A message from Christophe Berge, Chief Architect & Co-Founder of Agendize.com
Dear Agendize Friends,
Summer is already here and even though many of you have vacation on your mind, the Agendize team is always hard at work improving our services. We’re proud to announce several new features added to Book an Appointment, our online scheduling service.
Here’s a list of your wishes come true:
In the Book an Appointment widget, instead of having customers choose a service and then a staff member, they can now just choose a service and have our platform select the staff member for them. The staff member will automatically be selected by our system following certain rules: staff who have already served your client, those who are the most available or simply by random selection.
Buffer Time. You can now set time aside between two appointments. Buffer time can be used for a delay or a break between appointments. This way, there’s no reason to stress if your appointments are running late and you need a bite to eat, or if you need to allow for travel time between each appointment.
Your customers can now change the date of their appointment or cancel it on their own. The confirmation emails sent to customers by our service now contain a personalized link they can follow to access (and modify) the details of their appointment at any time.
We are working on more new features for Book an Appointment which will be announced on the blog in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
It took some time for many of us to believe that social media has a true ROI. Now that we accept this fact, we’re left searching for the right tools and methods to test it. Integrating social media to your business marketing strategies has many benefits such as increasing public relations and enabling customer service. But at the end of the day, B2B campaigns are mainly measured on generated revenue and leads.
In his blog post on social media metrics on Radian6, @DavidBThomas settled the “confusion” surrounding the words: listening, monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI. It’s important to remember that these buzzwords can also be used to discover the value of marketing campaigns beyond social media. Keep them in mind when measuring your conversion tool campaign ROI too.
Here’s a brief version:
Listening: is the process of learning what people are saying about you and where.
Monitoring: adds the 24/7 component to listening and attempts to make sure you capture all relevant mentions.
Measurement: is the first step toward integrating the results of your social media activities into your larger business processes.
Analytics: Understanding the analytics of your social media activities is no different than understanding the value of your PR or marketing activities; you have to do the hard work to tie your activities to conversions, whatever that means for your business.
ROI: in social media is thorny, in part because some people expect it should be easy to track because it’s online. You can, but only if you do the work of building the connections.
Conversion tools like Click- to- Call and Book an Appointment can be great for ROI since they welcome more visitors to call and schedule real meetings with your business.
Remember the feeling of studying for a final high school or university exam? Drinking coffee and pulling all-nighters, so you can cram every bit of information into your brain. Imagine how you’d feel when you find out the next day that you weren’t going to receive a grade. Ever! You wouldn’t even have the chance to fail the class. It didn’t matter if you did your homework or not. Nothing would matter because the score will never exist. Psssssh… What a waste of time. I could’ve gone to that party and had the best night of my life, but instead I was drinking coffee and memorizing millions of slides!
Unfortunately, in the world we live in, the scenario above will probably never happen since we rely so heavily on numbers and stats. Look at yourself and see how many numbers describe you.
Our work and lives are valued by many systems of measurements and comparisons: older, younger taller, shorter, richer, bigger, smaller, heavier, better, faster, slower…
For the most part, numbers and stats serve as solid evidence that assure us if we’re on the right track. Especially in the online world where nothing is purely black and white. And understanding website revenues, exposure, traffic and audience can be pretty tricky at times.
At Agendize, we invested quite some time to make sure that every experience with our tools is never tricky, nor futile like studying for a test that will never get graded. What’s a conversion app if you have no way of testing and tracking your success?
Analyze customer behavior and demographics with 24/7 live access to data such as: phone numbers, call times, email addresses, transcripts, keyword traffic, IP/geolocation, browser/operating system information to name few. You can also add Google Analytics integration to centralize your campaign reporting so it’s easy to track all actions and conversion goals.
We hope our analytics brings more meaning to your work and campaigns. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns. We hope to learn from you too. Tell us how we can improve!
Great news: you can now track all of your Agendize actions in your Google Analytics account! In addition to being able to track the actions, you can configure the completed call, chat, appointment, form, save, share and comment actions as conversion goals, with each open of the dialog box being tracked as a step in the funnel to that goal.
Setting it up
To get started on integrating your Agendize actions with your Google Analytics stats, you first need to get the Google Analytics ID for the website on which the Agendize buttons will be placed. To get this ID log in to Google Analytics, and choose the relevant account. On the list of Website Profiles, find the one belonging to the site in question, and copy the UA-XXXXXX-X number immediately to the right of that website’s URL. That is your Google Analytics ID.
Now, log in to your Agendize account and when creating or editing a button, you’ll notice a new block just below the Customization panel:
Check the “Enable Google Analytics Integration” box, and enter the Google Analytics ID you found earlier in the text field, save the button, and you’re done! Once the button code is copied to a page and a visitor starts using it, the activity will be tracked in Google Analytics.
How will my actions appear in Google Analytics?
Your Agendize actions will be sent to Google Analytics as pageviews on fictional pages. When a dialog box loads, “/agendize/<action type>/load” is sent, and when an action is completed (phone call is made, appointment is scheduled, etc.) “/agendize/<action type>/action” is sent.
Configuring Conversion Goals
Given the level of engagement enabled by the Agendize tools, it makes sense to include them as part of your site’s conversion goals. To do so, consult Google’s guide to setting up goals. When you get to step 8, choose “URL Destination”. The URL to enter then depends on which action type you’re looking to track. For a full list of URLs, see the table below.
Configuring Conversion Funnels
If you want to take it one step further and also track each dialog box open, you can add the open to your conversion funnel. To set up the funnel, refer to Google’s guide to defining funnels. On the second step, the URL to enter depends on which action type you’ll be tracking. See the table below for the full list of URLs.
A message from Christophe Berge, Chief Architect & Co-Founder of Agendize.com
