Tag: Google Analytics

Baltimore – Social Media Analytics Presentation

If you missed my presentation on social media analytics in Georgetown last week, fret none my fine analytic colleagues… I will be appearing at the System Alliance Digital 360 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, March 4. My first session at 11:10 AM is titled, “Making Smarter Social Media Decisions Using Analytics” and I’ll be covering some simple reports that have powerful data on measuring your social media campaigns using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. Later that afternoon, I’ll be participating in a panel on “Best Practices for Managing Web Content”.
Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics
Have you heard of Social Media Week? If not, check it out here: http://socialmediaweek.org/

This February, Social Media Week will take place in 10 cities:
1. Copenhagen
2. Hamburg
3. Lagos
4. Miami
5. Milan
6. New York
7. Paris
8. Singapore
9. Washington DC
10. Tokyo (TBD)
How does it work? It’s a collection of events sponsored by a wide variety of companies and organizations throughout each city, bound by the common theme of social media.

Last year I spoke on the ROI of social media to a standing-room-only crowd in Manassas, VA. This year, I will be presenting the following session:

Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics
Leveraging Facebook EdgeRank and Google Analytics to Drive a Return on Business Objectives

So you’re adding social media to your game plan for your organization, moving it from an afterthought to front-and-center. You’ve even got a staff member ready to roll up their sleeves and manage your social media strategy for the organization (and that person might be you!) But now what? How do you decide which campaigns are working and which ones are not? In this session, attendees will learn how to leverage Facebook Insights, Facebook EdgeRank and Google Analytics (all free tools) to measure campaign ROI (return on investment) and ROO (return on objectives).

While I’m still working on the details of the venue, I do know it will be somewhere in the DC metro area. I hope to have a venue locked down by 1/21/13. So check back to the event page early next week for more details.
The Short List: Social Media Monitoring & Measurement

I’m always being asked about which tools are the best for monitoring and measuring social media. That’s a difficult question for me to answer without first understanding your business objectives, of course… and all my fellow blog followers know, the first question you have to ask before starting any marketing project is:

What is your objective?

Once you know that, we can drill into both free and paid products.

Last November (which somehow was already about four months ago), I co-presented on measuring and monitoring social media with John Mohr of System’s Alliance at their annual user conference in Baltimore, Maryland. John and I put together a short list of products we were familiar with and I’d like to share that here.

I always suggest starting with Google Analytics. It’s free and easy to use. If you’re not using it, I suggest not bothering with anything else until it’s up and running. Analysis is the basis of nearly everything you will do with measuring social media, so you need a good foundation, and GA is just that. If you’ve sat in on any of my sessions lately, then you already get it.
YouTube Upgrades Insights into Robust Analytics
YouTube’s effort to remain the dominate force in streaming video received a nice boost today with its upgrade of the legacy-driven “Insights”.

The old Insights dashboard which provide somewhat rudimentary data such as number of video views, geographic preferences and how viewers found your video has been significantly enhanced – both in how the data is presented, but also what type of data is provided.

Take a look at the new YouTube Analytics dashboard:

The New YouTube Analytics Dashboard

The first thing you’ll notice is that the data is presented in a similar manner to Google Analytics (I’m still unsure why they don’t straight-port GA’s functionality to YouTube, but that’s for another day to discuss).

What I’m really digging is the “engagement section” which shows you how many video likes/dislikes you’ve received, along with comments, shares and favorites. This type of engagement data is more in tune with social media’s role in the discovery of video.

You’ll also find data on how the videos are being watched… be it on a mobile device, embedded player on a website other than YouTube, and so on.

The entire suite of analytic data is just fantastic. Plus, you can select a host of date ranges for analysis (including custom ranges) through a more intuitive data selector). Here’s a quick breakdown:
- Views – let’s you examine how many views your videos are receiving
- Demographics – gender and geo data
- Playback Locations – YouTube vs. embedded players, mobile, etc.
- Traffic Sources – how folks are discovering your videos
- Retention (a favorite of mine, somewhat unique to video) – shows how people drop off your video over time
The next set of reports are called “Engagement Reports” and include:
- Subscribers – basic data on subscriber counts
- Likes and dislikes – counts of likes and dislikes
- Favorites – counts of how many times your vids have been marked as a favorite
- Comments – data on your comments
- Sharing – data on how viewers are sharing your content
All in all these upgrades are outstanding for YouTube content providers and businesses. Congrats to the YouTube (and Google team) for making a very wise investment in analytic data and making it easy to use, navigate, export and analyze.
Avinash explains changes to Google’s Sessionization Algorithm

If you use Google Analytics, this post (and accompanying video) is a must-read. Avinash, an expert on web analytics, especially Google Analytics, explains how the session algorithm changed and the resulting impact this has on various reports and metrics in GA.

Of particular importance, this changes the number of visits (not unique visits, just visits), as well as that metric’s cascading change on avg pageviews per visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc.
Google Analytics Advanced Segments How-To
If you ever wanted to know how to build out complex advanced segments for a brand with non-traditional product names, Stephen Croome at SEOmoz has produced one of the finest articles I’ve come across in quite some time.

But, it is not for the analytics newbie or even the faint of heart. If you are an experienced analyst, this article will walk you through a fantastic example.

However, if you are just getting started with adavanced segments, you may want to start out with something more simple.

One that is a good starter is one I like to call “Social Media Traffic”. This segment lets you compare traffic and behavior on your site as a whole to that of visitors referred to you by the major social media websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

It’s easy to create…
1. Click on “advanced segments” and then “create new custom segment”. This will open the editor for you to work your magic.
2. Essentially, what you’re going to do now is tell GA to only look at traffic coming from sources that you specify. In this case, those will be social sites. So, your first filter will be the default “include”.
3. In the green area (dimensions), you’re going to select “source”.
4. In the match area I suggest leaving the default “containing”.
5. Now, in the text box, you’ll type “facebook”.
6. You’re done! You’ve just created a custom segment that filters on only traffic to your site referred to you by Facebook. Of course you may want to include other sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn… To do this, simply click the “Add Or Statement” and repeat for as many sites as you like. Just keeping adding them as “or” and you’ll be good to go.
7. When you are finished, give a name to your segment and click save or preview to check your results.
Here’s what you might end up with:

Creating an custom segment for social media in Google Analytics

It’s that easy! Now you can compare your traffic and the behavior of that traffic such as how long they stay on your site, how many pages they view, bounce rates or any ecommerce activities with other segments of traffic to understand if you should invest in generating more traffic from these types of sites or less.
Google Analytics – Custom Reports You Can Actually Use

If you are just getting started with Google Analytics and you’re wondering what types of custom reports you can create, look no further than this great article by Greg Habermann at SearchEngineWatch.com.

I’ve long recommended one of the best ways to get your feet wet with GA is to look at what types of reports others are running and why there are of a particular significance. You can then translate those reports to your business and objectives.
How to Measure Social Media ROI using Google Analytics

Ever wonder how to measure your social media ROI? Sure, lots of expensive products will do it for you! I won’t name them to protect the innocent, but what I can say is that you can get highly insightful metrics for free using Google Analytics, and they are just as powerful as the services you pay for. It’s an odd bit of marketing arbitrage in the web analytics world, so you should take full advantage of it.

Basically, you need to create a custom filter which captures referral traffic from social media sites and then report that against whatever metric you use for ROI, such as goals, or visits, etc.

You can also do it with some on the fly filtering on existing reports, but I actually recommend using a custom filter and custom report.

Samir Balwani at Search Engine Watch describes this with a decent amount of detail, so if measuring social media ROI is your goal, check out his post.
How to use Google Analytics’ Intelligence Feature
A very powerful, yet often overlooked feature of Google Analytics is the “Intelligence” set of features. These are pre-packaged and customizable alerts that enable you to actively monitor virtually any type of situation on your web site. Here are a few examples:
1. Alert when traffic falls more than 25% in a day
2. Alert when goals drop too much
3. Alert when time on site increases for a particular page
4. Alert when traffic from a certain area increases
5. And thousands more…
If you want to get started with alerts, one of the easiest things to do is click over to that tab and review the pre-packaged alerts. Those will give you a good understanding of what the Google experts think should be important too you. Your next step would be to customize those alerts and add your own. Don’t forget you can send alerts to multiple mailboxes if need be.

And finally, for more inspiration, there are many great resources on search analytics blogs (including the Google Analytics blog). Here’s a great post by Abby for PPCHero that can get you started too.
Understanding Google Analytics – Site Search
There are a number of sections (groups of reports and metrics) in Google Analytics that webmasters often overlook. Perhaps it is due to not fully understanding how the reports are actionable, or simply due to the fact the reports are difficult to understand. Regardless, one set of reports, site search, can provide you some fantastic insight into how people are discovering content on your site, what they are looking for, and how well your content is tagged/organized. Addressing all of these topics is a challenging feat, but doing so can pay great dividends. If you can improve your conversion rate on your website by just a few points without spending any more money driving traffic to your site, why wouldn’t you want to get started as soon as possible.

The first place you may want to start is with Google Analytics of course.
1. Start by logging into your account and viewing some of the reports in site search. See what data returns. If you don’t have many visits, then you might not have much to gain here after all.
2. Learn more about these reports in GA’s help center:
3. Another fantastic way to learn about site search is to comb the web for great articles. One I recently came across which is a wonderful article introducing you to the benefits of site search reports was written by Rachel Anderson for the Search Engine Journal. You should definitely bookmark it!