The Ultimate Digital Marketing Toolkit From Google

September 26th, 2015

This article is basically a list with some of the best and most useful tools that any digital marketer should know, taken from an official presentation shown at the recent Retail@Google event. Some of the services listed here are very popular, while others may be interesting surprises…

Google Trends

URL: google.com/trends

The Google Trends tool uses realtime search data to help you measure consumer search behaviors over time.

Consumer Barometer

URL: consumerbarometer.com

The Consumer Barometer delivers consumer insights to support planning and decision-making in a fast changing digital landscape, like Internet usage and attitudes across various devices, the role of the Internet in making purchase decisions or online video use across different devices.

Think With Google

URL: thinkwithgoogle.com

Think with Google is Google’s take on fresh marketing insights and a look at what’s next. Find data, articles, research and case studies across various industries.

Google Consumer Surveys

URL: google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Design, target and launch a survey (up to 10 questions) in minutes. Your survey is answered by real consumers on partner sites and the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app. Receive initial analyzed results in hours, complete results in just a few days.

Google Tag Manager

URL: http://www.google.com/tagmanager/

A free tag container designed for marketers, that works with both Google and non-Google tags. Error proof and mobile ready, it allows for flexible tag firing. Multi-account and user permission options for collaborative working within agencies and groups.

Google Tag Assistant

URL: chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google

An official Chrome Extension from Google that can be used to to confirm correct tags on each page and testing custom parameters on remarketing tags, analytics tags and Google Tag Manager.

Rich Media Gallery

URL: richmediagallery.com

The Rich Media Gallery is an intuitive guide to Google’s creative solutions to inspire and help you identify the optimal rich media ad formats for your campaign as well as resources to build them. The Adwords Ad gallery has easy to edit formats to build Lightbox ads with videos and images.

YouTube Analytics

URL: youtube.com/analytics

YouTube Analytics is your channel’s pulse. It lets you uncover key insights of your YouTube channel and videos based on real viewer data and performance reports. You will better understand who your viewers are, where they are finding your videos, what makes them come and go, how you can increase audience engagement, how effective your annotations are, and how fans interact with your videos (e.g. likes, dislikes, shares, comments).

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How To Evaluate (And Improve) Your Website With The 2QCV2Q Model

September 6th, 2015

If you have some background in journalism or mass-media communication you probably heard about the popular rule of the 5 wh-questions: any news story should provide an answer to the questions “who?”, “what?”, “why?”, “when?” and “where?”. But you may not know that such rule was taken from Cicero’s De Inventione, a kind of handbook for orators containing lots of hints on how to do a public speech in the 1st Century BC.

In particular, Cicero wrote that any good speech should contain a set of 6 properties used to determine the completeness of the exposition (expositio). These properties, or loci, and their relative questions, represent a classical principle of rhetoric that can be very useful for evaluating a website in all its aspects, too. It may be surprising, but any website in 2015 can be not so distant – as a communication process – from a speech in the ancient Roman Senate.

• QVIS (Who?) » IDENTITY
• QVID (What?) » CONTENT
• CVR (Why?) » SERVICES
• VBI (Where?) » LOCATION
• QVANDO (When?) » MANAGEMENT
• QVOMODO (How?) » USABILITY

This is the so-called 2QCV2Q Model, from the initial letters of the Ciceronian loci on which it is based, originally developed by L. Mich and M. Franch at University of Trento (Italy). It’s based on the fact that the design of a website, too, can be viewed as a series of answers to the question contained in Cicero’s rule. In fact, the original model identifies a set of evaluation elements for each of the 6 properties and the resulting checklist has 4 important features:

• it is general, so that it can be applied to any kind of website (corporate, ecommerce, individual portfolios, blogs, etc.)
• it is domain independent, meaning that it can be easily applied, for example, to the tourist sector as to non-profit organisations, to the automobile sector as to the public administration.
• it is easy to use, in fact it does not require highly specialised expertise, neither from a technical nor from a marketing/creative standpoint.
• it is robust, meaning that it contains all the basic elements needed to guarantee the quality of a website.

The following presentation sums up the whole methodology. Note that I updated the evaluation elements in order to include some modern principles of web design and UX that were not present when the original model was created.

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