Thursday, July 22, 2010
Marketers know that the ability to measure success online is far more accurate than measurements offline. Tracking, analyzing and responding to the data is your key to success. Begin by defining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your campaigns.
With your marketing goals in mind, what is measurable? As Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook notes, social media’s goals are about increasing online visibility. This means creating awareness about your products, services and brand. When determining metrics, think of actions that indicate people are aware of your brand and, from these actions, what is measurable.
The development process for KPIs can be visualized as a funnel:
Goal > Action > Measurement (KPI)
Web Stats To Measure
KPIs linked to product and brand awareness should focus on visits your website and how they found it. Are people aware of, and visiting, your site? If they are, how did they get there and were they aware of your brand before they visited? The following is a list of web stats that can help gage awareness about your product and brand.
- Unique Visitors. This shows how many people are visiting your website.
- Direct Traffic. This shows how many people are coming directly to your site by typing the URL in their address bar. These visitors are coming to the site having already heard about your product or brand.
- Referral Traffic. This shows where your visitors are coming from. This is important because referrals are like recommendations. You will want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to your site.
- Keyword traffic. This shows how people are finding your site. Are they using your brand’s keywords? This shows that they already knew about you before they visited your site. What other keywords are visitors using? If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it shows a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site’s content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.
With these KPIs, you can create a KPI scorecard. Fill in the scorecard monthly and go back over previous months to determine a baseline. Looking at the numbers month over month, are they the same? Where do they fluctuate? What does this mean in relation to your marketing activities? What should be repeated, modified, or discarded for something new?
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
One of our clients, BC Book Prizes, is holding their Summer 2010 Online Auction. They have some amazing prize packages that are open to bidding and the proceeds go to supporting the achievements of British Columbian writers and publishers.
Prizes Include:
The Illustrator Pack. Bid on an original, framed, gouache illustration on watercolour paper by Kathryn E. Shoemaker entitled “Snowy Eye” as well as four children’s books (Good-bye Marianne, Floyd the Flamingo, A Telling Time, and My Animal Friends) that feature the illustrator’s work. Value: $950. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
Betsy Warland Writer’s Retreat. Bid on admission to the upcoming writer’s retreat with Betsy Warland at Annie’s Acre Bed and Breakfast in Nanoose Bay. Value: $250. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
The Heart of Vancouver. Bid on a one night stay for two in a one-bedroom deluxe suite at the Rosedale on Robson Suite Hotel (valid after October 1st), a voucher for two tickets to the Vancouver Opera’s December 7th or 9th production of Lucia di Lammermoor, and a gift certificate ($50) to book’mark, The Library Store at the Vancouver Public Library. Value: $540. Bidding ends: July 28th at 11:00am.
Bidding ends in August. As the auction progresses, prizes will be added and removed weekly, so check back for updates.
How Bidding Works
Send an email to cody[at]rebuscreative[dot]com with your name, address, phone number, email address and your bid for the package you’re interested in. The minimum bid increment is $5.00. Bids and bidders are updated as frequently as possible. Additionally, most items can be shipped worldwide. (Note: Additional costs may be incurred to cover shipment of item(s) when necessary.)
For more information, visit the Summer 2010 Online Auction page.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
If you are unfamiliar with Hootsuite, it’s a twitter platform (based out of Vancouver) that lets you manage multiple twitter accounts, schedule your tweets, sync twitter accounts with your team, and track your twitter stats - like how many users are clicking on your tweets. Basically, Hootsuite brings a whole bunch of useful twitter tools together into a single management platform.
In addition to Hootsuite’s regular features, they have released various new features and tools over the past few weeks. Below are the changes that you should be aware of.
Hootsuite5
Named after the release’s upgrade to HTML5, Hootsuite5 includes geo-searches, new or ol’school RTs and Google Analytics.
Geo-Searches
Geo-searches let you narrow your twitter searches to tweets from your local area, which is useful if you’re looking for resources or people that are close to your location. To access geo-searches, enter your search in the search box and click on the compass image on the right. It will ask you if Hootsuite can access your location, click Share Location, and the search box will show tweets from your local area related to your search:
New or Ol’School RTs
In the past, Hootsuite has used “RT” for re-tweeting messages. It has now integrated Twitter.com’s auto re-tweet function and users can choose whether they want to use the auto-re-tweet tool or re-tweet with “RT”. The difference is that with auto-re-tweet you can’t edit messages and if a message is over 140 characters it will simply get cut off. With the “RT” method you can edit the message to fit within the character limit. The default is the “RT” function, but if you want to set your preferences to auto re-tweet, click on the owl image next to the compose message box and click Settings > Preferences:
From here, select Choose Twitter Web Retweets.
Google Analytics in Dashboard
You can now bring your Google Analytics data right into Hootsuite’s dashboard. This means that if you want to see your twitter stats as well as your site traffic numbers, you can do this all in one place. To access Google Analytics, click on the owl image next to the compose message box and click Stats > Site Analytics. Click Connect to Google Analytics. Choose your Google Account and Grant Access. From here you can choose which websites you want to see stats for and view your statistics, just like you would in Google Analytics:
Social Owl
On Tuesday, Hootsuite released Social Owl, what they call “social relationship and support tools,” which lets you filter your twitter stream by influence or by keyword. Filtering by influence lets you filter your twitter stream using Klout’s rating score. Users are graded from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest. This feature lets you quickly zero in on influencers to target in your campaigns.
In addition to being able to set up columns for keyword searches that you always want to be tracking, you can now filter columns “on the fly” by keyword. This helps focus your twitter stream and is great for tracking hot topics.
To access either of these new filters, click on the arrow on the rightside of the green bar at the top of your column, click Filter by… From here you can choose to filter by either keyword or klout score:
Coming Soon: Premium Paid Packages
Within the next few weeks Hootsuite will be launching a new freemium model where premium users, such as Conde Nast, Banana Republic and Dell, can have access to extra features. The paid plans will include:
- Unlimited social networks
- Unlimited RSS feeds
- Team members on social networks
- Advanced analytics & reports
- Expedited support
No prices have been released yet, but it’s interesting that more and more social tools and platforms that started out free are adding paid elements. Just this week, it was announced that Reddit has changed its business model to freemium. What do you think about Hootsuite moving towards a freemium model?
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
A lot has been happening on the web these past few weeks so we thought it’d be useful to do a roundup of some of the must-read articles that we’ve come across that you may have missed.
Do you have other interesting articles to add to this list?
5 Social Media Trends to Watch Right Now
It’s important to always be looking forward online. This article from Mashable points out upcoming trends that they believe will be important in the future. As the article states, “...being aware of oncoming movements in the social media landscape can help keep you and your business out ahead of the curve…” We couldn’t agree more.
How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days
Very informative post about how BlitzLocal built up Weekly World News’ Facebook fans. They went from 3,244 fans to 40,310 fans (10 times larger!) in less than a week. The article lists some great tactics that you can follow to increase your fan base.
Top 10 Questions Businesses Asked Us About Facebook Marketing
HubSpot lists 10 common questions that companies often ask them about Facebook marketing and provides helpful, informative answers. Find answers to questions such as, “What is the best way to drive interactions on your Facebook page?” “How often should we be replying to fans?” And, “how can Facebook ads be used in a campaign?”
Why Friends Matter in Work and in Life
Not necessarily focused on social media, this is a great post from Harvard Business Review that reminds us just how important friends are in all aspects of our lives. According to research referenced in the article, “money can buy happiness . . . as long as you spend it on other people.”
What Identities Are We Using to Sign in Around the Web?
We’ll end with this neat graphic from the social optimization platform Gigya that shows what online IDs people use to sign in around the web. It is an interesting indicator of how we trust different services with our identities.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Back in April we talked about How to Understand a Google Analytics Report and since then we’ve been providing a lot of Google Analytics tips. Since it’s handy to have all of our tips in one place, here is a roundup of our Google Analytics guidelines and how-tos. Following these best practices will bring you one step closer to becoming a Google Analytics pro.
Technical Basics
How to Filter Out My Internal Traffic in Google Analytics
Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data.
How to Get Analytics Reports Sent to Your InBox
Setting up your Google Analytics account to deliver your reports to your Inbox is a handy way to remember to monitor your web stats.
How to Give Someone Access to Your Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you the ability to add users to your account and to grant them different levels of access. This is useful for when you want to share access with others in your company or when you hire an outside consultant who would benefit from looking at your web stats (like us).
Techniques for Tracking Campaigns
How to Use Analytics Annotations to Track Your Marketing Campaigns
Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is a really useful tool that doesn’t get used as much as it should. It’s an easy feature to apply and it’s great for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns because it creates an activity timeline that positions your marketing activities in relation to your website traffic. Annotations are extremely useful for creating benchmarks and measuring and tracking your marketing campaigns.
How to Use Google’s Advanced Segments
Analytics’ Advanced Segments tool allows you to segment your website users into separate, defined channels to see how different audience groups are interacting with your site. The ability to analyze your reports by particular user groups and compare one traffic channel to another is extremely useful and helps to make your Analytics reports more meaningful.
And if you missed April’s post, here’s How to Understand a Google Analytics Report, which includes a breakdown of a standard monthly report and what the numbers mean.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Why? Because they are busy working on the site, doing programming maintenance or adding content. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data.
To get accurate analytics data, you can filter out your IP address.
How to Exclude Your IP Address From Google Analytics
Go to your Account Overview and click on Filter Manager.
In the Filter Manager screen, click Add Filter on the right hand corner.
In the Create New Filter page, enter a name for your filter.
Under Filter Type, choose Exclude > traffic from the IP addresses > that are equal to
Enter your IP address.
Under Apply Filter to Website Profiles, select the website profile that you want to block your IP address from and click add. This adds your filter to that website.
Click Save Changes.
Now in the Filter Manager screen, your filters will be listed.
If you need to edit your filter, you can do so from this screen.
Finding Your IP Address
There are a number of free sites that will help you find your IP address:
Note: If you have a dynamic IP address or need to filter a range of IP addresses, check out the Google Support forums for excluding IPs.
Now in the Filter Manager screen, your filters will be listed. If you need to edit your filter, you can do so by returning to this screen.
Today we are testing the localization settings for our website and server. There appears to be a disconnect between when we think posts are going to go live and when they actually go live. Rather annoying. So now we’re going to test our theories.
Some days you are the scientist, some days you are the guinea pig.
Posted by Monique Trottier |
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