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