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In this month’s lesson I’m going to show you how to use Aweber’s ad tracking to create a geo-targeted mailing list with no fuss. And no, this has nothing to do with paid advertising. “Ad tracking” is just the name of a little-used feature within Aweber that can help you to segment your mailing list by location.

You can find the lesson here: https://www.mmmanifesto.com/in.....-tracking/

If you have any questions about the lesson post them below.

Enjoy!

Having trouble with your marketing? Wish you could have an experienced direct-to-fan marketing expert look over your actual campaigns, music, or content and offer feedback? Or perhaps you’re just looking for a little one-on-one assistance so you can ask questions that pertain to your specific goals and get a second, more experienced, perspective? Click here to book a session with me now.

April 8, 2015
11:24 pm

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Hi John and Steve,

I really appreciate that you've set this lesson up. I may be one of those you were referring to as having posted this question recently as I have been in conversation with Steve, implementing almost exactly this system and trying some variations, and I am on tour at the moment so using it in conjunction with regional Facebook ads, geotargeting the cities I play with individual forms on separate squeeze pages. I am doing something slightly different though than what you describe here, in that I'm generating forms for each city list, so that people subscribe to the city list first, and via automation are added to the main list second, from which they receive the funnel series and initial download codes.
There is a major flaw in this due to an Aweber shortcoming, which I will get to in a minute.

But first, I'm having trouble understanding why you are having people subscribe to the main list first, rather than the secondary (geo) list first? It would solve one problem, which I'll get to below, but not this:
The reason I'm creating forms in my city lists is that I often want to send them an automated city-specific welcome message (i.e. , details about the specific show advertised, or an invitation to reply for guest list, etc). This way they will get both this, as well as the regular funnel series from the main list including that first email which includes their download codes.

About the problem I alluded to earlier I'm going to paste an excerpt of my long conversation with AWeber tech support. If you guys have a solution to this or can explain how it might work better if I send them through the main list first, I'd really appreciate it. As well as trying to sort this, I'm also playing shows every night and tour-weary, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something.

I learned from COMMENTS IN MY ADS that people were thinking the downloads 'didn't work'(!) because they weren't getting an email right away.
This all took place yesterday:

ME to Aweber tech support: (she asked me for links to test my forms, which I gave her)
Hi (name witheld),
Will be really grateful if you can help me figure out what's going on.
Here are two links: The first, for the Sheffield City list, does not have a welcome message associated with itself but does also sign up to the main (Thomas Truax) list, so the signee should receive the first welcome message associated with the Thomas Truax list (that includes the download codes) right away. In my tests though, it always took about an hour, sometimes much longer (18 hrs in the case of my sheffield customer) for that second-list email to arrive.
In a second instance, my own tests usually received the cheap tickets email very soon, but again the download message a very unpredictable amount of time later, often more than an hour. In both instances I can see right away in my AWeber panel that the test subscriber has been successfully subscribed to both lists almost instantly.
Really appreciate your help on this. As I am doing this for a different city almost every night, it would be nice to know there's a reliable solution.
Much thanks, Thomas

Later Reply from Aweber:
Hello Thomas,
Thanks for your patience while we check on this! It looks like I was added to all of the correct lists and I received all of the emails, but the emails for the main list (the list I was added to via the automation rule) were a good 40 minutes later than the others. I can definitely see how a delay like this can cause issues with your subscribers - I do apologize for that inconvenience!
I checked with our administrators and unfortunately this is a known issue. There is a delay in Follow Ups going out when subscribers are added to that list via an Automation Rule. I'm afraid that while this is a known issue, there is not yet a fix and we do not have an ETA as to when this will be resolved. I'm so sorry about that!"

----

So, where I'm now at is including the download info in the first (city) list automated reply, and just explaining that they'll get another email in an hour or so with the download info again (so that I can preserve the main list sign-ups that don't come through the city lists) But surely there must be a more elegant solution, what do you think?

Thanks,

Thomas

April 10, 2015
3:04 am

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Hey Thomas,

Glad you enjoyed the lesson. I believe it was the discussion you had with Steve that led to me digging in with Aweber to come up with the best solution we could.

The issue you descibed at the end of your post is the reason this was so difficult and took so many passes at before I could settle on an ideal solution. Even Aweber seemed unclear on how to go about it.

The reason I don't add to the geo targeted list first is that because, as you noted, it often can take up to 45 minutes for the welcome email to be delivered in the list people are being passed to by the auto subscribe rule. It doesn't always but it did in most of my tests and Aweber confirmed that they do this so a person doesn't get two welcome emails at exactly the same time. We want the autoresponder series to be associated with the main list, not the geo-targeted list, so that we don't lose the ad tracking info when someone becomes a customer. And therefore it's important to connect the follow up series with the main list as apposed to the geo targeted one. That make sense?

If you want to send a city specific welcome message you could do it the way that you described and explain that the downloads could take up to 45 minutes, but that seems like it would really irritate a lot of your new fans, and worse, hurt any potential impulse sales. If you want to send out custom city-specific welcome messages (which I think is a cool idea) I'd set that up as the second email and just word it a little different so it makes sense as to why they are receiving the second email.

For example, the first message could send the basic download info, and then you could get really ninja with the welcome email of the go targeted list and use a subject line like "oops, I almost forgot..." and then pass on the important info the shows, promos, or whatever local stuff you wanted to get across. It would make the whole process feel really authentic, instead of seeming like the tool you were using was just a bit off.

But you'd want to just test it to make sure it worked the way it was supposed to every time.

Thoughts?

April 11, 2015
3:42 am

Doug Clyde

Salt Lake City, UT

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John,

Thanks for the lesson! I'm not a touring musician, so it's not something I think I'll be using, but it's still good information to have. Maybe I'll still use it to send out e-mails for local promotions. I'll have to figure something out. Thanks a bunch!

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

- Doug Clyde, ALBEDO, http://www.albedomusic.com

April 12, 2015
10:38 pm

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Hey Doug,

Glad you like the lesson. There are actually all kinds of possible applications of ad tracking aside from touring.

For example you could create a list for friends and industry and turn off the autoresponder series on those subscribers if you didn't want them to go through your sales process. You could also create a segment that left them out of overly promotional broadcasts if you wanted to.

Any time you might want to treat different traffic sources differently, this is the way to go about it.

April 13, 2015
5:04 pm

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Hi John,

Sorry about the delayed response, again on the road and juggling lots including trying to find the best solution for all this.

Yes I understand making the general list the first in line because of this problem.

I like The 'oops, I almost forgot…' for the second (delayed) welcome email that you suggest as a way of working around the unfortunate limitations we're faced with. Not ideal but trying to work with what we've got and that could work.

I think it still means the need to have a second city-specific list for EACH city though, in order to have an automated second welcome only go to that specific city, right?

Meanwhile it's also occurred to me that I can just copy my autoresponder series over to city specific lists and add the individual show-specific info to the welcome/download message. Additional steps but…that might be my best solution as I see it. Having just 3 lists is an elegant solution but then I'm running in to more problems again when I want to send a separate list /autoresponder series for the people that sign up AT the shows because many of those people have just bought CDs and I don't want to offer them a special offer a week later via my regular funnel for music they may have just bought at the show because that feels lame. With our regular funnels being designed to seduce cold traffic, it just doesn't seem like a good fit for the people who have already seen us play live.

With all of it in mind I am thinking maybe juggling loads of lists is the only way to really be able to do it right. But it is frustrating because we do need to find time to write a song now and then eh?

What are the main reasons you see in having a bunch of lists as being bad?

April 13, 2015
5:23 pm

Philadelphia, PA

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Hi Thomas,

Steve here.

You're exactly right. John and I actually bent our brains in preparation for this because of all the different scenarios.

For what you want to do: having special welcome emails and different follow-up series for different cities WILL require a separate list for each city, which also means setting the automation rules for each list as well.

However, since follow-up is one of those things you are measuring for effectiveness, you could very well copy every follow-up series to each list. But then you'd have to edit each list, every time you edited an email that's under-performing. Know what I mean?

If having a special welcome email is what you want to do, I totally agree with the care involved in trying to treat people right. Just keep in mind the work involved in doing so, much of which is likely unnecessary with John's approach to it.

-Steve

April 13, 2015
10:24 pm

Los Angeles

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Hey Thomas,

Yeah, what you are doing is a little advanced and there is no perfect solution without paying for a tool like Aweber Pro Tools. Which you might look into as it's only $30 a month. But you can do it by creating multiple lists like you mention. It's just a big pain and there is a lot more to manage. From message editing to stats monitoring. But you can do it. It's basically what I have always done. But I find it to be such a pain that I tend to neglect things that I shouldn't. So we went looking for a better solution.

It comes down to how advanced of a city specific funnel you are trying to create. If it's just a matter of a city specific welcome email I see no problem using the city specific welcome email and then just editing the email when you go to a new town. If you were really worried about any stragglers from the last town signing up after you had changed it then you could go to that web form and edit it so they no longer received the welcome email. But now we're getting back into managing a lot of variables and so maybe it's worth just sticking with the different lists in your case. It's your call really.

I have learned about myself, that if I give myself too much to manage I drop the ball on all of it. So I look for simple solutions that I can take on without becoming too overwhelmed.

April 14, 2015
2:46 pm

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Hi John and Steve,

I completely hear you on giving yourself too much to manage, I do it all the time. That's one of the reasons I'm excited about automating things. Still, I'm hoping it is possible to set it up with separate lists for each city, for all the reasons I mentioned before, and I think that once I've got those lists up and running, and the form code in place, next time I hit those cities on the next tour it will just be a matter of editing the city-specific welcome emails and squeeze pages a little and re-plugging the already-made forms to new ads, which will not involve too much additional work.

But I am still stuck on this, and maybe one of you with your brain-bending on all this can suggest something I may be missing?

Steve, when we first started talking about this you told me this:

"P.S. – By the way, did you know that with “subscribe-on-subscribe” you can have a custom welcome message that is different from your general list welcome message? Yes, you can have a message that says, “Hey thanks for coming to the show last night. Here’s your free downloads”, rather than having the message that delivers the downloads from your general list."

I am trying to figure out how to implement exactly this. i.e. if someone signs up via say 'philly' form (that was generated from the general list, which also has an automation rule to add to the philly list in addition to the general) there is a way, in form settings, to have the signee start on autoresponder message #2, rather than the welcome message. But can I have an alternate welcome message take the place of message #1? Or have we figured out that the 'replacement' welcome message will be delayed because it's on the second list?

Thanks guys!

best,
Thomas

April 15, 2015
11:28 pm

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Hey Thomas, I've asked Steve to chime in in case I'm mistaken about something but I don't believe there is any way to do a custom message based on web form. You can only do it on the list level. So as I see it you have two options. You can either create a unique list for each city and then use the ad tracking and subscribe on subscribe rule. It's more of a pain but totally doable.

Or you can use the method I laid out in the lesson and just go in and manually change the welcome message whenever you have a show in a new location.

Steve, chime in if you know something different.

April 15, 2015
11:45 pm

Philadelphia, PA

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Hi Thomas,

Yes, you can give your city-specific people a custom welcome message. It involves setting an autoresponder message on the city -specific list to go out immediately. In this scenario though, you'd be adding the subscribe on subscribe rule to the main list, to also add the subscriber to that list, when subscribing to the city-specific list. John is having you do it the opposite way than we discussed, so that you don't get the big delay in the free songs getting to the person (he's having them subscribe to the main list first, so there's no delay.)

So here's what you can do instead. For your city specific list just set an autoresponder message that says, "

"Hi {!firstname_fix}

I just wanted to drop a line and say thanks for being at the show in [Whichever City This List Belongs To]. We really appreciate it. I've got to run, but I'll be sending you some free music here in a bit.

Make sure to take a look a little later.

Thanks again!

-Steve"

This message will go out right away after confirmation. Then when your regular list finally sends the free tracks, people might think that you just made good on your word to get back to them later.

However this would require having a separate list for each city you visit, each with it's own different welcome message and it's own city specific form. John's approach only requires one list for all cities, with each city having a form with ad tracking. That way, when someone is moved off of the main list, the ad tracking from the city list will always be able to tell him where the subscriber originated from.

The way you are wanting to do it is super-cool, but again, it's very much work to set up.

Another way that John mentioned you could do this is to use just one list, but each day, before you add the new subscribers, you could just change the form and the name of the city in the welcome email. However that's only if you're not letting people add themselves at a show... If that last bit doesn't make sense, I'll clarify.

Again though, your way requires separate lists, welcome messages and forms to really make it as real and eventually hands-free as possible, while still customizing the experience. It's a great idea though, just a lot of set-up.

Steve

April 15, 2015
11:52 pm

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Hey guys, just to chime in, While you COULD do it that way. I think delaying the email with the downloads is a mistake purely because that's what people signed up for and you want to strike while the iron's hot and get them engaging with your funnel. That is the ultimate goal here. In my opinion what you are trying to do is more complex and really constitutes a "unique funnel". To do it right I would create a unique list and follow up series and then do add the main list that you keep for location purposes, without any follow up series on it. But that gets into a lot of work. I would personally just try to simplify the customization. But hey, if you can envision an angle, go for it.

May 8, 2015
2:46 pm

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Hi Steve and John (happy Birthday John by the way)

After a lot of struggling with the maintenance of separate lists for each city I'm gradually moving closer to doing it the way you've suggested, but still find it too compromising to ONLY have a general and geo list.
Somewhere in the middle, I'm hoping I'll get something that works, but I'm stumbling on a few things:

I wonder if maybe you guys may have already bent your brains around any or all of these 3 problems (they are all related), and might have a solution or idea that I'm overlooking? Let me know what you think. Thanks!

1. In addition to the individual forms/squeeze pages I've got for cities I'm performing in, I've also got a form on my main website with a CITY input as well (which I don't have on my regular squeeze page forms) , on my regular site I feel it's not too much to ask for this information.

While in most cases, once someone signs up via a city-specific squeeze page form, as per your video, I then search them via ad-tracking and create a segment for that city, after which each subsequent subscriber via that particular form is added automatically to that segment. All fine so far.

But here's where I run into a problem: say I have a segment for Oxford, which I created after I ran an ad for Oxford. Now everyone that signs up via the Oxford ad is automatically added to that segment. Beautiful. Then lets say that the first person that signs up VIA MY GENERAL WEBSITE form happens also to be in Oxford. If I create a segment for that person, all the subsequent people that sign up via that form will automatically be put into the 'Oxford' segment, or wherever I put them, whether they are in Oxford or not. See my problem?

Any idea of how to get around this?

-----
2.
I've got a separate list for live show subscribers (so that I can run them through my 'thanks for coming to the show' funnel rather than the cold customer version), but can I not have an automation rule in place that unsubscribes them from this list if they buy something? When I try to apply the automation there is 'already a rule in place for that target list" which unsubscribes them from the other (general) list. What am I missing? Is there a way of working this out? I really want to have this separate list/ funnel for people who have already seen me play.

3.
I want to get clear on how the segmenting carries down through various lists, I find this confusing. For example, say I've got a customer on my 'customer' list with a 'southampton' ad-tracking-defined segment. Meanwhile, I've got a 'geo-targeted' list which has a southampton segment from people that signed up via a Facebook Ad targeted to southampton. These people are also on my 'general' list, so in some instances, I've got Southampton people in two places (the general AND geo-targeted list) But I've ALSO got a segment of people on the GENERAL list that I added myself, whom I just happen to know live in Southampton, so have therefore created a 'southampton' segment in my general list to single out these subscribers. On another list which I've created exclusively for people that sign up in person at my shows (so that I can run them through my 'thanks for coming to the show' funnel rather than the cold customer version), I also have a 'southampton' segment.

Now suppose I want to send a broadcast to all people in southampton, but I don't want anyone to receive two emails.
If I just select one of these lists (say, the customer list, for example) and create a broadcast to the southampton customer, do I understand correctly that the broadcast will also go out to all the other lists for which I have created an ad-tracking segment called 'southampton' ?

Is there somewhere I can see or confirm that exactly these and only these have all received only that single email?

Thanks so much for your time guys, I feel like I've been running around this forever now, but I hope that some of these questions/struggles might result in some solutions that are valuable to all of us. I love Aweber when I see its benefits working, but also find it unintuitive and frustrating on many levels.

Thanks,

Thomas

May 10, 2015
1:45 am

Philadelphia, PA

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Hi Thomas,

Steve here. Sorry for the delay. It took me a bit to parse all of what you were asking. This stuff does stir up a whirlwind in my head.

Okay, I think I'm following all of this and I think there's a simple solution. It's also the same solution for questions 1 and 3.

1) So someone signs up via geo-targeting and you've set up the segment for Oxford. But then someone signs up at your regular website and says they are from Oxford.

In order to make this so not everyone else gets erroneously added as "Oxford", you need to define additional criteria for your Oxford segment.

Here's what I mean. So you know how when you go to "Manage Subscribers", you can choose which people you are searching for? So for instance you would select "Ad Tracking is (tracking for Oxford)"? Well you can also push the little green plus sign to add a second criteria for this particular segment.

So then you push the plus sign and select "City is/contains 'Oxford'", so that the segment picks up the data from the form field for city and includes it in this segment, but only if the value for the city field is 'oxford'. Therefore the next time you want to email people only from Oxford, this segment will include not only your ad tracking Oxford people, but also the people who sign up at your regular website and type in "Oxford".

Does that make sense?

2) I'm not quite clear on this question. Are they being added to the general list, or is there a second live show list, that simply has all of the same autoresponders in it? If there is a second separate list, you should just be able to add the automation rule to the live show list that says "Unsubscribe when subscribed to Customer list".

Please try to clarify the differences in your lists, so that I can try to better understand your issue.

Thanks!

May 11, 2015
1:22 am

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Yeah, that made my head swirl 🙂

I'd agree with Steve as far as the solution goes.

May 11, 2015
2:16 pm

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Hey guys,

Thanks to you both!

Yes it's mind melting, but getting there little by little. I've cleared up the 'Unsubscribe' automation bit (I'd been attempting to put the automation rule on the general list rather than on the specific item customer lists themselves).

As for the questions 1&3 answer Steve, looks promising but I'm still not quite fully clear on this. I see how I can add this additional criteria for the city field. So, say I search via ad tracking the subscribers from the website form ("website_subscribers_ " ad tracking), who are now on my 'general' list, and then if I search the additional criteria for 'Oxford' in the City field, it singles out one person who signed up via the web form and is from Oxford. I am given the option: 'Save as Segment', and it offers me a space for a name for this segment. So if I name this segment 'oxford' and save it, will it now add that subscriber to my already saved segment 'oxford'? and can i presume that future people signing up via the ad tracking "website_subscribers_" AND who live in Oxford will be added to this segment called Oxford, but the others signing up via "website_subscribers_ " WONT?

Is that correct? Or am I looking at a second segment that are specifically 'website_subscribers_' from Oxford, (and for each additional place?)

And here's another thing that complicates it (urg! sorry) but some people put in the name of the city in lower case, most in upper, and the search (and presumably the automation in the future) is case sensitive. I've taken to the practice of segmenting and adding people in lower case for those addresses I'm putting in myself, thinking it would simplify things, but now I'm thinking I should maybe have done it the other way around.

Here's an alternate idea I'm wondering about: What if I just manually change the ad tracking of those subscribers who come in via the website form to the name of the city they input in the other section of the form?

Thanks again for your help,

Thomas

May 11, 2015
4:29 pm

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Hi Thomas,

Steve here.

Yes, the way segments work is that you set up the filter that you are wanting Aweber to catch.

In this case you want it to catch everyone who's ad tracking matches Oxford's ad tracking, but also people who typed in that they were from Oxford. Then you save the segment and call it Oxford.

Now that the filter parameters have been set, every time someone fills out a form and meets one or both of these parameters, they will automatically be sorted into this segment. So as you pick up subscribers from the Oxford area, this segment will grow automatically, so that emailing them becomes easy.

As far as the lower case problem, when you are adding a search cirteria for the segment, you'll see you have the option for "is" or "contains".

If you use "is", this is a rigid rule and the form field's value must be exact, where as "contains" gives you a bit more leeway.

For instance, let's say I said that I live in "philadelphia, pa" on your form. If you use "city is" and search for "philadelphia", I will be excluded from the search results, whereas if you said "city contains" "philadelphia", I will be included in the results.

Makes sense?

Your last suggestion isn't a bad one, you can manually change subscriber details, but that takes all the fun out of having an automated process.

Let us know how you make out.

May 14, 2015
3:15 pm

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Thanks Steve,

Well, here's how I'm making out, not all roses I'm sorry to say:

I've been back and forth with Aweber a lot these last few days, and setting up segments based on 'contains' rather than 'is' seems promising when searching (and, in theory when creating) new segments that come from different forms. As you've pointed out, it's more forgiving and doesn't matter if the city name starts with a Cap or not. Even so, it seems crucial to keep the ad tracking fields identical, as The only way for the segmenting rules to pass through various lists on a broadcast, I've been told by Aweber, is if the Ad-Tracking field itself is exactly the same in the various lists, it doesn't even matter if you create a segment in the secondary lists, I'm told.(!)

Anyway I'm having a problem integrating your solution that involves adding the second criteria. The problem is that once I've created a first criteria (i.e Ad Tracking contains oxford) the second field can only be IN ADDITION to this, rather than either/or. My website form ad tracking is 'website_form_', so even though I've created an oxford segment with an additional criteria with 'city' field 'contains oxford' it seems BOTH criteria apparently need to be filled in order for a new subscriber to be automatically added to that segment. In other words, I'm not seeing an option to make the second criteria an OR/either, it seems to be both or nothing. Am I not seeing the forest for the trees here?

Sorry to perpetuate these headaches, I can't wait to get it all solved. I feel that aWeber should really write a more comprehensive resource describing exactly how these segmenting rules work, it seems barely touched on in all the aweber blogs and searchable resources I've been able to find, and my conversations with support people seem to often deliver me conflicting info.

Thanks,

have a good one,

Thomas

May 14, 2015
4:56 pm

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Hi Thomas,

You'll have to forgive me because I'm a Getresponse user, rather than an Aweber user. While they are mostly similar there subtle differences. For instance when I segment, there is an and/or modifer.

There must be one for Aweber. The only other option is to have two separate segments, one for Oxford Ad Tracking and the other for Oxford City. That way you just send to both segments.

That doesn't solve the problem of the custom fields not carrying over from list to list.

However, your second segment (from your regular website) could be for both the ad tracking on the form and the city custom field value. Then, again, you could just send to both segments.

For the people adding city info manually, you might just have to give up this data as someone bonces from list to list unfortunately.

May 14, 2015
5:00 pm

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