- Socially engaged visitors’ conversions and goal value
- [...]]]> Google Analytics launched new social media reports recently. It not only provide deep insight into how consumers engage the content via social media networks, both on and off your website but also new reports provide performance data on the following:

- Socially engaged visitors’ conversions and goal value
- Performance by social network
- On-site social activities and social plugins
- Off-site social activities

The new Google Analytics social report

Social analytics data is now contained within a single set of reports. Previously, social media referrer information was found in the traffic sources reports section, while social plug-in data was found in the visitor reports section.

Automatic categorization of social media websites is now available. Before now, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter would be categorized as referring website traffic, unless URLs were appended with Google campaign tracking parameters (e.g., utm_source=Facebook and utm_medium=SocialMedia). Now, using a comprehensive index of 400 social networks, Google automatically categorizes certain referring sites as social media, in a similar fashion to the auto-classification of organic search traffic.

Even though Google automatically categorizes, personally still suggest to use campaign tracking if you have a multi-channel promotion or specific content tracking require.

Off-site social metrics, on a limited number of social networks, are now visible. These networks include Google+, Blogger, Meetup, Digg, Disqus, Delicious, Diigo, and Reddit, among others.

Social media is now automatically tracked and accounted for as contributing to the conversion funnel. By compiling information in a single reporting suite, Google Analytics social reporting makes it easy for users to determine social media’s impact on digital marketing ROI.

Something is not there yet

The new social reports are still being tested before a full public roll-out, so you can expect a number of updates and improvements in the coming months. Currently the report suite has a few limitations,

For comprehensive social conversation analysis you will need to supplement Google Analytics social reports with data from third-party tracking systems like Sysomos or Radian6. Google Analytics social data is URL-based, so it will only register mentions of your website URLs. In other words, Google Social Analytics will not track mentions of your brand, product, and competitor mentions if it shared without “http://”.
Google Analytics is not currently integrated with popular URL shorteners (e.g., t.co and bit.ly), so users can expect to see social sources such as t.co (Twitter’s URL shortener) in the social sources reports.

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are not currently partners in the Google Social data hub, so off-site metrics are not available for the top three social networks today.

Using the New Reports to Optimize Social Media ROI

The new Google Analytics social reports, located in the traffic sources section, contains six reports that can be used to optimize your social media efforts.

1. Overview
2. Sources
3. Pages
4. Conversions
5. Plugins
6. Visitors Flow

Social Overview

The overview report provides a high-level snapshot of social media engagement with your website. Metrics include visits by social media source, conversions driven by social media engagement, and overall contribution to website revenue (i.e., social value).

Sources

Google has identified a comprehensive list of 400+ social networks. The sources report breaks down the traffic driven by each. Focus your efforts on the networks that drive greater page views/visits and time on site. Then, click on the individual source of traffic (e.g., Google+) to view data per URL. Optimize your posts by identifying the URLs that drive the highest quality visits as measured by on-site engagement metrics and data hub activities (i.e., off-site engagement).

The social stream report includes conversations and events that are taking place on social networks. Visit the social conversations tab to identify the users that are sharing your content, along with the content of those posts. You can use these reports to optimize your social media campaigns by engaging with influential users who drive traffic to your website.

Pages

The pages report identifies the web pages that are garnering the most traffic from social media websites, and which of those pages are being shared most often via social plugins.

Conversions

By integrating it with the conversion goals you established, you can use the conversions report to track the social media outlets that drive the most conversions, including both sales (i.e., ecommerce) and engagement goals (e.g., time on website, sign-ups, and more).

Ultimately, the conversions report can be used to calculate social media ROI, as it identifies the social media sources that are driving the most value. By assigning revenue to goals, you can quantify your social media ROI through the following formula:

ROI= (Conversion value – Investment)/Investment

The conversions report is calculated by default based on the most recent traffic source in the conversion funnel. Because social media is often an upper or mid-funnel tactic, it is important to review the assisted conversion report, which tracks conversions based on the visitors referred by social media in the conversion path. Valuable social sources should contribute more assist conversions and higher assist conversion value.

Social Plugins

The plugins report identifies the pages on your website that are being shared via social media outlets, as well as actions and networks. Use it to identify the most “shareable” web pages and optimize content accordingly. Additionally, use it to identify the social networks that are most frequently utilized by your visitors.

Social Visitor Flow

The visitor flow visualization report displays how visitors interact with your website after arriving via a social media network. Use it to optimize the landing pages you’ve created.

Tips to get more value out of Google Analytics Social Reports

Set up social plugins. Ensure that popular web pages contain prominent calls to action, including Google+, Facebook’s “Like,” and Twitter’s “Tweet” buttons.
Implement social plugin tracking to track “Likes,” “Tweets,” shares, and other onsite social engagement actions. Note that this requires adding custom code to web pages.

Create goals and assign values. To learn how social media engagement affects your ROI, assign revenue values to your goals. Even if you’re not operating an ecommerce website, quantifying activities such as leads and engagement will help you determine their affect on your bottom line.
Increase your brand’s social media engagement. Share more quality content and link back to your website within posts.

As this [...]]]> This month we are happy to share a case study on how to create a data driven campaign to track various digital marketing effort. As many marketers are still struggle about the complexity as well as effort require to plan and execute a proper digital campaign in order to get valuable data.

As this is the first time we are using a real life retail case therefore make sure you reserve your ticket in advance and don’t miss out the opportunity.

It’s not true [...]]]> It seems insane to talk about email direct marketing as today people all talking about social media and no one cares about email. Regarding Web 2.0 era, we prefer two-way communication and that’s why social media blast in recent years and information is not push but pull.

It’s not true that email is meaningless to your marketing effort. If emails sent by means of more personalize yet it remains an immensely credible and profitable channel. Today, many company’s EDM is way changed to updating subscribers on company news with subject line likes XXXX – January Newsletter. It’s good to limit the number of EDM per month rather information overwhelms the audience and it’s not too hard selling.

So, to analyze the email campaign effectiveness of your overall marketing effort, remember to think end-to-end. Don’t just stop at the metrics that email service providers provide but also look at your website data and combine multiple data source.

A general report from email service provider would include the following metrics (may be more).

• Delivered
• Soft Bounce
• Hard Bounce
• Open
• Clickthrough

By evaluating theses metrics, you only know about how effective that email encourage people to click the inner links to your website or how attractive that your promotion incentive is in order to have a very high open rate.

In terms of an end-to-end EDM campaign objectives, the only thing businesses want is result, and it can be lead generation/ acquisition, audience behavior and sales. Just make sure you are clear to your tied goal, and don’t just stop at knowing how many people clicked the EDM and then off.

Email Direct Marketing Campaign Metrics

Delivery Rate: (# of E sent – # of bounce) / # of  E sent

Open Rate: # of E opened / # # of E delivered

This metric highly reflects the magic of your designed subject line but not the attractiveness of incentives provided.

Click Rate: # of clicks/ # of E delivered

This metric reflects the relevance of your message to recipients as well as the effectiveness of your EDM. To optimize your EDM campaign, A/B testing can help to learning rather to put a image message or text message for a better click rate.

Combining Multiple Data Source

Make sure all your EDM is tagged with tracking code or ask your email service provider to put on those tracking in order to trace visitors from email to your website.

Bounce Rate: # of E visit with single pageview / # of E visit

This metric reflects rather you are directing your audience to see wanted information, are your landing page delivering on the promise you made in the email? Make sure your landing page is setting right as even 100% email click rate can be totally wasted the effort by having 100% bounce visit.

Goal Completed: # of goal / # of E visit

Goal should be something you designed that its value is important and that’s the ultimate objective of what you want the audience do. Say you want to drive people from email to signup as member or encourage people to download resources/documents from your webpage. All of these can be defined as a goal for a visitor, you can use event tracking, custom variables or set up goal to capture customer behavior that create value to your business.

Overall Conversion Rate: # of objectives converted / # of E sent

Average Revenue: Total revenue / # of E sent

Profitability : (revenue – EDM cost – cost of goods sold) / # of E sent

The three metrics above captured the importance of analytics as one should know the overall effectiveness of EDM as well as how much you can earn or loss by sending one email. This are key indicators on whether your company should continue email marketing or just leave the resources to other more profitable channels. Questions you may have are what if my purpose is not clearly defined as like as Ecommerce Company?  How can I measure the total revenue? To solve this problem, you definitely know the value of EDM campaign like it will help in offline sales and awareness. So you can assign monetary value to specific goal on your website.

Email marketing may not serve as the best marketing channel in most companies today. However, you can optimize your effort with analytics to your EDM campaign.

Tips of Making a Good EDM

1. Precise and Concise Subject Line
2. A Balance Ratio on use of Text and Image
3. Make Sure Tracking Code is Placed Correctly
4. Provide Alt-Text for People Who Can’t View Image
5. A Big and Clear One Unsubscribe Link

Believing the future of digital strategy will be driven by analytics and technical innovation, Dickson Wong transformed himself from an IT individual [...]]]> This month, 22nd Hong Kong Web Analytics has invited Dickson from MRM worldwide to speak. Reserve your ticket in advance and don’t miss out the opportunity.

Believing the future of digital strategy will be driven by analytics and technical innovation, Dickson Wong transformed himself from an IT individual at Merrill Lynch, to a Business Analyst in Bank of Communications, to a Digital Intelligence Specialist at k-matrix, and finally to his present position as an Analyst at MRM Hong Kong, helping Fortune 500 clients to optimize their digital strategy through data-orientated analytical approaches in the APAC region.With a wide range of experience and interests, he is also an active blogger on idea-stack.blogspot.com, an social media evangelist, an startups enthusiast, a self-confessed bookworm, a coffeeholic, and a cat lover.

“3 Steps for Effective Content Management Strategy: Content Categorization, Platforms Bridging and MultiChannel Analysis” will cover three practical approaches that help marketers to embed analytic tactics within their content management strategy. From preparation to data collection and analysis, such strategic framework will help marketers to optimize the execution throughout the whole conversion cycle and provide a more macroscopic view for them to manage their series of campaigns.

The analysis was performed in 2009 and 2010 and conclusions can be draw easily [...]]]> During November 2011, there was a research done by iPerceptions which is about Top 500 retail websites to see how many were using web analytics tools to track their online performance and making data-driven decision.

The analysis was performed in 2009 and 2010 and conclusions can be draw easily by comparing the growth of companies leveraging web analytics.

Retail Analytics Results

At a glance, there are 2% of retail websites were not using analytics tools. By looking at the trend, you will find how analytics is important to ecommerce and retail. The use of analytics tools steadily grows in usage over the last 3 years.

Analytics Vendor

Google Analytics occupied about 68% of retail websites, which is the most popular free tool. If you read carefully, only Google gained market share in 2011 while Adobe (Omniture) and IBM (Coremetrics, Unica) maintained their retail website presence.  Besides, There is an increasing trend of using other tools from different vendor such as Yahoo, Comscore, Webtrends etc.

However, be reminded that choosing analytics vendor is highly relevant to what industry does the company belong to, such as banking is more likely to have Unica because of the data privacy issues.

Deploying Multiple Analytics Tools

Obviously, there you pick a trend of retail websites who implementing more than one analytics tools. It nearly doubled on use of multiple web analytics between 2010 and 2011. No wonder, retailers began to realize insight from data is the key to improve their business performance as well as their website usability.

Use of Analytics by Category

Overall, the use of analytics in different categories go up, especially the usage in Ad Network. For the VoC (Voice of Customer), marketer and retailers are putting strong emphasis on it, as social media is the hottest topic of the market.