I recently attended the Coremetrics 2010 client summit.  My role there was dual purpose.  Officially, I was there as an advanced Coremetrics user for the company that I work for.  As a three time attendee of the conference, my main goal was to make sure that my co-attendees enjoyed themselves and gleaned some good information specific to their role at our company.  Unofficially, I attended the conference as a published author of a web analytics book and co-owner of the website on which you are reading this post.  My main goal in this capacity was to continue making contacts and crowd source the topic of the next book that Carlos and I will publish in January.

The gist of the Coremetrics conference is this: keynote speeches, breakout sessions on specific web measurement and web marketing topics, meet and greet with a multitude of vendors, showing off new features of the new analytics tools, and socializing between clients.  The gravy of the conference, as is with most conferences, is the time available for socializing and bouncing ideas off of each other.  I balanced this time between being a web analyst for a large company and engaging my peers as a fledgling thought leader in the web analytics arena.

As you might have previously seen on this website, we’ve published a poll of four different book topics for you to choose from.  We’ve done some crowd sourcing over the multitude of social media forums and have had a good response from our friends and followers as to what book they would most like to read.  I felt that it would be a brilliant idea as I was chatting with my peers at the conference to give them the opportunity to peruse the four book options and make their voice heard.  So I set out to this task in the midst of enjoying the rest of the conference and learning some brilliant new marketing and analytics ideas.

It was interesting for me because most people at the conference recognize me from my company name, but not as many knew me from my previous book.  Such is life sometimes.  It definitely added an interesting perspective for me and for the peers that I spoke with.  Most analysts it seems, are content with their single job and don’t necessarily take it upon themselves to b ranch out.  For me, writing a book and keeping up with a web analytics blog has allowed a great outlet for me to expand my analytics knowledge while at the same time, allowing me to share some of my knowledge with my readers.  If you are reading this I hope it is because you are like me and are seeking additional knowledge and are not satisfied with just doing your job.

If you have not attended a web analytics conference, or any type of web marketing conference, I encourage you to do so.  Specifically, if your analytics provider is hosting a conference, there is a mint of information you can glean off of the presenters and your peers alike.  It might be very minute and tangible such as how ad retargeting works, or it might be more topline and holistic like why tagging matters, or why segmentations helps better identify what your customer is doing on your website.  As well, if you are like me and you want to make a bigger name for yourself, attending a conference is great for making acquaintances and garnering a following.

credit: *^ ^* Sherry

Over the last three weeks I’ve seen a rather stupid rash of posts claiming that social media experts are a myth. Most recently an article at ereleases went popular on Sphinn.

Many of these articles are ridiculous, duplicitous, and unhelpful. They make claims like:

1. Social media is new and constantly evolving
2. There is no right way to use social media
3. What works for one may not work for another

Social Media is NOT New

First, social media is not new. The name is new but the content is not. The modern social media platforms started wide scale use in 2002, more or less, with Friendster and Myspace. Blogs, and their communities, predate that (1997). Before that there were already forums, user groups, and Bulletin Board Systems! The Internet has been a social medium for a very long time. All the way back to the 1970s the back-bone concept of Twitter has been available, but without the character limit. People have been using written telecommunication interactions to pass information and have conversation for more than 30 years.

While social media is evolving it isn’t really moving forward; platforms like Facebook and Twitter are actually taking retrograde action into behavior that is more like forums (Hashtags, Groups, and Fan Pages).

There IS a Wrong Way to Use Social Media

Second, there is a wrong way to use every platform. Reddit has different etiquette than Digg, Facebook has different etiquette than Myspace, and every platform has a different group that are their power users. The background and important issue for the power user group creates a clear set of negative actions on the platform; Dan Zarrella just shared why you don’t bash Twitter on Facebook.

What Works for One May Not Work for Another

This is a truism. Every time you use a truism to make an argument Socrates shoots a kitten from a cannon.

Defining Experts

Experts are people who know considerably more than the general populace about a given subject. It doesn’t matter the number of hours (though 10,000 is a popular distinction), even after a year in a profession you will know more about the job than most people. There are countless people that have been working on the web who have been actively engaged in multiple social platforms, forums, or blogging reaching back for 5 to 10 years. There are thousands of people who understand marketing strategy, web analytics, blogging, etc. and also spend thousands of hours on multiple platforms and communities to understand the etiquette of the most popular sites. These people can easily describe the communities and their norms, in addition to offering other value to your web presence.

If you are worried about the expertise of the person you are talking to ask, “Yes, and how does that support your other work?” If they don’t have some way of leveraging the knowledge, they can’t really help you, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know the landscape in and out. A social media expert is not really useful unless they have some additional skill to connect to their knowledge.

</end rant>

We are starting a new book. In the spirit of User Driven Change we are opening the decision up to you. Please read over the descriptions below and give your thoughts at the bottom.

Thanks,
Jeff and Carlos

Geolocation:
Geolocation by IP address has been around for quite a while, but with the rapid increase in website visitors from smartphones and geolocation apps, geolocation has taken on a whole new level of visitor customization. This is creating many questions about how to properly monitor and respond to the opportunities created apps like FourSquare and Gowalla. Clearly geolocation games connect with the Competitive customer type, but how can these apps be modified to better serve the other customer types and create customer relationships? Finally, we’ll talk about how to define success through your existing web analytics metrics.

Practical Metrics:
Beginning with a set of common problems from real websites we will layout how to diagnose possible solutions based on customer behavior, define performance indicators, and plan next steps. This will come in the form of a framework for choosing what tests to perform and what metrics to track to determine success and define follow-up steps.

Channel Failure:
You invest a lot of money into your marketing channels and if you are a good marketer, you have a good mix of channels. But what happens if you lose a channel? For instance, what if Google decides that your SEO is not up to their standards and your natural search links drop from page one to page 20? What happens when MSN shopping changes to Bing Shopping? What if an email goes out and none of the links are active? You can only control so much of what goes on in your channel. We will provide you with some quick and actionable answers that you can utilize today.

Social Change:
Are you using social data to make decisions about your website? It certainly couldn’t hurt. Monitoring your company’s social activity is critical, but what do you do with this data? We’ll utilize our four main visitor types: Relational, Researcher, Competitive and Immediate; and apply them to how you can utilize their social data to make changes to your website. We’ll define some of the metrics that we think are key for you to look at; explain how you can capture that data; finally, we’ll provide you with example of improvement you can make to your website based on your social data.

“Crafty” analysts will often ask, “If you could only have one metric, what would it be”.  I have a hard time answering this because I think it’s a dangerous proposition.  When you only look at one metric you don’t get a holistic picture of your website.  For instance, I’ve heard practitioners say, “Bounce is not important”.  By itself, no, it’s not that important because you don’t really know what the metric is telling you.  I’ve also heard, “Conversion is the only metric you need to worry about.”  Again, not true.  If my conversion is up +25% month over month, why?  I need more info.

Pairing metrics is crucial to analysis.  If you don’t, you’re simply regurgitating a data point to your listener.  You cannot glean actionable insights from a single metric.  Further, you can cause unwarranted panic if you just speak about a single metric.  “Our Average Order Size dropped -20% last week!”  “Oh man!” … “Oh my gosh, what does that mean?”

So now you ask, “Ok, what metrics do you recommend that I pair together?”  It can definitely vary depending on what you are trying to determine, but here are some of my more frequently used pairings:

• Traffic, conversion, AOS, and then by segment (new / return; organic / paid, etc) – mostly used when analyzing total site (ecommerce sites)

• Bounce, time on page, traffic and then by marketing source and by browser for top 5 entry pages – bounce segmentation can indicate if a certain traffic source is not being directed to the right page on your site, and as well can tell you if you might have some technical issues with a particular browser

• When measuring a video engagement: traffic to area, video category total starts, video category total completions (and thus an overall completion rate); top viewed videos by starts; top completed videos; videos viewed per visitor.  Also depending on your analytics provider you can get more specific such as pauses, average completion percentage (i.e. how many completed 50% of video or 75% of video) etc.

There are tons of metric pairings that help give you deeper insight into your projects.  My philosophy is to ponder whether the glass is half empty or half full, if I feel that it’s half empty, I look for other metrics to glean additional insights; if I feel that it’s half full and I’ve already dug deep enough, I stop before I succumb to paralysis by analysis.  Again, my key point is using one metric to analyze something is a dumb idea.  So don’t do it.

Last week, Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends announced features that allow their respective users to measure certain aspects of Facebook.  My review of these announcements, so far, indicates a parallel product from these companies.

Omniture announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow customers to refine their Facebook ad campaigns. Utilizing their Search Tool “Search Center Plus”, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network.

Coremetrics announced that they have been able to partner with Facebook to utilize their Impression Attribution tool,  which can record something as passive as an ad impression on the Facebook site and, utilizing cookies,  tie it back to the customer activity on your website.  As well the data is set against your other ad campaigns so that you can compare and contrast.

Finally Webtrends’ announced (technically Webtrends’ announcement was the week prior to the others) that they have a way to “scrape” data from Facebook, Twitter etc, using an API and can tie the data against other ad campaign data.

Sounds a little redundant doesn’t it?  That’s because for the most part it is the same thing.  The key here is that Facebook has finally opened itself up to these companies to allow the respective API code into their system.  My understanding is that this API has been working for Twitter measurement for some time now.  The ability to do the same type of tracking that you can tie into your main analytics program is a big step forward in Social Media measurement.

Its important that Facebook is allowing these partnerships.  It’s too bad that they didn’t make the announcement themselves.  Not that Web Analytics needs validation from social media (I’d say Web Analytics is more commonly accepted as a company need than social media in most businesses today, but that might not be the case tomorrow!)  It is important that all three companies have announced a product that will help with social media measurement and that the product is fairly similar.

I’m interested to know how analysts will use these tools to analyze their respective clients’ social media engagement.  These announcements show that social media tracking is an important piece of web analytics and should be an important piece of your social media campaign.  I’m glad that the big boys in the web analytics world are taking social media metrics seriously.  My only concern is that the analysis stops here.

Engagement is only once piece of social media measurement but it is a big piece and right now seems to be the most tangible aspect of SM tracking.

My hope is to follow up to this article with a side by side comparison of the Social Media dashboard / report for each vendor’s system.

Would love to hear from anyone utilizing any of these three companies’ social media tracking tools on what you like and don’t like about the tool.

Whether your background is in statistics and data crunching or whether you come from the usability / design world, if you are a web analyst your main goal is to help influence a positive experience for the customer.  Regardless of if your site is an ecommerce site, a non-profit site, a lead generation site, or just a blog site, if your customer has a good experience there is a much better chance that your customer will do whatever it is you wanted them to do than if their experience is bad.

Sometimes, this goal can seem a little intangible.  You might not feel like you can really have an impact on your site just because you report on the numbers and give insights into why the site conversion might be lower than normal. 

 But if you find something key, for instance maybe email visitor conversion is down -15%, the email team can review their content and marketing strategy and determine that they need to make changes.  Or maybe you determine that your main landing page has a 30% departure rate, but 90% of that departure was from a specific ad campaign which was mistargeted (so the ad team won’t use that campaign again!).  Your insights got the ball rolling on creating a better system. 

Most of the web analysts I’ve met are definitely a special breed (and I mean this in a good way).  Some come from an advertising background, many come from a search back ground, and more still come from some sort of technical background.  But more often than not, it seems that we web analysts are not in the position to design a new landing page, or create a new email marketing strategy.  Rather, we can only add influence to these teams.  But when we see new design templates and we see a change in strategy and we monitor the results which turn into positive we can feel good that we had a hand in providing actionable insights to our internal customers and in turn they provide a better experience for our external customers.

Jeff and I are taking on a new challenge. Answering questions about web analytics in videos–very short videos. A couple weeks ago we each showed up at a Hops and Chops in Seattle with some questions in our pockets. Each of us had 1-minute to answer each of the questions.

The resulting channel: Web Analytics in a Minute.

If Carlos Only Had One Web Metric

If Jeff Only Had On E-Commerce Metric

credit: luc legay

Social media is supposed to be a conversation. How do you make a conversation tangible with standard measurements? We would liken it to the term “engagement,” which defines how deep a visitor was on a site regardless of purchase. Typically engagement is measured by looking at several metrics. We can do the same thing for measuring your conversation rating. For our purposes engagement means the three-Rs: reference, response and retweet.

Ideally what you’d like to do is read, listen and watch every mention and interaction. However, without some sort of third party tool that will be next to impossible. There are several companies out there that can provide this sort of tracking. VMS is a well known and established company that has transitioned itself from a solely traditional media tracker to more robust tracking than anything you will need starting off. However, if you want to dive in head first, you should look at their software. An alternative would be a newer and lesser-known company called StatsIT. They offer a social media dashboard that is pretty compelling. Finally, Coremetrics, Omniture and Google Analytics all offer some solutions that are integrated with their existing software, however these solutions are all things that you can design yourself. You can build a Twitter API that will scrape any mention of your brand terms and will send the data to your database or analytics provider of choice. RowFeeder offers a service that populates a real time spreadsheet of your keyword (tell them Carlos sent you).

You’ll need to start with the metrics that you think are important to you. You could go as basic as appending marketing links to the tweets with URL’s and then measuring clicks, visitors, shoppers, and orders for each link. However, you can only measure your online statistics this way. The metrics you might be more concerned with, or rather will be more successful at utilizing immediately are the statistics that you can glean from Twitter itself. Our metrics are intended to save you the time and cost of a developer in the short run and help you improve your engagement immediately.

Before jumping into the metrics we recommend, there are some points you should keep in mind. You should take a holistic and a detailed approach to each of these metrics. What this means is that you should have a top level mark for all of your social media, then a secondary level for each individual account and then you should consider grouping these by brand term, category, or region. Finally, you should be able to dive into each account and break down your measurement by individual data line.

Several metrics that you could use are the following:

1. Sentiment
2. Reach
3. Experience Rating
4. Quality Score

Sentiment

As mentioned above, the search mechanism can be used to gauge how people feel about your brand. However, this is a fairly nebulous measurement and is not entirely precise. A live person looking through the tweets best determines sentiment, but Twitter Search can do a rudimentary filtering. Filter out invalid (non-actionable) tweets and if possible move them to the more appropriate bucket. We suggest that you establish a plan for responding to both positive and negative sentiment. You’ll also want to tailor these to your specific request; keep your eye out for tweets that have questions. Tweets that contain questions are the low hanging fruit for improving your sentiment values. Example of sentiment monitoring for Twitter: Twitrratr.com

Reach

Reach is the potential network of people who could be influenced by your social media. Think of a pyramid. Say your Twitter account has 100 followers, and in turn each of those followers has 100 followers of their own. Your reach would be 100 x 100, or a 10,000-person network (second-degree followers). You can then set up a query to show how many impressions per tweet you got and then divide that by your potential reach to determine a benchmark for success.

If you are doing a good job engaging your followers you should see a growing reach value. Once you have a large following (more than a 1,000 followers) you should consider refining your reach to only the people that have directly engaged in the recent past. Twitter will catalog either 9-days or 100-pages of tweets–which ever comes first. Assume that your real reach is roughly the value based on the people who engage (reference, reply or retweet) in a 24-hour period. So, if you generally have 100 users engage in a day either an expansion of breadth (engagement number) or depth (second-degree followers) should be considered a success.

The reason that reach should be considered with breadth in mind as you grow is because Twitter as a channel has a high loss rate. Only about 40 percent of Twitter users are still active after one month of sign-up. This doesn’t mean that no one comes back. If you have a large following reach is best measured by activity—not raw numbers.

Experience Rating

Experience rating is how you compare specific users based on the influence and quality of their interaction with your brand or account. So if @jhandy says that he likes your product but he only has a following of 10 and has never made a comment before, his rating would likely be 1. However if @welch says that he likes your product and he has a following of 10,000 and has made 100 comments on your product, he would likely have a rating of 100. You can aggregate your RT’s and mentions and then base them on the average rating to determine whether what is being mentioned is really impacting anything. If you find that your growth is slowing your should consider engaging your middle to high experience rated followers.

Quality Score

Finally, quality score is used to measure the number of mentions or comments you receive on your tweet. If you have one tweet and get 30 responses then you’d have a 30:1 ratio. You should be looking at your quality score on the small level of individual tweets and on the larger level of total engagement for the day versus total tweets for the day.

There will be a point where your followers and reach will slow. This is the time that quality score will be of particular interest. If you do not have a high quality score when your growth slows you should be investing in improving your engagement with your mid-rated users.

These are just some of the methods that you can use to measure your social media conversations and engagement. Creating your performance indicators will vary based on your goals and particular vertical.

There are many tools you can use for analysis that you don’t have to buy that will help you become a better analyst.  I don’t necessarily mean data compilers (other than your head), but rather just using your skills and the skills of some of your peers to help improve your analysis and insight to your company.

For usability review

Image credit: http://www.simpleusability.com/services/usability/testing

If part of your role is to help the creative team polish their projects before they are launched, here are some tips on how you can be of benefit to this team without being a true usability expert.

Past data benchmarks: You can rely on your past analysis or even better, keep a “cheetsheet” matrix of benchmarks from past analysis.  Of course this assumes that the projects are similar in spirit.  However in general, you should have some overall benchmarks that you can relate to any project, such as do your visitors prefer auto starting video vs. manually started video, or an auto rotation slide show vs. a manually started slide show.  You can use these numbers to gently remind the creative team whether the project would be more successful if it takes a slightly different direction.  Ideally you might even want to create a “best practices for video projects” document that you can share with your creative team.

Technical properties of the user: It’s also important to keep up on the latest info about the technical make up of your visitor.  i.e. do more people use 1024 by 768 screen resolution and is your project geared to be all above the fold at those dimensions?  This will help you determine whether the full project will be seen by the visitors.  Your analytics provider should have this report handy for you.

User standpoint and wisdom of the crowd: Hopefully, you yourself are a user of the internet.  You know what you like and don’t like.  Chances are if you don’t understand how a project works or if you don’t feel like the project is going to help the customer reach the end goal, chances are it won’t, so speak up!  My recommendation is to try to pretend you are a novice internet user, then review the project from that standpoint.  While your creative team produces great work, they often forget to consider that not every user is looking for frills and thrills and as well not every user is familiar with the latest and greatest.

For data analysis

Image credit: http://www.jir.com/graph_contest/index.html

If you struggle with creating an easily digestible way of providing analysis…

Benchmark matrix: again, you may not think that every project is related to each other but there are several ways you can compile a matrix.  You can take it from a metrics point of view: compare all projects from a conversion standpoint and then break them into divisions such as video vs slide show vs landing page vs wish list, etc.  You can create multiple matrices such as all KPI’s for video projects, then a separate matrix for all KPI’s for landing pages, etc.  The key point is to create an easily accessible reference tool for yourself so that you can determine the success of a project without getting into too many details.  This will help you answer quick, high level questions that your VIP’s may have.

One page brief: if you’ve downloaded 15 spreadsheets worth of data and feel like you could put together a 20 page slide show but you know that you are going to be talking to high level executives, try writing a one page summary of your findings.  This will help you keep the data high level and will allow you to express yourself without having to create too many graphs and diagrams.  Most executives like to be able to think in a one track setting, so giving them 3-4 paragraphs worth of information without any distracting graphs may be the best way for them to digest your findings.  A one page brief is also a great way to leave a legacy of the project findings for future review.

Dashboard approach: if a brief seems too long winded you can also take a dashboard approach.  Avinash Kaushik provides a great example of how to create a dashboard.  The essence of it is: graph; summary of metrics; impacts/areas for improvement; and next steps  I find this to be best for recurring data such as a weekly, monthly or quarterly review of KPI’s but you can definitely tailor this to specific projects if you so choose.

Final free tool

If you struggle to find meaning to your data maybe try looking outside of your company for the answer.

Analytics forums: the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum is a great place to look up questions that you have that might have already been asked and answered.  If you don’t find your question, simply ask it and be amazed at how fast you will get a response from your peers.  Twitter can also be useful if you already engage with plenty of other web analysts and as well if your tweet contains the #measure or #usability hash tag.  You can also try the #measure Twibe to ask a question.  You can also just try “googling” your question and browse the blogs and forums that are out there.  Utilize these types of forums if you just can’t seem to wrap your head around a certain data point and what the meaning of it is. Of course, this assume that your company allows you to divulge this type of information, or that you can be vague enough about the details of your question while still getting a productive answer.

We’re seeing a trend of blog posts that overpromise and under deliver.  For example, say the title of the blog is: What you need to know about Web Analytics in 2010; but when you read it the gist is – you need to figure out your KPI’s and your traffic sources and decide what analytics provider is best for you (and we can tell you how to do all of this if you contact us now).  Rubbish!  Tell me something!

I challenge you to go through any and all of our blogs and find where we leave you hanging on a point and tell you that the only way to find out more is to buy something.  I feel slighted when I think I’m going to read something interesting and it turns out to just give me a bland answer and then tell me if I really want to know the answer I have to pay for it. In this day and age, knowledge and information can only get better if we share our ideas with one another.

I’m not saying its wrong to ask for subscribers or leads or even to ask for money for your services.  But even the most established thought leaders will give you something that you can learn from and keep you coming back to our website to learn more.  We all have to get paid, I get that.  But if you really want me to read something that you wrote and further trust you enough to devote a subscription to you or pay for your services, you’ve got to at least give me something tangible that I can say, “Ok, that is an interesting point, tell me more.”

It is entirely possible that I may take for granted some of the elementary stuff that certain bloggers write about and pass it off as negligible information.  But I think for the most part I can smell I sucker blog when I read one.  It is my pure hope that our blog NEVER becomes this.  We strive to give you enough detail that you either want more information, or you challenge our thoughts and give us something to think about.

We can’t build a community if we don’t openly share our real thoughts and ideas; whether it be web analytics, SEO, online marketing, offline marketing, social media whatever, just give us a real, tangible sniff of what your thinking and I can guarantee your end results will be better.  Continue writing drivel that we essentially can say, “No, duh” to and then ask us to subscribe or pay for more information and we’re just going to look elsewhere.  We’re in an interesting time where information is more readily at our fingertips than ever. Whether we like it or not we’re becoming more intellectual because of the internet.

You might think that I’m crazy because I am the blogger and you are the reader.  But I’m also a reader, a consumer of information.  I am an expert in what the customer wants (at least I think I am, please correct me if I’m wrong!), thus I’m trying to write this from your point of you.

You might say, “Jeff, you haven’t really said anything other than, other blogs suck, so what are you gonna do about it?”  Our goal is to try to find 1  blog a week that we feel are inadequate and don’t live up to their billing and try to answer whatever is they failed to answer.  That said, we fully welcome you to help hunt down blogs that you feel were unsatisfactory to you.  Send them to us and we’ll see if we can give you a more detailed answer.  FOR FREE!

Shocking right?

For a look at what we feel is an unsatisfying blog: click here

Carlos wrote a brief follow up which he posed in our question of the week on this blog which you can read here.

For a look at what we feel is a pretty satisfying blog: click here

We’ll start our more thorough reviews next week!