In high school you may have had to choose between studying statistics over being social with friends. Some think this still applies when it comes to social media. Here are a few simple ways you can measure the effectiveness of your company’s social efforts.

1. Set Goals

To measure whether something is effective or not, you need to figure out what you’re measuring against. First, determine what a valuable action on your site would be. Making a purchase, requesting a quote, or downloading a whitepaper are common conversions (measurable desired actions).

After you figure out what you want to measure, follow the next steps to determine how social media plays a part in driving conversions for your business.

2. Social Tracking

If you’re like many companies, you use Google Analytics to track traffic coming to your site. Using Social Interaction Analytics you can measure social interaction with non-Google networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

This Analytics report will show you if someone came to your site, looked at your Facebook page to get more information, then came back to make a purchase. You may notice people with a social interaction spend more time on your site or are more likely to make a purchase.

3. Multi-channel Funnels

Your company doesn’t just advertise on one channel. You have mobile ads, email campaigns, pay-per-click ads, links on referral sites, and social media pages. The Multi-channel Funnel report in Google Analytics will let you know what are the most popular “paths” people take to convert on your site.

Maybe your email campaign is driving traffic to Facebook. People then search for your company, come to your site, and convert. This report will help you determine the return on not only social, but other online channels.

4. Link Tagging

If 500 people view this blog post and then go to our contact page I can determine that from Analytics. But if 500 people come from a single Twitter post, it can be harder to measure. Google provides a great free tool called the URL Builder. This tool allows you to “tag” your links with information that will be recognized by Analytics.

Use this URL, for example:

purevisibility.com/contact?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=SocialExplained

The bold words will send extra information to Analytics for tracking. I will easily be able to see this traffic was a “referral” from the “SocialExplained” post on our “blog.” If you tag links from Twitter mentioning your fall clearance sale you can easily see how that traffic acts once reaching your site.

5. Good Ol’ Traffic Sources

Finally, look at how social traffic interacts with your site. Segment Facebook or LinkedIn traffic and see if anything stands out. Don’t just look at how many Tweets you sent out or how many commented on your company’s Valentine’s Day greeting.

Look at how social traffic acts differently compared to PPC or organic. Does social increase your conversion rate? Do they spend more? Now you can tell your marketing director that in 2011 LinkedIn traffic downloaded 20% more whitepapers than organic traffic did!

Social? Measured. Boom.

On February 23rd, 2012, Pure Visibility’s own Michael Beasley will be speaking on Michigan State University’s campus, at 6:00 p.m. The presentation will cover how to cut through the complexity of all the possible things you can measure with web analytics, to find the things that are really important and useful to measure, from a business and a user experience perspective.

This talk, which is the first Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association meeting of the year, brings together the areas of user experience and web metrics in much the same way Pure Visibility brings together these two fields within the work of our own Measurement Team.

For more information or to register, please visit the Michigan UPA website.

Approaching web analytics as a new user can be daunting because of the complexity of the tools. There’s no one right way to do it, but a good way is to have problems to solve or a question that needs to be answered.

Integrating analytics into our user experience practice started with the need to get clear answers to specific questions. We had questions like “How many users will we alienate if we optimize this site for a 1024 by 768 screen resolution?” which is the less open-ended version of “What screen resolution should we use to optimize our site?” (The answer, it turns out, is “all of them”).

There’s a clear answer in the Google Analytics’ Visitors > Technology > Browser & OS report. Or, at least, as clear as anything gets when you deal with anything as messy as user behavior.

Another good initial analytics/UX question is “How many of our site visitors are using a mobile device?” This is a better way of asking “Should we invest in a mobile site right now?” (The answer is “yes” and you may want to focus on designing the mobile version first, before the desktop version). Google Analytics makes this easy, through the Visitors > Mobile > Overview report.

Neither of these questions lead to terribly deep insights, but that’s the point of your first few forays into web analytics. Take a little time to get accustomed to the interface of your analytics tool and to ask the sorts of questions that analytics can actually answer. That’s why it’s good to start small and get some early wins. Have fun!

Just last week, in addition to Google Analytics Premium, Google also launched their new beta of Google Analytics Real Time to a limited audience and will expand that audience over the next few weeks. This is a real-time analytics tool that shows what is happening on any site that is already using Google Analytics for tracking, without any additional setup required. Add one point in the “plus” column.

When… and Where… is Real Time?

For those of you who haven’t checked out Real Time yet, head into your Google Analytics account and click on your Dashboards tab (in the main orange nav bar). Real-Time (beta) will be the first item in your left nav now, with further options of aggregation once you open the Real-Time menu item. This is kind of hidden for to more novice users.

What Happens in Real Time?

Your first impression will be the spinning dial, labeled “Right now,” as it winds up. Once running, this number constantly changes along with your Pageviews charts to the right.

It may not be clear to you immediately without a bit of actual testing, but this is very fast. Demos and tests I have seen show 1-2 seconds of response time. Apply this across the segments available in the nav and, on the surface, this seems to be a powerful tool.

So, the real question is, how will you be using Real Time? Google demonstrates its usefulness in social media, but what other uses are there? Go live or site launches? What about smaller sites where a user may be the only user on the site at a time? That’s almost like real-time, real-user, anonymous, and remote usability testing all in one…

How valuable is real-time data? Is there something more useful here beyond its pure immediacy? Let us know what you think.

Have you heard the big news yet from Google? Today Google publicly announced Google Analytics Premium! For the official announcement, check out Google’s blog.

What is Google Analytics Premium?

Google Analytics Premium is the paid version of Google’s popular free analytics program – Google Analytics Standard Edition. The product is Google’s answer to Enterprise level analytics and according to Google is being used by some of the world’s best known organizations. We can help answer a lot of initial questions, being that we’re a Google Analytics Certified Partner. See Google’s snazzy marketing video below for an overview and introduction to the new product.

Is Google Analytics Premium Available Everywhere?

Although they are hoping to expand quickly into other regions, right now Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee (billed monthly) in the United States, Canada, and the UK.

Why Pay, When You Can Get It For Free?

Google Analytics Standard Edition will continue to be supported and there are many exciting updates arriving in the near future. That said, Google Analytics Premium will be offering a level of service that is needed only by companies that feel limited within Google Analytics Standard Edition. Below is a summary of the additional features available with Google Analytics Premium.

Processing Power

• Lifted hit limits – 1 billion hits per month
• Download unsampled reports – export high data volumes and analyze all your data

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Attribution modeling – perform attribution modeling on your campaigns to understand full value of all the channels in your media mix
• More custom variables – 50 custom variables!

Dedicated Support

• Custom training and support – you get your own account manager along with technical and business training
• Real live technical support around the clock – 24/7 customer support!

Summary

While Premium may not be for everyone, here at Pure Visibility we are extremely excited about it! We believe this service can really benefit our clientele and are looking forward to digging into it and taking full advantage of the new features. For more information, visit Google Analytics Premium or contact Pure Visibility!

To all of those marketing directors looking for a way to measure social media – Google just gave you a gift this week. You can now track the behavior of your visitors that originate from one or more of the many social media channels all thanks to the new Google+1 reporting. For example, following the navigation patterns of people who originate from Facebook could uncover the fact that they are more engaged with your site and are actually looking for specific information – perhaps information that you may need to add more of but never thought relevant before. This offers an opportunity to engage more visitors, giving them what they want and potentially lead to more sales (which of course you can measure in Google Analytics). Understanding the origination of the visitors could impact how and where you place your budget in 2012.

Oh and of course, I am particularly excited about this because it takes some of the mystery out of social media traffic.

Have your marketing analyst read all about the technical details on Search Engine Land:

Official: Google Analytics Gets Social Engagement Reporting.

Enjoy the 4th of July!!

If you are a Fortune 1000 company, chances are you actively use attribution management to justify spend in the many marketing channels that are being used to drive leads or sales through your site. (And if you are not, its time to jump on this or you will be left behind.)

What is attribution management? It’s the science of measuring and analyzing the marketing touch points that your target market produces before they turn into a true conversion. With this information intelligent decisions can be made by analysts on which specific channels, within your marketing strategy provides the best return on investment. For example, an email campaign then a newsletter and a specific paid search ad (in that order) may be the best plan for increasing leads for your specific product. You can prove it…your analytics says so!

Now Google Analytics v5 (still in beta) will be giving us more ways to slice your data and understand how your conversions come to be. Search Engine Land provides a great review of the main highlights of Cross-Media Funnels and the reports available. I am particularly excited about this because it offers a chance for marketing analysts to use Google Analytics to answer more questions around which channels are assisting to help make a conversion reality. In the video below Google does a nice job describing it like it is a basketball game with team members assisting each other to score. Go team!

Understanding how many marketing channels assist in your conversions will help you analyze conversion behavior. And at the end of the day if you can repeat what is working faster than your competition…guess who wins the game.

Hello from the Pure Visibility newbie! After three full weeks on the job, I thought I’d venture out into blog land to introduce myself, and talk about TextWrangler, a tool that’s been a huge help as I learn more about testing regular expressions (or RegEx) in Google Analytics. Regular expressions are character patterns used to match text.

After some hands on experience using RegEx in Analytics, I could understand their usefulness, and wanted to make sure I was applying the expressions correctly. It can be tricky to test, because you may THINK you’ve correctly applied the result in GA if you’re seeing any results returned, but even if you see results, it’s possible that you’re not seeing the entire picture. Luckily, there is a great tool called TextWrangler, that makes it easy to test regular expressions, so you make sure you’re using the right expressions when searching in Analytics reports. TextWrangler is a free text editor available on Macs. TinyEdit has the same functionality needed for testing RegEx, and is available for Windows Users.

In my position as an analyst, I will mostly use RegEx in Google Analytics, to view groups of data based on sets of rules that I determine.  For example:

Many people arrive at the Pure Visibility site after looking for information about QR codes.  However, there are many variations of these terms: qr code, q r code, qr codes, qr-code, and so on.  To really understand how many people arrive at the site after searching on these terms, I need to use regular expressions in my Analytics reports.  But first, I want to make to make sure that I’m using the right regular expressions to bring up the appropriate results! So, I’ll test in TextWrangler using the following steps:

1. First, enter several variations of the terms you want to have returned, as well as some terms you do NOT want to be returned.
2. Next, hit Command/Apple + F to begin the process of returning results using RegEx.
3. Make sure your cursor is at the top of the screen, as you will only see results for terms below your cursor (this has happened to me more than once!).
4. Make sure you’ve selected ‘Grep’ under the matching option.  Select any other fields appropriate to your search.
5. Use the appropriate regular expression/s in the ‘Find’ box.  In this case, I want to find any terms containing the letters Q and R in the same search term, so I’ll use parenthesis to group, and the pipe, to include an ‘or’ statement.  Using (qr|q r) means that I’ll find terms where Q and R appear directly next to each other OR with a space in between.
6. Hit ‘Next’ or ‘Find All’ to see which results are returned.  Assuming you used the proper expression, you’re all set to plug into Analytics! If you didn’t get the results you expected, make sure your cursor was set to the top of the page, and review the article from the Google Analytics Help Center if needed.

Now, you’re ready for the real thing.  After logging into your Google Analytics account, select the appropriate report, and apply the RegEx in the search field.

Have fun and happy RegExing!

Big news from Google Webmaster Tools!   This month, Google unveiled richer data about the search queries your site is visible for in the Top Search Queries section of Google Webmaster Tools.   You can now view the number of impressions, number of clicks and clickthrough rate associated with the search queries your site is visible for.   And better yet, you can review that data position-by-position, and for each page of your site that was visible for a given query.

Webmaster Tools Screenshot

Managing our clients’ pay-per-click accounts, we’re used to monitoring metrics like “impressions”, “clicks” and “clickthrough rate”.   But as an internet marketing company that also specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), we have frequently longed for similar performance data for the organic search aspect of our clients’ online visibility.

Until now, we’ve only been able to track the success of our SEO efforts in terms of website visits or point-in-time rankings. Now, for the first time, Google Webmaster Tools gives us the chance to look at the visibility of a website one step prior to a visitor arriving.

Another Webmaster Tools Screenshot

This sort of data allows us to answer all kinds of questions, like “How much of a difference does position make on clickthrough rate?”, and “Which of the pages on my site do a better job of inviting a searcher to clickthrough?”, “Do I have pages competing for visibility on the same keywords?”, and so on.

Of course, Google Webmaster Tools only offers a look into your site’s performance on Google’s search engine – but given that Google still commands over 65% of all US search traffic, it’s still very useful and relevant information!

The online interface offered by Google Analytics offers a wealth of easily-accessible, business-oriented data and reporting about the usage of your website. But it has it’s limitations. Recently, when attempting to segment branded and non-branded keyword traffic for one of our larger clients (which, by the way, is a good idea for anyone who wants to understand whether their SEO efforts are gaining traction), we ran into one such limitation.   Here’s the scenario: in order to capture all of the possible brand-related terms associated with our client, we created regular expressions matching variations of each (20 in all), and plugged them into two Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (one segment to exclude those terms, and one to match only those terms).   After quite a bit of work (identifying the branded terms, writing the RegExes, creating the Advanced Segments, etc.), we clicked the Advanced Segments “on” with eager anticipation.   And voila! Here’s the spiffy chart that appeared:

Hooray! Just what we wanted – visitor trends by branded and non-branded keyword traffic!   But wait, what about that little yellow box of fine print? It reads: “This report is based on sampled data. Learn more.”   So what exactly does that mean to us?   Check out the data table that Analytics presented us with:

The numbers for branded and non-branded traffic *should* add-up to 100% of the visits… but they don’t.   See those little yellow boxes next to the segmented data? Those depict the margin of error that Google’s data sampling resulted in. Basically, the statement “This report is based on sampled data” means that the numbers aren’t as precise as we might like them to be. In fact, the margin of error on some of our results was over 70%!   Kind of a big deal…

After a little experimentation, it became clear that neither the size, nor the complexity, of my Advanced Segments were triggering the use of sampling.   Instead, it turns out that the number of visits contained in the selected date range was the determining factor – specifically those instances where the total visits exceeded 500,000.   In order to return reports for large data sets quickly, Google employs sampling whenever it generates a report through the online interface that isn’t automatically compiled.

The take home message?   If you’ve got large volumes of Analytics data that you want to slice-and-dice, you might be better served to pull the raw data from Google using the Analytics API and perform the calculations on your own!