ReviewRail

Create A Custom Audience & Setup Conversion Tracking

SEO

So you want to advertise on Facebook? That’s great because it’s really not all that hard, but there are definitely some important steps you must take before we begin. You will need to setup a custom audience pixel and also conversion tracking. A custom audience pixel will help build an audience from your website traffic and the conversion tracking pixel will track people who completed a goal on your site (check out, email sign up, ect..). I’ll show you how to build an audience like these bad asses below! 🙂

The gameplan will be:
– Setup an ads account
– Create a custom audience and grab pixel
– Install the pixel on your site
– Create and insert your conversion tracking pixel

Let’s do this!

Setup an ads account

You’ll need a business page and also your billing information must be setup for ads manager. You can’t advertise from a personal page, only business pages. I want to explain the juicy stuff not this boring account setup tasks. So if you aren’t setup, simply follow the links below to get going.

1. Create a business page
2. Accessing ads manager
3. Setup billing

Create A Custom Audience & Pixel

Your ads account is now setup, let’s get a retageting pixel created. What the heck is a retargeting pixel?! Good question. A pixel is a small piece of code that gets inserted into your site. FB uses this pixel to track your website visitors. FB then creates an audience of website vistiors that you can retarget/remarket ads to. Say what?! Let me simplify it:

Website visitor -> pixel captures their visit -> FB stores their info -> You can then advertise to those users

Since we’ll be generating traffic with your new image ad, it makes sense to get this setup first so we capture those visitors. The earlier you do this the better!

TIP: Facebook works a lot better on Chrome. I suggest you download Google Chrome to use FB ads.

Step 1: Setup An Audience

  1. Go to your ads manager, https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/ and click on your account.
  2. Select Tools -> Audiences
    custom audience
  3. Select Create Audience -> Custom Audience
    create a audience
  4. Select Website Traffic
    website traffic
  5. In the popup, enter your website address like this, yoursite.com.
    – Bump out the days to 180 (or keep at 30). This is how long FB will store a users info for this audience.
    – Name your audience. For now let’s name it, All Website Traffic.
  6. Click Create and follow the instructions below.
    finish audience

Step 2: Grab The Pixel

  1. On the main custom audience screen check the box next to that audience
  2. Then under actions select View Pixel
    grab pixel
  3. We need to copy this code. I like to save it in a notepad file (if you’re using windows).
  4. If you have a web developer you can email them the code so they can install it.

Step 3: Install The Pixel

We now need to install the pixel on your site. This is a little more advanced. If you are unsure about this I would consult with a web developer.

  1. First install this plugin on Chrome. We’ll use it to test your pixel when we are done.
  2. Head over to your site. I’ll demonstrate on WordPress since that’s what I use.
  3. Copy the code in between the head tags. This will insert it on all of your pages so you only need to do it once!
    head tags
  4. Once done test with the Pixel Helper. If it’s green you’re good to go!
    pixel helper

Now let your new custom audience sit and don’t worry about it at the moment. It will collect data and build a powerful audience that you can do lots of great stuff with down the road. Let’s get your conversion tracking pixel setup.

Setup Your Conversion Tracking Pixel

We want to track actions for when someone fills out our form, checks out of our cart or signs up for our email list. Follow the instructions below.

1. Go to your ads manager, https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/ and click on your account.
2. Click Tools -> Conversion Tracking
3. Click Create Pixel
4. In the popup choose the type of conversion and name it. My name will be RR Beta Sign Ups.
5. Click Create Pixel and either email the code to your web developer or view it
6. FB gives you instructions on how to add the code to your webpage

What you want to do is insert this code into the thank you page for when someone completes a goal on your site. For example:

A user signs up for my beta, enters their email and then is sent to a Thank You page. I would insert this code on that thank you page.

You can use the same FB Pixel Helper I explained above to check that it’s placed correctly.

“I’m clueless and don’t want to mess around with this stuff.”

If this is you then hire a web developer to get this going. You can expect to pay a decent programmer $50-100/hr and this shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours.

Let me know if you have questions in the comments below!

You need to track your website conversions and understand where your leads are coming from. If you don’t, then you might as well burn your money (or give it to me :)).

I love this topic because you should always focus on optimizing your site before you get more traffic. If your site sucks and you can’t track conversions, you’ll never know what’s working. Since I like simplicity I broke out this subject into two parts.

1. Setting up a thank you page
2. Creating goals in Google Analytics

Part 1: Setting Up A Ty Page

First we want to setup a thank you page for your form. If you don’t know how to do this then contact your web developer and have them implement one.

conversion tracking with analytics

I use WordPress for all my sites because it’s super simple to use. I also use the plugin Contact 7 for my online forms. You should setup a separate thank you page for each form on your website.

To do this in WP do the following:

1. Install Contact 7 or a form plugin and setup a form
2. Create a thank you page
3. In Contact 7 enter on_sent_ok: “location.replace(‘http://www.YOURSITE.com’);” in the settings at the end of your contact 7 form settings.

Make a note of these thank you pages because we’ll need the URL’s in the next part.

Part 2: Creating Goals In Google Analytics

Your thank you pages are ready but what the heck do we do with them now!? No need to bug out, I got you covered.

We’re going to setup goals in Google analytics. A goal is when someone successfully completes the form on your website. If you aren’t using GA sign up for a free account now. It’s the best tool to learn about your website traffic.

I recently bought a new microphone (Snowball blue) and wanted to give it a run so decided to create a HOW TO video. Check it out below and I’ll walk you through setting up a goal.

If you have any questions about goals please comment below. You’ll now be able to see what web forms are working on your site and what type of traffic is converting.

If it was my business, I would use that data to invest in more traffic from X. So if you see your Adwords PPC traffic is converting, spend more money there.

stephen-albertsHey there. I want to explain why your business NEEDS citations and what they are. My name is Stephen Alberts and I’m the creator of ReviewRail, customer feedback software. I’ll go over why you need these and also have a GOLDEN NUGGET tip for you that could help your website rankings!

Citations (or sometimes called local directories)

These are sites like Yelp, Angies List, Google My Business (Google local), Yellowpages and many others. They are places to list your businesses information. Google looks at this information when ranking your website. They want to see that you are listed on all of the important local directory sites.

The best part are most of these citations are completely FREE (cha-ching)!

The word on the street is that these are the new “backlinks” and helps with SEO/ranking your website. So it’s super important that you are listed on these sites. Google scans these citation sites and then scans your website. If the information matches correctly then it’s a + for you in Google.

Now that you understand what exactly a citation is, let me give you my tip when submitting your business to them.

Golden nugget tip

You NAP needs to be perfect when submitting your business to these sites. Not the NAP I need because my 1-year old is teething (yikes!) but the NAP I’m talking about is your business Name, Address, Phone (NAP). This information MUST be displayed EXACTLY the way it is on your website.

My advice is to get your Google My Business listing perfectly. And if you don’t have a Google listing, create one now! If you list your business as Your Company Inc. on your G listing then make sure it’s the same way on your site (don’t put Your Company Incorporated). Or if G displays St. as your street address, use the same on your site and don’t use Street.

local citations for seo

I know this sounds crazy, but an inconsistent NAP can actually hurt your Google rankings!

Simply do this:

1. Make sure your business Name, Address and Phone are listed on all pages on your website (usually down at the bottom of your site is cool).
2. Make sure your Google My Business listing matches your website NAP.
3. Fix Yelp and all other listings so that this info is exact.
4. Submit your site to more free citations.

Most of your competitors probably aren’t doing this so I recommend following this right away. If you have any questions comment below.

I found something cool and wanted to pass it along to you. Google states backlinks aren’t all that important for stuff like SEO and rankings, but the truth is they still are. I monitor my SEO/PPC clients sites with Google Alerts. Each month we submit their business to local citations. One of them triggered Google alerts which mean they see that citation as a backlink/mention of my clients business! That’s a good citation. 🙂

I want this citation!

Calm down, I’ll send it your way. Just simply go here, http://www.expressbusinessdirectory.com/AddYourBusiness.aspx and submit your businesses information.

This is the message I received from Google alerts. It’s a good one so submit your business now!

Google citation alert

If you’re looking to really improve your SEO efforts then check out my SEO plan that I follow for this exact site. It can help you increase your traffic and give you a bump in the rankings.

And if you’re interested in bringing in more customers and revenue then check out our software. Our beta is open and discounted just for you. 🙂

rr-betasale

This 10 minute marketing tip will help you learn more about what visitors are doing on your website, where they are coming from and how they are getting there. It’s crucial to know this information if you intend on marketing your business online and even offline. If you’re not tracking this information then it’s going to be tough to figure out what’s working.

The tool most companies use is Google Analytics. If you don’t have an account you can sign up here, it’s free!

The 3 metrics that are crucial to look at for your business are:

– Traffic Overview
– Traffic Acquisition
– Traffic Behavior

Basically we want to see how much traffic you’re getting and how long visitors are on your site (overview), how they are getting to your site (acquisition), and what pages they are looking at (behavior).

I look at these metrics for all my clients and it literally only takes around 5 minutes per client. I also look at some advanced stats that I’ll talk about later on but let’s start with these 3.

A lot of people that do SEO worry about where they are ranking in the search engines, “I want to rank for X keyword” but they really should be looking at traffic. It’s much more important to understand than Googleing yourself.

Golden Nuggets For The 3 Metrics

I always like to include some golden nuggets. Here is what you want to look for when looking at your traffics overview, acquisition and behavior.

Traffic Overview

Compare your traffic to the previous year if possible. The reason you don’t want to do month to month is that your traffic will act different each season and time of the year.

Sessions: This is your overall traffic. It’s always good to know this number. You want to see a slow increase in this area.
Pageviews: If you have a lot of pageviews that’s great! It means that people are looking at more than one page on your site. If you’re a local business (plumber, dentist) this number could be low and that’s ok. If a user is only looking for your contact info then they might only go to one page on your site.

Avg. Session Duration: The longer the better but again your visitors might be there to get some quick info and then leave.

Bounce Rate: 100% means that the visitor went to your site and immediately left your site. 50% means they spent some time and went to more than one page. The lower the better but again it depends on your business. If they are there for some quick info then this might be higher than an ecommerce site where users are scrolling around different pages.

Traffic Acquisition

Here you want to look at where your traffic is coming from. Google organic means that people are searching specific terms for your business and then clicking on your site. Google PPC would be traffic that is coming from Google ads.

Nugget: If you’re spending a lot of time on Facebook and other social posts then you’ll be able to see if that effort is converting into people coming from Facebook to your site. If you don’t see any traffic then it might be a good idea to rethink your strategy.

Traffic Behavior

We want to look at the top pages on your site. Believe it or not one of the most popular page on websites is your about page.

Look what pages people are looking at and then go to that page and make sure it’s working correctly and important contact info is on that page.

Can they contact you for more information on this page easily?
Do you have a lot of good content on this page?

If your about page gets a lot of traffic and is really short, doesn’t have pictures and doesn’t tell a “story” about your business then it’s time to look it over again.

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Which metric are you confused about? Let me know in the comments below.

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