Getting into the Growth Zone

So you want to be a growth hacker. You’ve come to the right place. How does one step into this mercurial, money-making mindset? The answer lies in the right combination of experimentation, data analysis, persistence, and moxie. If another site is dominating your search landscape, the right research can help you understand why. Much can be learned from studying what is already out there on the web. I learned how to grow my traffic strategies by learning to dissect those that were in front of me.

Accept from day one that nothing will ever be handed to you; the engines do nobody any favors. The results will always favor the user—and they should. My point is that the arsenal of traffic strategies you secure are yours to build.

As Warren Buffet put it so succinctly: “Never invest in anything you don’t understand.” Make no mistake, SEO is an investment.

When marketing a site, your philosophy colors everything. Are you positive about the site? Are you excited? If not, get that way! Begin the journey by stepping into the discovery mindset. It’s not always an easy thing to grow a website, but your perceived reality will determine your approach to building growth. Maintain a keen eye toward new potential search moves to be made and partnerships forged. I have always believed that to help a site’s traffic grow full tilt requires imaginative exploration coupled with scientific discipline. Top growth marketers masterfully combine their creative endeavors with data capture and analysis. Curiosity with a hint of skepticism should be exercised when determining potential areas for growth online. The key to long-term growth is testing and then adjusting course correctly. To test should mean you are going to learn; therefore, learning from tests means integration, which in turn creates growth patterns.

There’s an expression people use in business: don’t boil the ocean. To go for it and go for everything in terms of search sometimes means that you’re likely to accomplish nothing. Decisions must be made at the outset of any project. Which role should the search practitioner play? Maybe the project reeks of data drama (i.e., are we seeing too much dark traffic in analytics?). Are the load times painfully lackadaisical on mobile due to large video assets and inadequate hosting packages? The most important targeting decision is to figure out who the target actually is. Be open to targets you wouldn’t normally consider. I’ve seen businesses delighted by the fact that their income derives from happy customers, but care must be given to finding that information. Once the search targets are properly identified, all other decisions will naturally flow from that.

The content and physical piece of the puzzle is referred to as on-page SEO. Always think about the user and why they are visiting your site in the first place. What are they getting in exchange for coming to your site? Is it what they want or is it what you want? Data analysis works in concert with the creative elements to aid the practitioner in navigating the decision-making process.

Growth marketing as a profession cannot and should not be scalable, for it cannot be applied generically. Universal concepts and methods of testing can be applied to most sites, but each case is unique. Take running developer tool audits or diagnostic tools. They will generally return some result that needs attention. The key to growth is to set yourself up for it by having clean code, optimized pages for usability, and generally decent information for the user to consume. The balance of art and science that’s called for varies for every new project. Sometimes the first step is not to do the right things (better), but rather to stop doing the wrong things.

In summary, it is not a winning idea to think about SEO in terms of being a one-hit wonder. A search champion’s mindset is not to think, “We did that one thing and so—yeah, cool—we did SEO.” A one-dimensional approach seeking to game the search engines or a platform is not a long-term strategy.

SEOs should operate in a similar style to David Bowie; with his tireless evolution and collaboration between channels, habitual artistry, and innovation, he managed to stay relevant for decades while maintaining his creative integrity. A superior strategy over trickery is to put the time in, study, experiment, and always measure everything.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

Richard Branson, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Some of the best ideas for growth I’ve ever had have come from mucking around with my own stuff or someone else’s. It’s like riffing to your favorite jam on the radio and creating your own silly songs. Experimenting requires thoughtful tinkering. One of my tried and true tinker methods is to explore sites built by intriguing companies. I will often examine pages thoroughly to learn what they’re doing on their homepages, blogs, shopping carts, etc.

Sometimes I’ll go so far as to fill out their web forms to see how they market themselves effectively through email. I like to see what it’s like to hop in their funnel: how is the experience? Is it exciting? Is there ample feedback? Is it fun? Be honest with yourself; if you spare their feelings, remember that the general public won’t always be as kind.

Figure 2-1. Apple is a solid example. Look how cool it is to have a favicon! 

Where you’ll need to cruise for ideas is dependent on what you’re working on. Apple is an interesting case to look at for SEO as they have never really “done” a blog in the classic sense, so their site is not necessarily a good example for content layouts. If you are enhancing a shopping cart for better click-through rates (CTR), it would make sense to study Apple’s cart because they sell millions of dollars in products online every month, despite speculation of a decline in recent years. If you are creating a blog with heavy imagery, then it’s better to study sites like Lyft, Fubiz, or Quartz because they have delightful layouts. Without an inviting layout, your content has less of a chance to be seen. Users are especially fickle when it comes to mobile layout and design, because the time on site is less than desktop.

Even if the goals of a site do not line up with what you’re working on, ideas can be gained by studying who’s on top. Make sure to review the sites on desktop, mobile, tablet, TV, etc. and note the subtle differences. Responsive or not, the experiences should be crisp for each user on every platform. Websites have had browser sniffing and redirecting capabilities for the better part of a decade.

Just like flipping through fashion magazines for wardrobe ideas, perusing sites that are crushing it helps an SEO to gain a sense of “what’s in” this season. By studying strategies of others with mad traffic, you start to get the sense for what users are responding to and how usability changes over time.

When you’ve spent a great deal of time working on a site or managing a site, it’s really easy to be blind to the little things. Competitive research is where you have the opportunity to tighten things up. There is invaluable information to be gained by researching sites in terms of physicality (i.e., source, layout, forms, etc.). You can see who registered a website, where they’re hosting it, and how many site managers they have. Check the hosting and registration information of any website by doing a Whois lookup. If a site is using fancier services like Rackspace or Akamai, then they’re probably serious about their performance. Are they cloaking their information? That’s also information to keep under your hat. If they’re cloaking information, are they who they say they are? Is this project a competitor trying to look like someone else? Information gathering is so crucial in research; gather it and then tabulate it. The trends will start to appear!

Let’s say you hear about a contest being run by a cool new tech company. The creatives on the website are amazing, but you don’t know much about how it was put together.

Here are a few example steps to break that web page down:

1. Maybe an agency put it together soup to nuts? Look up the Whois registry information. You can actually check that by seeing who registered the domain.
2. Check the source for any and all tools used. Is tracking deployed? What pixels or rich snippets are there? Sometimes comments in the source can be telling.
3. Click on any interactive elements and then Ctrl-click to see them isolated in a new window. From there, you can tell if they’re a gif or a script, etc.
4. Enter the contest! Hey, maybe you’ll win—either way, you can see what the emails look like. Enter their marketing machine. Trends change, but maybe their emails are on point and inspire you to revisit your own strategy.

Gaining Authenticity

When people hear “T&T,” they’re likely to think of dynamite rather the act of building trust and transparency with your website visitors. Conversions come purely from building trust with the people sitting on the other end of the inter-tubes. Why does trust matter so much? Because nobody wants to get hoodwinked. Most people have developed a sense for when they might get deceived online, especially during a financial transaction. As search marketers, we must first gain trust to get a web form fill or conversion. Conversions happen only when a visitor’s comfort levels in trust and transparency are met.

There are two main philosophical buckets of practices for SEO: black hat and white hat. The term black hat originates from before search was a thing, with old cowboy western movies. The color of the cowboy’s hat denoted if it was a good or a bad guy riding toward the protagonist. The hero, often in white, was painted as the good character, the one who unties the girl from the train tracks, etc. Zorro is the only exception to this; he wore black. He operated as an outlaw, yet wearing black probably made him seem cooler to the audience—an unexpected hero who fought for regular people.

Search engine optimization is not like the movies, but philosophically an SEO always needs to don the white hat. The difference between the two types of methods is deception. I think of black versus white hat in terms of night versus day. People who embark on black hat SEO tactics have to operate in the darkness (to some extent). They lurk in the shadows since it’s atypical to see anyone declare their evil machinations to the world. Users do not get what they came for; they fill out information under false pretenses. Further black hat examples could be misleading link bait from ads for poorly targeted news articles, clicking on links spawning extra windows, or simply only dealing with robots (in a shady way).

White hat SEOs operate above board, performing work that will benefit their sites long term. They also deliver what they promise to the user as they enter the site. Deception is never the basis of a sound business strategy. Black hat methods include knowingly violating the terms of service for any engine, tool, or platform. Black hat SEOs spend nights scheming and biding time before getting caught, such as using bots to take down competition or just generally being kind of evil (you know who you are). 

It’s not just the search machines that black hat SEOs can deceive, it’s the site visitor. Taking someone’s email and spamming them mercilessly without the appropriate unsubscribe links or reselling private information to other sites is also black hat. Violating your first implied agreement with someone does not build trust; it builds bad user experiences, which can, in extreme cases, spill over to social media. This is not good attention.

Only 5% (or less) of top websites are performing at the level where black hat methods reap huge financial rewards, but even then the risks are just as great.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Black hat SEO tactics sometimes self-characterize as gray hats, but gray does not fundamentally exist without the presence of black. I’ve seen many companies wrestle with their preconceived notions of right and wrong, and the ones that use shady tactics seldom win in the end. Doing things to competitors like using advanced knowledge of current search engine penalties from algorithm changes to sink them is an aggressive move by meanie-hat SEOs. Building trust means advocating for the site visitor to get what they’re promised.  Page meta descriptions appear in search results, which means they should always match the page’s content. People often click away from a site if they do not get what is suggested to them; some SEOs call this “the scent; the essence of truthiness.”

Unfortunately, black hat tactics against competitors will sometimes work enough to sink their site temporarily. It’s possible to use knowledge of search engines to negatively influence another’s ranking. The sinking of others only works until the website’s administrator and/or SEO discovers what’s happening. There are remedies that a company can take when they encounter bad traffic or other competitor activity. If these things happen to you, it’s unfortunate, but you can report violations with terms of service easily for either paid or organic issues to the engines themselves.

Sometimes the type of trust issue you’re faced with is related to reputation or branding. Reputation has become a form of currency on the internet. Issues related to reputation are generally one of two things: a site’s brand is not appearing where it should in the SERPs or unsavory results appear at the top of a branded query. The approach to solving these problems is to handle with care.

Trust between a potential customer and a company must be present for a potential customer become a customer. Many companies seek to manipulate how they appear, especially if mistakes have been made. Manipulation erodes user trust. Simple things like including the name and picture of the author of a blog or linking to their biography can help establish trust. If you’re trying to build credibility, then make the effort to cite the information you’re referencing and link out if it makes sense.

Some growth opportunities are too good to be true. While it’s tempting to bribe your way into credibility, it’s dangerous. Maybe you hear of a hot new service offering pay-for-play content placement or easy reviews in the app store. Deception cuts both ways. Sites that seek payment to assist in building trust should be given thorough examination. Ask for references or get a case study to determine if the service is legitimate. If a vendor cannot tell you specific results they’ve gotten for other people, they do not warrant your trust.

The most important thing with a trust or brand problem is to never try to squash the truth. The internet gets the most angry when it feels lied to. People will often forgive mistakes made by companies, but they will not forgive insincerity. Nobody can be the internet’s police. We can only try to direct where things go as traffic cops (pun intended).

Clients have often asked me if it’s OK to ask for reviews from customers. My philosophy is to ask the customer two questions: are you active on Yelp (or review site in question)? If so, would you feel comfortable giving us a review online? Then it’s good to also explain why their review is helpful to you, such as that you are new and need to establish your business online or whatever the real reason is. If the person says no, they have not done any reviews, then do not push for them to leave one.

It’s super tempting to right (perceived) wrongs online. Deleting Facebook comments or manipulating your reviews will only make life worse. If the issues in the reviews are real, then deal with them. It can take time, but fixing problems at the root level will allow your online reputation to repair much faster. There’s never any reason to buy or pay for reviews. It’s far superior for outsiders to leave reviews (even if they’re bad), but never the CEO. Employees should not be writing reviews, ever. It’s fairly easy to spot an online review written by an employee or owner of a company.

A Day in the Life

The path to growth is paved with bounteous experimental activities. This section seeks to explore the daily routine in the mindset of a growth marketer. Growth hackers by definition cannot stay still in their routines, because “still” is not a valid state of being. Ambitions for the growth hacker are endless. Learning is the most important element to having and maintaining a strong growth mindset. Always stay open to learning what informational analysis reveals and what’s happening all around the search ecosphere of the industries you target.

SEOs have to perpetually learn new things. I read about an hour or two every day and watch news in the morning. I listen to podcasts about all sorts of weird topics from survivalist stuff to pure nerd comedy. I also track senseless internet holidays like Geek Pride Day, Towel Day, National Paper Airplane Day, and the always-Twitter-trending National Donut Day. My typical reading consists of various social media sites, blogs, search industry journals, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and various nationally prominent technology and business news sites. Then there’s the aggregators, sites such as Reddit, where the line between work and gluttony starts to blur.

On social media, it’s beneficial to follow contrasting people, such as fellow top-notch SEOs, online influencers, industry analysts, and journalists in discrete categories. The majority of learning can be done online, but some should be done in real life. It’s fairly straightforward to find local Meetups, seminars, and conferences covering the SEO topic areas you will want to start following such as site speed optimization, content marketing, or user experience design. Most cities in the US have events or groups that get together on any variety of fun topics and purposes. Fortunately for me, I’ve had a few top-notch mentors over the years and their benefits cannot be disputed. It’s a winning formula to always have at least one mentor, but also mentor others and pay it forward. It’s extremely invigorating to help someone gain knowledge about something you take for granted. Learning means excitement for your brain; think of it as a data party. All of this (seemingly) random information we are collecting gives us a broad basis for knowing what’s happening across a variety of industries.

Books like Freakonomics (William Morrow) and A Mathematician Reads the Paper (Basic Books) make data analysis feel so neat and tidy that it’s almost cool. The truth is that not everything you read will make your brain’s neurons luster like a pearl. The SEO’s job often includes needing to make mathematics seem intuitive to their less technical counterparts. Fortunately for us information-hungry types, mobile news sites are now highly optimized for glimmering headlines. Mobile apps like Flipboard or CNN make it easy to consume information broadly and quickly. Even newer kids on the block like Snapchat provide a super fun way to consume news.

Continuous targeted learning can help you gain skills for snatching traffic from many mediums, not just the search engines. If my goal is to rank for the search of a new product or service in any given market, then I should also know where the people I’m targeting tend to spend their time online. For example, typically I can predict a fair portion of what will trend on Twitter any given day in any location based on a few things such as ongoing trends for the area, the calendar, the sports that are in season, etc. Predicting the advancing social waves happens when you are looking for traffic from a certain subset of people and have been studying personas.

Like growth hackers, stockbrokers are constantly reading news and finding ways to follow market trends, they share this in common. Brokers deal in currency and stock while SEOs deal in information and data. They follow the same methodology, staying on top of news about select topics to better spot trends. Listening to industry experts and their predictions allows you to look for patterns (i.e., opportunity).

When you read about similar or overlapping areas every single day, you start to spot patterns. The best discoveries I’ve had have come from my own form of pattern recognition, seaming together connective tissues between different information sources. You do not have to become an information or data scientist to keep up on discovering every traffic-gaining source possible. Deriving your income from kiting trends online is not for the faint of heart; commitments must be formed to consume the information surrounding pools of information.

In terms of tracking potential upcoming algorithm updates, it’s best to track industry commentary if you do not have access to managing multiple data sets. Industry leaders spend countless hours tracking trends. I enjoy reading and gleaning industry information from sites like Search Engine Journal (disclaimer: I sometimes guest write for them), Search Engine Land, or Moz’s blog. For user experience, performance, and web development trends, I really like Smashing Magazine, DZone, and Stack Overflow.

Search optimization is not only reading and research, but also dabbling. The experiments! We borrow from the scientific method in this regard; we form hypotheses and then devise experiments. There’s so many good ideas to try out that it’s often hard to define the experiment. It’s prudent to treat your experiments as campaigns, not as an open-ended freeform chasing of rainbows (or waterfalls). Campaigns have a defined starting and ending point; they are measured and evaluated afterward. Failure is always OK, but ignoring the results and reasons for it are not.

In San Francisco, we’re decidedly social media hogs and super crazy about our sports teams and conferences. Anything the Giants, Sharks, A’s, 49ers, or Warriors are doing will trend on social during those seasons. We also tend to see some fun and classic old-school Twitter trends pop up weekly, like #MotivationMonday and #WomenCrushWednesday (now the leaner #WCW). Tech conferences also seem to trend on Twitter in San Francisco (possibly due to the fact we’re the company’s home town). In the Bay Area, we often have giant screens near conference stages specifically to display the Twitter feeds from their hashtag to the audience so that people will join in the online conversation. Online conversation means engagement and therefore guaranteed eyeballs for the conference sponsors.

Understanding the market you are living in and often targeting gives a keen advantage to also gain social traction here. It’s simply going to be different in rural areas versus cities like New York, Austin, or Los Angeles. Social mores and folkways are going to vary by region, which makes social media difficult to apply unilaterally with live events. People outside of the tech bubble might even feel that it’s super rude to be constantly tweeting about everything that’s happening, and online marketers should consider that before choosing a campaign like that. Perhaps for different areas it could be Instagram or Facebook, roughly one post per event. In that case, getting attention may be better sought out by a limited “friends of friends” dark post running on the company’s Facebook page that’s locked down by location or a Snapchat Geo filter campaign. There’s no all-in-one method to fall back on for a social growth hacker; each audience (and platform) should be attended to properly.

Knowledge of an industry is very useful, but so is knowledge of platforms. For example, there’s social media, but there’s also social bookmarking. Bookmarking is the lesser known form of consuming information, and a supportive friend to SEOs; it’s also known as content aggregation. The largest sites on the internet are either content creation sites or those that cultivate the content of others via user-generated content (UGC) or aggregation.

Classic data aggregation site services are Metafilter and Digg, which are not as popular as more modern services like Scoop.it. People can use a site like Scoop.it to aggregate their own pages of links on certain topics. Done in volume, the index of recommendations start to get some juice. New aggregators and bookmarking sites pop up all the time, and even take new forms like with Pinterest. Pinterest has a steady stream of quality user-generated content (UGC), beautiful UI, and click-bait. When content population starts rolling, so does sharing, and then the traffic is sure to follow.

Platforms or sites that generate quality traffic inexpensively to your site should always get your attention—even if it is a site for lumberjacks and even if it’s run by people wearing cat-covered pants. A growth hacker is constantly searching for new ways to grow and collaborate with others in the field. There are some top influencers on the internet that have networks sizable enough to gain mass interest—the Robert Scoble’s and Guy Kawasaki’s of the world.

Many products have been launched by endorsements. Influencer marketing is on the rise dramatically. Instagram stars can demand thousands of dollars for quick videos featuring a product. The endorsement is most likely to go viral when it is unexpected by the public, like Susan Boyle, a random presidential mention, or the Chewbacca Mom. Live video could soon play a major part in retail endorsements, with the popularity of services like Periscope, Facebook Live, and YouTube.

How to Spot Trends

Trend spotters are habitual line steppers. It’s almost not a choice; it’s a way of thinking. The thrill of the hunt is real! You’re going to always have outliers, observations that don’t fit into the puzzle. The challenge is to discern the difference between signals and just noise. Seemingly random things become less so within the right context. Do not put on your tinfoil hats on yet, because Ello and Peach aren’t coming back. Just ask MySpace.

Having a cool website or product is generally not enough to get discovered. Competition for user attention is stiff. Mobile users are spending more and more of their time on fewer platforms. Predicting future viral success online is a craft possessed by a select few and sometimes their success is also based on luck. Finding online growth means unearthing low-cost ways to grow by exploiting an opening somewhere. A less buzzword-y way to describe the practice of trend spotting is identifying opportunities.

Monitoring a wide variety of data sets helps an SEO to spot trends and potential algorithm changes. If you’re only managing one site, there’s another way to spot trends: by measuring specific pages versus rankings via spreadsheet. When changes are made to the pages, be sure to annotate them in analytics. It takes a few weeks at a minimum to measure the page-level way, but with careful monitoring you can determine patterns that emerge. If any campaigns, emails, or paid search are used in conjunction with your specific page monitoring tests, it will throw data off slightly. Depending on the length of time you’re monitoring specific page rankings, there could be insights gained from mixed strategies if tracked and also annotated properly.

“Keep learning” sounds like something your high school principal or guidance counselor might have said once, but it is far more serious than some motivational speech. How do soldiers and generals alike prepare for battle? They go the distance, train, research their enemies’ capabilities, properly estimate their own capabilities, and deploy all the weapons in their arsenal, from lasers to tanks.

The fact remains that knowledge of one’s domain and the tools out there is vital to success. A growth marketer is the most effective when armed with knowledge of emerging information, whether it is about traffic opportunities or the industry or both. Here is a cross-section of trends we might need to know about if we’re optimizing in a hyper-competitive local search space for a high-end luxury service that goes door to door:

• Who are the major players in local directory listings?
• Where is the site hosted? NGINX or ELBs? When are updates rolled out?
• When are the next hackathons?
• How are the new Instagram ads converting into traffic?
• Do the new Google publishing rules make it harder to enact Project AMP for large sites?

Monitoring information should include but is not limited to:

• What is the price of fair trade coffee beans?
• What is our biggest competitor doing with their content on Pinterest?
• Who is most likely to buy Twitter?

Trends can take shape in peculiar ways. These questions might seem random, but when forming a picture of a search landscape, the more information used in making decisions, the stronger the program becomes. If the information gathered is going to be useful, you have to think through what the competition is doing, and also what’s happening with budget.

Let’s take the example of the growing trend of “wearable computing.” Everyone is cuckoo over IoT trends lately, but the levels of knowledge are different. If you want to get ahead for “wearable computing,” you’ve got your work cut out for you! For that particular query, the competition is increasingly steep (see Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2. Aye caramba! The results page for “wearable technology” has some heavy hitters.

There’s no real reason to go after this query for a product unless you’re running a gigantic ecommerce site selling wearables (like Amazon or Best Buy) or a publication that covers the category (Wikipedia and Wearable). The issue with targeting something too generic is that your competition will be higher for no good reason. Success is harder to reach when targets are too broad. If you’re doing SEO in the wearable family of technology, like smart rings or bracelets, why would the above SERP matter to you? That could be a reason to consider for paid search, but only the search category of “wearable technology” matters, not page one results.

Watching the trends of the wearable-computing category is helpful because they are the search umbrella (bucket) that jewelry falls under. Sweeping changes in terminology or social interest in the wearable-computing category will trickle down to wearables that are jewelry.

Let’s say someone famous on a daytime TV talk show renames “wearables jewelry” to “smart jewelry.” The social media explosion that follows is sure to affect search.

What scares me the most is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.

Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox

It’s sometimes hardest to do organic search optimization projects in new category spaces, because the search interest is just not there yet. In these cases, you’ll see very few competitors to benchmark against. So what do you do? You research, to the best of your ability, what is related to the new space and place some bets based on trends and search volume. Trust your gut where you see signs of growth.

One rather self-centric example is how I track my own reputation via a search of my online moniker, Annebot. As an internet marketing enthusiast, I constantly register for new social sites and professional profiles when I find them. By tracking a singular query over time, it starts to become clearer which services are on the rise. For many years, CNET was in the top five results for a search of my handle; now it’s nowhere to be seen.

Be Data-Agnostic

The struggle is real: it’s difficult to avoid bias when reviewing the results of a campaign you’ve worked hard on. Maybe this campaign was your baby? Maybe your baby is a little less attractive than the others? Perceptions and folklore about a campaign’s results within an organization often become part of the results (i.e., the executives loved it, so it’s a good campaign). Then everyone starts thinking “We are great—let’s reverse engineer this data and show just how great we did.” It’s natural to be influenced by feedback, but growth marketers have many, many ideas and a decent portion of them will fail. That’s OK! Failure is fine, but denial is not. Denial of failure equates denial of learning. Quick acceptance of failure is what keeps a web marketing program profitable.

In order to keep moving towards growth, constant experimentation requires objectivity when reporting results. Be willing to be wrong (if you are). Refusal to accept failure is where expensive mistakes happen, mainly because they are unnecessarily prolonged. For example, someone launches a campaign and forgets to test the landing page URL they placed in an email sent out to thousands of people. Maybe the URL is broken in the email itself, but a simple server redirect could fix it.

SEOs must fix their mistakes instead of hide them. Data can be massaged to show certain results by selectively plucking dates and random pieces of more flattering data from reports. It’s an unhealthy practice to decide for yourself what the data should be telling you. The better approach is to form a hypothesis about what you’d like to know and then let the data tell you the answer in the most objective light.

For example, did an email drip campaign bring in more leads than the social media campaign last month? If you’ve deployed campaign tracking URLs, then measuring their effectiveness is as simple as comparing the two URLs in Google Analytics. If you forgot to use tracking URLs, you’ll have to check the referral traffic or overall traffic (to links) used in the campaigns, and then the lead sources in Google Analytics (Figure 2-3).

Figure 2-3. Pulling conversion by source in Google Analytics because—oops, we forgot to use a tracking URL!

Understanding how to spot growth opportunities takes a keen eye and a taste for adventure. Recognizing quickly what’s working and what’s not is the most basic tenet of the growth hacker.

Aaron Ginn defines a growth hacker as:

One who’s passion and focus is pushing a metric through use of a testable and scalable methodology. A growth hacker finds a strategy within the parameters of a scalable and repeatable method for growth, driven by product and inspired by data. The essential characteristic of a growth hacker is creativity. His or her mind is the best tool in their war chest.

A very wise woman once told me that fear holds us back (and she was right). Have the guts to do what other people don’t even fully understand, and get creative or as immersed in the product you’re marketing as you have to. Some of the best growth hacks have involved a tie-in to product experience. Growth hackers who are empowered can see whitecaps on their growth mountains instead of just hockey sticks.

Now that we’ve discussed the pie in the sky, it’s time to get back to reality. We’re pretty much all in business to make money, but the handling of it is where many organizations screw up. Care must always be given to your handling of information, money, and the power it comes with.