CDG Interactive Blog

How to Transition From One Creative Agency to Another

Looking for the right creative agency can feel like looking for the right mate. You need mutual respect, shared goals, and above all, chemistry. And like romantic relationships, your relationship with a creative agency can run its course.

We have several clients who have come to us fresh from a breakup with another creative agency. We’re always happy to welcome new clients who are “on the rebound,” but we can also offer tips on how to make your break up as painless as possible for all parties.

Tips for Leaving Your Creative Agency & Starting with a New One

• Talk to your agency. This is the first and most important step! Let your agency know what your plans are. Your account team can then help you plan for the transition, from website hosting to social media account ownership—and all of the other little details you might miss if you try to do it on your own.
• Plan for your website transition in advance. If part of the transition includes moving your website from one hosting company to another, or even just moving the DNS for your domain name, plan ahead. There are a number of implications for such moves, from search engine optimization (SEO) to analytics accounts tracking to transferring files, like PDFs, that are hosted with your site. The tech teams at the old and new agency may even need to have a conversation to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.
• Bring your files. Especially if you want the new agency to work with your existing creative—and especially if it’s in Flash—you’ll want to provide the original source files, such as Photoshop, Illustrator or Flash. The more your new creative agency has to re-create, the more expensive it is for you.
• Allow for some wrap-up time. Even after you’re fully ramped up with your new agency, there will be some loose ends that pop up. Allow for at least 30 days of final maintenance time with your old agency in case they need to hunt down a last file or answer questions.

If you follow these tips, you’ll make it much easier for us to hit the ground running with your account and start turning out great work on your behalf.

And if—GASP!—it’s us you want to leave, well then follow these tips too. We’re professionals, and we know that not all client relationships last forever. Just be up front with us and we’ll help you transition to your next relationship.

Your Turn

• What steps do you use when you start a new agency relationship (or end an existing one)?

CDG works with new clients every day. Contact Us to get started on fresh new work for you!

[Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos]

Scan that code

If you’re going to create a QR code campaign, you should probably make sure it’s implemented in a place where it will work. Over the holidays, I was visiting a wildlife preserve that offered QR codes along the trail. Unfortunately, there was no data signal available to let us know what the information was.

What did you resolve?

Curious about the most popular resolutions or how likely you are to achieve your resolution? There’s an infographic for that. http://dailyinfographic.com/new-years-resolutions-infographic

If you resolved to upgrade your browser, it’s a good thing. Microsoft is saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 6. Download newer versions from Microsoft.

Rules are rules

It’s nice to know that Google’s rules apply to everyone – even their own products. And when the Chrome browser violated Google’s own rules with their ad campaign, Google punished them by pushing them further down in the search engine results.

Change your password

Call it another New Year’s resolution, but change your passwords. Once hackers have accessed information on one site, they will use the same email/password combination on other sites with an alarmingly high rate of success. Even computer security firms aren’t immune, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal that also identifies the most popular passwords.

If you’ve been keeping an eagle eye on your web stats, you’ve likely seen an uptick in the organic searches that are tallied under the cryptic little label called “Not Provided” (as in, the search term visitors used to get to your site is not provided).

So what gives?

Well, back in October, Google announced that there would be some changes to how keywords data would be presented in Google Analytics. If a user is signed into a Google product (such as GMail), and they perform a search, they do so on the secure version of (https://www.google.com/) Google by default. Any of the searches performed on that secure version are still recorded in Google Analytics as organic visits, but the search terms the user types into the Google search bar are—you guessed it—not provided.

So instead of seeing a breakout of individual search terms used by people logged into their Google accounts, you’ll see all of these visits aggregated under the single label of: “Not Provided.”

Continue reading "Solving the “Not Provided” Conundrum: What A Recent Google Change Means for Your Stats" »

2011 Wrap Up & Lessons Learned

From A List Apart - What I learned about the Web in 2011

From UX Magazine -  Global Lessons from Travel Websites

Social Media most popular online activity

According to a recent comScore report, social networking is now the single most popular online activity, accounting for 1 in 5 online minutes. Facebook now reaches over half of global online audience. Mobile fuels the social addiction – with 64% of smartphone users accessing social networking sites, either through apps or a mobile browser.

Military families are among those increasingly relying on social media to keep in touch. Facebook and BlueStar Families have teamed up to create a Social Media Guide for military families.

Google Image Search

Google is now detecting your device to add some new features to movie and Image Search for mobile and tablet users. Google is trying to anticipate the reason for the search and provide a richer experience such as offering opportunities to purchase movie tickets on your mobile device.

To all of our clients, partners and friends, thank you for another great year.

Highlights of 2011 include the launch of new sites for CQ Roll Call, GastroKids.org and the US-Ireland Alliance, a second iAd mobile campaign for GEICO featuring the Gecko's Secret Savings Society (and winning a Platinum Award for the first one), and the continued growth of Zeus, our custom-built content management system.

From all of us at CDG Interactive, we hope your holidays are delicious and your New Year is sweet.

(And speaking of delicious, check out the entries to our third-annual cookie smackdown competition, above.)

How we search

One word searches are increasing dramatically, possibly as a result of mobile search becoming more popular.

A recent Pew Internet Project report indicates that people are increasing turning to search engines for information about local businesses – an argument for optimizing your Google Places listing.

Just for fun

Open a Google search window and type “let it snow.” Enjoy.

Go to LinkedIn and click to see who has viewed your profile in the last 5 days. Click on any special consultants you see listed to get a special holiday message.

Google released Google Zeitgeist 2011 – what we searched for.  You can also see what we talked about on Twitter with HootSuite’s top trending topics of 2011.

Tomorrow night Google and NORAD will help you track Santa’s journey as he brings presents to all the good boys and girls. (I hear cookies can help.)

I first passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test in 2009; since the certification is only good for 18 months, that means I was up for requalification this year.

I took the test—and passed it—again this November. (Yay!)

Here’s what I’ve learned after 2 years and 2 different test-taking experiences.

Test Basics

As before, the test is priced at $50 and your Individual Qualification is valid for 18 months. But now, you must score 80% or higher (rather than 75%) to pass.

Also as before, you’ll have a total of 90 elapsed minutes to complete the test’s 70 multiple-choice questions, and you can pause and come back within a time period of 120 hours (5 days).

As you go through the questions, you can right click to strike through any answers that are obviously incorrect. If this functionality was available before, I don’t remember it; I definitely found it helpful for some of the trickier questions.

If you’re uncertain if any of your responses, mark those questions for completion later. This puts them into a list that you can review before submitting, or at any time during the test.

If you don’t pass the test, you can re-take it again—but you have to wait 14 days and pay another $50.

• Learn more: Google’s FAQ on the IQ test.

Test Prep

The best way to prepare remains by reviewing the extensive series of Conversion University videos. This time, I took some notes as I viewed them so I’d have them available for reference as I took the test.

Example Test Questions Content

Once again, the set of questions you’re presented with will vary from person to person. So knowing the exact list of questions one person was asked will not tell you what questions to expect on your own test.

Having said that, here are some examples of the question content from the test I took:

• Why you wouldn’t see CPC data in your reports, and how to configure a profile to see only CPC data.
• How and why to use virtual pageviews, and the use of _trackPageView().
• Attributes tracked when manually tagging an AdWords campaign.
• A word problem on filtering that described the way a site constructed the URLs for its product pages and then asked which set of filters would produce the desired result.
• Using Urchin and Google Analytics together.
• How to track custom search engines.
• What a high bounce rate on a landing page associated with a keyword suggests.
• Goals: how many you can have, how they’re tracked.
• Best practices for creating profiles vs. accounts for multiple clients.
• Tracking the number of transactions vs. tracking the number of goal completions on an e-commerce site.
• Understanding $Index.
• How Google Analytics tracks visitors and the difference between first-party and third-party cookies.
• Filter order and whether it’s important.

Looking at this list, you can see that the test content covers the major areas of functionality and concepts for Google Analytics.

So imagine you are creating the IQ test for someone else. What questions would you ask? You can get pretty close to the real thing by watching the Conversion University videos, looking at the subject matter groups they are arranged by, and then making a list of the main topic items for your questions.

What to Watch Out For

Google is in the middle of transitioning Analytics from the old interface to the new, entirely redesigned version. As of this writing, account owners can choose which version to view, but the new version will become the only option in January 2012.

The test question material didn’t rely on the version of the interface you’re using in order to determine the right answers to the questions.

However, the Conversion University videos are still using screen images from the old version.

If you think you’d find this confusing, you may want to wait to review for the test until Google has updated the videos to reflect the new Analytics UI.

(And we’re still waiting for an official graphic badge that Individually Qualified analysts can use to promote their now-certified Analytics expertise.)

Your Turn

• Have you taken the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test recently?
• What did you find most challenging?
• What would you change about the test?

Find out what your website’s data is really telling you about your site performance. Our team of Google Analytics Individually Qualified experts can help. Contact us today.

New new Twitter

Just went you got used to new Twitter, there’s a new new version. And this one includes brand pages. So far those brand pages are limited to 21 advertising partners and charities including CocaCola, DisneyPixar, and McDonalds. They’ll be rolled out to a wider audience over the next few months.

I remember when….

The holidays always make us nostalgic, so here’s blast from the past - see how 20 popular sites looked when they first launched including Google, the Facebook, Apple, and Whitehouse.gov.

Public Messages vs. Direct Messages

In case we all need a reminder about direct vs. public messages (and why you should probably just text when you’re sending your phone number), Charlie Sheen accidentally tweets his phone number.

HTTP Status Cats

In true Internet fashion, there’s now a way to help you remember http status codes… with cats.

Online activity

According to a recent report by comScore, more than 200 billion online videos were viewed in October and over 40% of those were on YouTube. This makes the new YouTube metrics even more important.

Projects are winding down; office parties are ramping up. Before you take off for the holidays is the perfect time to reflect on what’s happened and think about goals for the coming year. Here’s our checklist of things to do now to position yourself for success in 2012.

Continue reading "Top 6 Things You Can Do Right Now to Ensure Success in 2012" »

Location aware deals

You can now add a “Save this to Foursquare” button on your website that allows visitors to save your location to their Foursquare account – they’ll be notified when they are near your location. This is even more interesting now that ScoutMob has partnered with FourSquare – showing available deals when you check in.

Jargonitis

As we’re approaching the end of the year, let’s make an early resolution to not commit any of these jargon-related sins next year. May plain language be with you.

Facebook events

Facebook changes the way event invitations act, and it’s confusing people.

Holiday Cheer

Bing offers a “Magical Holiday Calendar” that opens a new holiday icon each day with links to deals, contests and give-aways.

NORAD will be tracking Santa on his journey again this year and you can follow along with Google Earth.

No idea what to get your co-worker for the office secret Santa gift exchange? Search Engine Watch has you covered with suggestions ranging from gloves make especially for touchscreens to a t-shirt that detects wi-fi signals to a phone case with a built-in bottle opener.