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Three Social Media Measurement Tools That Save Time, Money, and Heartburn.

March 22, 2012 By 2 Comments

Social media is an important component of any successful digital marketing strategy. However, with the services themselves consistently changing metrics on the back-end (like Facebook and YouTube) – how does an online marketer measure success in 2012? April Wilson, a featured blogger and CEO of Digital Analytics 101, is here to help understand how to measure, monitor, and optimize your social media marketing efforts.

First, know your limits.

I am constantly looking for new ways to cut down on the time I spend monitoring my social media. I run a start-up company and we are completely crunched for time, money, and resources. However, I play in the digital marketing space, so my online footprint should mirror that. I can’t say I’m a digital company and NOT have a Twitter or Facebook presence. Most importantly, that presence shouldn’t SUCK.

This narrows down my criteria for a tool set:

  1. I need as much information and functionality in one place as I can get. Having just one login and one interface to manage ALL my social channels is a baseline criteria.
  2. Whatever I use, it better be easy to figure it out intuitively. I budget my time at no more than one hour a day to manage social media.
  3. Finally, it has to be free or so cheap that I don’t give that line item on my credit card statement the hairy eyeball.

 

Second, I have yet to find ONE tool that does everything I want.

I know that my reality is going to be that I need to use multiple tools to do multiple functions, so the tools I use have to complement each other without too much overlapping.

This is not to say that there ISN’T a larger enterprise social media solution out there that will do what all three of my tools do. I just haven’t found it yet.

 Because there isn’t just one tool out there that does everything, I use three different tools with three different objectives:

1)      Content curation: I believe it is my job as a subject-matter expert to share research, tools, trends, and articles with my followers.

2)      Social Media Management: I measure, respond, and grow each of my social streams all in one interface with one dashboard. I don’t have time to log into 4 different accounts to get my work done.

3)      Monitoring: It’s important to understand who’s talking about your brand, and where they’re discussing you. Also, it’s important to know what your overall share is of the chatter for your industry, product, or service.

 

Step 1: Content generation.

My first priority is delivering interesting or valuable content to my followers. If I’m lucky enough to get them to follow me, then I want to make sure that I’m shooting them articles, news stories, blog posts, infographics, and op-ed pieces on whatever topic is relevant to that brand and their followers. As such, I subscribe to several industry newsletters and have a slew of Google Alerts emailed to me every day. I need to stay current on everything in my field, and so do my fans.

But I don’t want to overload them with tweets or Facebook posts. That’s a total rookie mistake – one that I am sad to say that I made once upon a time. It’s better to pace yourself and make every communication count.

Buffer is the tool to help you NOT be that annoying post-er.

I love Buffer for content curation and scheduling. It’s a beautiful thing. I mean it. The way that it works is that as you create or find content that is interesting, you click a little button (via a browser add-on) to add that content to your “buffer.” Your buffer is like a metered repository of content.

You then schedule posts to publish based on the BEST times for you. When you first set it up, it will default to 4 posts per day, scattered throughout the day, so that you aren’t over-posting and making your followers freak out. Over time, you can ask Buffer to adjust your posting schedule to optimize for the best times for YOUR audience. This enables you to publish content at the times when YOUR followers are most likely to a) see it and b) engage with it.

You can play around with the tool for free, linking 1 Twitter and 1 Facebook account. I feel in love in the first 24 hours and upgraded that same week. I pay for the “Pro” account which lets me buffer up to 50 articles at any given time across 5 social media accounts… and it’s only $10 a month which is well worth the value of the software.

 Screenshot of bufferapp analytics

(Click on image to see full size screenshot)

Step 2: Relationship Building

Now that I have interesting things to say to my fans and followers – and I’m communicating at a pace that doesn’t freak them out – it’s time to take the relationship to the next level. There are several things I want to be able to do at this stage in the game:

  1. Make sure I’m following back all of my new followers
  2. Thanking people for RT’s and follows
  3. Answering questions or leaving comments on stuff they put on my Facebook page
  4. Sharing content that THEY post that is relevant to my “tribe”
  5. Understanding the impact of social media on driving traffic back to my website
  6. Seeing all my metrics in one place, in aggregate, and by social channel
  7. Finally, monitoring chatter about key topics that interest me so I can find new fans and followers to follow and learn from – and hopefully add to my “tribe”

SproutSocial is my go-to social media management program for all of my brands.

They have a free 30-day trial – and I was hooked. I currently pay $49 a month for the service, mostly because I think it’s important to link my Google Analytics to my social streams. There’s a really nice review of the tool on Aaron Lee’s blog that goes through some of the features, and many of the things he didn’t like have been fixed in the latest release.

It meets all of the criteria on my list, and I spend about 30 minutes each morning drinking my coffee, and sorting through what’s going on with each of my brands. I communicate, measure, and monitor topics I care about for each brand, all in one happy place that has a simple user interface and kick-butt functionality.

 Screenshot of SproutSocial

Last, but not least, Step 3: Keep an eye on the competition

When I’m working for a client – even if I’m NOT managing their social media — I want to see what percentage of the conversation they’re actually getting. OR, conversely, if it’s normal for there to even BE buzz about their industry or product.

I’ve had the pleasure of using some of the enterprise monitoring tools in past jobs – tools like Radian6, Buzzmetrics, Lithium (aka Scout Labs), and Crimson Hexagon.

All of these are really nice tools, but I’m not an enterprise anymore. I’m cheap. For my purposes, Social Mention works just awesome – for free.

I can search for branded and non-branded keywords and phrases. I can filter. I can download the data and manipulate it myself. While it may not be perfect, NONE of the monitoring tools are perfect. I don’t let it bother me if, for example, my monitoring tool doesn’t pick up Twitter chatter so well – because when I’m doing an competitive analysis, it’s the same problem for any brand I’m searching. If SocialMention doesn’t pick up EVERYTHING for Lexus, it’s also not picking it up for BMW or Mercedes, so I’m not going to sweat over it.

 Screenshot of Social Mention

In sum, my core social media measurement toolkit is:

  • Content curation and scheduling: Buffer App
  • Social CRM:                                   SproutSocial
  • Competitive research:                   socialmention

I’d love to get your feedback if you’re a current user of these products… and I’m always looking for new products and services to try if you’re in love with your own solution.


Filed Under: analytics, business intelligence software, Facebook, free, internet marketing, marketing, social media, Social Networking, social search Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: Part 2 – The pros and cons of Event Tracking

November 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Welcome to part 2 of this series on how to track on-site campaigns, for example, teasers on your homepage. After taking a deeper look at In-Page Analytics in part 1, we are now going to dive into the world of Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews and offer you a script that will track all the clicks on your homepage by default.

One of the best things about In-Page Analytics was that you don’t need to add any code to your page or alter your links. With Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews though, there is no way around some additional coding.

Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews?
So what’s the difference between Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews again? To make a long story short: With Virtual Pageviews, you can track Pageviews for “virtual” URLs (you can decide their name), even though there is no real pageview. For example, anytime someone clicks a link on a teaser, you can tell Google Analytics to record a virtual pageview like “/teaser-click-to-url-x”.


Almost the same happens with Event Tracking. To stick with our example, when somebody clicks on a teaser link, you can tell Google Analytics to track this as an Event. The major difference is that Event Tracking doesn’t create fictional Pageviews and thus doesn’t inflate your Pageview-based data. Imagine that every click on every teaser on your homepage was tracked as an additional Pageview. That would skew your data a lot because it also has a major impact on other data like Bounce and Exit Rate, Pageviews per Visit etc…

I prefer Event Tracking
That is the main reason why I do not use Virtual Pageviews for this purpose. Be aware though that Event Tracking can also skew your bounce rate and Time on Site/Page metrics, for example when you use it to track outbound links (usually bounces). Luckily, Google Analytics has recently published a way to work around this with “Non-Interaction Events”.

In the full article, you will find advice on how to properly implement Event Tracking for on-site campaigns, including a javascript that automatically tracks all the teaser links on your homepage or category pages, and we will analyze 7 advantages and 5 disadvantages of Event Tracking as a means for tracking on-site campaigns.

Filed Under: analytics, Google Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics Implementation, web analytics tools, Website Optimization

Google Secures User Data: Mixed Messages, Mixed Feelings

October 31, 2011 By 2 Comments

Google recently announced changes which will see them redirect all logged in users to https://www.google.com. The reason given for this change given by Google is that it will make search data more secure for it’s users, ensuring private data remains that way.

From a web analytics point of view the main impact is that no keyword referral data will be passed for organic searches in the above circumstances. Although Google played down the impact, stating that this would affect less than 10% of data, there was much uproar from the whole SEM community (I don’t think I’veImage of red and green traffic lights representing mixed signals ever seen so many comments on an GA blog post or reaction blog posts), with much of the ire being directed towards what has been dubbed a highly hypocritical move: not applying the same user protection to keyword data for users clicking on AdWords ads. If user data protection is priority number one, then Google should have the courage to stick to it’s principles, especially when money is involved.

The reason for doing this is obvious – a great selling point of advertising through AdWords is the ability to accurately measure ROI and optimize performance at keyword level. To take this away would surely lead to a huge drop in revenue from the cornerstone of Google’s financial strength.

This lack of consistency is at the root of the frustration for the SEO community: by not committing fully to the cause which they give as the reason for the change, it clearly shows that Google is merely paying lip service to need to to show they are serious privacy issues. The move has all the hallmarks of a compromise; finding a middle ground to keep everyone within the Google team happy.

I specifically choose to say ‘reason’ rather than ‘defence’ in previous paragraph – in the big picture this is a positive move as you cannot deny that any move towards increasing the security of data around the web is hugely important. For anyone outside the SEM industry, it would be hard to find any negatives to this change. Ill feeling at this point from a minority voice is surely collateral damage that was expected and accepted before the changes was publicly announced.

With my web analytics hat back in place, I have to draw the conclusion that this change merely pays lip service to the idea that they are prioritizing the protection of user data.

This is a real shame, but I get the impression that no amount of outcry will change the stance Google has taken.

Change happens all the time and at the end of the day the best thing to do is to accept it, adapt and continue to do the best job possible with what data we do have.  As Stephen Hawking wisely said “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”.

Filed Under: analytics, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, SEM, Web Analytics

Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: Part 1 – The pros and cons of In-Page Analytics

October 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Your homepage is usually your most important landing page. But it is not an easy task to find out how the page’s teasers or “on-site” or “internal campaigns” are performing, especially for content-heavy websites. In the first part of this series on how to track on-site campaigns, we will look at some general issues and then show you 5 pros and 9 cons for Google Analytics’ “In-Page Analytics”.

I work for a company that has a homepage clogged with teasers and links. It looks like this:

Image of e-fellows.net website

 

The teasers change once a week, so every week there’s the question: How well did each teaser perform?

If it were teaser links in an email campaign, the solution would be easy: Just tag all the links with your campaign parameters, and make sure your email service provider offers click tracking.

Why shouldn’t I use regular campaign tags?

Some people also use these normal campaign tags (utm_source etc.) in their on-site campaigns. That is not recommended because you lose the original source of the visitor as soon as she clicks on an on-site campaign link: The original source gets overridden by the parameters of that link.

Paid solutions: Mouse Movement and Click Heat Maps

So what is the solution? You can of course resort to full-scale click-tracking tools like CrazyEgg or PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking (both are paid solutions, PicNet offers a free trial on some pages). Be aware though that this means putting a lot more Javascript on your page which often needs IT buy-in (often hard to get), can impact the page loading time, and you have to use yet another tool. I also think it’s a little obtrusive to track each and every click and mouse movement of your visitor even if they are not (easily) individually identifiable.

Analyzing teaser performance with Google Analytics

You’re not lost if you just want to stick to Google Analytics. In my opinion, there are several proven methods to analyze on-site teaser performance:

  1. In-Page Analytics (a.k.a. “Website Overlay”)
  2. Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews (actually two methods, but they work similarly)
  3. URL parameters that specify the referring link (like http:\\www.mydomain.com/article?ref=home)

All have their pros and cons. To spoil the show, I use In-Page Analytics for some purposes and Event Tracking for others. I used URL parameters for a while, but almost entirely stopped doing so because it makes reporting a lot more complex and causes other issues. But depending on your goals and your resources, all three solutions may be viable options for you.

In this series on how to track on-site campaigns, we’ll look at all three methods in detail. This first post will focus on In-Page Analytics – a powerful and often neglected tool that is available out of the box and can help tremendously on most websites, although it also has many downsides especially when you have dynamic content, outbound links or links to subdomains. To read the full article, visit “Tracking on-site campaigns” with Google Analytics in Web Analytics World’s guides pages.”

Filed Under: analytics, Google Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics Implementation, web analytics tools, Website Optimization

Are these your top 10 biggest website mistakes?

September 22, 2011 By 2 Comments

Following on from my last post about building websites to take account of Social Media, I thought, seeing as I spend most of my life reviewing sites that I’d share some of the most common errors I see – these are not in any order and the list is not definitive, but hopefully they may strike a chord!

1) What’s it all about then?

If I see another website where I struggle to understand why on earth it was built in the first place, who it’s for, what it’s supposed to do or what I’m supposed to do on it, then, I will …… have seen an awful lot that fall in to this category. Websites need a purpose!

2) Build it and they will come?!

The key to a successful website is understanding your audience and building a site that offers value to them. Without knowing that, you’re on a hiding to nothing!

3) Accessibility isn’t for me Logo for Positive about Disabled People

There are laws and there are standards – make sure you follow them. Visually impaired and people with other disabilities use the web too you know!

4) Well I know where everything is!

Any usability study will tell you that when people are lost, they leave. Clear, logical navigation and tools to improve (such as breadcrumbs) are key.

5) Looks good in my designer’s office!

It looked great when you saw it on a 25″ widescreen monitor, on a safari browser. Now that you’re looking at it on a 17″ monitor using Internet Explorer 6 – it’s not so great! Ensure that you build for the widest possible audience.

6) They’ll get in touch if they really want to

Image of button saying Talk to UsYou build a site, you attract traffic through Search Engines and other mechanisms and then you leave site visitors to their own devices when it comes to what you want them to do – be clear, be bold. Make specific to the page the visitor is on.

7) Website – done. Now back to the day job.

You have a site which is invisible to the outside world – don’t get me wrong, there are occasions when you don’t want any profile, but most clients build a site to attract business, yet the site has either been built so the Search Engines avoid it like the plague, or there are no links in to it……

8) Build for now, we’ll think about tomorrow, tomorrow!

Think of your site as an apartment block. If you can consider what you’d like the block to look like over a 3-5 year period and then build the site – even if it’s the first storey, then at least you’ve got the architecture to allow you to continue to built. The amount of multi-storey bungalows I see!

9) My developer knows what I want

“I thought the guy knew what he was doing and gave him £1500 and my logo and he built me a site – now I find it has no search engine profile and I can’t update it myself”. True story and oh, so common. Always specify your requirements before starting.

10) We’ll get an enquiry one of these days……Image of magnifying glass over graph

Everyone says that Google Analytics is wonderful – question whether they use it and that’s a different matter. It’s as if by the very fact that Analytics is plugged in that the site will heal itself! Analytics are great, learn how to read them (Google’s Conversion University is great) and make decisions based on the information . Two words of warning – make sure that you filter yourself/ your developer out from the data and make sure that you treat the data with a certain amount of common sense – after all they only tell you what people did – not what they wanted to do!

Filed Under: analytics, Conversion Rate Optimization, Engage, Google Analytics, Tips, Web Analytics, Web Design, Web metrics

Lies, Damn Lies and Info-graphics

July 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

Should we just consider badly constructed Info-Graphics as nothing more than pieces of “Graphic Art”, or should the potential to mislead be a serious concern to us all?

The persuasive power of numbers, in the form of statistics, has been used and abused by everyone with an argument to make since the first abacus was invented. However as we all know pictures “speak a thousand words” and the growth of Info-graphics, and the tools that produce them, has been prolific.

And so to my point… given how our little human minds work, our eyes are literally “drawn to pictures”, (see the link to a revealing example of this below ! ). Pictures make an impression like no table of numbers ever can. Properly executed this is a powerful tool for education and good, badly executed this is not only a waste of an opportunity it could even be used to deliberately mislead.

What factors determine a good info-graphic from graphic-art? – Here are a few suggestions and I welcome your thoughts….

  • Credible source data and source accreditations
  • Accurate interpretations of scale (e.g. don’t represent stated numbers with a picture unless the scale accurately represents those numbers)
  • Careful use of color conventions (try painting a start sign red and a stop sign green and you will see what I mean)
  • “Balanced” written commentary

Cisco's Internet of thingsTry working through this recent info-graphic (click to view) from the good folks at Cisco. Since the source is a reputable one I am going to take the figures as read – even the ones we can’t easily prove or disprove such as the number of IP addresses vs atoms on earth. (personally my first instinct is surprise at this however any physicists out there please reveal your answers now…)

It’s an interesting picture that combines simple line and picture drawings to represent connections and tell a story over time. It also uses diagrams such as the world population that are unclear as to whether the size/volume of the shapes represents actual numbers (or just a graphic to show rising size).

When you take an info-graphic apart in this way its surprising how more questions than answers can be raised.

(For those of you interested in the focal power of images on the human mind – in this case the male mind – and who haven’t yet heard of the (true) story of how Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam reduced their cleaning bills in the gents restrooms you might want to check this out)

Infographic Resources

Visual.ly – an infographics resource with promise of more tools to follow…

Gooogle Public Data Explorer – in beta with Google Labs, so I’m not sure where the team will relocate this app to but it’s worth checking out before it moves

Infomous – we’re divided on this Twitter graphic as to whether this is a true info-graphic or more graphic art, what do you think?

Filed Under: analytics, data analysis, Infographics

What Happens to Reporting as Analytics Approaches Real Time?

September 15, 2009 By 4 Comments
Analytics has been about reporting for many years now. As more and more web technology moves toward real time, what does that mean for the future of reports? Let’s speculate!

Reports are generally used to confirm a prior decision or to provide support for an upcoming decision. What we really need is both confirmation on previous decisions and help making future decisions, which we currently use reports to accomplish. As analytics approaches real time, reporting will be too slow of a method for assisting in decision making. So what would future innovations look like?

Confirmation on decisions

All work starts off as tasks. Tasks can be correlated to onsite impact. Future systems will be able to map our tasks to impact and provide a conclusion on the activity. Some of those conclusions will be used by site optimization engines to make adjustments on the fly without need for humans to read and decide on reports. Some of the data will make it into quarterly board meetings and reviews with agencies and consultants.

Assisted decision making

While there are some unique scenarios, much of what happens online in marketing fits into patterns. In the not too distant future, we’ll see systems that use these patterns in a library to provide a dashboard of recommended actions. We will be able to complete simple actions with the push of a confirmation button. Other actions will be as easy to complete as clicking through a link. All of those actions will be tracked automagically for confirmation on the decision.

What do you think the future of reporting looks like for real time analytics?

Filed Under: analytics, real time, reporting