Dive Deeper on the Slate Stage with RHB: Tying It All Together: Optimizing Your Digital Marketing Efforts Across Platforms

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OK, so we're going to get started and I'm going to do a quick introduction of our session today and then we'll get into the content. So today we have our deeper dive session with our slate preferred partner, RHB, tying it all together and optimizing your digital marketing efforts across platforms and for our session. Today we have a couple of housekeeping items. This web and R is going to be recorded and will be available about 24 hours.

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And for today's session, we have Megan Miller from RHP and Christopher Hardy as well to take you guys through our session.

Great thanks Don B. It's really great to be here today with this like Community to discuss a really important topic that I know so many slate users have questions about it, which is how do we fully measure and track our digital marketing efficacy? Chris and I have both field in it.

A lot of questions about this spent a lot of time with various institutions talking through this, and so we're really excited to share some of our strategies with you. Today I'm going to start by saying that I find it really awkward to try to manage slides and camera at the same time, and so I'm just going to turn mine off until it's Q&A time. Thank you for indulging me there. It just makes it a little bit easier for me. So thank you.

This session is presented by RHB. We are a higher education consultancy that just celebrated its 30th anniversary last month. We have guided more than 300 institutions. Tord greater relevance and ultimately success in achieving enrollment retention and revenue goals.

HRB delivers expertise across four practices, including slate and related technologies, where we have a footprint in more than 10% of all slate instances, offering best in class implementations, diagnostics, advanced builds and training.

Illinois allow me to quickly introduce the two of us as well. My name is Megan Miller. My pronouns are she and her and I serve as a senior integration consultant with VHB, which means that I have the really awesome opportunity to guide an advice clients at slate institutions on how they can implement and optimize their instances. It's it's a lot of fun. I really love getting to work with a lot of schools and do do slate well.

It Prior to joining VHB in 2019, I worked at Seattle Pacific University for six years where I was a slight captain and the director of Enrollment Communications.

I am joined today by Chris Hardy. Chris is a member of the PHB Cooperative, which is a group of slate experts at campuses across the country who partner with VHB in support of our clients and in his day job, Chris serves as the director of Web and Digital Marketing at Messiah University.

Today we're talking about tying it all together and really integrating marketing efforts. We have three big questions that we will be answering today. First. How do we track conversions? Will explore how we can properly attribute our lead generation and conversion using slate forms and our advertising platforms.

And Speaking of platforms, how do we integrate platforms? We'll discuss how we can employ integration and test automation skill tools to bring data into slate, and will also examine how to use those records externally for retargeting and look alike audiences.

And finally, how do we monitor engagement? We will impact some best practices for your slate emails so that you can leverage the metrics that exist within your instance. And we'll talk about how to utilize Google Analytics and Google Data Studio to do the rest.

And we're going to cover all this and also hopefully have some time at the end for your questions. So we better get going, and so without further ado, I give you the one and only Chris Hardy who will get us started with conversion tracking Chris.

Alright, well thank you Megan. Let's go ahead and dive into question number one here how do we track conversions and even more specifically, how do we track conversions coming from those slate forms that we all have on our website? And typically when we hear this question?

It's a client who's coming to us and they're working with the digital marketing agency. Or maybe there's an inhouse shop that's running digital ads for them and they're trying to figure out how do we attribute leads that are coming into slate back to the specific campaign where those leads were acquired from. So they're really just trying to figure out what's our return on investment for these different campaigns that were running. So unfortunately there's not a real quick and easy way to do this. It's definitely possible, but it's definitely worth it as well. So we do have two recommended approaches.

For tracking these conversions and this is kind of the first step to digital campaign Attribution. So the first approach is tracking slate form submissions in our ad platforms and web analytics so your ad platforms or things like Google Ads, Facebook ads, simplify snap ads, all those good things and also web analytics be tools like Google Analytics, which people are typically using. So really what we're trying to do here is send a signal.

When a slate form is submitted to these different platforms, they know hey, this isn't just a regular page view. Something special happened, a conversion happened and we want to count that as a conversion, and you know these different platforms. The second approach is capturing UTM data and slate, and at first glance these might seem a little redundant that we're doing these two different approaches, but hopefully through the course of this presentation I'll make the case why it's important to take both of these approaches when measuring digital campaign Attribution.

So if you're asking yourself, what is UTM, there's probably a few of you here that don't know what that is, so the definition is urchin tracking module. If that name doesn't do much for you, think about it more as a universal tracking method, so all the different digital ad platforms, whether it's Facebook or Google.

We're going to allow you to track across other platforms using this universal tracking method, so they're all going to allow you to enable UTM, and that allows you again to track from one platform to another. So maybe you're going from Facebook ads to Google Analytics. You know. Unlike proprietary proprietary proprietary tracking, excuse me that you can do within those platforms. The UTM is universal and allows you to track across all these different platforms, so the way it works is if you have a.

And add you're running and you're linking to your website. Maybe we're going to this yourwebsite.edu. You can add what's called a query string and that's everything. After that question marks, that's that's the query string. And in that query string you could add UTM parameters and values. So here's kind of what we're doing here. We see the UTM underscore source parameter and the value for that is parent Email 6, and then we have UTM medium equals email and UTM campaign.

Equals huge slate, so when Google Analytics sees a visitor coming to the website that has those UTM parameters, it treats them a little different. It catalogs that visit and that user session into a specific module within Google Analytics that allows you to see campaign data, so that's why it's so important to use this UTM data. But what makes it even more powerful is we're not only tracking sessions and visits from these UTM campaigns.

We're actually able to tie that UTM data to the specific user, so even if that user leaves your website after clicking an ad and comes back at a later date, we're still able to attribute, you know, specific conversion that happened at a later date back to the campaign where that UTM data originated from, so that's a row high level look at UTM data. Hopefully that helped if you weren't sure what it was and how it worked.

But let's circle back around to this two recommended approaches and take a deeper look into tracking slate form submissions in ad platforms and web analytics. So imagine for a second, this is a perspective student and they've gone to an ad platform. Let's say it's Facebook and clicked an ad.

And then they go to your website and they submit a slate form. So this is where we want to send a signal to our different AD platforms, and we're going to use a tool, a tool called Google Tag Manager and we won't get too much into that right now. We'll talk about that more, but Google Tag Manager is going to help us communicate with these different ad platforms so that they know that a conversion has happened and the reason I think it's really important to set up these conversions, and this is a screenshot from Facebook ads. As you can see here.

In the screenshot we have conversion setup for registered foreign account, so this is when someone clicks an ad comes through our website and they start the application process by registering for an account. So we want to know when that happens you can see we also have a conversion setup for slate form submit and I want to be really intentional here. We've set this up.

To track all slate forms, not just a specific form that's associated with the campaign and the reason we do that versus just tracking a specific slate form here is because we see a lot that perspective students after clicking those ads they want to shop around before they fill out an RFI form. They want to answer the question you know, do you have my major? Maybe they want to do a specific rec sports, so they want to shop around and figure out if they can do all that and then once they get their answer, maybe at that point.

They'll go and they'll fill out an RFI form, but maybe it's a different RFI form. It's not the one from that original landing page, so whenever we set up these flatform tracking, we always try to make sure it's like a catchall tracking that's going to basically catch any slate form anywhere on your website, regardless if it's an embedded form, an event registration form, or a form that's embedded or on your slate sub domain site. So when you see that slate form submit, that's what we're referring to there.

But the beauty of having these conversions set up in your ad platforms is you compare that data with with information on the amount of money you've spent. So now we can actually see a cost per lead and in Facebook they refer to it as a cost per result. But typically you would have to wait until the end of the campaign and you have to kind of figure out. Alright, what was our cost per lead for this campaign? By looking under the hood and slate and then you know, looking at the amount of money you spent on the campaign by having it set up.

In your ad platform allows you to see that cost per lead data in real time, so every time a new lead comes in that cost per lead is re calculated when you spend more money on the campaign that cost per lead is recalculated. So that's really valuable information because you can use that to optimize your campaign in real time versus waiting for the campaign to be over to have that information.

Another reason it's really important to capture form submissions in your ad platforms is we have different ways of calculating attribution, so here you have highlighted in green we're looking at click attribution, so this is when someone comes to the website after clicking an ad and they fill out a form, but it's a lot of fun is we can also track view attribution, so this is if someone sees the ad doesn't click the ad, but at some point down the road within a specified time frame.

They come to the website and they submit a form. So because Facebook and Google have some proprietary tracking, they can actually track this view attribution that we can't do will never be able to do that in slate or even in tools like Google Analytics. That's why it's really important to set this tracking up in multiple different places.

Now another thing we can do in our ad platforms is optimize our campaigns for conversions. So here's a screenshot from Google ads and we're setting up a new campaign and it's asking us what do you want to focus on and we're saying conversions. So once you set that up, Google is actually going to adjust the bid strategy for maximum conversion, so it's actually going to automatically update the bid strategy based on the conversions that it's seeing.

And this seems like a pretty routine setting, but it's actually pretty powerful because Google and Facebook, both of them, have a lot of data under the hood, so there's a lot of data points that they can see that we can't see as advertisers. So for example, things like estimated household income and different affinity groups or demographic data or interest groups. Google and Facebook have all that information, so as the campaigns run as people come to the website from the campaign and start converting.

Google and Facebook will start creating a model based on the data from those converted users and adjust the bid strategy based on that. So for example, if you're running a Google search ad for accounting programs in Pennsylvania, if someone Googles accounting programs in Pennsylvania and they have a higher likelihood to match that model, Google ads.

He's going to bid more for that user, so your ads are going to show up higher on the page versus if you're someone who is less likely to convert, they're going to bid less and you're going to show up lower on the page, so a lot of good information and a lot of things to consider when it comes to setting up conversions in your ad platforms. But one really important question is what happens after they submit the form, and unfortunately this is something that we're never going to be able to track in our different AD platforms and in Google Analytics.

This is where we need slate to kind of peek in and see down funnel, you know what's happening after they submit that form? Are they applying six months later? Are they enrolling three months after that? This is all really good information that helps us better determine return on investment.

So let's go back to that perspective student, and imagine that they've they've clicked on our ad again.

They go to our website, they submit a form and when that form is submitted, obviously all the data that they've added their first name, last name, email address, phone number that all gets inputed into slate. We all know that that works. That happens, but what we what we want to be really intentional about is making sure that we're also pulling in the UTM data that came along with that ad click, and making sure that gets stored and slate as well.

So the good news is if someone clicks on an ad goes to the landing page and there's a form on that landing page. If they submit that form, that UTM data gets collected and stored in a form field. In Slate, the slate form does this because that UTM data is in the URL when that form is submitted, and that's how it pulls the UTM data.

However, if a perspective student clicks on an ad goes to a web page and then visits another page, and when that next page loads, the UTM data gets lost, it doesn't stay in the URL, and in this situation the UTM data would not be captured and stored within Slate because that page where the form was submitted. There's no UTM data in the URL, so Fortunately there's some hacks we can do to help with this situation, and we'll talk about how to do that here in a second. So let's circle back around.

To that first approach, setting up slate form tracking in our ad platforms, and let's look at how we might set that up to track those conversions. So for those of you who work in Slate on a daily basis, if someone came to you, maybe someone from an ad agency and said hey, we need you to install this Facebook Pixel when a form is submitted.

Our knee jerk reaction typically is to go to that specific form, go to the communications module and click on web confirmation.

And then through the source code there you can add that Facebook Pixel. However, I do want to recommend that we don't do that. There's a few technical reasons and unfortunately we don't have enough time to discuss all those technical reasons we want to avoid that. There's also a lot of governance reasons we want to avoid doing this. If you're at a really big school where you may be different colleges and schools within the university are using different agencies, and maybe you have multiple instances of slate, it gets really hard to handle.

All these tracking pixels across all your different forms. So at VHB we recommend a tool called Google Tag Manager, and if you're not familiar with tag Manager, it really is. It's in the name. It's A tag management system, so think of A tag as something like a tracking script or a Facebook pixel. So what we can do with Google Tag Manager is we can associate a trigger with A tag and triggers or logic based. So we can say if PG equals this then fire this tag.

That tag, you know, might be the Facebook Pixel. Or we could say if form submitted on this page then fire this tag. So there's a lot of different options in Google Tag Manager to allow us to fire those different tracking mechanisms as needed.

The good news is in Google Tag Manager, there's a specific trigger called the Form submission trigger, and this trigger only fires A tag when the form is actually submitted. So one thing we hear sometimes with clients as they come in and say hey, we're working with a digital ad agency and they're telling us that we get 50 submissions a month from this campaign, and when we go into slate we only see 20. You know something must be wrong with slate, and typically what we find is that agency is using click tracking, so they're tracking every time that.

That form is submitted or someone is clicking that submit button, but what happens a lot is maybe there's a required field somewhere on that form that that perspective student is missing so they're clicking, submit and then they're getting an error message and having to go back and fill in that required field and then hit submit again in that instance, if you're just using click tracking that that pixel would have fired multiple times, so using this form submission trigger, it's really important because it only fires when the form is actually submitted.

So if we go to our website and look at a slate form, if we look at the source code, you'll see that there is a very specific form ID that lives with that form. And the good news is, Slate's done a really good job in the way that it structures all of its different forms. So if it's a embedded form, if it's a four mana portal page, or if it's a form for an enrollment event registration form, they're all going to be structured the same and have the same Form ID. So what we can do in Google Tag Manager when we're.

Creating that trigger we can use that form submission trigger like I just mentioned, but we can reference that Form ID. So here we're saying win Form ID matches and we're using regular expression here, so we're saying when the Form ID starts with form underscore and ends with underscore container fire. This trigger. So earlier when we were looking at the Facebook dashboard, I was saying how important it is to track all slate forms, not just a specific form associated with the campaign.

So this is how we would do that. This is that catchall trigger that's in the catch. Any slate form, regardless of where it is on your website, and even if we add a slate form, let's say we create a new event type after the campaign goes live. This catchall trigger would even basically capture it would capture those new forms that are added to the website. We wouldn't have to go in and update or modify anything, so it's just a really good way to track form submissions using Google Tag Manager.

But let's say there is a specific form on our website, maybe it's for internal use only. We can also exclude specific forms using that unique ID that also lives in that Form ID. So here we're saying if the form includes this isn't this, but if it doesn't, but make sure it doesn't include this. That's how that trigger works, and that trigger is referencing all of these different tags below, so maybe we're working with multiple agencies, maybe were.

We're firing tags for Google Ads and Facebook ads and Google Analytics. All those different tags live right here and you can see how easy it is to associate them with that trigger. So maybe we switch agencies and bring in someone new. It's easy to see what's out there already to remove it or update it without having to go into slate into all those different forms into the form communication tool and update them here.

So that was a really quick look at setting up form conversions. Tracking with Google Tag manager. Hopefully that helps. If the Google Tag Manager stuff was a little overhead, please take some screenshots. If you have a web team or the marketing team, they're probably going to be more familiar with Google Tag Manager and those screenshots will definitely make more sense to them.

So let's move on to that second approach. Setting up UTM tracking in slate, and this is where it gets a little tricky, because again, if you remember there was some native functionality within Slate. If that utn data was in the URL when the form was submitted, we can track it, but what we want to do here is make sure that we can track that form as they go from page to page, and that UTM data persist with that user. So here we're going to store that UTM data data.

Part of a cookie in that Cookie will follow that user from page to page and even from session to session.

And then on all of our form pages, are enrollment forms were going to fire a script that listens for that cookie, and if there are UTM values in the cookie, it's going to inject it into hidden fields on the form, so that perspective student when they submit the form, they never know that there are hidden fields on the form, but when they submit it, that data makes its way into slate along with first name, last name, email and whatever information you're collecting in that form. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Megan, and she's going to talk about what we need to do with that data once it hits late.

Yeah thanks Chris. OK so we have this cookie that has hitched a ride over to our slate form when the responder clicked on our advertisement and we know that we can pass the UTM parameter values into slate and that we're going to want to use some hidden fields on the form to capture this. But so how should we store this information within Slate so that it's accessible and usable?

We could take really one of three approaches.

The first option would be. We could create some person scope fields for UTM and map those hidden fields to there.

That makes it pretty easy to query for the UTM's, but the problem with this approach is that it assumes that there is a one to one relationship between the person and digital campaigning. As we all know, our leads may be exposed to too. They may respond to many different campaigns, and so we would run the risk of overwriting data. If a student responds more than once.

Given that we're going to say no to this approach, next we could consider.

Keeping those fields unmapped, then use some configurable joints queries to join to the form responses and pulleys values.

That will address the issue of the one to many relationship, but this gets complicated really quickly. You might have dozens of lead forms that you're working with, and so you'll either be using a person scope query and joining to dozens of form responses to get the UTM values from each one, which will get pretty messy as you try to keep your data organized. That's a lot of concatenating and coalesce, sing, or you'll have to have dozens of queries.

Each with a different form as its base, and so again we are going to vote no on this solution.

There's got to be a way to record data in a one to many fashion without it being scattered across a bunch of different objects. In our instance, right? You bet there is. We can make use of one of my favorite slate features, the entity.

Entities will allow us to have many rows of data connected to one person, and we can also use the entity itself as the base for our queries and reports to get at the most succinct and useful information. So I think this is our winner.

Now you'll want to set this entity up with a person scope. Generally speaking, we are working at the person level. When we were reporting on our marketing, you will want to create this as free text fields for the different parameters as that will allow us to easily map our cookie values within the form. Don't use props, use free or free text fields.

We will be able to manage the one to many relationships that are person scope fields couldn't accommodate and will have similar querying and reporting than we would have had with unmapped form fields.

So on the screen here is an example of how this would be configured where there are hidden fields containing that UTM data from the cookie. I will note that in this example I UN hid the UTM fields on this form so that I could display what a form submission is actually recording. This form is sending campaign content, medium source term and GA user ID all into a new entity row for each responder.

Each time they respond and this becomes especially useful when we get into reporting will be able to use that entity itself as the base for our report. So we will have one row per set of UTM parameters, and since that into T. Rowe has a one to one relationship to the person. We can also tie in some data about the lead itself if we want to. Now, if you're going to report this way in Slate, you might even consider using translation codes.

To make your campaign names or your campaign mediums, things like that a little more self explanatory.

I could spend a lot more time talking about all this, but our time is pretty limited and so for now, let's move on to question #2, which is how do we integrate platforms? How can we take the data that lives outside of Slate and get it back into Slate and vice versa? We were just discussing how we can optimize our forms to better track Attribution and conversion for those leads that respond to digital campaigns via slate form, and hopefully that was useful for you.

But there are going to be times when our digital strategies are going to be best served by using a form that lives outside of sleep.

And what are we going to do then?

Backing up just a little bit as many of you probably know, several social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, offer advertisers the opportunity to capture leads directly within the platform by using what are known as instant forms or lead Gen forms.

These tools will prefill a brief form with information from a user's account. So when a user clicks on an advertisement, all they really have to do is verify that everything is correct, then click submit. As you can imagine, imagine the simplicity with that is that form abandoned rates are significantly reduced, and the barriers for getting new leads into your pipeline or lowered. But of course if we are going to actually get that, we actually have to get those leads.

Into our pipeline, which is Slate. In order for us to really have those digital ads pay off. So how do we do that?

Well, one option would be to go into the Facebook ad Manager or LinkedIn marketing Solutions. Download those responders into a spreadsheet and then upload that into slate.

This will work, but that strategy has a lot of downsides. It's a manual process, it's inefficient. If someone submits that form on a Friday night, it might be several days until they're imported in, etc and so that's not a long term solution. There are other options, though. If you have done work in the digital space, you may have come across the term webhook before. Webhooks are similar to APIs, in that they are used to allow applications to communicate with each other.

So that data can go from one to the other. But while an API runs constantly, webhook is only going to fire when some sort of trigger occurs. It's basically the difference between having a doorman Anna doorbell your API. Is that doorman waiting outside and always ready to open the door to visitors? Your webhook is a doorbell saying hey, there's someone on your porch, but only when it's pressed.

If you aren't expecting a constant stream of guests, it's a lot more practical to have a doorbell land to pay the salary for someone to manage the entrance to your building, because that door Bell is only going to be used when it's needed.

So in digital marketing webhooks are doorbells, they enable us to bring in new data on demand, and we can configure webhooks that work with slates web services.

Oh here at VHB, the integration tool that we utilizes Zapier.

If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a task automation platform that allows users to identify both the data source and the data points that should trigger specific actions within another system, and then push that information along to where it needs to go. And the best part about it is that it is affordable. Hurray. Let's say that when Elite fills out and Facebook instant form, we want to send that person's name, email address, and information about that advertisement.

Over to sleep to create a new record. Zapier can do that, and configuration will require us to do some work in both our instance and in Zapier itself.

To get started.

Over in Zapier we are going to create what's called is app which is a workflow that will run based upon a specific trigger. For this app we're going to need to connect Facebook and Zapier and we're lucky because Zapier actually has a standard trigger for Facebook, which means it already knows how to go grab Facebook data once it's connected to the correct account. That's pretty easy peasy.

Now we need to set things up so that Zapier can actually send this information over to Slate. So step one, let Zapier talk to sleep. It's app here is going to send any data into our instance. It needs to have access to our instance, which means we need to configure a service account for it within the user permissions section of the database.

You don't need to give that account any additional permissions though. A username and a password will do the trick.

Will also want to create our custom source format and Slate which will use Jason. This requires us to update the source formats XML configuration so that Slate knows what the headers are for all that data that's coming over well. Then use those headers to map the data coming in and this is a great place to use that append values feature in the value mappings so that we've got everything pointing in the right place from the start.

Well then head back over to our ZAP and tell Zapier how to transform that data so that's late. Can bring it in. This requires us to create what's called a custom request where we set up an XML data configuration in SAP year that will correspond with the source format XML configuration that we created in Slate.

We then gives after the credentials for the service account that we set up and then today our new leads move right into Slate.

Now remember that you'll potentially have a one to many relationship for these ads, and one person could theoretically engage with several campaigns.

So as we discussed before, when you're bringing these records in back into Slate, you don't want to map any campaign data to any person scope fields. Again, we could consider mapping to an entity like we talked about before. We also could use interactions to track digital responders and interactions. Have the added benefit of being able to be used as origin sources, so that's a compelling reason to go that route. You can map out some of that campaign information to interaction scoped.

Fields like date, parent code, and subcode so that you've got that full record on an individual's timeline.

We've spent the last few minutes exploring how we can bring our leads from our external platforms into Slate, but of course.

We'd also like to send our lead data back out of Slate to those platforms into in order to really optimize our multi channel marketing. And for that I will turn things back over to Chris.

All right, thank you Megan. So before I get into talking about passing slate data off into Facebook, I want to speak really high at a high level about digital marketing, and my guess is most of you are most people when you think of digital marketing, you probably think of it as more of a lead generation tactic, right? So we're using digital marketing.

To drum up new interest in our institution or maybe in a new program. But what I want to challenge you today is to think about digital marketing also as a good way. A great way really to do lead nurturing. So maybe we have a really healthy top of funnel and we want to focus more on nurturing and cultivating those current leads already in our system. And the good news is this is where Slate can really shine. It can really help us in this with this tactic.

Regardless, if you're doing YouTube ads or Facebook or Instagram or Google Display, most of these platforms have what's referred to as customer list retargeting, so this is where you upload a list of your customers. Or in our case in higher education perspective students you upload that list to the different ad platforms and they'll spin through that list of customers and say, OK well we have users who match here, here and here, and they'll actually let you.

Advertised to those specific users in your customer list and this can be really, really powerful and I would encourage you instead of just doing a large customer list. Really think through how to segment your customer list retargeting into specific stages within your funnel. So for example, at my university Messiah University, we do search in house, so we have an email campaign that goes out. We also have a postcard.

So while we're doing all that, we also have a segmented customer list that just includes those prospects. Those purchase names that we purchased for that search campaign, and we send them out to the different ad platforms and do things like YouTube where we show our promo video for those people that are getting that search campaign and the goal here is we don't have like a really strong call to action really. Just trying to generate some brand awareness. So when they finally do get that email or they get that postcard, they say Oh yeah, Messiah university.

I saw an ad for them the other day, so that's one way we can use a segmented customer list retargeting, maybe for inquiries for the upcoming start term. We want to promote an application fee waiver so we can run a an ad just to that specific segment. For that apply today for free ad. Or maybe we have an event coming up for admitted students and we want to make make them aware of that upcoming event. So there's lots of different ways to use customer list retargeting.

You can think through some options. I'm sure at your institution as well.

But typically, the way that this is worked is we've gone into slate. We've created a query, identified that population that we want to see those ads that customer list, and we've downloaded that as a CSV file and then re uploaded that to the different ad platforms for that customer list. The problem is, the more personalized we're making our marketing, the more up-to-date those customer lists need to be. So for example, I shared the example.

Of the apply today for free ad. So if we're only updating our customer list once a month, if your perspective student clicks on that ad and applies, you know they could still see that ad for a few weeks after applying, so we don't want that to happen. We want to make sure that those customer lists are getting updated more regularly at least once a week. So the good news is Slate can help here. So Slate has done some integration with the Facebook marketing.

API or sleep can actually generate and create customer list in Facebook and also update those customer lists as frequently as we need them.

So this is actually pretty easy to do and to set up if you go into Slate, go into the database module and click on deliver configuration. You'll see at the very bottom of that page you have the ability to add an account.

So click on that ad account link and you'll see a few different services options here and click on the Facebook ads service. And once you do that, slates actually going to bounce you over to Facebook and someone's going to need to log in here. And this is where it gets a little tricky because the person who's setting this up and slate also needs to have access to the Facebook ad accounts. So especially at the large schools that are very siloed, this can get a little tricky little sticky.

But try to figure out a way to get one person access to both of these, and then once that person logs in through Facebook, slates going to bounce them or Facebook will bounce them back over to Slate where they can select the specific ad account that they have access to that they want to sync with slate.

So once you do that, Facebook and Slate are sync their connected. But what we haven't done at this point is told Slate which specific perspective students we want to send over to our ad platforms as a part of that customer list. So this is where you go in and you just you just create a regular query, add the filter that you want for that specific group of students, but where it gets kind of tricky as you want to pay a lot of attention to the specific exports.

So the Facebook Marketing API is a little picky when it comes to the column headers or the export names. So for example if we add first name in Slate that export it's titled first. But as you can see over here in the left, Facebook wants it to be called FN. So definitely do do some research. There is a help guide on Facebook's website that outlines all the different column headers. So for example here you can see first name should be FN.

Last name should be Ellen, and there's even some other formatting things we need to think about. So for example, with country, Facebook is looking for the ISO two letter country code, so Luckily there is an export specifically for that ISO. Two letter country code and slate that we can use.

And the reason it's really important to pay attention to that column header names and the formatting is that Facebook is pretty particular with how it matches people. So let's say I am a perspective student in your instance of slate over here on the left, and I used myoutlook.com email when I registered or filled out that RFI form, let's pretend to that. I just filled out a dummy phone number because I didn't want you to call me if in Facebook. When I created my account, I used a Gmail.

Email account and I used my real phone number. What would happen here in this situation is Facebook would say wait a minute like there's not enough information here to prove that these two Chris parties are the same person, so we're not going to match them.

However, if we have multiple exports, more data points, you can see here, we've added my gender, age and state and pencil art, state and city. Now, at this point Facebook and say wait a minute like even though the email address is different and the phone number is different, we have enough information to confirm that these two Chris Hardee's or the same person. So we're going to let you advertise to this Chris RT. So typically you'll see a match rate of anywhere between 55 and 70% on these customer list.

So if you have, you know, for example 100,000 people in your customer list, you could see upwards of 70,000 perspective students getting matched where you can advertise to them through those different platforms.

So once you have your exports defined, you can click over here to scheduled export.

And this is where you're going to set up your destination. So you would select Facebook audience.

We can then select the specific account so maybe have access to multiple accounts that you've connected with slates. You'd have to select the specific account you want to send to.

This is where you're going to put the audience name, so this is what shows up in Facebook after you've made the connection. So I like to add or preface this with Slate. So once I'm in Facebook I can see that the specific slate audiences versus the web, retargeting, and lookalike audiences that I have their set up as well.

Definitely set up a failure notification to an email just in case something goes wrong. You're aware of it and then you can identify your delivery window. So this is just where you're telling Slate. OK, every night at 2:00 AM every day of the week, we want to send this information over to Facebook and update that customer list. So once you've done that and once that delivery window is triggered, all that data gets passed over into Facebook and you'll see it there.

The next time you log in.

So that's it. That's how we set up tracking in Facebook and set up that integration to push those customer list over into Facebook from Slate.

So I'm gonna go ahead and pass it off to Megan and she's gonna talk about question #3.

Thanks, Chris. Already we have covered two of our very big questions and now we know how we can track our conversions and integrate our platforms. And this brings us to question #3 how do we monitor engagement? We're all doing a lot of really creative, really hard work and we want to be sure that what we're doing is hitting the mark. Today we're going to specifically focus on our slate email marketing. And as was the case with the previous two.

Questions our strategy will include optimizing our set up in our instance and also utilizing tools outside of Slate. Let's start with deliver as those of you who know me know that I love deliver just tremendously. So I'm excited to start talking about this as we know we can get a snapshot of how any email or drip populations emails are performing right within the interface with our delivery statistics.

We'll get delivery and bounce rates. The number of opens and unique opens our count of clicks and unique clicks. An opt out and we can take it even further. Now with this new delivery report and tracking report, queries that utilized configurable joins which allow us to get to some really helpful details about the recipient or other data points that don't exist in the messages table. But sometimes we're going to want to examine things differently.

Maybe we want to compare how the various messages in a campaign are performing so that we can identify any emails that aren't performing as well. Maybe we want to explore the engagement for all of our event marketing messages over the course of an admission cycle. Or maybe we'd like to know what the top five performing emails were for admitted students this year.

All those scenarios are ones worse. This late reporting tool will be helpful.

And while we don't have time today to talk through all of those nuances of email marketing report since late, I do want to take a few minutes to highlight some best practices for optimizing your deliver messages for reporting purposes.

First of all.

Make your folder structure do the heavy lifting for you by effectively organizing your messages and folders. Your report filters and exports become much simpler. So instead of filtering for a specific set of 15 search messages, which can get pretty complicated when you have a lot of emails in your instance, you can instead it filter for all messages within your search folder in deliver. That's a much simpler process.

Instead of creating a separate report data part for each group of messages, which would be a lot for you to maintain, you can have one day to part with a group by export of folder and then a drill down to the message instead. That is going to make your marketing reports much simpler to maintain and instead of reporting on all admins who have clicked on one of many deposit emails.

Which might require you to sort through a huge number of messages in your filter list instead. You can simply filter for admins who have clicked on a message within the Confirm folder, so you will never have to worry that you somehow missed an email or two when you're building that folder for that filter. I mean now when it comes to this folder structure, I generally recommend that you identify the various types of communications you're running out of, deliver and make those the top level level.

Folders so you'll end up with folders for drip marketing, event marketing application, messaging, etc. Then use one of the use those subfolders for the specific populations you have for each communications type. So under drip marketing you'd have folders for senior inquiries, junior prospects transfer applicants first, your admins, etc. Some schools may choose to flip this around and start at the top level with populations and that's.

That's fine too. The only caveat there is that sometimes messages might be sent to more than one population, and so then you need to think through how to approach that scenario.

Once you've got your folders set up nicely, make sure that your naming conventions are both intuitive and sortable. This especially applies to drip marketing, where you might want to have a row of data for each message of the campaign in sequential order. When you're doing reports. As you know, Slate is going to default to organizing your report exports alphabetically, but the names of your messages are probably not going to be in alphabetical order by default.

Therefore, for your sequential messages, it's really helpful to add the number in the sequence to the front of that messages name so that you end up with something like 01 introduction O2 location 03 academics so on and so forth. I always use the two digit number in the sequence because when it comes to mailing names, slate is identifying those numerals singularly, which means that if you have more than 9 messages in a sequence.

Slate will sort it so that any messages from 10 to 19, which I'll start with the one are listed after message one and then message 234 and so on will show in the list. We want to have messages one through 9 display before message 10, and so 2 digit numbers will help us work around that little quirk.

And along with that, please be thinking about how to convey the content of the message when you give that mailing a name, develop your email names with reporting in mind. I'll say that again, it's really important. Develop your email names with reporting in mind what is going to be the most useful information for someone who is reviewing a marketing report? Generally speaking, I find the MTX summaries something where you're talking about. The theme of each message to be your best bet.

And when you combine that with the numbering structure like I mentioned, you'll be able to clearly capture both the cadence and the content of your emails within your slate report.

And finally, we'll want to leverage one of the great shortcuts that exists in deliver when we're building out our emails, were able to set up UTM's for our emails directly in the in the deliver interface, and when we do, this slate will automatically append all our UTM parameters to every link in our message when creating our message, we're going to set UTM Stu enabled and then add in the campaign medium source term and content.

Slate will then take those data points an append them to all of our links, which sets the sets up, sets us up to be able to report on this data within Google Analytics, and for that I'm going to hand things back over to Chris and he'll explain what all this entails.

Yeah, thank you Megan. So as Megan mentioned when we add those UTM fields and enable that tracking and deliver, it's automatically going to add those values to all the different links in that specific email. So if those links are linking to a web page that is using Google Analytics, it's going to allow us to see what that perspective is. Perspective student is doing once they hit that website and that webpage. So a few of the things we can track in Google Analytics.

Are the time on site the number of pages per session, the specific content that's being viewed, the time of day that people are clicking on those links, different types of engagement data? So maybe they're watching YouTube videos we can. We can see that maybe they were scrolling down a page or clicking on interactive elements. We can see that type of thing in Google Analytics as well. We can also see completed enrollment forms and even estimated revenue generated if we've set that up.

So there's a lot of really cool things that we can do and track within Google Analytics that we might not necessarily be able to do. Using things like ping and slate.

And I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about Google Analytics. It is a great tool, but it's not great for reporting. And what I really want to focus on in the next 5 minutes here is how to create a great report for our different email campaigns. And to do that, we're going to use Data Studio. And here's the good news. Data Studio is a completely free tool that allows you to pull in data from Google Analytics, which is also a free tool. So everything I'm going to run it getting ready to show you.

Can be done for free, so here's an example of a Google Data Studio report I put together for my University, and as you can see on the left side of the screen here we have a number of pages within this data studio report. So if I click on overview, we see the second page of the report and we're answering some of those popular questions we hear from stakeholders on key performance indicators. So for example, here we can see the bounce rate, we can see the average session duration.

The number of pages per session. If we look down the page a little bit to 2nd chart, we can see traffic to the website from different email campaigns and this is where it gets a lot of fun because this isn't a static report that the end user or the stakeholder can actually engage with this report. So if they hover over a specific date they can see OK. On December 2nd we had 96 visits. From this software's junior search email campaign. So it really allows that stakeholder to engage with the data.

And even do things like filter. So in the top right of this report I can actually Click to filter by the individual email campaigns that were running. So if I wanted to see just traffic from that sophomore junior search campaign, I could filter this entire report just to show that campaign. So instead of needing a report for all these different campaigns, we could just have one report and allow stakeholders to then filter the report down.

Moving on to the next page, we can see the specific web page content they're engaging with, whether it's a main website content or maybe a slate page. We can see the specific pages they're going to below that, and even below that we could see the specific device they are using when they click on those slate emails and end up on our website.

Now, one of the great things about Google Data Studios. It has some really cool visualization tools. So for example here we have a Google Maps chart where we've laid all of the traffic from the different cities and Metro areas over that Google Maps charts so that stakeholder can scroll in and pan around and see specifically where traffic's coming from to these different slate email campaigns.

Also, another great data visualization tool is scatter plot. So for example here the bubble size reference is the number of visits from that specific email an along the bottom. That percentage is the slate form conversion rate, so the further the bubbles are to the right, the higher the conversion rate is for people clicking on that email and then submitting a slate form and then on the Y access across the left, the higher up it gets, the more pages there.

Doing per session. So as you can imagine, this is just a great tool for identifying those outlying emails that maybe were performing way better or way worse than the group. So lots of work to be done there and lots of analysis that you can do to better understand what emails and what email campaigns are working. So obviously we don't have a lot of time to spend on this today, but I do really just want to make the point that stakeholders Love Data Studio. It is a real time report.

So at any point a stakeholder or end user can go and see that report, it's really easy to share it. They don't need specific access to data Studio or Google Analytics. It works just like a Google Doc where you can say anyone with this link can view the report. So I'll leave that there, but just know stakeholders love datastudio and it's just a great tool not only for your slate emails but also for digital marketing.

Campaigns and other Google Analytics data as well.

So we're going to go ahead and move on to question #4 and that is, do you still have questions for us and what do you want to know?

Yeah.

Alright, well thank you so much Megan and Chris for that. Really really informative and helpful on session. So we are just about at 3:00 o'clock. So to be respectful for for all of your guys's time will ask one or two questions and one question here is.

We have went through Contra lot of information and it looks like it takes a lot of time to set up set up, you know, thoughtful process. How long typically does it take to get all of this up and running?

Yeah Chris, you can. You can start that one. I think 'cause you're the one who gets to do the really fun stuff.

Yeah, so for the slate form conversion tracking I recommended or the two recommended approaches we're tracking the slate forms in our different AD platforms, and that's not as time sensitive over. It's time doesn't take as much time as actually setting up the UTM tracking and slate, so the first approach can be done in a few hours versus the second approach. It could take weeks to kind of going back and testing.

To get all that figured out.

OK, that's a Megan. Anything to add in that.

I think I think Chris is covered it. I think the only other thing I would add is it there's some, there's there is some work that you might want to be looking at in your in file editor as well. In terms of installing the appropriate Google Tag Manager code on all of your site pages if it doesn't already exist, and that's another element to be thinking about as well.

Awesome and my last question is, do you have any best practices on sustainable development that will reduce the need for maintenance down the road?

Yeah, yeah, I think that it's really important to. I always talk about I use the term future proofing your your slate instance right in terms of how you set things up so that a year from now three years from now there's still a still working for you. So you know when you go and win the lottery and run off to Fijian.

Someone else has to take care of the work you felt. There's something that's already sustainably there. I think. Like I said, I think that keeping your data organized really clearly is really important, so making sure that like I said before, naming conventions make our intuitive make sense for emails, but also in terms of how you're doing things with your campaigns digitally. Making sure your field values are really clear, making sure that it's intuitive what these different campaigns are, translation codes or your.

Friends here because that helps you to make sure that your understanding what's coming through. Keep things updated in real time and then make sure that your documentation is really solid. You. Your processes are only as good as the documentation that you have for them, and when you don't document you are. You're kind of setting yourself up so that your your work in the future can degrade in a road over time, so make sure that it's all really clearly recorded as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ask them. Well, thank you so much, Megan and Chris for taking the time to do this for us and we really appreciate it. For those of you who are waiting for that recording, it's going to be up in about 24 hours on your sleep home page, so make sure to go take a look at that.

Everyone.

Thank you.

Take care.