According to some big boys of Social Media platform – Facebook & Twitter, their simple analytics insight provides metrics such as “Reach”, “Mention”, ”Impression”, ”Fans/Followers and “No. of Post” etc. From time to time, these metrics has been accepted and used to measure social media campaigns but what metrics should business owner really have to care about first?

Number of Fans/Followers (By Engagement Level)

Today many traditional marketers care so much about the number of fans/followers as like as a usual practice from offline channel but the quality of  fans or by means of individual influencing power does matter your social media marketing most. Businesses shouldn’t value social media entirely based on fan pool. Therefore, It’s not about how big your community numbers but how many of them are actively engage in conversions with your brand.

Impressions, Comments and Reach

By how far your message has been spread out? What sort of content arouses interest of your followers most?  These metrics are simple yet you can not ignore since its important to know how engaging your posts are as well as to know what time during the day are getting most engagement. As the message is the most important thing to drive fans to your goal, you better have to find the right message to the right audience at a right time.

Website Traffic and Conversion

Last to mention is the most important measurement but it’s not solely on social media, It’s how social media drive people to your website or goal page.  No matter what you have done on social media, you want to bring traffic into your website and ultimately you want  CONVERSION. Conversion does not necessarily need to have dollar value, it can be the pageview of contact us page or just sign up membership. However, this gives you the actual goal to measure ROI. With more and more important of digital analytics, many marketers can no longer neglect this vital measurement. This really require proper setting in analytics on website or any platform to track entire performance from social media campaign.

There are many more measurements that you should know about social media and if you like to find more  about social media analytics/measurement, you can join the coming Social Media Week event in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Digital Analytics Association is going to host the Social Media Analytics 101 and Social Media Analytics & Regulation on 13/2, 16/2 respectively. Don’t miss the chance and book your ticket now!

Consider tools that are available on the market and do not necessary to have expensive software to start your effort; you may start with Piwik, Google Analytics, Clicky etc. But the most important thing is your outcome, before any analytics efforts you start think about what is your desired outcomes. You website exist because of what? What goals of your website you want to achieve? Lead generation? E-commerce conversion? Initially this will help you understand your website behavior that is tied to those goals/outcomes.

First five reports that you should consider:

1. Site Bounce Rate:

No matter what business you are in, bounce rate of your website indicate a very important message to you that how relevant your content to audience are.

2. Top Keywords from Search Engine

You probably know how important “Search” is, nowadays people rather type in keywords instead of remembering the long URL especially if people who are using Chrome browser. SMB who have small ad budgets have to leverage the power of search engine. Do this infer intent of your customers? Do this to know if you are getting the traffic you think you deserve. Figure some you may ignored keywords and take action!

3. Top Referring URL’s

Partnership with some association or corporate can be usual to SMB, Looking at the report, do you find any interesting brand name appeared? Do you have some connection with them? If not, should you?

4. Search Engine Optimization

A start to effective search strategy is to know if you are optimized for the right key phrases , and all aspects of that:

-Are you showing up in Search Engine, can search engine index your website?
-What key phrases are you wanted for people to search?
-Do you keep content update and precise with the right key phrase?

5. PPC Campaign (Search Engine Marketing)

If your company invests in PPC to drive traffics, a right marketing tag set up enhances you to better understand your PPC report. Base on the keywords you bid, the ad copy that you design, which one performs better to bring in traffics with conversion or (goal conversion)? Which cost you much but no contribution to making profit? Buying your competitor’s domain keywords?

There are many more reports help you to make decision and above were just some suggestion for SMB web analytics starters. Why not give it a try?

1. Social Media Monitoring
   This year there are many changes, most of the company like Adobe and WebTrends have launch Social Media Analytics. With the Google launching Google Plus, at the same time the Google Analytics Social Plug-in also release to the market. This indicate more and more focus on the Social Metric which yet to be standardise. There are more and more standalone tools trying to track Social Media but yet integration is what required. There still isn’t any tool that combine the east and the west.
2. Location Base
   This is something that did not seem to get any traction at all. With more and more location base information, the market still yet to able to drill down the user data by their location. Hopefully we can see some movement in 2012 and yet this will be interesting to see when Foursquare or Facebook will show us Location Base data. Maybe Jei Pang should kick start this project to provide location tracking information before the west does.
3. Mobile
   There have been a lot of talks about mobile analytics. Certainly we see more and more tools being launch in the market but the market start asking for more in depth questions and not just how many downloads of the application anymore. With Adobe giving up Flash, HTML 5 should be taking over and Mobile Web Site will get more popular. Therefore the linkage of data is last to forget.

Basically, apart from the Location Base analytics wasn’t develop as what we predict but hopefully it will come soon. So what for 2012 and what we should look out for? Maybe here are some hints.

1. Real Time Analytics
   More and more marketers are asking for real time data which Google launched a beta version of real time tracking in 2011. This clearly shows that Google already seeing the need of real time analytics and not predictive analysis anymore. So this is what we should look out for in 2012 as Real Time Analytics will change the traditional way of analytics. It will require more resources as well as business model to support real time analysis. So do we have enough resources and resources that have the right skills set?
2. Tools Consolidation & Data Integration
   After all the major analytics tools being acquired,  there are many more tools being developed over the past one year but a lot of them are quite similar. Therefore, some of the tools might either be acquire by others or disappear in the market. One of the major issues as digital analysis is that the data is still very lose and hard to combine into one report. What the market require is integration with different tools and medium to allow proper analysis to be conduct. This is a very interesting area as not many tools have this capability to integrate different data into one.
3. Demand in Education & Resource
   As more and more company are now moving to data analysis and which the industry is lack of these type of resource. In Asia after talking to more people in the region, the same comment being given when it come to resourcing is that it is hard to find suitable one. On the other hand education to the management team is also what being usually discuss. As clearly that a lot of company still behind with their data analysis and seeing the true value of data analytics.

So here is the thought and prediction of 2012 and which it will be another interesting year to look forward to. If you have any other thoughts, please feel free to share with us. Again looking forwards to another analytics year ahead. Happy New Year! Looking forward to all your support in 2012.

• EasyTracking Library – automatic session management, better integration with Google Analytics SDK
• Updated Google Analytics SDK – More reliable method for sending hits, Android Market referral issue fixed, available via the Android SDK manager
• More samples – new open source application aimed to help reduce the ramp up time for new developers who want to track their apps

With the improvements they are ever making, Google Analytics is helping many SMB to dive into data. However, no tools can be perfect unless you are willing to pay huge dollar. So, any limitation is on Google Analytics? Sure.

1. Do you expect your data storage are infinite? No, Google Analytics only store 2 years of your company data or more accurately is up to 25 months.

2. Data lag in report, even Google Analytics provided the real-time tracking later in this year, still it takes up to 24 hours to show up data, which you cannot access today’s data at night. We are more than happy to see any improvement made on this.

3. Some metrics are hiding from you, which are Time spent on site and Bounce visit. Google calculate the Time spent on site as the time between the 1st page loaded and the last page loaded, however, how bounces visit results?

If visitors loaded a page but didn’t move through your site (e.g. Blog), you will see time spent on site is 0:00 with bounce rate recorded. So it has no way of knowing how long a bounced visitor, who only visited one page, spent on your website.

4. Unlike other “Big Boys” of analytics tools, Google Analytics didn’t provide any customer support instead they only provide you an online help center, forum and email support. To be honest, the documentation in help center are quite thorough but don’t expect anyone from Google analytics team will come up and answer your question six days a week.

So now you know more about limitation of Google Analytics, but the fact is hundreds of thousands of companies are Google Analytics user and its free and thus there something we have to accept, right? Or you can consider setup few more free analytics tools to compensate the flaws of Google Analytics or just pay more to those “Big Boys” and get more.

Social Media Measurement (Analytics)

Today, the more mature the social media is, measurement becomes things that come after business first start to experiment with social media. How web analytics evolves, it’s similar. Social media is accepted as an effective business strategy promotion channel. With the increasing pressure on corporate social media practitioners to deliver on investment, there’s an ever more desiring need to demonstrate ROI, along with progress against other crucial KPIs.

What companies are usually measuring on Social media? From the research on type of metrics measured by CMOs Worldwide, you would see some generic metrics such as clicking a link, sharing the content, watching a video and push to friends but the most difficult part is how viral it can be, a key metric that didn’t show up in the research is amplification, how strong your company is motivating your followers to share your content and by how far your viral (WOM) can reach.

Amplifiers are the heart and soul of your base, when it comes time to promote something heavily.

So how can you measure all these terms? Twitter has Tweetreach to track amplifiers in twitter while “People talking about this” of Facebook Insight is one metric that is close to as well as the “Influencing power” of Weibo Statistics. They are all freshly come up in 2011 and that’s why social media analytics or measurement is believed on the list of hot trends for 2012.