Introduction of social network site integration with Google Analytics

Posted on December 12, 2011 by FavorStats

Social Hub Integration - Analytics

Analytics Social Data Hub

This past week Google invited social networks to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics in an effort to get better visibility and tracking within the analytics tools. Essentially this would give marketers more measurement tools in terms of engagement and social activities like sharing and liking content, brands, and companies.

By essentially calling all of the social networks to openly participate will allow more data to flow into your analytics reports to provide more transparency to your social impact.

What does this mean? Any network can integrate their streams – like +1, votes, and comments – into the Google Analytics social reports, which will be fully available next year to the many marketers, publishers, and websites that are using Google Analytics for free. Effectively extending the work that was done to integrate Google+ into the web analytics data analysis and extending this to other social networks.

Several big sites have signed on to this initiative, including: Reddit, Digg, Delicious, TypePad, among others.

To find out more developers can visit the Activity Stream Integration site.

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Twitter Reveals Web Analytics – Performance Measurement

Posted on September 18, 2011 by FavorStats

In order to measure your Twitter traffic better the company is rolling out web analytics tools to help understand your twitter traffic patterns better. Essentially the Twitter Web Analytics tool as described will allow you to accurately measure Twitter traffic being sent to your website. Presumably from any device although details have not been released.

Twitter Web Analytics

The product provides three key benefits:

  • Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
  • See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
  • Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration

We will be anxiously awaiting taking the Twitter Analytics tool for a spin, and are excited that an API is being mentioned which could fit nicely with our upcoming FavorStats web analytics trends product.

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Measuring Sessions using Google Analytics

Posted on August 12, 2011 by FavorStats

On Thursday Google made a change to how Google Analytics will calculate new visitor sessions. Here is the important change below, notice the nuance.

What’s changing?
Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when:

  • More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
  • At the end of a day.
  • When a visitor closes their browser.
If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session. In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

 

  • More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
  • At the end of a day.
  • When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id,
    utm_campaign, and gclid.
As before, if any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the user will be the start of a new session.

 

What does this mean for your web analytics trends?

 

After Aug 11, sessions will be measured will change, and previous session statistics will remain the same. The real change here is measuring a new session when a visitor’s campaign information changes.

 

Meaning that when you click on a newsletter link with a campaign link including (utm_source=newsletter) and then click on a banner ad including a campaign link (utm_source=ppc) your session will start tracking based on the source of the banner ad for the pay-per-click campaign.

 

However the side effect of this change could be that he number of visitors being reported in your web analytics tool could increase. Google is expecting to see less than 1% change based on their own research.
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Why Web Analytics is not a Waste of Time

Posted on July 25, 2011 by FavorStats

Using web analytics tools can help you to understand your marketing programs and how they impact the bottom line. Concentrate on quality instead of volume to better understand what you want to measure and ignore metrics that don’t have any meaning or context. With FavorStats you will have clarity and your Web Analytics Explained.

If you only look at the quantity of web traffic to your website you are missing the big picture. So many times when we have sat down to discuss web traffic with a client they always say how many visitors came to their website. But what is this really telling you?

If you asked a small business owner how many phone calls they received last month would they be able to tell you? What would that mean though, every call you get does not equate to a sale. Now lets change the question; if you asked whom is a profitable customer or who are you trying to target as a prospect or lead then they can usually tell you.

How to Tune Up your Web Analytics Program

At the end of the day web analytics tools are just that tools but they do require setup out of the box to track what you are actually interested in knowing. Usually most businesses will run with the default settings and look at the total traffic or the number of time spent on the site. Unless you sell a lot of banner ads on your site, total traffic may not mean much.

What should you know by looking at your web analytics tools?

The following are some examples. But the key concept is to start with your question. Think about what you need to know from all of this tracking and the endless number of reports.

  1. Existing Customers vs. New Customers vs. New Visitors
  2. Are visitors ready to buy?
  3. How do visitors find my site?
  4. Do they leave without looking at your locations or hours of operation?
  5. What are your calls to actions?
  6. Do they look at your products or services?
Tell us what you want to know from your web analytics tool of choice! Get in touch
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eMarketer – The Seven Performance Metrics that Matter Most

Posted on June 29, 2011 by FavorStats

Today eMarketer released the key metrics involved in Performance Measurement.

  1. Qualified Reach, or Qualified Visits
  2. Clickthrough rates
  3. Brand perception lift
  4. Engagement Score (ES)
  5. End Action Rate
  6. Efficiency metrics
  7. Return on investment (ROI)

You can read the descriptions for each of these important metrics for measuring performance on the eMarketer website, The Seven Performance Metrics that Matter Most.

Based on research from Chief Marketer 2011 Interactive Marketing Survey for March 2011 the most used metrics for measuring marketing performance primarily focus on clickthroughs.

Question your assumptions!

The real question is what should you be measuring, and does clickthrough detail reports provide you with enough meaning and transparency into your business to learn from it. Put another way can you action clickthroughs, traffic to your website and lead generation to be more successful. FavorStats believes so and we think you can learn from these but only if you understand where they fit in the bigger picture.

Let us know in the comments what you are using for your key performance metrics. And where Web Analytics Trends can help you better understand your business and website.

What are the metrics that we use to determine whether or not we are successful?


Responses indicate the top 5 metrics being watched currently are:

  • Click-throughs (58.7%)
  • Traffic to website (53.3%)
  • Lead generation/user opt-in (43.3%)
  • Page views (38.3%)
  • Incremental sales (34.1%)

 

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Google Notifying Webmasters To Update WordPress Blogs

Posted on June 21, 2011 by FavorStats

Google has started notifying WordPress users of outdated versions through the Webmaster Tools notification system. At first glance you might be wondering why Google would go to the trouble of reminding WordPress users to upgrade their software.

However if you look at the number of sites running WordPress powered sites and not everyone has been upgrading as new security releases have been updated. In fact WordPress is usually setup to be operated by non-technical users who go in to post new content but do not necessarily manage the installation or setup.

In the past upgrading WordPress had caused issues with the integrated plugins and certain parts of your website would break. Having said that in recent versions of WordPress > 3.0 this is less likely to happen.

Google Webmaster Tools already notifies you of changes to your account such as crawling issues or when your site has been infected by malware. Since older versions of WordPress have been vulnerable to web attacks and in a lot of cases these sites would be de-indexed by Google as being harmful. Notifications to the webmaster make sense to remind them to upgrade their WordPress software and prevent having to clean up infected sites after the fact.

As confirmed by Matt Cutts on Twitter:
“we’re kicking off a fresh run to inform webmasters with out-of-date/insecure versions of WordPress”.

We would expect Google to continue this trend of notifying webmasters of these type of issues in the future as well, perhaps when the site’s performance or speed has changed.

With that in mind we also want to make sure FavorStats sends you relevant and timely notifications to changes in your web analytics trends. The vision for FavorStats is to answer the question of what is going on with your website, and in the past you had to dig into the mountains of logs and data to try to answer those questions. We believe it should be simpler and more proactive to understand how your website is performing and helping your business.

Posted in Webmaster Tools | Tagged | 2 Comments

Count Facebook Likes Using Google Analytics

Posted on June 15, 2011 by FavorStats

If you have adopted the Facebook Like button on your website then chances are you will want to track your popularity in terms of counting the number of times you are “liked”.

Step 1: Add Facebook Like Button
For our purposes here we will assume you already have a Like button on your website. However if you need a good tutorial head on over to Add a Facebook Like Button and Box to Your Website

Step 2: Add the Google Analytics Tracking code for the Event


<script>
FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(href, widget) {
pageTracker._trackEvent('facebook','like', href);
}
);</script>

Using the Google Analytics Event tracking feature you can track the Like button click event and count the number of times your page was liked including which page url was liked. Later on you could then use these metrics to determine popular or viral content on your website or blog.

Step 3: Reporting on your Results
Now that you are counting the number of times the like button is being pressed you can now go into Google Analytics to show the  results of your efforts. Within Google Analytics  go to Content, and then Event Tracking to see the activity of your Like button. If all goes well you will be able to see the URL for the page that was liked as well.

Optionally
If you want to track the number of times someone “unlikes” you then you can change the code above to use ‘edge.remove’ instead.

A great recommendation for using a Like button is to also add the Facebook Open Graph meta tags. This will allow you to describe the page to Facebook, including a title, description, thumbnail images, etc. Remember when you click on the Like button your friends will see this on your Facebook Wall. So telling Facebook all about the page that was liked will help to control what is being displayed on the Wall.

In our case we are using WordPress as our Blog Platform so we use a plugin called Facebook Open Graph Meta in WordPress to add these to our blog posts for us.

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Do you want to know how effective your website is?

Posted on June 5, 2011 by FavorStats

Understanding your web analytics and web page effectiveness is critical to helping your business grow.

The problem with web analytics tools in general is that they focus too much on collecting too many metrics. In fact some tools are so complex that you need dedicated teams just to understand and summarize the metrics for analysis.

Not to mention that in most cases data is exported and analyzed again sometimes even in Microsoft Excel. Having said that there must be a better way to do some of the analysis without crunching the numbers yourself. Besides not everyone has the time to understand their web analytics unless they have full time staff that know how to do it.

For the reasons mentioned above FavorStats has been working on a solution to solving this analysis conundrum of trying to figure out web analytics. We believe if we get the formula right with web metrics we can further expand this to social media,

If you want to join us on our journey please sign up for our FavorStats beta list to be notified when we having something to show.

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