Hello Digital looks at the highlights from the week that was.
We made it. 2021 is here and the first week is done and dusted. There’s already been some big news worldwide, from the riots on Capitol Hill in Washington, to further developments in the Coronavirus pandemic here in Australia.
Craziness of the world aside, it has also been a busy time in digital. This week we look at tech newcomer Voxie shaking up text marketing, some big wins in the fight for net neutrality in the U.S. and a great resource for Google Analytics users to avoid the curse of false conversion tracking.
Keep reading for all the digital highlights.
Moz release a great resource for avoiding false conversions in Google Analytics
Any business owner or marketer will know that tracking online conversions can be both a blessing and a curse. Conversion tracking in Google Analytics provides valuable information about where and when online conversions happen on your website. Using this, you can track how effective your online marketing efforts are and make informed decisions about where to invest advertising budgets.
However, many users will recognise the annoyance of conversion tracking going awry. Thankfully Moz put together a great guide for avoiding false conversions in Google Analytics. False conversions are any conversion events that are recorded inaccurately, which skews the data and shows incorrect conversion numbers.
Moz explains that false conversions can happen if, for example, you’re counting conversions when you shouldn’t be. This can screw up automated ad bidding, how much you value individual channels, or even how well you think your business is doing.
Some of the things they recommend to check to see if you are tracking false conversion include: whether you are recording conversions on thank-you pages, whether you are linking to conversion pages in other ways besides form completions, and whether users can land directly on thank-you pages.
The ideal conversion type in Google Analytics is an event-based goal, rather than a destination-based one. This can help avoid confusion and record much more accurate conversions. Take a look at the article for a full explanation of how to do this and other ways to avoid false conversions.
Tech start-up Voxie is shaking up text marketing
Atlanta-based start-up Voxie saw a gap in text marketing and have quickly become the ones to watch in the industry. They have just secured US$6.7 million in Series A funding, with plans to continue to grow their service and eventually expand their offerings.
They saw a common issue with the available text marketing services, which was providing what felt like real, personalised conversions across a large customer base. Voxie founder and CEO Bogdan Constantin set out to solve this problem and offer tools to help businesses automate and manage this process.
Compared to other text marketing tools, Voxie claims to send messages that feel like a real conversation, even though 80% to 90% of messages are actually automated. The rest of the messages are written by real people.
Voxie will also allow businesses to send messages from a regular 10-digit phone number, instead of the more common five-digit numbers that are used for marketing texts.
Initially built for large enterprises, Voxie saw a massive uptake during the pandemic by the likes of retail and hospitality franchise brands. Expect to see more of Voxie this year, particularly as pandemic life becomes the new normal.
Net neutrality had a big win in the U.S.
The fight for net neutrality in the US may have been saved by the recent Democratic wins in the US Senate. Before Georgia’s runoff, net neutrality advocates were facing a gridlock in Congress. Now that the Senate is set to fall back into Democratic control though, possibilities have expanded.
But what is net neutrality exactly and why is this important?
Net neutrality is essentially the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally. This includes not discriminating or charging differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.
Given all the changes (and likely more to come) from the Democratic party, people are hoping that it will move things forward for proposed net neutrality. It has been largely blocked by the Republican Senate up until now.
Now Democrats will have the ability to push for progressive FCC nominees that will bring back the net neutrality rules from 2015, or may even push for legislation that would make net neutrality into law. As The Verge explains, “flipping these two Senate seats could make the difference between keeping net neutrality in a permanent legal limbo and making it the law of the land.”
We’ll have to keep an eye on further developments to see if these predictions come to fruition.