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

Excel is a powerful tool when you have to evaluate data – if you know how to use all the bells and whistles it offers. The idea for this series comes from a post (which I’m labelling as the first part of this series) onhow to create and use pivot tables. I got (and still get) a lot of on and offline questions and feedback about it. Most of us know the basics of Excel, but unless you’ve take a training course, you don’t know it’s true power. I know I don’t know all the tips and tricks, but I do know a few things that should help make some of the things you might want to do a little bit easier.

Whether you’re an advertiser trying to review campaign data or a not-for-profit working with donor files, this series will show you a few simple formulas you can use to get the most out of your data without spending hours doing manual manipulation.

In order to create pivot tables, or sort data into groupings you need to have a data file with multiple columns or data points. However, you might find the data you receive has arrived all lumped together in one column in the form of a tab deliminated csv or tab (text) file. Thus making it hard to do much of anything with your data.

The “text to column” formual in Excel allows you to take any lump sum of data and separate it into coumns.
For example, you might have received an Excel file, but your donor names are lumped together and you want/need to be able to separate them out (i.e first-name only personaliztion). Here’s how to get the data separated in less than 60 seconds

Using Excel 2007
1. Look under the Data tab and click “Text to Column”
2. Choose your data type – deliminated (separated by commas, underscores, tabs or single spaces) or fixed width (a specific amount of space separating items you want into two separate columns)
*Note: Using the above example of name separating, we would choose the first option of deliminated since we have an Excel file and the amount of characters (or space) in each name is different*
3. Choose your delimination type (we would click space for this scenario) or your column breaks if using fixed width
4. Choose your data format (text, numeric, date etc)
5. Click Finish

Your data has now been separated.

One thing to note, if you have data in the column immediately to the right of the data you’re separating you will need to insert a new blank column, otherwise you will either need to start over, or choose “ok” when prompted to replace the data in the destination cells.

The next post in this series will show you how to do the opposite of this one – combine several columns of data into one column.

Using Excel to its Full Potential – Part 2 Separating Data is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

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)

The latest version 0.21.5b not only provides measures to address these API concerns, but adds an entire other layer to the time-saving features offered. Included below is a list of the major enhancements that I’ve been able to notice with this version. To see these in action, check out this great video tutorial by non-proft social media consultant John Haydon .

Besides the Direct Message, Reply and Retweet options, the biggest, most notable change is that when you mouse over someone’s avatar, the ‘fourth icon’ is now named Other Actions. If you choose this icon, a fly-out navigation menu appears giving you the ability to:

* Email a tweet to somone (Using the default Microsoft email of course)
* Translate the tweet (I clicked on this and nothing happened – so assume it’s for non-English tweets)
* Untranslate a tweet (Again nothing happend when I clicked this – but to assume again, I imagine it’s to undo what you translated)

Other items in the Other Actions drop down include the ability to follow or unfollow someone, Search, View the tweeter’s profile, Mark as Read, Delete, Favourite and Add to a Group.

Being able to view the profile and add to a group without the extra clicks should save a few API calls and in general makes the interface that much easier and faster to use. What will save even more of those API calls comes from some new options in the Settings tab. You now have the ability to open profiles in web pages vs. in Tweetdeck – again to save API calls. I think this is really quite brilliant.

Other new setting options include:
* Choose how many tweets to keep in a column (automatically set at 500)
* The ability to hide direct messages after you’ve sent them or tweets you’ve marked (when you restart the system)

The other big news that hashtag users will love, is that when you reply to someone who used a hashtag, Tweetdeck now automatically picks up the hashtag and puts in the reply for you. This is just another wonderful time saving measure (and will avoid some typos I’m sure).

I’m thinking there are a least a couple of other new items, so feel free to let me know what I might have missed in this list.

A Recap of Tweetdeck’s Latest Update: Version 0.21.5b is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

In fact, most companies pay big bucks for that. Being able to get this real-time data is one reason why free systems like Google can’t compete. But what if those systems you pay big bucks for suddenly stop spitting out real-time data? What if it takes a couple days (or longer) for that data to appear? That would make daily optimization nearly impossible.

Well, this is what is happening to those customers of Omniture at present. And as a user of Omniture for a client of mine, I can attest to the fact that data sometimes disappears, or doesn’t exist for several days, and then suddenly does as though it was there all along and you just didn’t look hard enough.

It makes testing campaigns very difficult, especially when you’re trying to give the go-ahead for an ad to go live.

An article in Forbes last week shows that my client isn’t the only one facing this challenge. Which is good and bad news. It’s good news because we’ve usually been made to feel like we are the only ones with these issues. The bad news? Poor Omniture; they are really heading up the creek without a paddle.

In a time where Google is heavily ramping up their free systems, and companies are looking to tighten their belts, Omniture can’t afford to be losing or misplacing data – even for short periods of time. It doesn’t give them much of a leg to stand on when clients ask why they have to pay so much for their services.

I also feel like it raises a few more questions including:

1. Are we expecting too much from data systems?
2. Makes me wonder about those who pay for tracking systems – especially huge sums of money. These troubles kind of make free look good… Don’t they?

Tracking Systems Are Only As Good As The Data They Capture 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 the last post in my series – How to Measure Reach and Quantify Social Media Campaigns. It’s essentially a listing of tools that you can use to help you monitor and manage all the different streams.

These tools are all free, and it is noted that there are some services out there that you can pay for who will do this for you. This list is intended to help out those folks who either don’t have a budget to pay for monitoring, or for those who still need to convince the budget holders in their organization that social media does/can work and that you need to be more involved.

I’ve tried to also stick with sites that for the most part you don’t need to be heavily involved with/active to and can easily grab the info you need without spending a lot of time there.

Tweetburner: Shortens urls and tells you the number of times a url you shortened was clicked on.

Twitt(url)y: Twitturly is a service for tracking what urls people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Twitter Search: Lets you search for any conversations taking place based on urls, keywords, or Twitter handles.

BUDurl: This service takes Tweetburner one step further, it allows you to shorten urls and track them across any media.

Google Analytics: Use it to tell what social media sites people are coming from and use the Grease Monkey Plug in to understand what people are doing on your site to promote it outside.

AideRSS: Enter the url of your feed (if you have a blog) and it will return information about the posts, including which how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites.

AddThis: If you have an account with AddThis, they will tell you how many times someone used the AddThis feature.

Xinureturns: lets you find out how your (campaign for example) micro/website is doing. Just type in the url and you’ll get tons of stats ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more. Good to look at how your competitors sites are doing too!

Feedburner: Allows you to see how many people are subscribing on average to your feed if you have a blog or podcast. It also allows some simple tracking to understand what people are clicking on and where visitors are coming from and going to.

Technorati: Allows you to see who’s talking about you in their blogs, or find out who is linking to your blog.

Google Blog Search: As above, but I find more comprehensive.

Blog Catalog: As above, but has additional features for sharing and rating.

Blogscope: is an analysis and visualization tool for the blog world, developed by the University of Toronto, allows you to search on keywords to find out what’s happening in the blog world (great for product searches) and when activity spiked.

Google Alert: Create alerts for your name, company, product, campaign and keep track of what’s being aid where.

TweetBeep: The Google Alerts for twitter : Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com).

Spokeo: This is a bit more personal and kind of big brother like. Spokeo monitors 41 different social media sites (and growing) and reports what your friends are doing on each), I’m not sure how to use this effectively for companies yet.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, so I’d love to hear what other tools you use to help you keep track of what’s going on in the social media space when it comes to your company, product or campaign.

UPDATE: @jowyang tweeted this article this morning with additional monitoring tools that might be of interest! Enjoy, there are a couple of really good ones I indeed did miss.

Photo Credit: Juliaf; Stock.xcng

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Four 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

Over the course of the last two posts I’ve established what should be measured and how to go about getting the data. But now you’re likely overwhelmed at the ton of numbers you’re left with.

Let’s look at your total Reach number, which is the total number of conversations, shares and site visits. For the sake of this post, we’ll use the following numbers:

Conversations: 200; Sharing: 300; Site visits 1,500;
Total Reach: 2,000

Remember, this doesn’t include any banner-ad visitors or any other measures, just the three identified groups.

Now, what did you spend on your social-media campaign? Well, let’s see. What’s the social-media campaign? What kinds of things are included?

Keep in mind this number may be a little bit higher as your total Reach number may not be a unique number since we can’t confirm if someone conversed, shared and visited the site. If you want to look at it from an overly cautious way, you can then take the 2,000 Reached and divide that by three (which gives you about 667 or something else if you believe in superstitions). Your cost per person Reached would now be $150. These are two very different numbers, but it’s a range that you can begin to use for budgeting.

You’ll need to work something out that’s right for you based on what you think people are doing or what the numbers tell you. If you have more people sharing than visitors to your website, I’m going to guess that you can safely assume people are doing at least two of the three items.

The point of the matter is that the Reach Formula should be defined campaign to campaign, and that it should evolve depending on the social nature of what is actually taking place.

Eventually, you as a company should be able to benchmark and create your own personal average, and perhaps as an industry if this were tracked. There are some hard numbers that you can put beside it, but for right now, each campaign is different.

If you can go a step further and determine the number of people who took an action that you wanted as a result of getting to the page, you would have your total conversion number. Perhaps you also had a way for people to purchase offline if they quoted a specific code that was only given out in a video… Say you have a conversion rate of 20% of those who landing on the landing page – that gives us 300 conversions and a cost of $334 for each person who converted.

Now, how does that compare to what your company pays for each new customer acquisition (i.e. what is your customer worth in the long run, and therefore what are you willing to spend to get that customer in the first place?)

And how does this compare to what you would normally pay per person to see your message? When you factor in all the associated costs and not just media?

Compare it to the numbers you just created – where does it fit in? Now you should have some pretty compelling numbers one way or the other to either suggest why you need to spend more money or time on the medium, or why you need to improve what you’re doing. Or perhaps it’s proof that your customers just aren’t quite ready for your brand to be in the space.

If the latter is the case, it’s not necessary to abandon ship right away; it just might be time to better understand how they want you to interact with them in this space.

The final post in this series will be links to many tools used in the measurement/monitoring of the space now, and will likely be heavy on the Twitter links. If you have any links you think are worth mentioning, please let me know and I’ll be happy to include them.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

Direct Costs for media (such as Facebook; not banner-ad related, but would include any costs for blogger pitches)
- Agency costs
- Creative costs (Facebook, Twitter profile, website, video, etc.)
- Cost of internal hours for coordination
- Cost of hours for Facebook, Twittering and media monitoring
- Cost of hours for report analysis
- Cost of hours for responding and interaction
- Percentage of product-sample cost (Yes, some of the offline samples should be included as you want people to go online and talk about their sample. You’ll have to gauge accordingly based on online product-sample costs for blogger pitches, but I’ve used 60% here.)

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns – Part Three 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)

You can read more detail in some of the posts that have since spawned here and here.

What’s most interesting about this is how the big guys must be shaking in their boots. Let’s not forget, Google is still free. With these enhancements – especially the advanced segmentation features (I’m drooling), suddenly Google has just entered the major leagues.

Analytics tools like Omniture and Web Trends have been charging tidy sums of money for these kinds of services for years and now they are free.

Let’s not forget that the ability to custom reports, more complex data extraction (API) and fun “dancing” bubble charts have always been the claim to fame for some of these companies. It’s been their unique and differentiating factor from Google. They could give us something Google couldn’t. And implementing these things were so complex that they required huge internal tech team coordination and support staff/client care reps whose job it was to keep you so confused that you didn’t think you could live without paying for their services.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the pay-for analytics models don’t have a place or that they aren’t any good. In fact, many of these tools still have their own unique factors and still offer much more robust services than Google does – which for the biggest of biggest clients – is definitely required.

But these companies will need to get better at explaining why it costs so much for their services and why you need them vs. the freebie.

For companies – it will become increasingly important to create vendor RFPs designed to understand and evaluate which service or company can best deliver on your analytics objectives and needs.

Looks like times are changing – and with the current economic crisis, I’m inclined to think a lot of the small-mid sized companies are going to be looking long and hard at which analytics system best fits their needs.

Google Analytics – Not Just a Toy Any More is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)

More likely than not some form of search (paid or organic) is going to be the largest source of traffic. If it’s not you have bigger problems that won’t be helped byt this post.

But what about after search? What is the biggest source of traffic? Is there one site that stands out on a regular basis? Or perhaps it’s a matter of “bookmarked” or “typed” urls (which is basically people opening up their browser and either manually typing in your website, or selecting it from their favourtites).

Whatever that source is – do you give it a second thought? What do you do with that information?

Do you look to see what people do once they land on your site from that particular source? Do they convert? Do they view specific content? What are their habits? Are there any patterns you can identify to help you either provide better content, help them convert or improve your overall marketing experience?

Say they come from website X – should you go spend all of your ad dollars on website X? Maybe. Maybe not. Why wouldn’t you spend all your ad dollars on that site? Well back to my earlier question of what do people do when they come to your site? Did visitors from site X convert? Did they do so at a higher or lower ration as compared to your site’s average conversion rate?

If you answered yes, then you definitely might want to consider checking out some sort of relationship with that site (if you don’t have one), after you investigate what it was that caused your traffic spike and sent people to your site in the first place.

Once you have that information – you can use it to better understand why people are coming to the site, what they are looking for and how you might work with that site owner/pubisher to create valuable content (which can also be in the form of ads) that will continue to not only drive traffic, but keep site X’s conversion rates at the same (or higher) levels.

If the conversion rate for visitors from site X was lower than your site’s average conversion rate – the question you have to ask is, is it worth it to go spend money and advertise on that site for more traffic that doesn’t convert? Perhaps. Again once you know why or how visitors are coming to your site from site X, you can then determine if you think there’s a way to improve that conversion rate.

If for whatever reason you decide you don’t think you can improve the conversion rate then perhaps you should look at focusing your ad dollars elsewhere – maybe there’s another site out there that is providing you less traffic, but a much higher conversion rate. Wouldn’t you rather spend your money focused on converting more of these individuals than by driving large numbers of unconverting traffic?

It’s not enough anymore to say “Wow site X drives lots of traffic, let’s advertise there.” Pathing tools available within any analytics system (even the free ones), if set up properly, can start to give you a better understanding of visitor behaviour and help you make more informed advertising decisions, which should increase your ROI and… and… and…

Photo Credit: afreeta; Stock Xchng

Why You Need to Understand Where Your Website Visitors Come From is a post from: The Direct Approach Blog owner: Rebecca Atkinson (Muller)