Using Video to Tell a Story
Here’s our attempt to illustrate and promote Who’s Here Now, a mobile app for conferences and events.
(Shot on an SLR and edited in iMovie)
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A quick example of using analytics and geocoding to assess how your online efforts are doing by city.
With Omniture (SiteCatalyst) and just about any other web analytics tool, you can look at how much traffic your site or page is getting by city:
This chart identifies the top 5 cities for site traffic but it doesn’t show us the number of leads/customers for each city. For this, try using:
1) A data set of your customers or leads with an address, city, and state
2) A geocoding tool that will convert your addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates so you can place them on a map (Here’s a free one that lets you plot up to 500 rows: http://www.batchgeocode.com/)
Now you can get a visual representation of where your leads and/or customers are:
You can save data over time and import into Google Earth to see how each “cluster” grows for the cities you care about. Alternatively, you can look at the data in a table for conversion rate by city but an image is a better attention grabber.
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Definition from Wikipedia: Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics, data mining and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.
The basic premise of predictive analytics for marketers is to identify variables or behavior that can help predict a desired outcome and use these variables in a meaningful way. Let’s look at an oversimplified example:
Say you hypothesize that the following factors or events are important to your visitors (your X variables):
1) An animated Flash commercial
2) A white paper with product specifications
3) Viewing at least 3 pages on your site
Now let’s say there are two goals you want your visitor to accomplish (your Y variables):
1) Buy your product
2) Chat with a support rep
Now that you have your X and Y variables you want to see how effective these 3 events are in soliciting one of the 2 actions. With a good analytics tool and some knowledge of event triggers you can gather data to help find those answers.
Let’s assume you were successful and discovered the following insights:
1) Of the people who bought your product, 85% viewed a Flash commercial
2) Of the people who chatted with a support rep, 80% viewed the white paper AND viewed at least 3 pages on the site
It’s probably obvious what you can do from here armed with this knowledge. For example, you might (1) serve the Flash commercial on the homepage instead of burying it in your site navigation or (2) dynamically serve the white paper in the column of the 3rd page if a visitor reaches any 3rd page on your site within a single session. A more sophisticated approach is to score a person based on what events have been triggered. Joe Smith might arrive on your site (with 0 points), view the Flash commercial (+10 points), view the white paper (+5 points), then start chatting with a support rep. In a perfect world, the support rep now knows where Joe has been and YOU know the likelihood that Joe will become a customer (let’s say 30%) to qualify him as a warm lead.
In some cases, you might have dozens or even hundreds of X and Y variables but your approach is always the same. Determine what events (single or multiple) increase the likelihood that your visitor performs a desired action. Finally, keep in mind that the insights that come out of a model are only for a snapshot of time and need to be looked at on an ongoing basis (this can be costly especially if you don’t have an in-house expert). Finally, site optimization should be handled with both quantitative and qualitative information so accept the numerical insights as a general guideline rather than cold hard fact.
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Google Trends offers some macro-level information on what searches are popular and how key terms and phrases have trended over time.
For instance, typing in “webex” outputs a fairly flat graph with some sharp peaks and dips, the most notable at point C when Cisco announced its acquistion of the company.
What’s important to note, is that the graph captures (on average) how a search for a particular term performed relative to all possible searches. So in this example, the total number of searches for “webex” may have increased over this time (it did in fact) but so did the total number of all other possible searches. A more detailed explanation is offered here.
Google Insights takes it one step further to give you a micro-level view of how a search term is doing relative to a specific category. So, we’ll use the same example but this time we’ll see how the term “webex” performed relative to the “Internet” category. Now we see sharper peaks and dips and an overall increasing trend.
Google Insights can be useful to determine the success (or failure) of your marketing efforts relative to your industry. Other filters you can apply for a search term are seasonality (to predict demand), geographic distribution (to know where your customers are), and properties (to compare how you’re doing against other terms or competitors).
Using Google Trends and Google Insights gives you some general info, but you may find that it can complement your own internal tools by providing a pulse on what the search market is doing.
Anyone else using Google tools to monitor their business? I’d love to hear about it.
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First, some [estimated] stats of the heavyweights in the social media space:
- Facebook has some 200 million active users
- YouTube receives over 100 million unique visitors per month
- Yelp receives over 20 million unique visitors per month
- Twitter has over 40 million registered users
Smart companies are now incorporating social media efforts into their overall online strategy, but most our finding it difficult to define tangible goals and outcomes for their efforts. Here are some common questions that come up:
1) Why should my company get involved in social media?
If the numbers don’t sell themselves, think of it this way – if a large % of your customers are talking about you whether it’s positive or negative, don’t you want to be part of the conversation? Consumers are smart and they will want to validate any product or service with unbiased reviews and feedback. Think of your role as policing the user generated content and doing damage control whenever and wherever possible. It is also a relatively inexpensive effort.
2) What media/sites do we target?
This one is a little easier since it depends on who your audience is and what kind of media they prefer to consume. Anyone can create a Facebook fan page or upload a video presentation on YouTube but your decision should be intuitively based on the interest of your customer.
3) How do we monetize on our efforts?
This is probably the most difficult question to answer. One thing to keep in mind is the profitability of the social media companies mentioned above is still unproven. All required significant start up and operating costs with YouTube more than likely topping the list (due to much higher bandwidth demands). Of course, this doesn’t mean you should dismiss any opportunity to measure success however, keep in mind that the big guys don’t have it all figured out and the approach you take may be a little unconventional.
Direct vs. Indirect ROI
Direct ROI - Ads, lead forms, or any other call to action that you can translate to a desired behavior is the easiest way to show you got something out of your investment.
Indirect ROI – This is the intangible world of how you influence user sentiment and behavior. Here are some tangible ways on how to measure this:
1) % of traffic to your site that comes from blogs and social media sites
2) # of people blogging about you: http://blogsearch.google.com/ (Google Blog Search)
3) # of Facebook Fans (if you have a page)
4) # of people and # of ‘tweets’ about you: http://search.twitter.com/ (Twitter Search)
5) # of Twitter followers (if you have one)
6) Customer satisfaction surveys (monitor if/how social media has a positively influence)
Summary: The impact social media has on the online world will only continue to grow. It’s constantly evolving so let your strategy evolve with it.
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