The growth of Twitter and social media in general has made the need to measure and analyse accounts and their progress even greater for businesses. There are many analytical tools out there, like Optify and CoTweet, which aim to help businesses drive more traffic and leads but the number of analytical tools are as many as they are varied.
Twittie differentiates itself from the other analytical services by focusing on the location for its users, allowing them to keep up to date with new trends as well as their clients and competition.
The service, which will launch at the beginning of this month, analyses the results and development of your twitter account by tracking your followers, monitoring reactions to your tweets, links and tags and checks your influence in relation to your competitors.
The service also offers suggestions based on this to help tailor your tweets towards your target market and make them more effective. The site gathers data about when your followers are online so that you will know the best times to tweet at the best time, resulting in greater engagement with your followers.
Currently the service focuses on the British and Polish market but it will be introduced to other areas such as Germany, Spain and the US in the next few months.
Hopefully when the service launches properly, the quality will be far greater than their promotional video which appears to be a text-to-speech video, although the company is Polish so perhaps it’s a little unfair to dwell on it too much.
While many brands are on a clear race for Likes, those smart Facebook Page owners will be looking beyond the number of Likes on the side of their Page and into more detailed analytics that show them how their Page is performing, and where they stand in relation to their competitors. Facebook itself offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard that tells you how your Page is performing, and I wanted to take a look at some of the tips for using this, as well as other sites that can help you get more out of your insights. As with all form of analytics, remember that the magic only really comes when you make actions off the back of the data, and don’t fall into analytics overload.
See what you did right/wrong
Under the Users dashboard in Facebook, you can access a simple graph that tells you how many new Likes you’re getting each day, as well as the number of Unlikes. This is incredibly valuable information as it allows you to see what you’re doing that’s working for you on your Page, or not working. This is useful if you click into the graph when you see an unusual pattern such as a sudden increase in the number of Unlikes. Look for what you might have done on that day that turned people off. Did you post too often, did a competition end, did you post irrelevant content? Try and find a pattern here and make sure you don’t keep doing the same thing!
Optimise your traffic referrers
Also within the Users dashboard in Facebook Insights, you can see the external traffic drivers to your Page. You should pay attention to these to see if you can optimise sites that are driving you traffic, to get even better results. You should also be looking at those sites that are referring traffic, but maybe not as much as you hoped. If you’re running a promotion on another site for example, or your own site, and the traffic isn’t coming through, you might need to look at how you’re enticing people through, or how prominent the link is. The external referrers are incredibly important for growing your fans organically so make sure this activity is optimised.
Are your fans actually active?
If you’re investing in a campaign to drive up the fans on your Page, you should always be looking at whether these fans are actually active, or whether they’re just contributing to an idle number of Likes. This is easily accessed with Facebook Insights and can be tracked over daily, weekly, or monthly users. If this number isn’t where you’d expect it to be, look at what you can do to drive interaction or, more importantly, bring the right kind of fans into your Page.
Implement on-click tagging
While Facebook’s own insights tell you a lot about how fans are performing on your Page, you can get a lot more in-depth by combining with your own analytics package. By implementing on-click tagging for a Facebook app for example, you can get a complete overview of how the app is performing. Through this you can effectively see drop-off rates, such as the amount of people that entered their email address vs the amount of people that landed on this Page. If you’re getting high dropoff rates at certain points, maybe you’re asking for too much information or the page isn’t very user friendly and so you’re losing the conversion.
Track against competitors
Social Bakers is a great site for getting free Facebook stats worldwide, as well as those that apply more specifically to you. If you want to see how many Likes you’re getting compared to your competitors, perhaps for benchmarking before a new campaign, you can do this easily through Social Bakers. Simply click onto ‘Pages’ at the top, then filter by country and category, to view the Page breakdown by industry. As well as looking at the overall number of fans, you can also look at the rate of growth, to see if a new promotion is working well for them in terms of driving numbers to Facebook. This information is also important for your own Facebook Page, to get a quick overview of how quickly you’re driving fans :
Get Insights for your own site
A lesser known feature in Facebook Insights, is the ability to track analytics for your own website. This allows you to see how content is being shared throughout your site, such as the number of Likes you’re getting, or links that are being shared through Facebook. Here you can choose who can view that information, setting this either for your profile or a particular Page. You can also access additional insights such as how many impressions a particular link or content has gained through Facebook. This is great information to show you how your content is performing socially and you can optimise off the back of it, by seeing the type of content that is getting shared most and trying to replicate it :
If you are like me and you use social media on a regular basis you are probably obsessed with stats from your various different networks, sites, blogs and sharing tools. Finding out all those stats is usually quite a manual process of logging in and out of several accounts and most people I know check their Google Analytics account about 10 times a day alone. I’ve always craved a dashboard that would pull in all that information in to one central hub where I could get a quick overview of all the my activity online and Twenty Feet seem to have just launched that tool. You’ll need to do a little bit of manual work at the start connecting up all your various accounts but that should only take about 10 minutes and once done you’ll have simplified your life significantly and you can kiss goodbye to all the logging in and out of accounts again. It’s a great new service and the level of functionality and customization for a site still in BETA is very impressive…
Google Analytics
Goes in to a good amount of detail here and will give you a good look at traffic for the last week and some of your other headline stats. If you need more detail on tracking you’ll still need to log in to Google Analytics itself but perfect way of checking for an unusual spikes in traffic etc.
Facebook Pages Info
This is essentially the same data that you can get within Facebook itself but the beauty here is that it is all built in to one dashboard along with all your other stats. You can also add multiple Facebook accounts which is especially useful for agencies and brands managing a few pages.
Twitter Stats
The best thing about the Twitter stats is that they can show how many Retweets and interaction you are getting across your various Twitter accounts (it also lets you track multiple accounts). The stats here are simple enough but it does help give you a good overview about just how your content is spreading online.
Bit.ly
It’s very hard to keep a track of links you share online but if you use Bit.ly you can see exactly what happens to all your links. You’ll have to set up an account on bit.ly itself but once you do you can see every single click on the links, where those clicks happened, when they happened and watch out for any spikes of useful content you might have shared.
Youtube
Youtube videos have a funny habit of blowing up and getting a load of views, comments or ratings without you even noticing it because most people don’t spend much time looking at their stats there. With this tool within the dashboard you will pick up spikes in your videos within hours.
One Beautiful Dashboard
Once all the work has been done and you have tailored all your reports to be delivered the way you want them you can simply add them in to your dashboard so as soon as you come back to the site you don’t have to go flicking around your various social media statistics. It is streamlined, simply designed and gives you an instant snapshot of what you are looking for. It’s data presented in a way where you can quickly see spikes of activity and choose to do something about it if needed.
The Verdict?
It’s a great idea and something that many of us have been crying out for now for a long time. Although the content is excellent the site is still very slow at the moment and it shows that it is in BETA but you can expect that to get better over time. It takes them a while to get the feeds at the moment but that will hopefully get faster. If they do sort out the speed issues then I can see people using this on a daily basis because it will save everybody time and cut out all that flicking between accounts. You can check out Twenty Feet here. Here is a good video with the founder that I spotted on Scoble’s blog…
Most people struggle to manage one Facebook page or profile but there are many businesses, agencies, publishers, freelancers and brands who have to manage multiple pages and this post is dedicated to you. Most good campaigns live or die by the data and analytics that they produce and I wanted to bring together a list of the best ways of tracking the data on Facebook. You can of course use Facebook’s own analytics and they are sure to improve over time but this list gives you a mixture of serious business tools, some quick research aids and some more light hearted fun tools. Make sure to add any that I have missed to the comments and enjoy this list of Facebook analytics options…
Webtrends
Might as well start the list off with the most expensive one on the list and this solution from Webtrends is going to set you back some serious cash. Mostly used by medium to large brands and agencies you can drill down in to some serious detail but you will need some volume to find it in any way useful.
Real Time Analytics
So you have like buttons on your website but you are not sure how they are converting and what the traffic is doing? You’ll need a developer to help you implement this or at least a little technical knowledge but as they say it gives you “access to real-time analytics to optimize Like buttons across both your site and on Facebook.” You can read more about implementing it here.
This one is completely free to use and it used to be called Facebakers until the big bad lawyers came along and asked them to change their name. You do have to connect your account using Facebook connect to unlock some of the features but the good news is that there is a whole wealth of free information in here including users per country, city, by brand and growth figures.
Wildfire App
This is a simple little app from Wildfire who allow you to compare up to 3 Facebook pages and it’s a great way of tracking competitors and it even allows you to set up alerts around different spikes in traffic. You can of course pay to unlock even more features.
Facebook Grader
You may have seen the Grader range of products for websites and other web products and this is their version for Facebook. They give you a score out of 100 and also tell you where you rank among the other pages that have been ranked. This services doesn’t really offer you much insight but it does give you a quick overview of where your own page or your competitors rank.
How Much Is Your Page Worth?
I add this one to the list in a joking way because there is no way that you could ever use an automated tool to calculate the real value of a Facebook page and there wouldn’t be a value or buyer for your page. It is however a little harmless fun to calculate how much your Facebook page is worth. Apparently somebody would pay us 14k for ours. Haha where is that person??
I always get a lot of questions about business blogging and how people can improve their own blogs or just get started. There are 100s of posts out there including a few of our own but I wanted to look at things from a slightly higher level today and see what you can do to create a really remarkable blog. None of these tips are going to pay off overnight and none will turn your blog in to a massive hit without hard work but they do work and they are important if you are really serious about this. Rather than thinking everything on this list is going to deliver results by the end of the month look at the items on here and try and implement them over the course of a full year because that is when you will really see the value…
Write Your Posts On A Train Or Plane
You obviously can’t jump on a plane or train every time you need to write a blog post but all the great posts I write are when I am offline and only have a text editor in front of me. When I am online writing a blog post I’ll be distracted every couple of minutes and pop in and out of email, Twitter and Facebook which means that even though my blog post is taking hours to write the quality and concentration are just not there. Try switching the online world off and just concentrating on nothing but your blog post. You’ll be stunned by the results you achieve.
Don’t Try And Break News
It’s often tempting to try and compete with sites out there who break news within your niche but it doesn’t work. We can’t compete with the likes of The Next Web, Mashable or Techcrunch because they have teams of professionally paid writers whose main job is to break news. They spend their time on RSS, Twitter and chasing stories so as they can be the first to break news. Where you can compete is by adding insight to the latest news and delving behind the story. So rather than telling people that Facebook have launched new comments we will give you the analysis and show what it means for your own business.
Sell Your Blog Like A Book
I picked up 2 books in the airport this morning. I only had 2 minutes to make the purchase so I ended up going for the books that stood out to me from a design perspective and told me exactly what they were about on the cover. You need to think of your blog in exactly the same way and package it up like a book. The chances are people will only flick on to your blog for a couple of seconds before deciding if they are going to read it. Much like I didn’t have time to read blurbs or the first page of the book your potential readers probably won’t read your “about” section or any of your posts. They’ll scan over your blog and see if they like the design, the layout and the title of your post. If you have all of those things right they’ll read on, if you don’t they’ll move on.
Read Everything You Can Find
When I am not working or writing on the blog I am reading. When I wake up in the morning I read blog posts. When I am in a queue I read blogs. Waiting on a bus I’ll be reading and before going to bed at night I’ll be reading the work of others. Your own blog is never going to be good unless you absorb the work of others and know your industry inside out. Not only will you become more knowledgable but you’ll also get some great inspiration for your own blog posts and think of angles you never would otherwise. The big popular blogs are not always the best place to start because plenty of people are writing amazing content out there that you have never heard of before but isn’t getting found so look for the niche stuff. Make it your job to find the best content and read it as much as you possibly can.
Network Your Ass Off
Most of you know how to do this already. It’s a lot of hard work and the benefits are not always apparent but networking is the way to make your blog truly remarkable and build an audience. Use tools like Twitter and Facebook. Leave comments on other blogs. Speak at events. Attend events within your niche. Email people within your niche. Strike up relationships and generally increase the size of your network. None of this is going to bring people to your blog overnight but showing that you know your stuff on other sites and creating a network of people who trust your word on a subject within your niche is one of the most important things you can do as a blog owner.
Don’t Let Critisism Influence Your Writing
95% of people who read your blog will love it and thank you for the great content you are producing and the ideas you are sharing. No matter how helpful or accurate your blog is though 5% will always have something bad to say. It’s human nature and it will never change. Some people find it very hard to take because they find it personal, an attack on the work they have put hours of their life in to. You shouldn’t think like that. It’s right that people should disagree with your way of thinking and challenge you. The most important thing to do is to not let those 5% shape what you would write in the future and to keep writing what YOU think.
Lay Your Blog Out Like A Newspaper
When I pick up a copy of The Sunday Time I know exactly where everything is. The sections are always the same and the way the articles and photos are spread out on the pages rarely changes. Newspapers are very good at presenting the content to you in the way you would expect it to be delivered. Once you have settled on your final blog design you need to keep all your posts as uniform as possible. Have a look over some of our posts and you’ll pretty much see an image in same place and the posts broken in to sections with a title for each section. We never move away from that format because people are used to it and it allows them to scan articles like this for the bits that they need. Layout might seem like a small enough thing but think of all the big blogs you read and think about how standardized their layout is.
Write Stuff That You Shouldn’t Write
There are times when I’m writing a post and I think to myself “I shouldn’t really be saying that” and think about deleting it. More often than not though I’ll leave it in because a blog is about opinions and there is no point holding back. Sure you might get some bad feedback or people disagreeing with you in the comments but I’d always publish 90% of the things you think you shouldn’t. At the end of the day there are 100s of people out there writing about the same stuff and playing it safe so having your own opinions is one way of standing out from the crowd.
Set Targets
We have targets for this blog every month. Numbers of RSS subscribers, number of posts, number of unique visits, email subscribers and so on. They are in a nice little spreadsheet and they get updated once a quarter. I know you probably think that because we are a business we need to do that but I have always done the same on personal blogs as it’s a great way of looking at the bigger picture. I know some people have personal blogs and couldn’t care less about traffic or hitting targets but if you want to grow your blog get in to the habit of setting yourself targets. Where do you want to be by the summer? Could you double the size of your blog by this time next year? Think long term rather than short term.
Learn Google Analytics Properly
You probably have a good basic understanding of your stats and look at them every day to see how your traffic is growing but that is only scratching the surface. I would suggest spending half a day learning Google Analytics properly using their conversion University (totally free). You’ll start to pick up trends and spot content on your blog which is working well against content that just doesn’t get much of a reaction.
Get A Marketing Strategy
Your blog as it is at the moment is barely not going to be found. You are competing against millions of other blogs, news sites, content farms, Twitter and every other site on the web also screaming out for attention. You could be creating the most amazing content in the world but without a marketing strategy it’s never going to be found. I’ve written plenty of posts here in the past about drivingtraffic to your blog that you can use as a reference. Don’t just make it up as you go along but instead sit down and put a bit of thought in to your marketing plan and even get it down on paper.
For an FMCG advertiser the web brings a host of challenges and digital marketers need to deliver analysis beyond the standard analytics feedback with measures that marketing managers are familiar with. This recent campaign for Velvet Toilet Tissue has examined the true brand effects of online video & rich media in the Irish market. Irish digital agency, Bark, has shown that using a combination of online video & display advertising in isolation leads to a dramatic uplift in brand awareness, message saliency and likelihood to purchase.
However, as with all training, you can always elect not to pay and to gain your knowledge in a different way.
In the case of Google Analytics, Google has created a range of videos that they have posted online that should bring you through the full Google Analytics training program. For example, if you are trying to achieve authorized Google Analytics consultant status,you could do wose than study using this series of videos.
Analyze this was a great movie with Robert De Niro playing one of his funniest roles. The movie was called Analyse because of Robert De Niro’s shrink that had to analyze and sort out his problems. If you watched the movie you’ll see that that didn’t really happen.
How about your website? Have you done any analysis on performance and have you made some improvements? How many of you have not looked at your website traffic and done some investigation work? Here are some tips that will help you improve the performance of your website.
2. Set up your analytics tool to deliver you a daily reports showing a summary of the traffic on your website. How many people came to your website, what’s the difference over yesterday, what sites did they come from, what keywords did they use. This is all valuable and interesting information.
3. At the end of each week fill out an excel spreadsheet that monitors the vital signs of your website. What’s the traffic compared to last week, are you getting more leads or less leads? If you were running a shop would you keep an eye on how many people came in during the week? How many people left happy? What was their average spend? Consider your website is your shop, what are you going to monitor.
4. Read a couple of good books or follow a couple of good bloggers on analytics. You can follow Google’s analytics blog to find out all the latest changes or follow Avinash Kaushik for the advanced user!
5. Check out your bounce rate. A bounce rate measure lets you know what percentage of people came to a page on your site and left before going to another page. If you’ve got a high bounce rate on a page you need to check if this page needs to be updated and improved. @seamusbyrne sent out a link to-day about an article with more detials on bounce rate.
6. Check out the average time people are spending on your site. If they are not spending long on your site is your content not that good? How about improving it, making it more interesting and engaging would that help?
7. While you’re at it you should also check to see how quick your website is. Use websiteoptimization.com which is a free tool. If your site is very slow nobody is going to stay around too long!
Google has released a new Google AdWords Reporting feature in Google Analytics. With this update, users now have access to 3 new reports, 10 new dimensions, and more AdWords metrics.
Three Brand New Reports
Three new reports give you the ability to dig into all aspects of your AdWords campaign performance.
Day Parts Report
If you want to know the best day of the week for your ads or the best hours of the day for your campaigns, then can now see your ad performance broken down by day of the week and by hour of the day using the Day Parts report. The Day Parts report can help you find the most profitable times of day for your ads. Then pair it with the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords to automatically adjust your bid to capture the right traffic at the right time.
Destination URLs Report
What are your best landing pages? The Destination URLs report lets you dive into the performance of each of your Destination URLs. You can break out performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Apply a secondary dimension like Keywords and see your top Destination URL/Keyword pairs.
Placements Report
The Placement Performance Report in AdWords shows you the performance of your ads on the Google Content Network. With the Placements Report in Google Analytics, you can get rich post-click performance data about your campaigns and find the best sites to target your ads. Or, either exclude the sites that don’t send you engaged traffic or identify the top performers to create a targeted display campaign.
10 New AdWords Dimensions
Dive deep into your AdWords performance using 10 new AdWords dimensions. For example, try Match Type to see performance between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match. Love the search query report in AdWords? Segment by Matched Search Query to see exact user queries that triggered your ads and post-click performance.
Clicks Tab in Campaigns and Keywords reports
The Clicks tab brings your AdWords performance metrics into Google Analytics. From the Clicks tab you can get an overview of AdWords performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Combined with Goals or eCommerce tracking you can see a complete picture of your AdWords performance.
How to Get Started with the New AdWords Reports
To start using the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics you need a linked AdWords account. You also need to make sure that Destination URL auto-tagging is turned on. Start from your AdWords account, select the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. To access the reports from Google Analytics, select Traffic Sources, then AdWords.
You can see the new reports in action in this video:
Google has announced the AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE. This tool helps you to optimize your AdWords account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. As part of our ongoing effort to improve the AdWords experience, Google is this new tool and inviting advertisers to participate in the beta programme.
AdWords Campaign Experiments is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.
Today, the most common way to measure the impact of these types of changes is to do a simple before-and-after analysis. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during or between the before and after, including holidays, weekends or changes to end user behavior or advertiser behavior.
Different ways of using ACE
Use ACE to experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad group or placement changes. You can test and measure a variety of scenarios including:
The incremental impact of adding new keywords to your campaign or changing keyword and ad group-level bids
The value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
The change in volume by using different keyword match types
The value of using an ad group default bid versus keyword-level bids
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The growth of Twitter and social media in general has made the need to measure and analyse accounts and their progress even greater for businesses. There are many analytical tools out there, like Optify and CoTweet, which aim to help businesses drive more traffic and leads but the number of analytical tools are as many as they are varied.
If you are like me and you use social media on a regular basis you are probably obsessed with stats from your various different networks, sites, blogs and sharing tools. Finding out all those stats is usually quite a manual process of logging in and out of several accounts and most people I know check their Google Analytics account about 10 times a day alone. I’ve always craved a dashboard that would pull in all that information in to one central hub where I could get a quick overview of all the my activity online and 
Most people struggle to manage one Facebook page or profile but there are many businesses, agencies, publishers, freelancers and brands who have to manage multiple pages and this post is dedicated to you. Most good campaigns live or die by the data and analytics that they produce and I wanted to bring together a list of the best ways of tracking the data on Facebook. You can of course use Facebook’s own analytics and they are sure to improve over time but this list gives you a mixture of serious business tools, some quick research aids and some more light hearted fun tools. Make sure to add any that I have missed to the comments and enjoy this list of Facebook analytics options…
I always get a lot of questions about business blogging and how people can improve their own blogs or just get started. There are 100s of posts out there including a 
Digital Marketing Institute is running a PAID FOR 2-Day 
Analyze this was a great movie with Robert De Niro playing one of his funniest roles. The movie was called Analyse because of Robert De Niro’s shrink that had to analyze and sort out his problems. If you watched the movie you’ll see that that didn’t really happen.
