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This post is the second part of my post on “3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter”. In the first part, I wrote that one of the KPIs for measuring Twitter is the Percent Visit Rate (%VR). %VR measures what percent of your followers click on your link to visit your site. KPI: % Visit Rate = (Visits/Followers)*100)) Measuring VR the wrong way Referring Sites/Domains Report Late last year I did a small survey to understand how people measure the success of the links they post on Twitter. I found out that most of the people rely on “Referring Sites/Domains” report in their web analytics tool to see the traffic they get from Twitter. This seems like a great approach but there are two problems with this: Twitter.com is not the only way to access Twitter. A lot of people use 3rd party tools like Tweetdeck to access Twitter. A click on a link from such a tool won’t show up in the “Referring Sites/Domains” reports in the web analytics tool, it will be listed as “Direct Traffic” or “No referrer”. You can...

The popularity of Facebook is growing. With 400 million users spending an average of almost an hour per day on the site, marketers are clamoring to invest in advertisements, Facebook Fan pages, custom applications, contests and more. However, the analytics capability of for Facebook is pretty limited. So marketers spending all this money on facebook have very little insight into how their fan pages are performing. Earlier this week I saw a tweet (message on twitter) with a link to Google Analytics hack for measuring facebook fan pages. We tried this hack but it had too many bugs and after wasting 2 hours we gave up on that solution. As we were struggling with the GA hack, I got an email from Webtrends announcing their Facebook Measurement Capability. So I guess that is going to be our solution for measuring Facebook fan pages and custom apps but I will have to wait and see if it will live up to the expectations. Here are some screenshots of Webtrends Facebook measurement reports Here ...

How do you measure if you are being effective on Twitter or not? In my opinion it really comes down to measuring if anybody is paying attention to what you are saying or not, everything else follows. If you can measure the true impact on the bottom line then you are way ahead of a lot of people on Twitter. Congratulations to you!!! However, not everybody is yet in a position to measure at that level. This post is about metrics that you can measure on daily basis even when you don’t know the final impact on the bottom line. Key actions as a result of your Tweets As I said above, your success on Twitter comes down to one thing: Is Anybody paying attention to what you are saying on twitter? If people are paying attention to what you are saying then one or more of the following will immediately happen: Retweets @[twitter username] replies Visits from the links posted in your tweets Let’s look at each of these measures Retweets When some Retweets your message, their followers see you...

You are running an A/B test (or multivariate test) but are in a hurry to make a decision to pick the winning page. Should you pick a winner based on initial few days of the data before your tool has actually declared a clear winner? This question comes up quite often during the conversations with the clients. I always warn against such an approach and advice to be patient and get statistically significant results before pulling a plug on an underperforming variation o declaring a winner. I wanted to share few graphs with you to illustrate my point. The following example is from a test that I am currently running. First Two Weeks : If you make a decision without completely getting through the test, you will pick “Yellow” as the winner while declaring “Blue” a loser. Month Later : There does not seem to be a clear winner. Few More Days Later : Seems like “Blue” is trending higher. Should you pick “Blue” now? Finally : We don’t have a clear winner yet. As you can see, picking a w...

According to Web Analytics Association (WAA) standard definition, a conversion is a visitor completing a target action. Conversion rate is calculated by total number of visitors completing a target actions divided by a “relevant denominator” (Sometimes it is total number of target actions divided by a “relevant denominator). The key here is “relevant denominator”. This is often ignored by many organization and they tend to use the default denominator provided by their Web Analytics tool provides. The most common denominator used by most of the tools is either total visits or total visitors. If you are an eCommerce site then potentially every visitors or visit is a target for conversion and “Total Visits” or “Total Visitors” as a denominator might make sense. However if your site is a non-eCommerce site and conversion to you means getting people to register on the site then using a denominator like total visits or total visitors to calculate conversion rate, wrongly assumes that all ...

Most likely, you have all heard that high bounce rates are bad. Some people even believe that bounce rate affects your sites search engine rankings. Meaning higher bounce rate is bad for your organic rankings. I am not sure if that actually is true or not but it does show you that most analysts consider high bounce rates as a negative indicator of a site’s health. Are high bounce rates really bad? Generally they are but you have to consider the other factors and put everything in context before you can come to that conclusion. In my post “All that bounces is not Bad” , I showed you that there are cases when the bounces are not really bad. One of the causes of high bounce rate is the entry via “destination page”. A destination page is a page that provides the information that the visitors are looking for. Destination pages are going to have higher bounce rate and no matter how hard you try you might not be able to move the needle on those pages. For this reason, most of the news sites, ...

This is the time of the year to make few predictions for 2010. Here are my 5 predictions for Web Analytics, Social Media and Digital Marketing. Website Testing – What’s the point of creating a cool looking site that does not engage or covert the customers? Website Testing (A/B and Multivariate testing) is the key to those conversions, Website Testing won’t be optional in 2010. Website testing will become an essential part of website design and development. Website designs will make it easier to change the elements of page and hence make it easier to test them. Jobs in A/B and Multivariate testing are about to rise. For your reference there are currently 252 jobs for “A/B testing” on simplyhired.com. Web Analytics - I have two predictions about web analytics (generally known as web analytics): Adobe will start incorporating Omniture into its products . WebTrends will be sold this year. Mobile Analytics – Mobile usage will continue its upward trend and so will the number of mobile site...