Maybe it’s because of the whole Raiders moving to Las Vegas thing that got me started thinking about ways to geo target fans or attendees of an event with a sweet brand message or and image that would have the potential of garnering some earned media attention.

So, as any good Digital Marketer would do, I went to Starbucks, got my favorite drink (Starbucks Double Shot W/ Cream instead of milk) and began to run through some ideas in my head.

With Football season in high gear, I wanted to look into doing something with our local UNLV team but not have to create a partnership or some contractual thing. I basically wanted to make it look like we partnered or something but not actually do it.

I also,wanted to have something that was targeted to the people at the games on game day, but not so much outside of the field itself or the timeframe.

I had heard and seen people using these interesting custom Geofilters for Snapchat, so I wanted to take a look at how they work and what it takes to actually get one going.

Because you can design and not only filter, but also the geofence in which they will show as well as the timeframe down to the hour, this was the perfect solution for what I am wanting to do.

And for that reason I wanted to share it here. It’s almost too valuable to keep to myself.

I hope you find the tutorial helpful.

Geofilters

Geofilters are fun overlays that you can add to your Snap! Swipe on a Snap you have taken to see what Community or On-Demand Geofilters are in your area 👻.

Community Geofilters are unique overlays that share a location, such as a: city, university, or local landmark. Community Geofilter submissions are free. Snapchat does its best to select Community Geofilters we feel are visually compelling and represent the location.

Businesses and individuals alike can purchase On-Demand Geofilters for an event, business, or a specific location. Whether it’s for a house party or wedding, a coffee shop or campus-wide event, Geofilters make it easy for Snapchatters who are there to send your message to friends.

About Community Geofilters

Artists and designers are encouraged to create and submit a free Community Geofilter for their city, university, a local landmark, or another public location. If your Geofilter is approved by the Snapchat team, Snapchatters nearby will be able to use it to say where they are!
 

On-Demand Geofilters

Businesses and individuals alike can purchase On-Demand Geofilters. Whether it’s for a house party or wedding, a coffee shop or campus-wide event, Geofilters make it easy for Snapchatters who are there to send your message to friends. Brand logos and trademarks are permitted, unlike with free Community Geofilters, which are meant for public places like parks, landmarks, and cities.

Go here to create an On-Demand Geofilter!

What's the difference between a Personal and Business On-Demand Geofilter?

A Personal Geofilter promotes a personal event/location and are great for weddings, reunions, birthdays, or graduations!. A Personal Geofilters can also be used for private locations (like your home) over a longer period of time (max 30 days). Snapchatters on the scene can add your message to their Snaps, then send them to friends 👻  Please Note: Personal Geofilters cannot include marks, logos, or branding for businesses.

A Business Geofilter is one that promotes a business or a brand and are great for an upcoming sale at your store, an ad over a space like a coffee shop ☕️  or an awesome event! Think of them as your digital street team.  Please Note: A Business Geofilter must meet the logo guidelines set forth in our  Submission Guidelines.
 

How to Create an On-Demand Geofilter?

Interested in making a personalized On-Demand Geofilter, but the thought of using Photoshop has you running for the hills 🏃🏻? Just head over to our online Geofilter creation tool, which you can use to design a Geofilter for a variety of events like birthdays, weddings, and more — customized with your personal touch 💅🏽

So, here’s how it works:

Log in with your Snapchat username and password here.

Select the ‘Design’ or ‘Upload” tab.

I used Canva to create a custom design as you can see below. The size is 1080x1920 and once i exported the .png I went and removed the background making it transparent. That way when you are taking a selfie, you can put your head inside the helmet.

Anytime you can show your kid off, you take it... 

Once you’ve uploaded your file you’ll be asked to choose the start and end dates and start and end times. This works out great for me because I can choose the dates of the home games, select the time the game is schedule for which limits the amount of money it's going to cost to run this filter.

Now we have our dates and times in place we’ll move on to selecting the Geo Fence.
I zoomed in the the football stadium and basically drew a box around it.

Once you’ve done that and hit NEXT all you have to do is hand over your CC info and boom you’ve just created a sweet custom On-Demand Snapchat Geofilter.
 

I first have to give a shout out to my buddy Jason Stum who helped me identify a leak in our adwords budget.

Once I started to dig in a bit more, I was able to uncover and recover a pretty hefty refund from our agency partner.

 

In this post I am going to show you how I built some customized reports in Google Analytics that drill down in to device types, regions, user domains and why it’s important to look at this stuff.

You first want to start by loggin into your Google Anaytics account and make sure you are looking at the main homepage there.

Then, you will click CUSTOMIZATION in the top nav. This is where we can build all types of custom reports that drill down data in ways you just cant do using the standard Analytics reports.

Next, you’ll want to click on NEW CUSTOM REPORT.

This is the dashboard we will use to create our report and set up the data in way that is kind of like a data tree. So, if you are able to think ahead of time how you want the spread to look. You’ll save a lot of time. More on that later.

Now that we have a blank custom report canvas, we can begin by giving this report a name and making sure that the report type is EXPLORER.

METRIC GROUPS:
This is the basic metric or number of what you want to see. For this exmaple, we are looking for SESSIONS. So click on ADD METRIC and search for SESSIONS. Once you find it go ahead and add it to the report.

DIMENSION DRILLDOWNS:
This is the really fun part. As I mentioned above this is where we get to choose how we want the data ordered and displayed.

To give you some context of what I was looking for when I built this report. I was looking for

• Paid traffic
• Either Mobile or Desktop
• Regions outside of mine
• Network Domain (this tells us if someone was on wifi or cell)

Putting yourself through a quick excersize like this will save you a ton of time.

Q: What number am I looking for
A: Sessions

Q: What kind of Sessions?
A: Paid Traffic Sessions

Q: Paid Traffic from Mobile or Desktop
A: Both

Q: What Now?
A: Show me their region

Q: Now What?
A: Show me what network domain they were connected to

FILTERS
One of things I mentioned I wanted to do was look at the data above but outside of my region. So by building this into the report from the get go I wouldn’t be wasting my secondary drilldown to exlude region.
So in here you will want to

EXLUDE > REGION > EXACT > STATE NAME

Awesome! Now here is the really cool thing. Especially if you have a bunch of GA accounts. Instead of rebuilding this report for each of them you can simply click on the VIEWS option and select all the other accts you want to have this report.

Now click save and boom! Thats it…You should be redirected to the report you just built and can now start to drill down into all the various data points you’ve created.

So lets drill down a bit.

I want to see PAID TRAFFIC

What kind of Paid Traffic?

Desktop Paid Traffic..

What?! Why do I have PAID TRAFFIC coming in from Indiana when I am in Nevada? They aren’t even close.

Lets add a secondary dimension and see what KEYWORD these people are coming in on.

At this point, you can give your agency or whoever you might be having manage your adwords budget a call and find out why they are showing ads to people who live half way across the country…

There are many reasons why this is bad. Mainly because you probably dont sell cars to people across the country for one. 

Hope that helps some folks out there and below i’ve added a quick link that you can use to add the report to your custom reports tab if you are too lazy to build it yourself.

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=GvyEvnDBTj-xd0Nl6J3muQ

Priorities are like arms: If you think have more than a couple.

You're either lying or crazy... 

~ Merlin Mann

Productivity isn't something we seem to talk about very much on DS and is why I want to start talking more about the things we do to get more done everyday. Since having my baby boy last year I quickly realized how valuable my time is. With that in mind I need to make sure every minute counts as well as making sure that I am constantly moving forward in reaching whatever goal I am trying to hit. 

Here are a few apps that I use everyday to get more work done and be better at "adulting" 

Slack
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slack-team-communication/id618783545?mt=8
Built for teams we use it internally as a communication tool. I've also been able to wrangle in many of my vendors into their own private slack channels. This allows us to have open a free dialog outside of email in addtion to keeping a log of all conversations

Wunderlist
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wunderlist-to-do-list-tasks/id406644151?mt=8
Wunderllist is an amazing productivity tool that I use to manage my projects and tasks. The integration into Slack allows me to easily add things to my todo list and have them show up in a specific slack channel that any one can glance at and see what types of things I am working on at any point and time. 

Yelp for Business Owners
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yelp-for-business-owners/id936983378?mt=8
I am not the biggest Yelp! fan but hey, what are you gonna do. This app makes it super easy to reply to new reviews from anywhere. Since I manage multiple stores I would rather get a response in as quick as possible so I dont have to add it to my todo list. This app allows me to do everything that I would normally be able to do from the desktop site and I like that. 

Google my business 
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-my-business-update/id853371601?mt=8
A lot of what I wrote about the Biz Yelp app applies to this app as well. Being able to be mobile and reply to reviews from anywhere is awesome. 

Facebook pages
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-pages-manager/id514643583?mt=8
The pages app keeps getting batter and better in my opinion. With the addition of live streaming it's nice to be able to access any of our company facebook pages without having to be at a monitor. 

Instagram
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instagram/id389801252?mt=8
Managing multiple Instagram was a real pain in the you know what up until recently. A few months ago Instagram enabled the ability to log in to 5 different accts on the same mobile device. With the the ability to quick swap which account your in makes this app an amazing tool to capture both images and videos around our dealerships and post them. For an additional kicker you can link your instagram account to your dlvr.it account and have your pics shared amongst your other social channels as well. 

YouTube capture
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtube-capture/id576941441?mt=8
This app is amazing to quickly do walkarounds of vehicles to include in your follow up emails. in addition you can quickly grow your youtube catalog with this easy to use and light weight app 

Feedly
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/feedly-your-work-newsfeed/id396069556?mt=8
When google reader went away I was stuck out in the rain looking for a new RSS reader. Thats about the same time feedly came on the scene and saved me from my news woes. With feedly you can hook up RSS feeds, Topics, blogs etc. and basically have a plethora of news and information in your own personal little cubby everyday. I use Feedly for content curation for our dealership as well as my personal stuff. It's really easy to hook up your instapaper acct and save it for later or link it to your buffer account and schedule it across your personal social channels in a single push of the screen. The app makes things easier to read and save for later which makes life better. 

instapaper
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instapaper/id288545208?mt=8
There are many like it out there in the world but Instapaper has been a staple of mine since its launch. I usually will cruise through my feedly feeds and if something catches my fancy I will then share it to my instapaper acct. Here I will read more in depth into the thing I thought was cool and then decide if I want to get rid of it, share it out through buffer or something or write a blog post about it. This is an amazing tool to have in your pocket and makes combing through the web that much easier on a daily basis. 

Simplenote
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simplenote/id289429962?mt=8
I know there are tons of note taking apps out there. Ones even better than simplenote I am sure. But If you are a Mac user this app is fan freakin tastic. I take a lot of notes and write in markdown first of all. I also use a lot of text files, hashtags and like to be able to query my device in an easy manner. On my Mac I always write and take notes in an app called NVALT. The awesome thing is that NValt links to simplenote through dropbox. Which means I have all my notes, posts etc with me at anytime. No matter the device I am on I can access my stuff via the web, iphone app, ipad app etc. So if you are a person who likes to always have your stuff with you this is a must. 

What are some productivity apps that you use to stay on track and to keep on keepin on? 
Share them in the comments below.