TweetBurner, a Multi-Tasking Marketer’s Best Friend

Monday, September 15th, 2008

I came across a fabulous new tool today called TweetBurner that does two things at once for you. It is a url shortner and a tracking system.

Given I discovered this through another site, you can read the post – which also has a short video tutorial on how to get started on The Black Tech Report. I want to talk about the benefit of TweetBurner.

The beauty of this tool is that it now adds in a measurement function to this thing called Twitter. Sure Analytics systems can tell you that people arrived on your site from Twitter, but to really be able to analyze which links in which tweets are the most popular? This is a marketer’s dream come true. It’s also the quantifiable reason that you can use to tell your boss or cient they should be on Twitter.

It can even be positioned as a test – and once you know what people are clicking on (or if they are not) you can make a decision on how to proceed with Twitter usage and/or have a better understanding of what is engaging your customers (or potential customers).

Sure the number of followers is a great metric, but besides a popularity contest, what does it really tell you? Just because I follow you, doesn’t mean I read all your updates. With Tweetburner you can easily combine the task of shortening those way-too-long-for-Twitter urls and tracking user engagement at the same time.

I can’t wait to give it a try.

DiggIt! Del.icio.us

15.09.2008 Twitter, Web analytics, social media, tracking 4 Comments

The Stories that Analytics can tell you

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

What do visitors do when they visit your website. Where do they go? Do they start an applicaton form or register for something right away? How much time do visitors spend on your website? Do they come back often?

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

DiggIt! Del.icio.us

11.09.2008 Web analytics, analysis, tracking No Comments

Should You Care About Click Through Rates Still?

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

The Click-through rate has always been considered an important metric in online advertising. It essentially tells you how many visitors came to your site from a particular online marketing effort (e.g email newsletter).

It used to be that it was a highly regarded metric and deemed one of, if not the most (debatable), important metrics you had to measure the effectiveness of your online campaigns.

But what does a click-through really mean? It means someone came to your site. Okay. So what? What then?

1. Did they leave?
2. Did they buy something?
3. Did they spend a lot of time on the site? If so, what pages were they most interested in?
4. Do you even know what they did?

It is no longer enough just to look at your click through rate to determine if your campaign is a success. You need to ensure that you tie all of your marketing efforts in with some kind of analytics tool (e.g Google Analytics is free) so you can understand “beyond the click.”

So a home page takeover ad drove hundreds of clicks – did that mean anything? Some say brand awareness. If everyone stayed and perused the site after clicking, perhaps, but if everyone immediately left – staying on the site for less than 10 seconds, is that really brand awareness? Maybe, but was that the objective of your ad/campaign?

I’m not saying the CTR is no longer important, it’s obviously an important part of the equation as it gives you an idea of the audience size you’re dealing with.

But from there, you need to ask yourself “Self, What did I want people to do once they got to my site?”

Use your analytics tools to find out if they did indeed do whatever it is you wanted them to do, and from there you can judge the true effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns.

It’s time to stop judging your online campaigns in a silo. Work with all your marketing teams and advertising companies to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and start to tell the story beyond the click through rate.

Photo Credit: stock.xchng/telly

DiggIt! Del.icio.us

09.04.2008 Web analytics, online advertising, tracking No Comments

What Web Analytics Can Tell You About Your Website

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Understanding the behaviour of visitors to your website is of utmost importance if you want to engage them and foster prospect growth. There are many analytic programs ranging from free (Google Analytics) to fairly expensive (Omniture) that you can implement, it just depends on your organization’s needs and site complexity.

If you have a pretty simple site, then using a free tool, especially to start, is a great idea to gain insight.

However, if your company has a website with multiple data streams, interactive content, or online tools (shopping carts, etc.) then something more sophisticated is required, and once implemented properly, well worth the cost.

While you might have one of these systems in place already, are you using it to your advantage? Here’s the most important thing (in my opinion) that you need to be thinking about when reviewing your web data — especially for the first time.

Top Exited Page(s)
Look at the stats to determine which page on your site is the most exited. Is it a registration or some other type of task completion page? If so, that may signify a problem with the layout of the form, or what type of information you ask. Perhaps the form is too long, or you ask too much personal information in the mandatory questions?

Perhaps it is the thank-you page after a user has completed a task. That tells you you’re likely doing something right since more often than not, people are completing the task you set aside for them.

Once you know where people are leaving your site, you can start to figure out the why and make changes. Analytics programs are able to track the changes such as page exits in certain time frames, and many programs allow you to institute an event flag (marketing campaign, website update, etc.) so you can check and compare pre- and post-stats. This is invaluable as it allows you to test and learn and see improvements that occur over both the short and long term.

DiggIt! Del.icio.us

05.02.2008 Web analytics, tracking, websites No Comments