Measuring Social Media

Crank up Your Holiday Sales with Heat Maps

October 26th, 2011 by RyanDraving   |   No Comments

You’re running a bit behind your e-commerce goals this year, and everything depends on the upcoming holiday season. In the pit of your stomach, you feel a sense of dread. If your conversion rate doesn’t increase significantly by the time holiday traffic starts hitting your site, you might get a bundle of coal in your stocking instead of a big fat bonus.

Everything you’ve tried so far has flopped. You have a beautiful (in your own humble opinion) website that follows all the latest UI trends and marketing theories. You’ve spent hours poring over what keywords are being  Googled to find your site, your most popular web pages, the volume of visitors you’re receiving, and what links they’re clicking on. You’ve been getting a huge amount of visitor traffic to your website, but your conversion rates are, quite frankly… pathetic. Somehow your website is attracting visitors who refuse to pull the trigger. It might not be that the visitors aren’t interested in your offerings. It could simply be that something’s fundamentally wrong with the design of your website. But how do you acquire the data to figure out how your site is failing to direct the visitors to actually buy your goods and services?

Why Eye Tracking Is Not the Answer

Eye tracking might seem like the answer, but it can be quite expensive and tends to draw conclusions based on a statistically small group of people. It’s essential to pair eye tracking with a strong analytics program. Think of eye tracking as dessert, and a robust analytics program with extensive analysis as the main course. Similar to focus groups, a company has to pay for a group of people to be organized and placed in a controlled environment for testing every single time new user experience data is needed. Additionally, eye tracking is incompatible with people with poor vision, the elderly, and most people of Asian descent. While the data can provide valuable insights, it can be expensive and statistically insignificant.

Why Heat Maps Are So Cool

We prefer a handy little technology called heat map software. Heat map software provides similar results to eye tracking, but it gathers that data in a very different way. Heat map software monitors visitor mouse movements, and then combines data from all visits to create a color-coded map displaying the web page’s levels of activity. Unlike eye tracking, heat map technology runs on a bit of code installed on your website and gathers data based on actual visitors to your website without requiring any human intervention. We recommend heat maps as a sidekick to your primary analytics package. Some companies even use it as their only analytics tool (bad idea, but certainly possible). Since heat map solutions often integrate into your website with a simple bit of JavaScript code, there is no need to organize groups of people for eye tracking every time your company wants to measure user reaction to a design change.

Tips for Success

  1. One of the biggest complaints about heat maps is that the JavaScript code increases page load time. To avoid this problem, simply ask your programmers to insert the code just before the </body> tag in your web code HTML, and it will load after the page contents have already rendered. Using this trick, heat map data tracking will not affect visitor experience. In fact, the anonymous data monitoring process will be completely invisible to visitors.
  2. Be aware of these downsides before you buy:
    1. Heat maps are not a good fit for every website.  Websites with dynamic web content will not be able to gather reliable data.
    2. Additionally, in some programs the admin panel that displays data reports can be painfully slow. In some cases it can take up to a hour to load a single page. This doesn’t affect the live webpage for the end user, but it could give your analytics team a good excuse to whip out their iPads for a round of Angry Birds.

If you’re ready to give your standard analytics a strong sidekick or you need a simple tool to communicate user experience to your boss (or client), consider heat maps. You’ll gain a constant stream of real-world data in a simple, visual format to get your whole team behind web design improvements.

Let us know how you use heat maps for your website. How did heat maps affect your conversion rate?

Simple and Focused: Jim Sterne’s Social Media Metrics

June 24th, 2010 by admin   |   3 Comments

How refreshing to come to the end of a book on a deep topic and feel like I have a number of actionable take-aways.   Jim Sterne is a founding father of Internet Marketing and his wisdom comes through in his latest book loud and clear.

“Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment” (2010 published by John Wiley & Sons)  lays out a solid strategic framework that covers all the Social Media bases.   He makes generous use of the thinking from other thought leaders  and their blogs, tweets and reports.    As a result, its not a bad way to get an insider’s tour of the technorati of the Social Media Marketing tribe.

Here are the kinds of takeaways you can expect, with a sample from each of the book’s nine chapters.

Chapter 1: Getting Focused. With a focus on the big three (increased revenue, lower cost and improved customer satisfaction), Sterne leads you through the kinds of questions you need to ask to make your goals truly useful to your business.  With his tongue-in-cheek example of analysis around the question “Are fat people lazy?” ,  he shows how discipline and being crystal clear is critical to useful analysis.

Chapter 2: Getting Attention – Reaching Your Audience. This is where Jim Sterne’s years of experience as a sales and marketing pro really shine.  He marries the importance of brand recognition with the world of Social Media reach metrics.   Using models from a couple of industry leaders (Avinash Kaisuik, Charlene Li and Jason Stamper) he outlines some ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your reach across blogs, Twitter and Facebook Apps.   The chapter wraps with a cautionary tale of why the numbers from different tools don’t usually match up.  Learn to live with it.

Chapter 3. Getting Respect – Identifying Influence. How valuable are your followers?  Sterne dives into a discussion of the different kinds of influencers in your Social Network and how they drive conversations.   This is a great chapter to unpack questions about authority, impact and empty metrics.

Chapter 4. Getting Emotional – Recognizing Sentiment.  As a student of Artificial Intelligence in the 80′s, this was a particularly interesting chapter to me.   Sentiment Analysis represents the leading edge of Social Media analytics, but is also fraught with the same challenges AI systems have suffered from for decades.   Sterne surveys the latest and greatest thinking in this space and explains the pitfalls of having computers decipher the Tweets:

“My crab cakes were bad” from “Skied moguls all morning. That mountain is BAD!”

Chapter 5. Getting Response – Triggering Action. Some very helpful thinking around getting responses that cover Social Bookmarking and the Engagement Food-chain model lead us to understanding of whether our Social Media efforts are generating productive activity.

Chapter 6. Getting the Message – Hearing the Conversation. Sterne tackles the nature of the conversations taking place about your industry and your brand.  Ratings, reviews and recommendations  - and the tools that track them are covered here.   The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming an industry standard in measuring customer satisfaction for its ability to predict future company success.   Sterne integrates the NPS gracefully into this chapter on listening through Social Media.

Chapter 7. Getting Results – Driving Business Outcomes.  Finally, we come to business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators.  Tying everything he’s covered back to the goals discussed in Chapter 1, Sterne tackles the challenging topic of Social Media ROI (Sterne’s short answer to this industry hot potato – Yes, you can measure ROI!).  Again, some wonderful frameworks are shared from industry experts including Lithium’s model for measuring community health.  Good stuff.

Chapter 8. Getting Buy-In – Convincing Your Colleagues.   How do you get Social Media accepted in your organization?  Sterne dons the cape of the Change Agent and gives us a six step process, complete with a typology of managers we’ll have to navigate to get our Social Media initiative recognized.

Chapter 9.  Getting Ahead – Seeing the Future. A perfect wrap to the book ends with a view towards where this might all be heading.  From patented mind-reading technologies to the Cluetrain-driven shift from business-focus to the consumer-focus,  this chapter had me scrambling for my closest search engine to learn more.

To be sure, Social Media is an exploding arena which our businesses and cultures need to examine and understand more fully.   We need a discussion about tribal marketing and connecting to audiences, we need conversations about good conversations and we need to keep our hearts open to generational differences within Social Media.  However, Social Media Metrics fills an important gap in our understanding of how to operationalize Social Media and begin working it into our daily business.

Have you read this book?   If so, I’d love to hear your impressions in our comment section below.    Please share any other Social Media business books that you think people could benefit from.

Samurai Women and Renaissance Men – Social Media changes business

May 15th, 2010 by admin   |   3 Comments

The Samurai was a warrior who was also expected to be well-versed in the arts, literature and social skills.   Similarly, the Renaissance man typically refers to someone who is able to deep-dive into a wide range of topics, applying their knowledge to solve problems with agility.

The premise behind this talk is that business people must become more multi-faceted to operate in today’s Social Media driven world.   The age of specialization has come and  gone.  We are faced with the need to be anthropologists, psychologists, scientists and business people.

This talk was first delivered on May 13, 2010 to the Community College of Philadelphia, Corporate Solutions Group by Skip Shuda of  Team and a Dream.   It runs through the reasons why business people should care about Social Media, where it is heading and what we should do about it.  The meat of the presentation contains a framework for Social Media Strategy – as well as some case studies illustrating different objectives in Social Media.    We also touch on using teams to create your business Samurai… when you can’t do it all yourself.

Samurai Women and Renaissance Men: Social Media changes business

If you’d like to have us speak to  your organization about these topics, please contact Team and a Dream for more information.
Cast in the spirit of Leonardo DaVinci,  the audience brainstormed some of today’s best examples of Samurai Women an Renaissance Men.  Some names that came up?   Oprah Winfrey,  Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, Angelina Jolie.
We’d love to hear your favorite nominees for Samurai Women and Renaissance Men.   Who would you suggest?
Do you have ways in which you have had to flex into being more multi-dimensional for Social Media?    Leave a comment and tell us about your experience.

Book Chapter Summary of Social Media Analytics from Web Analytics 2.0

March 3rd, 2010 by admin   |   2 Comments

Avinash Kaushik has written the book on Web Analytics (two actually).   His most recent book is called Web Analytics 2.0.  Its worth reading the whole thing but, given our focus on tribe-building, I wanted to give a summary of the chapter on Social Web Analytics.

BTW – please buy the Web Analytics 2.0 book if you have an interest in this topic.  Avinash is donating 100% of his income from this book to charity.  I would like to commend Avinash on this generous action and the oustanding challenge he provides to all of us to consider how we can pay it forward. Web Analytics 2.0 Cover

The chapter on Social Media Metrics is called “Emerging Analytics: Social, Mobile, and Video”

In the first few pages, he provides an overview of how analytics have been impacted by the Social Web.   User Generated Content and off-site conversations are an essential part of our online brand experience.  He advocates that we need to think more about “Conversation Rate” than “Conversion Rate”.

Avinash dives deep into the options for tracking analytics.  He starts with Mobile analytics and describes the challenges of determining if your blog or content is being consumed on a mobile device.   He uses a tagging solution from PercentMobile in his blog, but mentions Bongo Analytics and Mobilytics as options.  This lets him track the amount of mobile traffic, devices used, networks, countries and mobile via WIFI.  He points out that the world of measuring mobile is just getting started, but will be crucial  if we are going to segment our data and understand what is happening properly.

Blog Analytics are tackled next.  Avinash advocates two metrics to measure “Raw Author Contribution”: posts per month and average words per post.   From there, he focuses on “Holistic Audience Growth” and discusses how you should use a measure of RSS subscribers to see how your blog is growing.   Reach will measure how often your content is accessed and “Conversation Rate” for blogs is measured by # of Visitor comments / # of posts.   He goes on to discuss the use of Technorati and Tweet Citations to measure your ripple effect.

Finally, he treats the cost of blogging by examining the expenses of Technology, Time and Opportunity Cost.   From there he examines the metrics of value including Comparative Value (blog valuation tools), Direct Value (monetizing through ads and affiliates), Nontraditional Value (savings on PR, offline ads) and Unquantifiable Value.   These factors can, arguably, be used to compute ROI for your blogging efforts.

With Twitter, he starts off with the basic tracking of growth in the number of followers and churn rate.  He then moves to “message amplification” in which the world of retweets is handled.   Pointing to tools like TwitterCounter, Retweetist and Retweetrank, he suggests that you find out which tweets are most effective with your audience.

Beyond these initial metrics, he starts to examine click-through rates for Conversion Rate and Twitterfriends for measuring Conversation Rate.   He wraps this section with a discussion of emerging Twitter Metrics including Engagement, Reach, Velocity, Demand, Network Strength and Activity.

The last section of this chapter tackles Video analytics.   While embedding tracking codes into player-specific modules is the way to get the most granularity, it is also IT-intensive.  He spends some time looking at YouTube Insights to provide metrics on any videos you place in your YouTube channel.   You can discover your top videos, regional data and attention throughout a given video.  [NOTE: - I discovered that this only works with videos that have a relatively high number of visits – in the thousands.]  This can help you identify which parts of your videos are most appealing to viewers.  You can also determine where your video has been embedded to measure the “viralness” of a video.

He wraps up the chapter by discussing the need to compute “Contextual Influence” or rather, the value of each feature relative to others.  Kaiushik is a big advocate of capturing “Voice of the Customer” to determine exactly why people are coming to and using your web site and other properties.   His answer to this problem is simple.  Ask them.  He advocates a tool called 4Q for on-site surveys.   You can also run A/B or multivariate tests to determine the preferences for certain material.

The chapter is filled with technical details, tools to support your analysis and insights into how you can take actionable steps in response to your collected data.

I hope that is a helpful overview that will allow you to decide whether this book might be helpful to your Social Media Analytics efforts.   Avinash tackles the topic of Social Media Metrics in his own blog in a lot more detail.

Have you implemented any Social Media metrics for your company?  Which ones are most helpful?   Please continue the conversation by commenting below.