Extra! Extra!

One of the strongest Project Managers that I have ever worked with, Nick Giordano, is also the lead guitarist for the band Monsters are not Myths.   Yesterday, Nick walked me through some of the analytics that he monitors on his band’s fans base (groupie analytics?) on both Facebook and MySpace. 

Facebook Insights has come a long way in the last 12 months. After creating a page and gaining fans, administrators can see a large variety of reports. Most of the reports focus on two main areas (1) How successful a page is at creating interaction within a community and (2) How successful Facebook advertisements are at getting Facebook users to act (convert).  The most impressive piece of data that you can find is your Post Quality.  This variable measures engagement by tracking each of your posts (text, video, photos, etc) and how many of your fans comment, like, or write on your wall.  While the report does not necessarily tell you which demographics in your fan base react more than others, it gives you an excellent idea of how strong your content is.  This would be an awesome feature for any site.  While Facebook puts a little too much emphasis on their simple demographics data (literally just age and gender), the export feature and the graphs on data such as media consumption give administrators an excellent understanding of their ability to create an interactive community.  Facebook Insights would be more useful if they offered the ability to integrate with offsite analytics applications such as SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, or Google Analytics to show downstream analytics – one can only dream.  With some work, an analyst could start to track trends between the applications – for instance, when Facebook Post Quality goes up, Facebook traffic to our site (and conversion) increases.

While the MySpace Dashboards are not as user friendly, the data offered is still very impressive.  The dashboards provide similar demographics to Facebook with age, gender, and location being the primary tracking variables.  MySpace gives a little more insight into interactions by showing posts, comments, views, and kudos over days, weeks, and totals (Facebook focuses on the last 7 days).  What impresses me the most about the MySpace dashboards is their unique variables suited for the goals of the administrator.  For example, Nick’s band uses the MySpace music player to let fans play the band’s songs and their dashboard shows how popular different songs are on MySpace.  It measures the song popularity by plays, dedications, iLikes and trending data.  For Monsters are not Myths, “Old Soul”  tops their MySpace charts. 

Most importantly, Nick can log into the bands Google Analytics account and see how traffic from Facebook and MySpace to their band’s main webpage (http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/) interacts with the site.  For instance, he can see if visitors to the site that came from MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter were more likely to be repeat visitors, viewed more content, and/or signed up for newsletters and events.  To isolate traffic from URLs posted on a fan page versus random users posting URL’s on a social networking site, be sure to append tracking variables to the URLs you post.  For instance, if Nick was to post his tour dates the URL might look like this - http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/v2/music_shows.html?source=facebook.  If you are using a URL shortener such as ow.ly, tr.im, or bit.ly, be sure to append the URL variables before you shorten them. 

http://www.Facebook.com/pages/Monsters-are-not-Myths/6306011877

http://www.myspace.com/monstersarenotmyths

I am feeling a little philosophical this morning and thinking about some of the behaviors of web analysts. 

It’s funny how most web analysts present the positive side of analytics.  They may produce reports which illustrate that 9.8% of the visitors converted to quality leads, that 749 users signed up for the newsletter, and that 56% of the customers came back for a second purchase.  The traffic reports often start with the keyphrases that get the best click-through-ratios and the best conversion rates.  Web analysts seem to be always looking on the bright side of the data.   The analysts are also often complaining that their web teams are not acting on the data they report.

I wonder if the analysts focused their reports on the 90.2%  of the visitors who didn’t convert, the 6,567 users who didn’t sign up for the newsletter, and the 44% of the visitors who never came back – would the web teams be more likely to act on the data? It might help site owners to make more objective decisions if all reporting tools showed both sides of the story.  For instance, traffic reports might show the 98 visitors that came from organic search results as well as the 7,528 visitors that searched for our phrases but decided not to click on our link.

While the buzz around micro-blogging is all about what is new and cool, marketing groups should realize that a successful Twitter imitative takes a significant amount of work and though you can’t thoroughly track your Twitter activities with your traditional web analytics suite, you should be tracking trends in your Twitter community. Many tweeters out there are simply posting 140 characters about the main course of each meal and/or retweeting every article they see online (or on other tweets).   Extraneous banter may create an active feed but it will not create a loyal fan base or ROI.  

A successful Twitter community takes continuous thought about what your followers want to read.  If your content is good, the analytics should prove it.  The following is a list of some variable that you can track on your Twitter initiative:

1. Traffic to your site: Track the amount of traffic to your site from Twitter (i.e. ow.ly,is.gd,bit.ly) as well as from Twitter aggregators (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook).  Be sure that when you post articles to Twitter you’re embedding URL parameters to help track how much traffic is coming directly from Twitter.  This report will help you determine ROI for your Twitter initiative.  Typically the best ROI for a Twitter campaign is cost effective traffic that converts. 
2. Traffic from your site: Track how much traffic you are sending to Twitter and how much of it is coming back. This is often surprising to site owners how much a link to Twitter can influence abandonment.
3. Followers / New Sign Ups: Keep a count of how many new followers you tweets are getting on a daily or weekly basis.  Remember that followers are not always reading your tweets!  A follower is not necessarily an impression.  One common mistake is to assume that your followers are reading your every word – remember that approximately 60% of Twitters don’t come back to the site after their first month.
4. Tweets: In order to make sure your content is fresh, record the number of tweets you produce daily/weekly.  This may come in handy if you need to correlate it with the growth of your community.  If you content is good, you may find that your community grows proportionately with your tweets. 
5. Replys, Retweets, Lists:  How many replys or retweets are your post getting?  This is best indicator that your posts are getting read and appreciated.  Dive deeper and determine if it is a small group of followers that are retweeting often or a broad group that is retweeting when they see fit.
6. Competitors: Many of the Twitter tracking tools out there allow you to track the variables above on your tweets as well as your competitors.  While I don’t typically see a lot of value in watching the competition, this may give you a good indicator of how well you are interacting with your community (or how well you should).

Determining ROI in Twitter can be difficult.  The most challenging step is determining the costs in creating a successful Twitter initiative.  Use of the website is free, the followers (if your copy is good) are free. Typically the largest cost is the time put into producing relevant tweets.  As you plan and implement the Twitter campaign, keep track of your time and associate a fair value for all time spent (Cost = time spent * value of time).  The return on your investments comes from the traffic you derive from Twitter that converts on your site. 

Below are some great tools for simplifying you data gathering on your Twitter campaigns.

1. Great for tracking article promotions – twiterurly
2. Great for tracking community development – twittercounter or twitteranalyzer
3. Learning about your community – tweeps and twitter.grader.com
4. Hashtag tracking – whatthehashtag

A lot of focus is put on using web analytics data to make incremental improvements in site performance.  But as audiences, brands, products, and technologies change – sometimes a site needs a complete redesign.  When it’s time for a complete site overhaul, it’s important to dive deep into the web analytics for the site early in the process.

Data and insight derived from web analytics should be a key driving force in the creation of wireframes, information architecture, and usability testing.  The following is a partial list of bits of data that help User Experience experts make informed decisions, when creating the layout for a new site that will more effectively achieve the intended goals:

• Navigation Preferences: By categorizing your navigation types into groups such as drop-down menus, primary navigation, content navigation, quick-links, content links, text links, graphic/button links, flash/media links, etc you can start to see how visitors prefer to navigate across the site.    This becomes more exciting when you are able to compare these numbers with the navigation preferences of other sites. 
• Visitor Tasks:  Content popularity and/or click-paths are essentially the visitor showing you what tasks they are performing successfully (conversion) or unsuccessfully (abandonment). 
• Vocabulary / Nomenclature / Taxonomy:  The visitors are telling you how they describe and categorize their needs in 3 important ways.  First, the choice of words and phrases they use on public search engines such as Google.  Second, their choice of words and phrases on your site search engine (i.e. Endeca).  Thirdly, they are exposing what words make them click within the navigation and content in the site (as well as what words they don’t click on). 
• User Research:  Often overlooked is the data that tells us what company the visitor is at when navigating the site as well as demographic information such as if they are using an expensive ISP or a more practical one.  Their technical aptitude can be loosely derived from their connection speed, browser, operating system, and plug-in preferences.  The language, region, country, state, and county of your visitors also helps in defining web marketing strategies.   
• Conformity / Variance: Analyzing the deviation in variables such as visitation (frequency / latency), click-through-ratios, and search trends shows degrees of loyalty and dependencies within your visitors during a sales cycle/product research.  

Generating a report of these variables and more helps the entire team review and evolve site layouts more intelligently.  Often in projects we find that if the wireframes and information architecture are data-driven, the revision of designs becomes an informed process rather than one of personal preferences.

Many of our clients ask us how to justify larger web marketing budgets to their executives.  One of the obvious places to start is an ROI analysis or a cost/benefit analysis.  If there is no straight forward conversion event (i.e. Lead Generation or eCommerce), it can be difficult to measure how effective web marketing is.  In some cases, web budgets need to be analyzed as a cost of doing business.

Marketing budgets are often divided up into channels/segments such as events, print, mail, television, radio, etc.  The sales team, often operating on a separate budget, actually spends budget on some channels with the same goals as marketing - such as inside sales.

When analyzing how the marketing budgets should grow (or shrink) an organization should analyze how the different channels stack up against each other for common variables. 

For example, as a touch-point (impression), ask your team to quantify how often each channel serves as a touch-point for potential and current customers.

Another example would be to put a cost to each impression.  Take the total budget per channel and divide it by the number of touch-points (impressions). 

From these numbers, as a channel for interaction with potential and current customers, the website and email are the most cost effective.  Adding conversion rates to this table may paint a different picture.  Analyzing budgets in this fashion shows that online channels are more cost effective at interacting with potential and current customers.

Marketers love the opportunity that the web offers to promote a product or service to a global audience.  But when the costs of translating/localizing content, integrating a Web Content Management that supports localization, implementing localized SEO/PPC initiatives, and maintaining sites in multiple languages get added up – the value of localized sites gets questioned.  Companies which have products and services that can be marketed to a global audience often let their websites follow their sales teams into new regions.  That is, the sales teams start to sell a product into a specific region and when the sales team is able to show a fertile market, the marketing team localizes a web presence to support the sales reps. 

But what if the product/service is marketable to a global audience and the company cannot afford to send a sales team to every major country/region where demand may reside?  How does a marketer decide which regions to make investments for global growth?  Knowing that some regions are more expensive to localize for and some regions are more competitive than others when it comes to SEO/PPC initiatives, how does a marketer weigh the cost against the opportunity?

The answer should be simple: 

1. Use global keyphrase research tools to see if customers in various regions are searching for your product or service on the web. It’s typically OK to make the assumption that if there are surfers using relevant keyphrases to find your services, that customers are out there. 
2. For the regions that have online audiences for your product, pilot as many micro-sites (2-5 pages) as possible with small campaigns for driving traffic and see which sites demonstrate growth.  Translating a few pages and posting them as static pages is significantly less costly than fully building and deploying integrated/localized web sites. 
3. While the pilots are running, monitor site analytics to see if your micro-sites are attracting the traffic you expect and if the sites are able to convert traffic at acceptable conversion rates (i.e. Lead Generation). 

Note: 2-3 page micro-sites are not always successful and generating leads for complex products.  Allow your micro-site to link heavily to your primary corporate site (even if it is in English) to help sell the company along with the product/service.  The analytics will show if the language barrier causes abandonment.

The pilots will cost significantly less than full-blown web sites and will allow you determine which regions have more opportunity for growth giving your team a prioritized list of regions to localize into.  Remember that these sites will require maintenance overtime as you are budgeting a pilot and full blown localized sites.

During the initial phase of an engagement and during the post launch optimization, we’re always looking for simple methods for improving a sites ability to hit specific goals.  Below is a fairly simple process for bringing your users closer to what they are looking for and hopefully gaining a couple conversion points in the process.

1. Start by estimating the value of a conversion event on the website. Let’s use lead generation as our primary goal.  If we have an average web lead / converted customer ratio of 4% and our average value of a web customer is $7,500, then the average value of a web lead can be estimated (roughly) at $300.00. 
2. Next, in your analytics tool associate the value ($300) with the conversion event (Lead Generation).  Most Analytics tools will help you do this if you can associate a dollar value with your conversion event.  For our demonstration, we will assume that there is a Thank You (and next steps) page after each lead form.  Users that reach the Thank You page are worth an average value of $300.  The way to do this in each analytics tool is a little different.  For example, if you are using Google Analytics this would be the $Index value. 
3. For the next step, log in to your analytics tool and decipher which content is most highly valued to your converted users.   Again, this will be different depending on which analytics tool you use.  Sticking with our Google Analytics example, go the Reverse Path report see which pages are viewed before conversion events and go to the Top Content report to see the value of those pages.
   
4. Now you know which content your web leads are looking for and which content is most influential to them!! !  Update the link structure on your homepage by adding prominent links to the most valued content and eliminating links to the least valued (or least visited content). 

2 Notes

* First: Be sure to measure your average conversion of the event (lead generation) both before and after the homepage has been optimized.

** Second: Use common sense when optimizing links on the homepage. Some links require context before you put them in front of a user.  For example, just because terms and conditions on a home loan application are highly valued and highly visited by customers that convert, doesn’t mean that it is the first page a visitors wants to see on your homepage. Customers looking for home loans may need to see rates first in order to put the terms into context.

If you have questions about how to implement this process, please contact us at 650-212-3900 or info@extractable.com

Over the years we have written several applications that integrate with Google components through open APIs.  We’ve used Google maps to show office locations, Google CSE for internal search engines, and even Google Charts to show graphs.  Last month, my favorite Google API was launched.

Google Analytics announced an API to their popular analytics service.

The first implementation we are working on ties Google Analytics into a content management system that we are deploying for a client.  For many organizations, the CMS is used daily to make updates to the site while the analytics are viewed less frequently.  This gives all CMS users the ability to analyze the page(s) they are working. 

CMS users will have the ability to know valuable information about the content they are editing, such as:

1. how people get to the page they are working on  (entrance, visitors, pageviews)
2. and how many leave after viewing it (bounce, abandonment)
3. are people reading this page (time on page)
4. if the copy they are spending so much time on only gets viewed by 1% of the site audience

Content owners / marketers that are aware of this data will improve overall site performance by being aware of how specific pages impact site goals.

I’m excited about our first implementation of this new, simple channel for getting analytics data in the hands of the web team. 

For more information, check out the Google Analytics Developer Docs.

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls recently worked with Extractable to launch their new website www.GIA.edu. The new website was designed with a coherent navigational structure that promotes critical user paths.

The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.

One of the most important factors search engines use to rank your website for keyword phrases is analyzing the number of websites and how popular (or important) the websites that are linking to you are (note: I’ll refer to these type of links as “backward links” although other SEO professionals might call them inward links, insite links, etc).  Google even patented a link analysis algorithm called Page Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) which helps Google determine the ranking of your website on keyword phrases.

Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program.  Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?

• Find industry related blogs; and blog!
• Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
• Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.

To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website.   Don’t email or call the website owner blindly.  You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests. 

Show value!  For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com.  Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link.  Example:  Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.