Why use the Promotional page vs some other content type
Notes from the Promotional page strategy breakout session.
The main thing about Promotional pages is that these were not designed to be a substitution for Organization or Service pages. They have a lot of flexibility, but the way they were designed was to support Service pages – not replace them. The Promotional page is a tool to direct an audience to a main point, but is not the main point itself. This is where KPIs were designed, to measure marketing type metrics so you can make changes to it as the campaign is going on.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Promotional pages are designed to bring more attention to something. They don’t do that by default, but through maybe a social media page, where you are moving an unusual amount of traffic, usually with a marketing campaign.
5 Possible KPI’s
% of people who can click on key message buttons
Featured links and key message
Videos – how many people play your video
Videos – how many watch your video (50% of the video counts as a watch)
Pageviews – this is a better KPI if your Promotional page is more informational
Most useful are the calls to action – buttons or videos. The box is really the point.
Questions and answers
Is there a way to tag to see how many people click on a button or link and actually complete a transaction?
If you want to see if they actually completed a transaction with another site that the Promotional page links to, this would require cross-domain tracking. If you want to see how many people came to the Promotional page and clicked on a certain link – it’s in the dashboard.
When a Youtube video plays, as soon as it ends, it populates with recommendations. Is there a way to prevent that?
These are automatically generated by Youtube. Vimeo does not do this. It also offers a custom clickable link. However, you can also check your own Youtube channel and change the settings for this.
Where can you link Promotional pages on existing pages in the CMS? I.e. which page types can they link to?
They can link to any of your other content on Mass.gov or external sites/applications. They can only be linked from Events, News types, and in an Organization page Mosaic on Mass.gov.
We have the yearly Self Identification Campaign for Persons with Disability for the month of October and the Self Identification Campaign for Veterans for the month of November. They both have applications to be filled by the recipient. Can I make them fillable online applications, and will the Promotional page be friendly accessible?
For forms, it depends on the campaign, but it may be better to link directly to those. Some instances it may be your call to action where you have more information on a theme, event, etc. so the Promotional page may be good. Think about your goal and how your visitors achieve that goal. You can also request a friendly URL for Promotional pages. We can always change what a friendly URL is pointing to when your promotion ends.
What do you plan on using Promotional pages for in your organization?
Department of Environmental Protection: We have a number of possible applications like outdoor water bans that we always get questions on that happen during specific times. When there are EEE spraying events, this may help us mitigate anxiety around this. Another option that is not time limited, but could be scheduled around an event, is recycling such as around National America Recycles Day.
MassHealth: Open enrollment. This would be handy for informing people next time around, because many do not know when it is.
We are asking for an unpublish date as these are time bound. Why do we do that?
We don’t want massive amounts of outdated marketing campaigns.
Why is there an unpublish date for such a visually appealing page?
So you can always re-up it, but it’s a good time to check back in. These were intended as a splashier page to highlight information. Design wise, filling these with a lot of information does not work well, but these were meant to help with calls to action and provide some lighter additional content where you can link to more in-depth information.
Why would you then even use a Promotional page? Why not just use an alert or something esle?
We spent a lot of time on the dashboard to help measure goals, which you can’t do with alerts. Also, alerts are more things that happen quickly, where as promotions are typically more planned out.
What’s better, an Event page or Promotional page?
An Event page is mostly just date, time, place, and text. The Promotional page can link to this, but you can also use the Promotional page for videos on the event, having a key message button lead to your volunteer or attendee sign-up application, etc.
Why can you only choose 3 KPIs?
You can find the data elsewhere in the dashboard or Google Analytics, but the key to figuring out if you’ve hit a main goal is probably only 1 or 2.
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