Valuable Google Analytics Measurements

Google Analytics is an incredible tool that helps track web metrics for websites. One of the best features is that it is free, which allows small and large companies alike to utilize the same types of measurements. This tool can be a goldmine for a company, given that the company knows what their goals are, how to use the tool, and how to analyze the data provided to make informed decisions on their site and brand activity.

For this class, I added a Google Analytics tag to my blog a few weeks ago to begin tracking visitor data and behavior. I will be honest that it was a rough start! I could not get the Google Analytics code to work with the current blog template I had applied, and after rotating between various templates over a two-day period I finally resorted to converting my blog back to the default Blogger template. Getting my tracking up and running was more important than making my blog background look cool! Once I confirmed the code was installed and tracking properly, I began sharing my blog URL with friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail with the intention of driving traffic and get data on visitors other than myself. While this blog is definitely in its infancy, I did see a flow of visitors arriving at my site and I was able to start diving into the Google Analytics tool and play around with pulling information.

The first part of the tool data that I began looking through was the Audience Overview section. This section showed me through graphs and summed up data that I had a total of 38 visits to my blog, 18 of which were unique visitors. It is important to know the difference between visits and visitors, since the GA tool measures both. Our lesson this week defines the two very well -“Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session. The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.” (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) The number of pages per visit was about 3.33, which I think is pretty good considering at the time of the analysis I only had four blog posts total on the blog! The visit duration was around 4:25 (minutes: seconds). Pages per visit and the average visit duration really show a picture that the visitors to my site found the content to be somewhat interesting in order to go through multiple pages or blog posts in a visit, and spend a few minutes reading through the content. Understanding these numbers can help me cater posts in the future to these interest levels, and gauge how the visitors are engaging with the content provided on my blog.

The next few measurements and data points I looked at through June 24, 2012, include demographic information, system information, and mobile information. The demographic information allows me to see the language of my visitors (all English), the country that my visitors are visiting from (all the United States), and even down to the city level (friends and family from the Dallas, TX area and San Francisco, CA area).  As detailed information that I can receive about who my visitors are, and where they come from, can help me better target them and others like them to drive more traffic to my blog. Under the System area, I am able to view the browsers that visitors used to access my blog (Safari 63%, Chrome 27%, and Firefox 9%), as well as the operating system (primarily iOS), and even the service provider (Verizon primarily)! The ability to be able to track down to the service provider of the internet used to browse my blog really made this tool unique to me. Something about that statistic, how specific it can get, really made me realize the potential this tool has to really provide detailed information about visitors. The mobile information provided allowed me to view the operating system, service provider and screen resolution of the mobile devices visitors used to view my blog. This information can definitely take optimizations of a blog to the next level. Since so much of social media is being consumed through mobile devices rather than web browsers, it is critical that a blog or company website be viewable and user friendly for mobile browsing. Knowing the type of devices being used to access the site, as well as the top screen resolutions could allow for prioritization of optimizing the mobile web design to these sizes and devices.

The last few analytics I took a deep look at were regarding the sources of the visits to my blog. These cold be viewed all together, or separated by direct traffic or referral traffic only. Much of my traffic was direct, meaning the friends and family members that I emailed my blog link to, or text the link to, directly entered the URL into their browser to access my blog. However, there were referrals from the Facebook link  I posted on my personal Facebook page, letting me know that some of the traffic to the blog was generated from that communication. This referral report also let me know that I received absolutely no traffic from Twitter, even though I tweeted my blog link and an invitation to view my blog to my followers and friends. This clearly is showing me that while I am pushing messages out to hundreds of people through Twitter, the communication is not working to drive the traffic necessary. So, I should either revise my communication strategy through that channel, or put more weight into other referral channels that are performing better.

What I chose to review from my Google Analytics dashboard was merely the tip of the iceberg of what this tool can really provide. If I had AdWords set up, and search campaigns going, this tool could provide an even deeper look at what these visitors find relevant and worthy of clicks to my blog. While I will not be launching a full blown campaign to promote my blog, I am excited to continue tweeting, emailing, and posting links on Facebook to continue to drive traffic to my blog and allow me to experience the different analyses available through the Google Analytics tool.

References:

Clotti, G. (n.d.). Top 5 Google Analytics reports for bloggers. DailyBlogTips. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from http://www.dailyblogtips.com/top-5-google-analytics-reports-for-bloggers/

Kaushik, A. (2010, December 6). 3 awesome, downloadable, custom web analytics reports. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved June 20, 2012, from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/

P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2012). Lesson 5: Google Analytics. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from the WVU eCampus website: https://ecampus.wvu.edu

Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising

      

            For the first time in history, online advertising is projected a higher spend than print magazines and newspaper spend in 2012. According to a study by eMarketer, online ad spend is expected to generate $39.5 billion in sales in 2012, an increase of 23.3% from 2011. (Indvik, 2012) With so many companies throwing more dollars into online advertising spend, the space is becoming cluttered and marketers are beginning to look at how to better target their online advertising to consumers that are more likely to respond to ads. So, where should you spend your advertising dollars? Spend money where your target customers are, and more than likely they are using Google and Facebook.

        Google Adwords averages a click through rate of around 2%, which is a substantial statistic compared to average online click-through rate statistics. Brands have seen the success of this platform, and are not afraid to spend millions of dollars on campaigns. For example, AT&T spend more that $8 million on AdWords in the month of June 2010 gearing up for the iPhone 4 launch, with other brands such as The University of Phoenix, Expedia, eBay and Amazon all spending over $5 million a month each. (Learmonth, 2010)

The key to Google Adwords is that the advertising is targeting to people who are already looking for a product or service similar to your company, i.e. “dog groomer in Dallas, TX” pops up a local business.  Since many people’s first inclination is to go to Google and search for things they are looking for, the chance of capturing consumers and changing their behavior is greater while they are in this active search phase of the purchase process. According to Google, 8 out of 10 internet users see AdWords each month. (GoogleBusiness, 2009) These ads require no minimum spend, and the total spend per day can be capped at anything the advertiser wants. Payment is done on a CPC basis, and advertisers bid on the key words they want their ad to show up on during a consumer search. These ads are quickly adaptable and can be changed, turned on or turned off at any time, making them ideal to advertisers. Google also hosts a detailed analytics system that allows advertisers access to their ad performance, making it much easier to analyze and make data driven decisions quicker than other advertising platforms.

While Google AdWords in certainly more popular than online advertising methods, Facebook has entered the online ad space and has unique offerings for advertisers. Facebook ad spend has experiences a 1600% growth over the past year – a number that almost seems unreal! (Eler, 2012) Facebook sets itself apart by allowing advertisers to customize the links in their ads to either outside websites (such as a company home page), or to Facebook features the advertiser owns, such as a group, page, application, or event, and can also include images. The targeting capabilities are extensive. Advertisers can target as broad as 25 countries to as specific as a local city. The ads also pull information based on profile data and IP addresses, and the advertiser can target based on marital status, interests, work or school experience, and even target only specific connections of current consumers engaged with the brand on Facebook. Similar to Google Adwords, advertisers bid based on the targeting parameters set forth, but can bid based on a CPC or CPM basis. The biggest difference between Facebook and Google Adwords is that Facebook will be served as regular display ads within the social platform, and consumers are not actively seeking the information server as they would be using Google. This explains why Facebook ads have a click through rate much lower than Google, at only 0.051%. (Lewis, 2011)

References:

Eler, A. (2012, February 1). Report: Facebook ad spending grew

1600% in 2011. Read Write Web. Retrieved June 7, 2012, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_facebook_ad_spending_grows_1600.php

Facebooktutorial. (2010, April 5). Facebook tutorials – How to

advertise on Facebook. Retrieved June 8, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jOBDIql4yc

GoogleBusiness. (2009, June 15). Getting started with Google

AdWords. Retrieved June 8, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2L6EGa9DY

Indvik, L. (2012, January 19). Online ad spending to surpass print for

first time in 2012 [study]. Mashable. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/online-advertising-surpasses-print-2012/

Learmonth, M. (2010, September 6). What big brands are spending on

Google. Ad Age. Retrieved June 7, 2012, from http://adage.com/article/digital/big-brands-spending-google/145720/

Lewis, M. (2011, December 28). Google AdWords vs. Facebook

advertising. Netwirds. Retrieved June 8, 2012, from http://www.netwirks.com/google-adwords-vs-facebook-advertising/#.T9avho5gNFI

Social Media - Content vs. Conversation

The average person is exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, or advertisements every day. As a culture, we have become familiar with being exposed to the immense quantity of advertisements. The space has become increasingly cluttered, with consumers not consciously hearing brand messaging. In order to stand out from the crowd, advertisers have to go above and beyond with messaging and tactics to reach consumers and get them to notice the advertisements.  

The online space, and especially the social media space, has transformed how brands can reach consumers. Over the past few years, many people have chanted the mantra that “content is king” within the online space. But, is that really the case? The other side of the argument adamantly chants that content isn’t king, but conversation is. Cory Doctrow of BoingBoing states, “Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you would choose your friends…. If you chose your movies, we would call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” (Lacy, 2010) So, what is the right answer? My thoughts are that both content and conversation are equally important and work in tandem in order to achieve the social media goals set forth by the brand.             

In my personal life, I interact with some of my favorite brands on social media on a daily basis. It is very important to me that I be a person first, and customer second. Norwegian Cruise Line, one of my favorite brands, is a brand that I feel strikes the balance between conversation and content very well in the social space. A dedicated team works to figure out what to “say” on the Facebook page, which can be anything from photos, videos, text, polls, and more. These things would fall into the “content” category.  All of these things are being pushed out and controlled by the organization, not by consumers. In essence, this is the advertising part of social media – brands can say whatever they want to their audience and have complete control over the what, when, and where.

However, what comes out of this content is hopefully engaging conversation. The content presented should be engaging enough to spark conversation, whether that is comments on the post or having consumers use hashtags or mentions of the brand in their posts to friends and followers. This is where the earned media comes in. These conversations are sometimes scary for brands to swallow since they are in essence losing some control, but they are ultimately more substantial in building longer-term relationships.

With such immense advertising clutter, consumers are increasingly relying on their peers for recommendations. This is why Facebook ads now show which friends of a user have liked the brand or voted on the poll. It is also why, when going to a brand’s Facebook page, a user can see which of their friends have liked the page and filter the page content to show only engagement with the brand by their friends. The conversation has become key for consumer influence and brand loyalty, but without engaging content these conversations would have little to no substance. This is why content and conversation are equally as important in achieving social media goals.

References:

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing.

MultichannelMerchant.com. Retrieved June 6, 2012 from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

Lacy, K. (2010, May 27). Conversation or content. Who rules the Internet? Personal

Branding Blog. Retrieved June 7, 2012, from http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/conversation-or-content-who-rules-the-internet/

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king.

SocialMediaToday.com. Retrieved June 6, 2012 from http://socialmediatoday.com/wordspring/152636/why-conversation-not-content-king