New moms love a few things – receiving food they can stock in the freezer for easy reheats when they are too tired because baby kept them up all night, or busy all day and guest posters so they can continue providing their readers with valuable content. Or at least this new mom loves both these things equally.

Here’s a fabulous post about real-time stats programs from Sue Clark. Sue is the author of Lighthouse News, a fun and educational (for me) blog keeping up with lighthouse news and information across the world; she’s also pretty darn talented in my personal opinion when it comes to technical aspects of blogging, including stats. Enjoy!

Using Real Time Stats Helps Leverage Traffic

If you’ve followed Rebecca’s excellent advice (Blog owner’s note: Thanks for the compliment Sue!), you’ve already learned how to use the free and excellent Google Analytics to your advantage. But one of its limitations is that it’s not real time, and you can be missing some important traffic. You don’t get your statistics until the next day. For this, I recommend you install, alongside Google’s tool, a real time traffic monitor.

Some reasons you might want to leverage real time traffic (and some not so obvious ones) include:
*You see traffic coming in on particular search term to a specific page and might want to update information that may be out of date.
*Someone accidentally stumbled the wrong page (yes, that happens quite often) and you may want to put a link to the correct page.
*You’re running a specific campaign and want immediate feedback on its success.
There are many more reasons, including just plain curiousity about how many people are online at the moment. But those are the most common.

One example of when it was useful for me was when I noticed a large amount of traffic coming in from Google on the search term, “Scotland’s tallest lighthouse.” Now, I have no post referring to Scotland and its tallest lighthouse (Skerryvore, in case you’re wondering), but I do have a slightly humorous post about the World’s Tallest Lighthouse. And that was apparently showing up in the Search Engine Result Pages right near the top. But it really wasn’t about the world’s tallest lighthouse.

However, with all of that traffic coming in, I edited the post to add the actual tallest lighthouse, just so I wouldn’t annoy the readers when they found out it wasn’t what they expected. And although I don’t sell anything, or promote anything except saving lighthouses, I don’t want to annoy anyone. They might come back and visit again, or better yet, subscribe to my feed or newsletter.

If you’re wondering, there is no issue in running another stats collector program alongside of Google Analytics. There are numerous real time stats packages available, both free and paid. The list is by no means complete, but should give you a start.

*Stat Counter (free)
>Feature rich, looks good. Demo available. No ads on your site.

*HiStats (free)
>I personally use this one. I like the visitor tracking in the “last 20,000 visitors” section.

*Woopra (free)
>Sometimes slows down sites, but great features. Has a WordPress plugin.

*Sitemeter (Free and Paid)
>Even the free version is good.

*Feedjit (Paid)
>Has a ten day free trial, and some widgets to use on your site.

For more, here is a quick search from (who else?) Google. Check them out, try them on for size, it’s easy. And the benefits to your campaign are instantaneous. In most cases it’s simply adding some code to your footer, or a widget to your sidebar.

Using Real Time Stats Helps Leverage Traffic is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

My daughter in mid-wail

What do crying babies and your website visitors have in common with one another? A lot more than you think.

Being the mother of a newborn infant (two months old this past Saturday), crying is something I’ve been learning about. Babies are not able to communicate with words yet, so they cry to tell you something is wrong. Visitors to your website don’t cry (at least not that you know of), but they do something else; they leave your website.

When a baby cries you try to understand what they are asking for – are they hungry, do they need to be changed, do they have gas in their tummy? You can go through each of these options (and more) to try and remedy the problem until you find the solution. Unfortunately you can’t do that with a website visitor, once they are gone, they’re usually gone for good.

This is why it’s so important to understand patterns and behaviours of visitors to your site and to try and identify why people are leaving the site and fix it before they leave. Previously, I wrote a post encouraging you to look at your fall out reports available to you from your web analytics software as it can tell you valuable information. This report can be very helpful if you know what you’re looking for and if visitors are going more than one page deep in your site, or are using some sort of registration.

But what if they aren’t? What if visitors aren’t getting past your front door? They come to your site, but leave right away? What do you do? Like a crying baby they can’t tell you why they are leaving – so how do you know?

Here’s a few simple questions you can ask yourself about your website to see if you’re able to change the bounce rate of your site.

Look to see where visitors are coming from

 If they are coming from search engines, what keyword is it they arrived on, this will give you a clue as to what kinds of information they were expecting to find. If it is wasn’t as a result of organic search, then what site was it? What likely made them visit your site?

How easy is it to find what they are looking for?

Now that you know where your visitors came from and what they might be looking for, ask yourself if your site caters to their needs? Can you easily find the information they might have been looking for in eight seconds or less?. If you answer no to this question, you need to seriously consider the content and layout of your site.

Is your call to action apparent and easy to follow?

What is the number one thing you want a visitor to your site to do? Do you gently guide them towards that path without any other obstacles in their way? Or do you potentially overwhelm them by giving them too much choice and too many options? Is your call to action clear, concise and most importantly – above the fold and enticing enough to make your visitors take that action, not now, but right now?

We all lead busy lives, it’s easy to start a task and abandon it halfway because the baby started crying, or the boss asked you to drop everything you were doing for another project.  So make sure your website is designed to make it easy for people in these situations to find and finish whatever it is you want them to do so they can go on their merry way.

Crying Babies & Website Visitors Are More Alike Then You Think is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

Table of contents for How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns

1. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part One
2. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Two
3. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Three
4. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Four

Part One of this post identified the three main elements that are required to create a Reach formula. I’ll now discuss how to get at each of these numbers.

Conversations/Metrics
This needs to be done through the use of tools and alerts, a lot of searching and a lot of man-hours, at least until someone can automate it. Pick a timeframe to start from, like around a campaign launch, for example.

a. Twitter Search allows you to create a feed for a particular name/comment/word, etc. Don’t just think about your Twitter handle here; think about your brand and how customers and clients refer to you, including the name of your campaign or product.

b. Google Alerts Rinse. Repeat as above. Except I find you need to be more specific with this one.

*NoteOnce the first two are set up, it should be a little easier to get that information. For the next two, you will need to pick a timeframe to start from, otherwise you can search a few years back in some cases. Make sure you also copy down the links of the blogs on a separate worksheet.

c. Blog Searches. There’s a variety of tools such as Google Blog Search, Blog Search Engine and the Blog Catalog are good examples to start with. You can also use Technorati, but personally I don’t find it picks up a lot of things, though it should make the list.

d. Facebook and Myspace: Search for your company or key products. Look for groups listed that have to do with your company or product (and omit internal ones).

Open your spreadsheet and start adding up numbers for each of the four areas within this metric. Include everything in that timeframe and/or related to that campaign or product – even if it’s negative, it’s still conversation. You can make notes somewhere of the negative stuff and go back to it later to determine how best to address it.

Now that conversation is out of the way, let’s look at:
Sharing

Add This is the most simplistic of measurement tools to track where your users are sharing your articles, but it requires the people sharing to use those buttons on your site.

A much more complete option that doesn’t rely on people using the share buttons on your site is my new favourite plug in for Google Analytics – GreaseMonkey. Yes the downside is you must have GA and Firefox. I can’t sum it up any better than this:

“Not only will it pull the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, but the icons are interactive.”

Depending on which analytic system you use, there may be a plug in for that, or one not too far on the horizon – because you can’t beat this in my humble opinion…

Again, grab the information for the entire time frame and total up the number of shares and enter that into your spreadsheet.

Now it’s time to play with your Analytics some more.
Visits to your site from a social media site

Make a list of all the social media sites – or sites you consider to be social media.
Then make another list of words found back in the conversation phase that are outside of your traditional SEM budget (this part will get harder as you should be adding in any keywords that your customers use to your SEM campaigns). Now lastly, take your blog list and go through the spreadsheet with all the blog links.

Once you have all that in front of you, it’s time to do some digging and report pulling in your analytics system.

a. Find out how many visitors came to your site from each of the social media sites you listed

b. Find out how many people came to your site as a result of the non-SEM keywords (or you can also look at organic traffic for keywords that you’re bidding on)

c. How many people visited your site as a result of one of the blogs that talked about you?

Each of those three main areas, conversation, sharing and visits, should now have subtotals. Add them all together and there is your “magic” Reach number. It’s not perfect and it’s not exact, but it’s a pretty good and hopefully impressive picture to paint for your bosses.

The third post in this series will discuss how to begin to quantify these results and determine if your social-media campaign worked – including comparing it to Reach versus your other marketing tactics. I might even be so bold as to offer a formula for ROI calculations, so stay tuned.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Two is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

Table of contents for How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns

1. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part One
2. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Two
3. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Three
4. How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Four

This is part one in a series of posts on how to effectively measure Reach and begin to quantify your social-media campaigns. It sounds complicated, looks long and a lot of work. It is. But it’s also not as hard as you think because the key here is around social-media campaigns; a time frame, not forever, so theoretically you shouldn’t have mounds of data to go through – and if you do, the short answer is your campaign was an overwhelming success.

A special h/t to @JeanAnnVK who asked me this question and forced me to put to paper what I’d been thinking about for a while.

In short, Reach is a term often used by marketing folk to understand how many people saw their campaign. Media planners use a measure of Reach/Frequency to let clients know what they will get for their marketing dollar.

I think it’s time that Reach came to play at the social-media table.

Reach as a Formula

The way I see it, there are three main parts to Reach in social media
1. Conversations/Mentions
2. Sharing
3. Visits to your site from a social-media site

A brick and mortar visit is great, but as most in the offline world will tell you, that’s really hard to gauge without coupons and promotions, and you can’t count on it being reliable.

So how do you get this magic number?

Part Two of this series will discuss and detail the three pieces of the puzzle in determining what your Reach is.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part One is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

Table of contents for How to use Excel to its Full Potential For Data Analysis

1. How to Create Pivot Tables and Why Marketers Should Use Them
2. Using Excel to its Full Potential – Part 2 Separating Data

I love Pivot tables, yes, love them. They really are a marketer’s best friend – once you know how to use them. They make a great tool that will help you organize and then slice and dice data in several different ways for analysis.

Sure you can use traditional methods and sort or filter data, but if you have a lot of data, this can be cumbersome and confusing. A pivot table is a great visual refernce that can be created quickly and most importantly very easily if you know what you’re doing.

Many companies use pivot tables, but I’m specifiaclly talking about how to create pivot tables using Microsoft Excel. Pivot Tables aren’t something often promoted and aren’t the easiest things to figure out initially. But once you know how to use them, you’ll look like a pro.

Once you have your data in a spreadsheet (presumably exported from a tracking system) with your data in columns, with appropriate named headers you can begin. Preferably, it’s best not have any other data in the document that you don’t want in the pivot table. Don’t worry about any formulas like CTR that you might need, you can insert those later in an instant.

Click into the top left hand of the file (i.e A1). Now from the data menu, find and select your pivot table option:

You will next be presented with the format screen. Standard options are ok, so just click Next. You will now be asked for your data range. Ideally if you’ve followed these steps, all you need to do is click Next. However if you have other data you don’t want in the table in the document. Reselect your povot table range. Note: If you are not in the uppermost left corner to start, the program often can’t recognize what you’re trying to do and may give you an error message.

Now you’re asked where you want to put this file – in the same sheet, or a new one. Make sure you choose the new sheet, otherwise as you play with the data, you may run into issues with your original data. Don’t click Next just yet! You’ll want to set up (or partialy set up) your layout. Once you clicked the layout option you’ll be presented with a screen that looks like this:

On the right-hand side you will see your column headers, these are fields that can be dragged and dropped into various field layouts. I’ve used an example for online advertising here. Ideally if I want to look at how my ads did per site, I will drag and drop the “website” field into the “Row” area. From there, I’ll be choosing the data I want to see in the data column. I’ve chosen and dragged impressions there now. Now I click OK and then finish. And voila, I get something that looks like this:

I can now see how many impressions I’ve had by website. But what if I want to see impressions and clicks? Simply drag the clicks box over to the data area. Hmmm This doesn’t look right does it? It’s stacked it on top of one another. How do I lay it out in columns? You will need to click on the “name” of the column header (in this case, “Sum of Clicks”) until you see the “movable” four-way arrow. Drag and drop. As you pick up the column, you will notice a little “ghost” box appear that looks like your current pivot table layout. The blue area shows where you are proposing to move your field to. You want to move it so that it is in “subhead” box on the right hand side.

Now that looks better. Any other fields you drag and drop over will follow that order/layout so you won’t have to do that each and every time.

What if I need to determine what my CTR was and I don’t trust my own math/cutting/pasting/manual function skills? Never fear, you can add formulas here, that will repeat for all the data in your column without having to manually do anything once you’ve entered it in the first place.

Using your Pivot Table Tool Bar, click the Pivot Table drop down menu until you see the Formula option, from there, choose the “calculated” option on the flyout menu.

Follow the instructions, give your formula a name – like CTR, then choose the metrics and formula you need – for example clicks/impressions. Click ok and your new column should appear with all data calculated for you. If it doesn’t appear, you’ll notice that it is in your pivot table field chooser box and you can simply drag it over.

Ok – great, so what you say? I can do this with a data sort and manul adds. Of course, but what you can do now – especially if you had a lot more data to work with – placement on page, targeting options, etc etc – is drag and drop various fields to show the data’s performance. For example, maybe I don’t want the “row” area to have “websites” as the filter option. Perhaps I want to see which ad size did best? And Maybe I want to view which ad size did best by which vendor -well I’ll now add vendor as a second option to the “row” area and voila, I have each ad size showing which publisher ran what and how it performed.

I can now start to optimize my media plans with my agencies/media teams/publisher based on how something is performing pretty quickly and efficiently. I can mix and match different combinations without having to change formulas or layouts.

What I can’t do is format the pivot table itself – otherwise the formatting would mess up every time I wanted to change it. So you’ll need to get the combination you want, and then do a simple copy and paste in another worksheet and format for size, colour, shading etc as you see fit.

In terms of the column names, the default is “sum of” so that you will get totals, you can change the “field name” to remove sum within the pivot table, but I prefer to do it in the worksheet as I format other areas. The reason is that I can also choose my field settings, in case I need to show averages of my data, counts or other functions for those numbers.

As you can see, I’ve barely touched the basics here on how to create Pivot Tables, there’s all kinds of customization and tips/tricks you can learn. I suggest watching the Demo from Microsoft itself.

Pivot tables are a wonderful way to sort and filter your data easily which allows you to look at your data in many different ways. You can really use it to start looking deeper and trying to find patterns or trends, even seasonality comparisons.

Put simply, pivot tables hep make the world of data analysis a lot less scary.

How to Create Pivot Tables and Why Marketers Should Use Them is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

These are all stories that an analytics system can tell you and these are important questions to answer if you want to determine what kinds of content should be on your site.

If people are not registering, or there are small numbers registering you need to ask yourself why that is. It’s one of two reasons.

1. They haven’t found your registration
2. The content isn’t compelling enough to encourage subscriptions

So how do you figure this out?

Well you look for the angle, the hook, the story your analytics system is telling you. Can you understand exactly why? Maybe, maybe not. But what you can do is dig deeper.

Hopefully your analytics system employs a fall out path reporting structure, if it does, this may become your best friend.

You can use thise type of report to determine exactly where in the process people are falling off. Once you have an idea – or several ideas, you can begin determining how to fix it. Is it a particular page – a particular set of questions? Maybe it’s whether something is mandatory (income field for example), or a way a question might be worded.

You can begin testing several different scenarios out and seeing what improves registration rates. In some cases you may see results right away, in other cases it make take time and several different tests before you begin to see an improvement, but again your analytics system will be able to help you compare the previous results to the new results and look not only for improvements, but other changes that might take place as a result of these changes.

That old cliche – Knowing is half the battle – works well here.

Photo Credit: Ulrick / Stock.xchng

The Stories that Analytics can tell you is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)