Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to track the effectiveness of online activities. Thanks to it, you can find out which subpages of the website are most frequently visited, what are the sources of traffic on the website, where conversions come from and what our audience looks like. Google Analytics allows you to create personalized reports that make measuring the effectiveness of your marketing activities quick and easy. It is a free tool, and in order to use it, you just need to implement a special tracking code on your website. However, it is worth knowing that while the monitoring of the effects is simple, the correct definition of reports and setting the tool requires a lot of knowledge and experience. Therefore, when starting your activities in Google Analytics, it is worth reading the guide on the tool or taking a course on its use.

Google Tag Manager

It is also a free tool provided by the giant from Mountain View. It is used to manage tags on the website. It is enough to implement the GTM tag in the code of your website, and we will be able to easily add all other scripts using this tool. This is a great solution, because adding tags directly on the page is a burden and slows down, and additionally increases the risk of incorrect implementation. Google Tag Manager is also helpful when making changes to the website, switching to a different CMS or changing the website template. In this case, we do not have to manually paste all scripts into the code – after adding the GTM script, all tags implemented there will still collect data correctly. We wrote more about this tool in the article Google Tag Manager – what is it?

Google Trends

From the Google Trends tool, we can find out what are the interests of Internet users from all over the world. After entering a specific query, we can observe trends for a given password over the last hours, days, months or even years. The tool shows the level of interest broken down into specific countries or search languages. Thanks to this, we can determine what interests our recipients to create interesting content or advertising campaigns tailored to their needs.

Google Search Console

This is another free website monitoring tool. Here we can check what external and internal links are associated with the site, track website traffic and domain visibility for individual keywords. Here, too, we can check if subpages are indexed by search engine robots and see a list of broken links on the page. It is also a place where we get information from Google about possible viruses on the website or penalties imposed for unfair positioning practices.

Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool for your website, social media, advertising and promotional materials (flyers, vouchers, posters, etc.). It includes ready-made templates to use, but also allows you to create your own designs based on available shapes, photos, graphics and fonts. Canva also allows you to create collaborative spaces for your team, so multiple people can work on the same project and access it from anywhere and on any device. The basic version of the program is free, but you have to pay for premium access with more features and templates.

Brand24

This marketing tool is used to monitor your brand on the web. It collects information about all mentions about it on news portals, blogs, forums and social media. Thanks to this, you can control what users think about the company, quickly react to possible crises and shape the brand image. It is mainly of PR importance, but it also allows, for example, to establish a dialogue with recipients. When you see a mention of a company on the web, you can leave a comment on the website or join a discussion, gaining a chance to attract users to your website.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a website positioning tool. In addition, however, it also allows, for example, to study the profile of external links and measure its strength. Thanks to this, you can find out how effective the so-called off-site SEO, i.e. activities taken outside the website. The Keyword Explorer, the keyword search engine with the greatest potential, is very well polished. Using Ahrefs, we can also check, for example, which keywords are visible on individual blog entries of the competition in order to fight it for a position in the ranking.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a tool thanks to which we can find keywords related to any phrase. The program will show us in which contexts a given query is used, which can be helpful, for example, when creating blog entries. It is not quite as advanced as Ahrefs, but it is worth mentioning as it allows free searches for a certain number of queries per day.

Newsletter tools

The company’s marketing tools should also include a newsletter creation program. We will not discuss them in detail here, as we did it in a separate post. It is worth mentioning here, however, that these are programs in which you can gather contacts and schedule the sending of messages with a very high acceptance rate (i.e. e-mails go to the main mailbox). Many of these tools provide templates that make your messages visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing. The most popular newsletter programs on the market include Mailer Lite, MailChimp, GetResponse and FreshMail.

Facebook Audience Insights

It is a free tool provided by Facebook, thanks to which we can get to know our audience. We can find out who the people interested in a given subject are, how old they are, where they live, what they like to do in their free time, how they behave on the Internet and many other things. Knowing this, we create content better suited to the needs of our target group – we know what problems they have and how our product or service can solve them.

Influtool

Influtool is a tool designed for brands that would like to cooperate with influencers. It allows you to get to know celebrities in a given field, as well as check the effectiveness of their activities on the Internet, including reach, impact on recipients, advertising potential and history of cooperation with brands (e.g. whether the influencer undertook activities with a competing brand). Thanks to this program, we can easily check whether cooperation with a specific person has a chance to bring profits and the desired publicity. Influtool takes into account activities on blogs and in the most popular social media, including Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.

WhitePress

WhitePress is, in turn, a platform that facilitates the acquisition of articles on external portals, thanks to which we increase brand recognition and obtain valuable external links. It acts as an intermediary between the ordering party and publishing houses, which significantly simplifies the process of buying sponsored articles, even on large, well-known portals. Through WhitePress, you can order the publication of an already written text or order the creation of an entry on a given topic.

Hubspot

It is a multifunctional tool with which you can automate many company processes. It is also a database of contacts and a system for managing them, a space for delegating tasks to colleagues, and additionally improves marketing activities. With it, you can create newsletters, plan and publish posts in social media, design landing pages, forms, CTA buttons or create personas. It is impossible to list all the possibilities of Hubspot here, so we refer to the article entirely devoted to this tool.

Social media planning tools

We have also described these types of marketing tools in detail in a separate entry. In short, however, it can be said that they are used to manage profiles on social media from one application. This way, we can easily publish posts in several places at the same time, create schedules for different platforms and respond to messages and comments from users from any medium. Thanks to this, our activities are better synchronized, and we have easier contact with users of all social media. Tools of this type include, among others, Hootsuite, Postplanner or NapoleonCat.

Webinar platforms

If we decide to create webinars for our audience, we will also need a program to support it. Thanks to such platforms, we can host webinars on various platforms, register attendees, send reminder emails, promote the event and store recordings for later playback. Some platforms also allow you to create paid events for which you can pay by card or PayPal. We can create webinars using tools such as ClickMeeting, GetResponse or GoToWebinar. We describe the programs in more detail in the article: Webinar Creation Tools.

Discrepancies in the analysis of the number of clicks and user sessions

The first differences between Google Analytics statistics and Facebook statistics can already be seen in the method of counting clicks and user sessions. So let’s start by explaining these concepts.

– A click is a parameter that sums up all users’ reactions to a given ad. So if you click the ad once and then click again, Analytics counts that as two interactions with the ad.
– The session, in turn, shows how many users clicked on the ad. Two or more clicks of the same user will be considered by the system as one session, provided that they occur within a 30-minute time window. Only when the time interval between clicks is greater, will the actions be considered as two separate sessions.

Up to this point, everything is quite simple and it would seem that there is no room for discrepancies in the counts here. And yet. Because when can you start counting users who actually reacted to the ad? Google Analytics claims that only when the user is on the page to which the ad is referring him. After all, he might have clicked the ad by accident and stopped loading or closed the tab in the browser before the landing page was fully loaded, and this is hardly an ad success. Therefore, such “incomplete” transitions are not counted in the Google Analytics system.

Facebook, on the other hand, will record each click, i.e. the user’s interaction with the ad, even if the recipient does not fully see the landing page or does not go beyond the Facebook platform at all. It is true that in the Facebook Ads Manager you can measure not only all clicks, but also clicks on links that lead beyond the platform – to the advertiser’s website. However, the Facebook system will also count those clicks that did not fully load the landing page. What is the conclusion of this? The number of clicks reported in the Facebook Ads Manager may be greater than the one we see in Google Analytics.

Tracking users between devices

Analytics is therefore much more accurate when it comes to counting sessions and clicks on a single device level. What about the situation when the user is using different devices and clicks on the ad, for example, first on the phones and then on the computer? Here, Facebook is much better at counting. This is because in order to use Facebook and thus click any advertisement there, the user must be logged in to his account. Most users use the same account on all devices, so Facebook’s algorithm has no problem distinguishing when it is dealing with the same user and when not.

In Google Analytics, the default data collection is based on cookies, and these are assigned to a specific device. Hence, each change of the device by the user qualifies him as a new person.

What does this mean in practice?

If the recipient first clicks on the ad on their phones and then reacts to it again on their computer, Google Analytics will register the ad as two separate users from different traffic sources. On the other hand, Facebook, if the recipient is logged into the same account on both of these devices, will recognize him as the same person.

Differences in attribution models

Conversion may be preceded by a variety of user actions. This means that before he or she fulfills our goal, e.g. buys an item in an online store, he may deal with the website in various ways. Let’s see it with an example. The user sees an ad for shoes from your Facebook store. He clicks it, looks at the shoes, but decides not to shop. After a few days, he decides that he needs shoes and enters a query to the Google search engine, for which he will receive an advertisement in the search engine with a link to your website. He clicks on the link, looks at the same shoes again, but decides to ask his wife for opinion before buying. In the evening, he will enter the search query again, but will not click the sponsored link, but choose an organic result, and this time he will buy shoes.

So to which interaction with the website can this purchase be attributed? Did the first contact with the offer, i.e. Facebook advertising, decide that the user has performed the assumed conversion? Or maybe the user did not remember it anymore when he searched for shoes in the search engine? So then the sponsored link would make it hit your store and make a purchase there. But after all, he did not buy shoes by entering the site through an advertising link, but through an organic result, so maybe he should be “responsible” for the conversion? On the other hand, there is a chance that the user initially had no plans to buy shoes and it was only advertising on Facebook that awakened this need in him. In this situation, the first ad would do its part to persuade him to buy.

The questions are constantly multiplying and it is not easy to find an unambiguous answer to them. Therefore, individual analytical tools may adopt different methods of calculating ad effectiveness, i.e. they have different attribution models. We will now show you what it looks like in the case of the Facebook Ad Manager and Google Analytics.

Facebook Ads Manager – attribution model

If the user makes a conversion on the page within 7 days from clicking on the ad, Facebook Ads will assign it to his ad (of course, if we have a well-configured FB pixel). The same will happen if the recipient meets the target within one day of being shown the ad. It is true that the user could later have contact with ads in other channels, but Facebook will attribute this success to itself anyway. This is currently the default attribution model for this channel and may be objectionable but legitimate. Facebook is not a strictly sales channel, so the task of advertising on this platform is to arouse the user’s desire to buy. So even if an advertisement did not lead to a purchase, but sowed a seed in the user’s mind, which then germinated and gave fruit, it is also a merit of advertising on Facebook.

For example, the recipient might want to compare prices with competitors before buying, or look for opinions about the presented product in order to finally go directly to the company’s website. However, he found it through an ad on Facebook, so the system rightly recognizes its participation in such a conversion. In addition, the Facebook system is not able to control whether the user was later exposed to ads created by other systems, so the assumption that the Facebook Ads campaign influenced the recipient’s decision is the best way to count conversions.

However, is it reliable? Unfortunately not. For this system, clicking an ad is not synonymous with loading the landing page, as we have already written about above. It’s even more difficult when counting views. Facebook’s algorithms take into account whether the advertisement was displayed to the user, but they do not measure the time that the advertisement was visible on the user’s screen. So it may turn out that yes, it appeared on the page, but it was scrolled so quickly that the user did not have a chance to even notice it, let alone read its content. Nevertheless, if the user subsequently performs a conversion within a certain period of time, Facebook counts the conversion as obtained from its ad.

Google Analytics attribution models

By default, Google Analytics uses a different attribution model – the last indirect input is counted as the one that decided to convert. What is an indirect input? Simply put, it can be any way to enter a website, except for directly typing its address in the browser bar. So if, for example, a user clicks on a Google Ads ad, but does not buy anything, and then enters the page by typing its address into the browser and converts on the page, Google Ads will receive the credit for it. Comparing this counting system with the Facebook system, it is easy to notice that the results of Facebook Ads campaigns in Analytics may be weaker than in Facebook statistics.

However, Google Analytics also offers other attribution models, and changing the default settings can significantly change the results presented by this tool. We can choose models such as:

– Last interaction – then the system assigns all credit for the conversion to the channel that the user used immediately before the conversion. This setting makes sense when your ad is targeting people who are determined to buy, not those at an earlier point in the funnel.
– Last Google Ads Click – All 100% “responsibility” for the conversion is attributed to the last ad displayed by the Google Ads system that the recipient clicked before converting. It is worth using this model only when you want to compare the effectiveness of Google Ads. Does not apply to statistics for Facebook ads.
– First Interaction – In this model, Analytics considers all credit for conversion to go to the channel where the user first encountered our site. It can be used in this case when we want to build brand awareness with advertising.
– Linear – considers 1 conversion = 100% and grants equal percentage of share to all channels through which the user came into contact with the page. So if he first saw an ad on Facebook, then clicked a sponsored Google Ads link and made a purchase, he will attribute 50% of the value of this conversion to Facebook Ads, and the other 50% to Google Ads. It is best to use this model when each user contact with the website is important to us.
– Timing – assigns different conversion shares to channels, depending on how many days before the conversion was done by the user. The closer the contact with a given channel is in time, the more important that channel is.
– Including items – this model also divides the share between channels that are on the purchasing path, but does not take time into account. Most often, in this model, 40% of the conversion value of the first interaction is assigned, 40% of the last interaction, and the remaining 20% ​​is divided equally among the other channels on the purchasing path.

Google Analytics or Facebook Ads – which statistics should be taken into account?

Advertisers often try to unify the results obtained from both tools as much as possible. You can, for example, change the attribution in Facebook Ads so that conversions are counted only within 1 day of clicking on the ad. However, before taking such steps, it is worth analyzing your business and industry or tracking the average length of your audience’s conversion path. Sometimes it’s not necessarily about fixing the discrepancy, but about accepting that both Google Analytics and Facebook are complementary tools that can be used in parallel to better understand your business with web analytics and make better marketing decisions.

In the past, in order to perform targeted surveys, it was necessary to hire specialist interviewers or those that did non-participant observation to study consumer behavior, which was thoroughly laughed at in the Swedish movie “Kitchen Stories”, for example. Currently, you can also cooperate with various types of research institutes that support the business world, but instead of spending a large portion of funds on it, it is better to use generally available knowledge and specialized tools that are available for free or for a small fee. With a dose of self-denial, anyone can become an expert in determining the target group.

Target audience – it all depends on the size of the business

When you run a small business, you often know your customers and their needs very well. In this case, questions like – “how to determine the target?” or “how to reach the target group?” they don’t make much sense. However, the matter becomes more complicated when the company is of a considerable size and most of its potential clients are completely anonymous. And how to convince people you don’t know?

This will only work if you properly target and create models of customers (so-called personas) who may be interested in your product or service. A teenager with crazy internet marketing has completely different needs and a middle-aged woman who prefers calmer advertising content. A solid, personalized message can hit the recipient’s sensitive points, evoke emotions and encourage him to engage, which is a necessary part of the relationship between the company and the client, which is what content marketing is based on.

Persona

No, we won’t talk about another well-known Swedish film here, but about the basic issue related to defining the audience. Persona is a model of our ideal recipient, its characteristics, which include such matters as gender, age, level of education, place of residence, preferences, worldview, marital status, life practice, current needs or level of life satisfaction. The company cannot afford to create content (such as SEO-compliant articles, video content marketing) that completely falls short of the expectations of the recipients who would be interested in the products or services you propose.

You should think about your personas as close friends who you want to meet, offering them to fulfill the most secret consumer dreams and make their lives a bit happier. Everyone lives in their own fairly closed world of beliefs, thoughts, visualizations, which is often referred to as being in their bubble, in their tunnel, so young people will not be interested in maternity-related content, and their parents will find the rebellious advertising campaign just plain.

That is why it is so important to always be a few steps ahead of your audience, trying to anticipate potential trends. For this purpose, it is worth continuing education, reading the industry press and portals, following the content placed under the hashtags important from your point of view, reading comments on social networks and opinions, and of course using tools to define the target audience.

Target audience – two basic tools

Thanks to individual, specialized analytical tools, you can learn about the characteristics of your target group in great detail. The most popular tools to help target audiences are:

Facebook Audience Insights
Virtually every modern company uses social networks, because this is where they can meet and establish close contact with their customers, presenting the latest promotional materials. Facebook gives you great opportunities to look behind the curtain and check the data on people who have received your company posts and how the recipients reacted to this content (whether it was hidden, liked or shared).

In addition to basic information about the target group, such as gender, age, place of residence, thanks to this system you can also check the relationship status of your fans or websites that are close to them. This helps you plan your strategies and collaborate with famous people or companies with whom you share your fans.

However, when publishing video content marketing on Facebook, it is worth paying attention to whether the material is viewed in its entirety or whether it is abandoned by viewers at some point. Such information helps in better targeting of content and allows you to create content that will please, amuse or evoke emotions in your recipients.

Google Analytics
Thanks to this platform, you can check what type of people the people visiting your website are. What are the characteristics of customers who quickly run away from it, and what are those who stay a little longer or make a purchase? Google Analytics allows you to examine, among others the age, gender, interests and industries they are close to, as well as how they navigate around your site. It is worth setting your promotional activities for the type of people whose visits to your website usually end with a purchase or the desired action. At the beginning of your business path, it is worth playing with targeting your target group by making a series of marketing tests. Sometimes you can opt for advertising texts written in a looser, more direct style, and other times you can choose more serious content (although even funeral services can be advertised cheerfully). The recipients of your marketing strategies will show you the right way by their positive or negative reactions or, for example, lack of them. Reality can surprise you sometimes and you may find that your target audience is completely different than you might have expected.

Website positioning for free

Running a professional business is connected with the necessity of incurring many costs. Paying salaries, renting an office, bill payment – these are just the basic expenses to consider. So wouldn’t it be beautiful if some useful advertising tools and forms were available for free? Or maybe you need to put cost-free positioning between cartoons? Before we have to solve the mystery of website positioning for free, it is worth to outline what it really is and what factors can influence the success of our efforts. If you do not spend money on positioning, you will definitely spend on it … your time!

Positioning from scratch

Creating a website is a relatively simple process. Difficulties arise when it is to acquire appropriate coverage and reach a specific group of recipients. The dream of most e-stores is that after the user types a given category or specific product, their platform appears in the first place or at least on the first page in the search engine.

Remember, however, that creating a page is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if it is done respecting the basic principles of SEO, it will still have to work out its place in the search engine.

The task of positioning is to help in this. Everything, however, requires skilful distribution of planned operational activities. Developing a schedule for implementing the necessary modifications allows you to increase control over the process of adapting your site to the requirements dictated by search algorithms. A number of actions necessary to take include optimization of meta tags, content on the page, graphics used and links posted. It may not sound so bad, but when you have an online store and we are talking about optimizing hundreds or thousands of product pages, then it gets interesting.

In addition, you must also remember about other improvements that will allow the smooth functioning of the site (e.g. by eliminating unnecessary duplicates). The list begins to grow as the company begins to increase its reach and becomes more and more popular. When you manage to join the strategic group of market leaders, you should monitor your online presence and respond quickly to any changes.

So conducted SEO activities – or more generally positioning – is a path leading straight to success. However, before you catch up and overtake the competition, you have to spend a lot of time in the peloton of this specific race. The use of cycling metaphor is not accidental, because there are many seemingly imperceptible analogies between these two areas. The best results are achieved by players who have full comfort – they have excellent technical facilities, and the sponsor’s support allows the purchase of high-end equipment. Although cycling is an individual sport, the whole team works hard for individual successes. It is no different in the case of positioning.

The first few laps, or how to overtake the competition?

There are two strategies that can lead to positive SEO results. The first is painstaking individual work. It largely involves independent search for solutions, which means the necessity of using trial and error methods. At the initial stage of business development, a good start is the basis, which is why a large number of mistakes occurring at the very beginning can make the time for prosperity not come. You can put a lot of effort in the process of positioning the page, but without a proper budget and substantive support, it is difficult to obtain positive and long-lasting effects.

It is worth focusing on a second strategy. This is a variant in which the owner of the page asks for help to a professional company, fluent in SEO activities. The solution is beneficial not only during the initial phase of preparing the concept of brand presence on the Internet. At every stage of the company’s activity, you can reach for the experience and knowledge of specialists. This substantive and technological base allows not only to save time, but also money.

Before decisions are made regarding the will to cooperate, the recommended action is to audit the website. Some companies offer this option completely free. At a rapid pace, reaching up to 20 seconds, you can check which elements of the current web page are working incorrectly, what to improve, and which aspects do not require modification. We are talking here about automatic audits, which of course operate to a large degree of generalization – if we are serious about positioning and want to allocate more funds to it, then it will be reasonable to order such an audit to a specialist.

Free positioning tools

Once you have successfully carried out the WWW audit, you can start your adventure with positioning on your own. As already mentioned, although individual work brings results only to a certain extent, it is worth at least taking this effort to be better prepared when talking with SEO specialists. The use of free positioning tools allows you to learn the basic concepts and principles on which the whole process is based.

Every day, most Internet users use Google search and only a few remain faithful to solutions such as Bing or DuckDuckGo. This is for a reason, because it is this gigantic company that has several tools in its portfolio, the use of which helps to elevate the site to the highest positions. Here are some examples that are most useful in business:

a) Google Advertising Academy
Before choosing specific solutions, you should familiarize yourself with the entire system of related opportunities that Google offers. Although the Academy of Ads deals strictly with advertising campaigns, it contains valuable knowledge about how to use Google Ads, Google Analytics or the Double Click platform. Completing virtual training gives you a broader understanding of not only positioning, but also any activity in virtual space. Graduates of the Google Advertising Academy receive certificates, which are an additional asset because their possession is appreciated by the best positioning companies.

In Academy for Ads you will not find direct references to the positioning process, but you will learn the specifics of how Google search engine works, how customers navigate and how to use analytics to achieve business goals. That’s why it’s worth it.

b) Google Keyword Planner
This extremely useful tool facilitates selection of key phrases. It is especially useful when circling a product and service promotion plan. Google Keyword Planner allows you to choose the right solution when developing your Ads campaign and of course – for positioning. An additional advantage is the function that provides verification of the number of queries for specific terms entered by Internet users in the search engine.

The clear interface gives full insight into statistics on selected operations performed on queries and forecasts of the effectiveness of operations. The results are given on an average monthly basis, taking into account the relevance of a specific key phrase. To use Google Keyword Planner you must have an advertising account in Google Ads (formerly: Google AdWords). The tool suggestions result from the ongoing analysis of data flowing into the Google database.

c) Google Analytics
A basic tool that should be familiar to anyone who is going to get involved in professional site positioning. From the statistics set you can read, among others at what times the website and specific subpages are most often visited, and in which places in the world there is interest in a given website. Traffic analysis is a key factor in the effectiveness of SEO because it gives an overview of the profile of users interested in the product or service.

What’s more, Google Analytics can indicate how potential customers came to the page. Based on only this one information, you can evalsuate the effectiveness of the marketing strategy implemented so far and possibly make new assumptions about communication channels with recipients. In direct translation into SEO activity, this means a change in keywords in the positioning process. Having full control over online marketing activities allows you to better respond to the real expectations of customers.

d) Google Maps
The user types in the search query. When it is possible to find the right company that provides a specific service or has the dream product in the range, the internet user makes the key decision – he intends to visit a point of sale, restaurant or hotel. A business card created in Google My Business points to a specific locations.

At this point, Google Maps comes to the rescue. This is one of the most recognizable and most frequently used solutions of the American company. Few people know, however, that it is also a great positioning tool. Integration with the search engine allows not only to find the locations on the map, but also to lead the client to the destination. Having a tag with the right name allows you to be among competitors.

e) Google Search Console
Another tool after Google Analytics and Keyword Planner that is hard to do without. It’s a free platform for professionals involved in website administration. Its task is to monitor the site and to control the indexing of pages. Google Search Console is an extensive analytical database which contains information about links to the site, possible errors and keywords contained on the page.

Website positioning for free and the help of professionals

Examples of solutions that have been successfully presented are available for free to every Internet user. However, as any statistics prove, it is not the number of data collected that counts, but the ability to interpret it. In addition, you need to spend a lot of time devoted to product or service development to become familiar with all the features of specific proposals.

Positioning sites for free will certainly prove very time-consuming. So it all depends on whether you can afford it or if you prefer to devote yourself to another part of your business activity.

When a company aims at positioning a website, it is a good idea to report the needs of an SEO agency. Many years of experience and knowledge that specialists have at their disposal allows us to accurately respond to business needs. The advantage of this output is the fact that all the tool is received in the package together with the service provided. This is a huge saving of time and money. Hard to believe? It is worth getting acquainted with the materials available for free on the Paraphrase-Online.com  blog, which prove that it pays to invest in positioning.