AcrobatAnt Blog – Pure. Simple. Honest.

March 13 – Google Partners Connect Event Recap

AcrobatAnt had a great turnout for our first time hosting the Google Partners Connect livestream event at our office. For those who couldn’t attend, here are a few takeaways to improve your video marketing through Google and YouTube:

Two new targeting options are available for video advertising: life events and consumer patterns.

Using TrueView for Action ads for direct response considerably increases campaign performance for CTA-based campaign efforts.

Create your Google video campaigns in a separate account than your search and display campaigns. If campaigns are with the same account, due to last click attribution, your conversions could be attributed to an AdWords campaign even if the user first saw and searched based on a YouTube placement. Keeping the campaigns in separate accounts allows for more insight regarding conversions and ad types seen throughout the conversion funnel.

Using custom intent audience is a great way to target users who are showing indicators that they intend to buy soon. Google rolled custom intent audiences out for the display network last year and it is coming soon to YouTube video placements.

If you want machine learning to help optimize your campaign, you will need sufficient volume and budget for it to learn and optimize. For example, Google provides an automated option for custom intent audiences where Google will create an audience based on the campaign and infer characteristics of target consumers to help you reach your goals. Start bidding with your current tCPA (target cost-per-acquisition) bid and overtime, and with machine-learning providing assistance, you can decrease your tCPA bid while increasing conversions.

Want to read more about new video marketing offerings from Google? Marketing Land has a great article with additional information. Or, contact your AcrobatAnt representative and we’ll be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Want to see all of the information presented? Watch the recorded video from the livestream.

Interested in attending the next Google Partners Connect livestream event at our office? Sign-up for our monthly newsletter and always be first on the invite list.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901

The Great Escape

Escape Room Winning Team — The winning team (pictured left to right): Jillian Mabra, Dana Jacobs, David Downing, Donna Keffer, Angela Harless and Anna Montoto.

Escape artists. Challenged to a room with only a 30 percent chance of escape, the winning team managed to free itself with 17 minutes to spare. And they haven’t let anyone forget it.

How do the Ants deal with the relentless pressure of keeping clients content? By spending an afternoon ferociously competing against each other for bragging rights, of course. In early March, the Ants invaded The Escape Tulsa for an exciting team-building event. If you’ve never experienced the escape-room phenomenon, the premise is simple: each team gets one hour to solve a unique mystery, leading to a code that will unlock the door to freedom. But that’s where the simplicity ends, because the mysteries are seriously complex and require real teamwork to solve. It’s nerve-wracking, nail-biting, pressure-packed fun, and we recommend it highly.
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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901

Jennie Stuart Health Rebrand

One of our newest clients, Jennie Stuart Health, has been serving the people of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and the surrounding region for more than a century. Our first assignment was to create a new branding ad campaign to convey the organization’s long history of healthcare excellence. This new look carried over into collateral, homepage banners, digital advertising and more.

Why choose an agency in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Because the new Jennie Stuart Health marketing director is a former client who understands the value we bring to healthcare marketing—proving that experience really does make a difference.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901

Wintrust Arena Tattoo Ad

Our new client, Chicago’s Wintrust Arena, gave us this challenge: Create a jaw-dropping, out-of-the-box ad to announce the opening of its brand new, state-of-the-art, 10,000-seat multipurpose facility. The client had a basic suggestion—an edgy, tattoo-themed look—but wasn’t sure how to execute it.

We figured out a way that not only made the client ecstatic but also resulted in high praise from a Billboard magazine representative. Another result: More out-of-the-box Wintrust Arena work for us, including prominent displays at bus and subway stops around Chicago.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901

Get More Insight Out of Google Analytics Acquisition Reports

Google Analytics is a great way to understand your website traffic, usage and behavior. But, you may be not utilizing Analytics to its full potential. Here are some tips to start using today—no advanced analytics training required—thanks to your favorite Certified Google Partner, AcrobatAnt.

Acquisition Reports > Source/Medium

Most analytics users are familiar with the source/medium acquisition report. This is a great way to easily see which website or marketing tactics drove the most users to your website. Even if you see which sources/mediums drove the most users, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this tactic drove the best traffic. Traffic should be high quality, meaning that users who visit your website engage with the content or complete an action. One good indicator of quality is the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Keep in mind, if your website is only a single page, you will want to skip bounce rate analysis and focus on other quality indicators, like “time on site.”

To easily compare bounce rate while viewing source/medium data, click on the comparison tool icon.

Then, select the metric “bounce rate” in the search field to the left of the icons.

This will compare bounce rate for each source/medium combination to the site average. In the example below, we see that the YouTube traffic is bouncing at a much higher rate than the site average.

Campaign-specific URLs

To get the most out of reporting, help Google categorize your traffic and provide yourself additional campaign reporting metrics by creating custom campaign URLs. Google Analytics automatically captures key attributes from your links: source, medium and campaign. By telling Google this information, it ensures accurate reporting for each link click. And, it will help you see performance variations between campaigns or even creative versions within campaigns.

Medium: The mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some examples of mediums include organic (unpaid search), cpc (cost-per-click), referral and email.

Source: This provides more information about the medium. For example, if the medium is referral, the source will be the URL that referred the traffic. If the source is organic, the source will be the search engine.

Campaign: Campaign (and campaign content fields) in the custom URL are a great way to facilitate campaign-specific reporting in Analytics. Campaign may be “spring_sale” or another indicator of the campaign running. The campaign content portion of the URL allows for identification of various creative versions, messages, etc.

Get started using campaign URLs today by using Google’s free campaign URL builder. Note: Analytics is case sensitive, so we suggest using all lowercase text to avoid multiple lines of reporting due to capitalization variations. Once your URL is generated, use it as the destination URL in Facebook campaigns, email CTAs, AdWords campaigns and any other digital tactics where you can control the link for user click-through.

If your business needs help ensuring your website is correctly setup with Google Analytics or for a third-party review of your analytics account to identify patterns or opportunities to improve website performance, contact us today.

AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7901

A Few of Our Favorite Things

For Valentine’s Day, we wanted to share some things that we love—from health and beauty items to entertainment, we hope you’ll find something new to try and love this February.

While we all had our favorite items, topping the favorites list are talking with mom, working on the ranch, being able to take notes on our phones, pit bulls and spending time with our families. And, don’t forget Oklahoma State football and the OKC Thunder.

Entertainment

For the Home

For the Office

Health and Beauty

Other

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7912

Kanban to the Rescue

Use Trello to organize anything and everything.

Trello is a simple but powerful visual tool for organizing, managing, and tracking team or individual tasks. At AcrobatAnt, our favorite setup for using Trello is known as a Kanban board. Originally developed at Toyota to improve manufacturing efficiency, Kanban boards are commonly used today in agile software development.

Kanban boards are made up of lists of cards. Each individual task is assigned to a card and then pulled from left to right between lists as work progresses from an outstanding task to completed item. The simplest Kanban boards we’ve seen include lists for To Do, Doing and Done. Most of the time, we’ve found it helpful to also add lists for Hold, Ready and Test.

Lists within a standard AcrobatAnt Trello board (from left to right):

To Do: The initial bucket of things to do. This is the backlog of all of the outstanding issues in the project. New issues are added here.
Hold: Something is blocking this task from being pulled through the system. Another task needs to be completed first, a stakeholder needs to weigh in, etc.
Ready: This card is ready. Nothing stands in the way of work being started!
Doing: Work is underway! The task is actively being worked on.
Test: The initial work for the task is finished, but it still needs to be checked for quality and completeness. In software development, this is where quality assurance happens; for copy, this is where the text should be proofed. When issues are found, the card should be moved back to a previous step in the process for additional revisions/work.
Done: This is for when a task on a card is done. The task has been completed and tested to ensure that it is truly complete.

Here is an example board using household chores as the tasks that need to be completed.

Kanban is different from other project management strategies because there is no set period of time in which a project phase must be completed. Instead, Kanban uses the continuous delivery of updates to create constantly progressing products and projects. This can be difficult to reconcile with a hard deadline for the initial launch of a project. At AcrobatAnt, we use additional tools for task management and time-tracking in conjunction with our Trello boards so that Kanban becomes a process within our larger project management strategy.

In the end, using a Trello Kanban board is a great way to organize, manage and visually display the state of a complex project, like launching a new website, at any given moment.

If you would like to learn more about Kanban, Trello or agile project management, contact Ryan at 918-949-3109 or RyanWatkinsHughes@AcrobatAnt.com.

The following articles are also great resources to learn more about Kanban and/or Trello:

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7912

Celebrating the Holidays—Ant-style

Over the years, AcrobatAnt has developed some unique holiday traditions—a good blend of fun and heartfelt, silly and serious.

Secret Santa

In early November, we draw names for a Secret Santa gift exchange that takes place at our annual Christmas party. Why draw names so early? Because our tradition is that each gift must be handcrafted in some way and personalized to the recipient. Sometimes the gifts are touching, sometimes silly and sometimes downright bizarre, but they’re always highly creative.
Senior Art Director Dell Chambers, with a custom clock modeled after himself.

12 Days of Christmas

Everyone knows the traditional “Twelve Days of Christmas” song. The Ants deliver something a little less-than-traditional on each of those 12 days, e.g., Crazy Sock Day, Ugly Sweater Day, Twinsday, Why-Is-This-In-My-Closet Day and, of course, Pajama Day. Every year we mix it up with new themes, so be sure to follow us on Facebook or Instagram to bear witness to this year’s shenanigans.
Ants showing their pride and cool graphic tees.

Seeing double for Twinsday!

Craft-building at The Children’s Hospital at Saint Francis

One of the privileges of working with Saint Francis Health System is the annual opportunity to share an afternoon with some of the greatest kids you’ll ever meet—at The Children’s Hospital at Saint Francis. Creating Christmas ornaments and other holiday decorations with patients and their parents is a wonderful experience and a great way to get into the real spirit of the season.
Account Coordinators Rachael Cervenka and Jennifer Hardgrave crafting with a patient from The Children’s Hospital.

Supporting Women In Recovery

The holiday season is all about giving, so one of our favorite traditions each year is making Christmas a little more special for those in the Women In Recovery outpatient rehabilitation program. Donations by the Ants help many of these women afford Christmas gifts for their children and essential items for themselves. A Family and Children’s Services program, Women In Recovery is operated in partnership with The George Kaiser Family Foundation.
Hot chocolate and bonding with some members of Women in Recovery.

The Ant family wishes you and your family the best holiday ever.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7912

IP Targeting—Leveraging Your List

We have all heard the expression “right person, right message, right time” when it comes to developing effective marketing strategies. With great lists and on-target messaging, direct mail can still be a viable tactic to include in your communications mix. Because direct mail falls short when it comes to message frequency, including it as part of a multi-tactic plan is needed to be effective. Unfortunately, other mass media tactics often fall short when it comes to being able to precisely target messaging to an audience.

Most companies spend valuable time and money to ensure that their direct mail audience list is as targeted as possible to help improve conversions. It is now possible to take that exact mailing list, with names and physical addresses, and target the same households digitally; IP targeting. This technique allows you to add frequency of message to your already targeted prospects to improve conversions more than direct mail alone.

If you have been in the marketing world for a while, you are probably familiar with the Rule of 7. The marketing Rule of 7 states that a prospect needs to hear your message at least seven times before they’ll take action. In today’s cluttered marketing landscape and bombardment of messages, it will likely take more than seven impressions to be noticed and make an impact on your target consumer. Another benefit of IP targeting is being able to deliver targeted, frequent impressions to reinforce the message to the prospect, who also received the same message via direct mail.

Digital impressions are viewed while prospects are engaged in their daily digital activity; checking their stocks, reading the news, exploring social media, etc. That being said, to get the most out of IP targeting, it is important to (1) serve enough impressions to each household to be noticed over a period of time and (2) utilize remarketing to engage those who have shown interest after they leave your site. The prospect may not have time to complete the action immediately, so reminding them that they were interested may encourage a conversion when they are not actively engaged elsewhere online.

If you would like to learn more about IP targeting, remarketing, list acquisition or direct mail, contact Angela at 918-938-7912 or via email.

See our results from an IP targeting + direct mail campaign by reading this case study.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7912

Ant Q&A: Dana Jacobs

Dana Jacobs
Digital Producer

Describe your role as digital producer and its importance to clients.
As a digital producer, I handle all things social media. Depending on the client, that includes writing copy, shooting and selecting photography, creating graphics, planning and executing ad campaigns, responding to customers and reporting analytics.

How has previous career and/or academic experience prepared you for your work here?
In my first job out of college, as a marketing coordinator, I had the opportunity to learn how to use the Adobe Creative Suite and gain a working knowledge of the different programs. In my second job, as a data marketing analyst, I was able to expand my knowledge in the analytics world. My current role is a perfect combination of the two, in that I am creating content for social media and measuring how well it performs.

You just celebrated your one-year Ant-iversary. What do you like about working at AcrobatAnt?
I really enjoy the people here. It’s just a great group of creative people who inspire me to work harder and learn new things to expand my skill set and become more creative. Everyone works as a team and works hard, but they also like to hang out and have fun outside of work, which is a great plus.

You like music and traveling. What are your five favorite concerts and five favorite places you’ve visited, in order?

The Lumineers (second tour)
The Lumineers (first tour)
Mumford and Sons at Gentlemen of the Road
Green Day
Rebelution

New York City, NY
New Orleans, LA
Portland, ME
Washington, D.C.
Austin, TX

What’s so great about your dog?
Everything, but here are a few particulars: He’s a golden retriever, so he has to say hello to every person everywhere we go and there isn’t a single person on the planet whom he doesn’t love immediately. We taught him how to give hugs, high-fives and how to sit in chairs, so it’s not uncommon for him to join us if we’re sitting at the dinner table.

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AcrobatAnt Marketing & Advertising
AcrobatAnt.com
1336 East 15th Street
Tulsa, OK 74120
918-938-7912