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People talk, they say good things about a brand, they say bad things about a brand or they just talk. Social media has become a place for people to make sure whatever they are saying is heard loud and clear by their friend and followers on Facebook, twitter, blogs etc. Going through all this social media chatter to understand and figure out what is going on about your brand is a very labor and time intensive work. Even though many Social Media Monitoring tools have done a great job in aggregating the data from various sources, but to understand the context of those conversation and provide that to marketers in a meaningful way still needs a lot of work. Currently it really needs a human to understand the full context of the conversations and understand the sentiments of consumers. However there are some metrics that can provide you a measure of the sentiments (positive or negative) of these conversations and indicate which direction they are going. Social Media Sentiment M...

QR codes have started to pop-up in lot of places such as store display, business cards, online ads, postcards etc. Whether QR codes are here to stay or not but from the measurement perspective they do present a huge opportunity in measuring advertising's (particularly offline) effectiveness. If you are one of those marketers who have embraced QR code or are thinking about it or just curious to know how QR code measurement works then this post is for you. Measuring URLs in QR Codes You won’t be able to measure the number of impressions of the QR codes if they are distributed offline. What you can measure is how much traffic those QR codes are driving to your site or to your pages on 3rd party sites like facebook page, twitter account etc. Measuring QR code links to your site Measuring QR codes that sends user to your site is as simple as campaign tracking. Just add the campaign tracking variable to the URLs that you have in your QR Codes and treat it like any other campaign. ...

Sometimes there are things that you know are not right and need to be fixed immediately rather than testing and waiting for the result. Such was a case that I recently encountered and the results were amazing. Recently, I was working with a client who sells people expertise (I am purposely vague here because I don’t want to reveal the name of the client). The “Expert” search is the start of the process and then “Expert Search result” page is a second step in the process. On the expert search page, each expert is listed with a small blurb and the name of the expert was linked to the next step of the “checkout process”. When analyzing the “checkout” process we noticed that there were 2 things missing The name of Expert was not underlined – it was linked to the next step in the “checkout” funnel but not underlined. Also, that was the only call to action on that page i.e. to click on the experts name to go to the next step. The picture of the Expert was static and had no link whatsoever...

Continuing my series on Creating a Culture of Analytics I would like to touch on a very critical aspect of creating a culture of Web Analytics and that is Context. What is Context According to Princeton.edu context is Discourse that surrounds a language unit and helps to determine its interpretation the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event Context takes the ambiguity out of the equation. As an Analyst it is very important that you provide full context when reporting your web analytics data. Context gets everybody on the same page. Do not leave anything for interpretation by the end users of your reports, give them the insights in a simple and easy to understand format . Let’s look at an example to understand critical context is. 60 Degrees If I say it is going to be 60 degrees tomorrow. What will be you reaction? If you are in Minnesota – You will yell “Summer” If you are in Seattle, you will think – ““Spring” If you are in Florida, you will say “ Damn… Co...

Adding a widget such as AddThis , ShareThis and Facebook Like button on your site makes it very easy for your site visitors to share your site and content with their friends and followers via email or social media. Even though these are small widgets, that your developers/designers might not have paid much attention to, they add a tremendous value to your business. According to a recent report by eMarketer 47.5% of the people trust the recommendations of their social media contacts. In order to leverage social sharers you have to make it easy for them to share you content and widgets like these do a good job in making your site shareable. A small widget like this can save you thousands of dollars in customer acquisition and even retaining the customers via either direct conversions from the traffic driven by shared links or by the brand awareness that those links create. Monetary value of Social Shares Most of the sharing widgets have built in analytics to measure the virality of your...

Several studies have shown that people trust the link and site recommendation they receive from their friends or experts in the field. To capitalize on this opportunity websites have long used features like “Recommend to a Friend” or “Email this” kind of functionality. Recently we have seen a rise in usage of tools/widgets that make it easy for the visitors to share links via email and social media. Measuring Virality Many of the tools/widget that allow you to add easy sharing now also have built in analytics to help you track things such as which content is getting shared, how many people like to share etc, what methods do they use to share etc. 3 tools that you should look into are: ShareThis AddThis Tynt Tool Comparison ShareThis and AddThis ShareThis and AddThis are very similar in functionality with some minor differences but they look more like each other. Both this widgets have very similar reporting and tell you How many links were shared How many people shared them What con...

Presenting the data is what Web Analysts do majority of the time. It is critical for Web Analysts to present the data in a way that is easily understood by their intended audience. However, I have seen time and again that this simple rule is missed. Why? Because we all suffer from what is known as "The Curse of Knowledge". What is The Curse of Knowledge? Here is what 37Signals.com write on this subject: Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise. "Curse of Knowledge" becomes a big issue for Web Analysts and Managers who are trying ...