in a certain period of time.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – a programming language for structuring the website mainly in terms of fonts, colours and layouts.

CTR (clickthrough rate) – the ratio of clicks on your ad to impressions the ad got. 

De-indexing – a page or group of pages being removed from the process of indexing.

DA (Domain Authority) – a ranking score that measures how relevant the domain is for a specific industry or subject area, typically seen in the Moz tool.

Duplicate Content – big pieces of content that are shared across different domains or different pages of a single domain. Having duplicate content is bad for the ranking of a website.

Engagement – a measure of searchers’ extent of interaction with a website from search results.

Featured snippets (often referred to as “Zero Position”) – informative answer boxes that appear at the very top of search results for some queries.

Google My Business listing – a way for the business’ potential customers to get all company contact info through a listing that appears at the top of Google results when a customer searches for business name or services catered by certain businesses.

Google Search Console – a program developed by Google that allows site owners to track how their website is doing in SERPs.

Hreflang – an HTML attribute that helps Google understand what the language of a website is so that a user finds the version of the website in his language.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – the set of codes used to communicate how to display texts and images on a website.

Image Carousels – scrollable images that appear at the top of some SERPs.

Indexing – organising and storing content found during crawling.

Index Coverage report – a report that shows the indexation status of all the URLs on a website.

JavaScript – a programming language used for integrating complicated non-static elements to web pages.

KD (Keyword Difficulty) – an estimation (typically out of 100) of how hard it would be to rank high for a certain keyword.

Keyword stuffing – a black hat SEO practice that involves the overuse of important keywords in content and links to try and rank for these words.

Lazy Loading – a way of optimising a page load in such a way that the loading of certain parts of the page or objects are delayed until they’re actually needed.

Local pack – a listing of three local businesses that appear for local-intent searches, like the ones that typically include “near me” in the search query.

Long-tail keywords – keywords that contain more than three words and are longer and more specific than short keywords. For example, “cotton summer dresses UK buy online” as compared to short-tail “cotton summer dresses”.

Organic – placement in search results obtained without paid advertising.

Private Blog Network – This is an artificial way of creating content and websites to generate fake backlinks to trick Google. This is, unfortunately, a common practice by most agencies and link providers and can jeopardise revenue and rankings in the longterm

People Also Ask boxes – an element in some SERPs that shows questions related to the search query.

Pruning – is a process of taking down low-quality pages to improve the website’s overall quality.

Scroll depth – a way of measuring how far visitors scroll down the website page.

Search Volume – an estimation of how many times a keyword was searched during the last month.

Sitemap – a list of page URLs that exist on your website.

Personalisation – a search engine feature that customises the results a user gets for his query based on the location of the user and his previous search history.

Redirection – a way of sending search engines and users to a URL that is different from the one primarily requested.

Rendering – an automatic process of turning code into a viewable, usable website page. 

SERP features – search results that appear in a non-standard format. For example Zero Position, Image Carousel, People Also Ask, Adwords etc.

SERPs – short for “search engine results page” – the page with relevant info and links that appears as a response to the user’s query.

SSL certificate (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) – a certificate that enables encrypted connection between a web browser and a web server. It makes online transactions more secure for customers.

User Intent – the kind of results on SERP users want or expect to see when typing their queries.

Webmaster guidelines – information provided by search engines like Google and Bing on how site owners can optimise their websites and create content that is found and indexed appropriately so that the content does well in search results.

White hat SEO – SEO practices that comply with Google’s guidelines.

Moving or migrating a site is an event that promises significant benefits in the long term and equally substantial troubles in the short term. While it is impossible to avoid the latter, there are ways to minimise risk. 

The site is a very fragile system, and changing or moving any part of it can significantly affect the structure of the site and its performance. But it is pretty common for those who make decisions about a site migration to underestimate the complexity of the work and the associated risks.

An example of how easy it is to underestimate a migration can be taken from one of our larger clients. The client had just engaged a developer to work internally to redesign and rebuild their website. The focus of the work was a simple template change to improve the UX and customer journey throughout the website. Our involvement in the project was kept brief, as the developer ensured the client that there would be no significant URL changes as part of the project.

Two weeks before launch, our team happened to ask for the staging site to check in on the progress, and we found that every category page URL had changed, including the placement within the site, causing some 100,000+ URLs to be affected. Luckily, our team was able to get the migration and web build back on track, ensuring that our client’s revenue and business is protected.  

If not discovered, this could have cost the client significantly, resulting in a potential loss of millions of dollars. Resolving this failure may have taken several months, while the business would have continued to lose organic revenue month on month until repaired. See below the keyword rankings of a past failed migration of a prospective client:

Web development and SEO migration are two different masteries and need to work hand in hand. SEO migration is the most common digital blind spot, needs to be taken seriously and requires the right team of specialists. 

When deployed correctly, a new website can be a great initiative and is an essential part of every online retailer’s digital journey. However, an incorrectly managed site migration often has disastrous consequences for immediate and long term financial performance and can set a business back years.

If you’re preparing to migrate, don’t get caught out and call us today. Let our specialised migration team help support your business through this challenging project.

[case_study_block caseids=”1252,4695,3988″]

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

Like what we do? Come work with us

People are looking for human connection, now more than ever. Being stuck at home, working from home, or just a little isolated due to the pandemic is a reality for most Australians right now. 

Brands that have used in-store experiences to create human connections in the past are now struggling to re-create the same dynamics through online purchases and interactions. 

On the upside, consumers are taking the time to open and read emails; both email engagement and performance are up to when people are stuck at home. This trend is independent of other channels, which may be down due to reduced search volume or increasing competition in paid media. 

“Consumers are taking the time to open more emails from brands. It makes sense, considering people have been spending more time at home and less time dealing with the normal hustle and bustle of daily life.” – Klaviyo.com

There’s also many first-time online shoppers who are not digitally savvy entering the market right now as their usual shopping habits have been disrupted. Personalisation and segmentation matter more than ever (i.e. we don’t want to spam our customers if they’re not engaging with our emails).  

Having the right content, for the right audience, at the right time is crucial to getting your message heard, understood and accepted. The number one reason people unsubscribe is that they receive “too many emails” 46% of people who unsubscribe put this as their reason. One reason this number exists is that many brands just email their whole list – all the time. While there’s a time and a place for this, the more personalised the communication, the better your human connection will be with your customer. Don’t fret, though, unless your unsubscribe rate is higher than 0.7%, you don’t need to be concerned. 

Not sure how you can create human connections in a digital world? Below are some practical tips that you can get started on right away. 

Replicate in-store experiences with virtual tours and consults

OneWorld Collection (we work with them) has the right idea, an upmarket furniture brand with eight stores in Australia. Since most of their customers are in metro areas affected by the pandemic, they’ve created a virtual consult where sales staff can be invited into the living rooms of their customers while still being able to demonstrate products on the showroom floor. They’ve used Calendly.com to schedule appointments to ensure all the customers can be seen and no one is waiting. 

Creating ways for customers to experience your product in new and unique ways is what will keep that human connection alive. 

Multi-channel communications with Gorgias

Let customers reach you however they want. Instagram comments, Facebook direct messages, email, live chat, SMS and any other form of communication you can think of. Gorgias can do it all. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to reach a brand that doesn’t leave another method of communication to reach them with. You may even convert more sales! I’ve personally been able to convert 25% of live chat inquiries into sales, working in an e-commerce team.

Reposition products in terms of value for their new routines

Since many lifestyle changes have had to be made for a lot of Australians, consumers don’t think about products and services in the same way they used to. Suppose you can reposition the way that your marketing; this will increase the connection between your brand and your customers. They’ll be saying to themselves, “they get me and the challenges I’m going through.”

This means for abandonment emails, include product comparisons, how-to-videos, helpful blog content or best practices in using your products. It will help the consumer realise how your product is uniquely positioned to support their new lifestyle. 

Pre-orders and back in stocks have also been one of the most successful email campaigns outside of sales or promotions in the pandemic. Don’t just limit these to auto-generated emails from your pre-order app or Klaviyo’s inbuilt back in stock. Use personalisation and customer behaviours to populate your emails with content that will be relevant and timely. 

Projects that you can do at home (or challenges to I imagine) have worked very well in creating connections with your audience. 

Tighten up your shipping notifications

Lastly, and probably most importantly – shipping notifications! Delays are inevitable while we’re all stuck at home, all shopping online. 

So, be especially clear and empathetic; people are stressed about their packages and where they’ll be, or if they’ll arrive in time. You can read more about Klaviyo’s recommended best practices for communicating shipping delays here. 

Not sure what Klaviyo is, or if it’s the right fit for your brand? Take a free trial via this link. 

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

Like what we do? Come work with us