The Team

Garry Jordan

Linkedin Profile

Garry has been executing digital campaigns for over 10 years. His last role was as General Manager of a digital sales company owned by one of the largest NZ publishers.  He further refined his digital campaign expertise and helped to establish the company’s first programmatic offering working with agencies to execute campaigns plus with publishers to sell their data, generate revenue and implement technology to support.

Garry has a strong understanding of programmatic activity, first/third party data analytics, and an in-depth knowledge of online e-commerce and sophisticated models for lead generation with daily goals.  

He intertwines his long history in a broad mix of advertising media as well as sales roles; television, radio, magazines OOH and how they work into the mix. He likes to talk in layman’s terms to help guide people to bring a project together.

Anna St George

Linkined Profile

Anna has been involved in media advertising for more than 20 plus years. Her first interest in digital began in the late nineties, where she set up a consultancy for digital media and strategy, working with TV3, Cuisine magazine, Playstation and nzjobs.co.nz.  At that point the biggest problem to solve was creating a stronger user experience of technology and creative, implementing a revenue model or up-skilling agency teams.

This evolved back into full-service media whereby digital was part of the more holistic approach; as a co-founder of Lassoo which supported media, PR and digital.  The company had great clients like Sleepyhead, Red Bull, Cavalier Bremworth and Emirates to name a few.

More recently this has progressed into SaaS marketing roles with the likes of Lightbox TV and other start-ups. Here, she is focused on digitally-led executions, brand building, lead generation and nurture, plus guiding customer experience to conversion. 

So, as you might suspect, she has broad digital, combined with media capability, from implementation to strategy.  She doesn’t think about a singular component of a business, but the bigger direction and execution that is cost effective, quick to market and results focused.

Her specialties include using data and research to understand audience behaviour and developing marketing plans that provide best value and reach the right targets. 

Social media metrics - what to look for

Social is inherently misunderstood. It’s been talked up over the years as the key thing for media campaigns, and it still, for many, sits in that ‘the kids get it, but I don’t’ seat on the marketing bench.  It is often aligned more with the communication (blogging/PR) team, which might even sit outside the marketing reporting line and with less capability to understand and report on metrics…. “They’ve got a head for english not math, darling!”

So, here are a few things to think about when you are looking at integrating your social KPI’s.

Social media is a great tool for layering your communication, engaging with customers and keeping front of mind.

Engagement is key due to the algorithm make up of Facebook, which will define who of your followers will see your post, based on their engagement and reaction.  Engagement has now got particularly low, meaning that boosting posts (paid ads) is critical.

Facebook becomes more like another advertising medium and its metrics need to align.  True performance needs to compare ‘apple with apples’ with other paid media i.e. what is the average cost per click (CPC) each month? What is the conversion of that click?  Too often we may give top-line results that show likes and shares but what about the wider picture of both organic and promotions (boosting) and how could this be applied to help build understanding? A few areas may include:

• Using data to learn what posts work, then immediately moving to advertise those that don’t gain sufficient reach, or those that do, as clearly, they resonated.

• Consider how the cost-per-click (CPC) and click-through-rate (CTR) compare to your other medium. Put more against the posts that are within the benchmarks.

• Define the total investment i.e. consideration of the management, curation and creation.

The starting place is setting up your UTM codes within the posts that you make, so that you can understand source/medium/campaign. This could look like Facebook/blog/summer sale. This could allow comparison to Instagram/boostedpost/summer sale or a digital campaign programmatic/Remarketing/summer sale, as other paid areas with the same messaging. 

This can start to build a stronger picture within Google Analytics about what is generating traffic and what messaging works. It can also showcase a truer picture of return-on-investment (ROI) data to your website, for example, lead generation, referral traffic and conversions.

In my experience, social media is great to build reach and engagement, but it doesn’t convert easily.  But this doesn’t always mean that it shouldn’t be included in media activity. It might mean that we learn how it sits to build awareness, grow loyalty and become a known and trusted brand, so that when the time does come, you are front of mind.

The important part, is to start to measure in-line with your other marketing activity, so that you can understand or invest in the right areas - be that content, a message which resonates or how it fits into the more holistic marketing activation.

Key tip - you want to know more about UTM codes

Need help with this? Give us a shout

Tracking, tagging and goal setting

As we’ve talked about, the question remains; what are digital efforts if there is no purpose?

Google Analytics is the one place to start to give your website traffic some meaning.  Sure, it’s not the be all and end all, but it is a free tool and allows integration of many other things to make it richer.

Like most software tools – S^*T in S^*T out. So, the higher quality information that is entered and set up and the more people and parameters around its usage, the better your information will become.

Defining what the key KPI’s of the business are and how all parts of the marketing mix fit into this is key. 

There are various levels of tagging and instances you might use, including:

• setting up tags that allow you can set up rules i.e. when someone comes to X page like a shopping cart, X is to happen

• you can start to see what traffic is being delivered from where, especially paid mediums - therefore understand investment, even if it is just messaging

• you can start to see what conversion percentages are and optimise to a benchmark.

Of course the KPIs can move and change as projects are implemented and learnings are gained.  But a summary that everyone in the business understands is a great discipline.

Key tip - Don’t start any advertising without goals in place as you will not know the true nature of success. Sign up to a Demo are the a great place to start also

The content myth

Content is king, right? And a picture paints a thousand words?

Both are right, but we need to remember what their purpose is, as part of the marketing strategy. I often feel like I am in-undated with content and much of it doesn’t seem to have much purpose. Online content for a business or marketing purpose specifically should, in my mind, have all of the following things covered. Here’s my the litmus test…

1. Does it resonate with the brand? Hold the same values, tone, imagery and in short behave and build the right picture?  Does it build a story?  If I’ve read something previously, does it build from that or remain consistent?  Does it build thought leadership or provide information in the right spaces that your company or product sits?

2. Does it contain keywords, supporting your search engine optimisation (SEO)?  Using key words that you need to be found and want to be found with?

3. Does it engage and draw on trust? Bring the customer along a path that is more subtle, a ‘get to know you’ step. We have all experienced a ‘hard-sell’ and know how off-putting it is. Customers are now owning the journey, wanting to do their own research, find their own paths.  Content can be the key to over-coming this problem and giving deeper insights - from “does it fit with what I need” to “is it aligned to me” to help tip toward the sale.

So, what to do with all of this content?

• Firstly, it must be found on your website if it is going to be of any help.  This means that it is set up as a blog/news or video channel that can be linked directly to your website to make the SEO and traffic that is delivered meaningful.

• You might share via a link on social media and onto your newsletters – this is owned media.

• Perhaps you could boost it across all social channels to increase reach and target specific groups. The algorithms of Facebook especially don’t mean that all of your followers will be shown the content when it’s posted.

• It is helpful if it has a publisher ie written on behalf of the GM, for example.  Then it could be published via their LinkedIn profile.  Not always ideal for Google to have two exact copies, but you can probably get away with it.

• Then, you could look at placing it as native advertising (sponsored ads), which allows you to use an image, a headline and sub-heading within your programmatic software, with a link to the longer format content. It can be targeted by many different audience and interest groups with a desired budget, bidding rate and time-frame set up.  It will self-optimise; meaning you could set up two or more images and headings with the same link to see which captures better results.  The programmatic software will automatically show the better performing content.

The key part to this; if you are going to spend the time on creating content, ensure that it is seen as far and wide as you can get it.  It then needs to align back to your marketing goals, including generating a UTM code, so it can be tracked back into the wider Google analytics understanding. 

Key tip – Ensure there is a call to action at the bottom of every blog.  It might be as simple as sign up to the newsletter to find out more detail.

Need content written we can help

Google analytics - creating meaning

One view – that’s what we all want, isn’t it?  One place we can visit where we can see the results of all the activity we have in place; be it website traffic, campaign activity, social (including KPI’s and customer journey), through to acquisition or conversion.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but for the most part customers are only using a very small percentage of it.  Used correctly and by maximising the tools within it, you can start to glean some strong information that will allow you to optimise more effectively and build a clearer picture of what’s working. 

By tagging pages and setting up goals and events, we can start to see a picture of what part of the traffic is converting better and establish true costs and efficiencies.

The first place to start is your campaigns. In the first instance, tagging your website means that you are in a stronger position to keep talking to interested visitors via re-marketing. Re-marketing can now be delivered from both digital campaigns as well as SEM and social.

By tagging your website, you can start to see the meaning within traffic data. Which source, medium and campaign name and the level of this detail is dependent on how you name parameters. 

Source, for example, might be social media, but it could also be as detailed as Facebook. While medium could be a post, but it also could be as highly defined as blog.  So, option one might read Social/Post while option two could read Facebook/Blog, the latter providing far great detail in terms of which ‘campaign activity’ has delivered.

For example, at a simple level, you might see that you get 25% of traffic from your programmatic activity. When you drill into programmatic, you see that a couple of mediums combined with sources provide strong lead generation. You might identify a line of messaging has better conversion.

So, what’s the out-take? Continue to build in-line with the messaging / campaign or format that is converting and increase budget against that. 

Setting up goals beyond traffic is also important, these can be actions within the website. For example, ‘ask for a demo’, contact us, sign up to enewsletter. A campaign might deliver well, but if it doesn’t lead to converting users to an end goal, this may not be as effective as the messaging or medium that only delivers a small high quality user.

Goals can be added to various parts of the funnel. Tracking this enables you to understand how well it is working, could it be optimised? For example if it consistently sits at 14% of your site’s traffic, but you think it could be higher.  You could build some more tracking goals to understand exactly where a higher percentage of users are falling off the funnel. As a consequence, you review this part of the sign up form to see if you can increase conversion.

So, while Google isn’t the be all and end all of analytics, it is a good place to start. It helps to define what other paid tools you might put in place to give better meaning or where to place more investment and focus on the business.  This could range from spend prioritisation and focus of the customer experience.

Digital display beyond local site

When you think about your day-to-day online media consumption, are you confined to New Zealand searches, or are you an omnivore that searches and clicks any link and site, not confined by any global limits?

The latter, right?  That’s what the web is all about – the limitless opportunity to gather and seek as much as you want.  So, why would you only want your advertising messages to be confined to New Zealand?

We still find that many companies only use New Zealand publishers, or if they don’t, they use the Google Display Network (GDN) for display advertising.

What are the options beyond this and how do I get to them, you might ask? 

Today, there is artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which encompasses very smart advertising digital display networks onto grouped publisher sites, known as exchanges. These allow targeting by many different ‘user’ audiences and other endless parameters. They are known as ‘programmatic buying desks’. 

Programmatic buying is anything that is ‘automated media buying’, but the essential part is really the real-time bidding capability (also known as demand side platform).  If you think of stock market trading where you might put in a rate that you are willing to buy or sell at, this is similar.  You set your levels and, ideally, as you learn what is working or not, increase or decrease with a focus on hitting your key and most desired audiences at the right time and place.

The beauty of these desks is also their targeting ability; things like geography, age, interest, technology platform and time of day. But it is far more sophisticated than this.  Each exchange collects a growing group of sectors based on user behaviour. More often much of this information is overlaid with third party data that it has bought. e.g. investment, car interest and the list go on.  There are also many different ad formats that can be used, including video and native (content).  Importantly, the disks automate targeting to find your audiences wherever they are globally or locally as they are surfing the web, including just targeting New Zealand eyeballs (or other geo targets).

These programmatic desks do require a level of expertise, so that targets are set up correctly, bidding is cost effective, budgets are set correctly, and ads are loaded and tagged.  But, the true skill comes from the optimisation outside of the AI automation, ensuring that the learnings are quickly implemented and sent back to management and relevant people.

Key tip: You are probably going to need help setting this up - so we’re here to help

What is the difference between Google and GDN

If you are already using Google Display Network (GDN), you might be asking – why do I need programmatic when I have already got it in place? 

Google’s largest client is the Google Adsense programme, made up of publishers who are happy to accept ads from Google within their site.  You may have used it to gain some revenue in sales on your website.  Google also owns DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), which is their version of programmatic and is the technology that supports the GDN.  So in short, GDN’s biggest client is Adsense; publishers wanting some revenue who pass criteria, but of course it isn’t all of them.

A strong programmatic desk will have relationships with many of the exchanges (AppNexus, AOL's Marketplace, Microsoft Ad Exchange, OpenX, Rubicon Project Exchange and Smaato) including GDN.  They will also be validated sites.

Therefore, the wider set of publisher sites that you can advertise on, which meet with your targeting criteria is going to have greater chance of finding that boundless, limitless web explorer at the crucial moment, to convert into an interested or converting customer.

Key tip: You want targeting and capability for placement within omni-channel these days, not just digital, therefore you need to understand how the consumer engages with these mediums here to help