The previous article briefly illustrates how a measurable digital campaign can keep the financial department satisfied that advertising budgets are being spent wisely (and improve marketing’s reputation!).

However, one of the most important takeaways from the the NCI Digital Marketing course to date, is that just because you can measure something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s useful information.

In order to make the most of digital measurement the following three principles apply:

1. Have Clear Goals

A huge amount of information can be generated from website and social media analytics. Measurement without a clearly defined goal will become quickly mired in all of this detail. You should know why you are measuring, as well as what.

2. Use Benchmarks

Analytics should be compared to statistics for a previous time period, or failing that, to those of a competitor, in order to see the changes in activity and customer behaviour. Benchmarks allow you to measure success.

3. Measure Like with Like

Compare website traffic, Facebook Likes, newsletter signups or any other metric, within the same categories and across the same exact timeframe in order to get an accurate representation of the changes in the campaign.

In short, a valuable digital campaign is one which has a clear purpose or goal, which can be easily measured against previous efforts and can therefore illustrate both its weakest and strongest aspects. This kind of targeted measurement allows digital campaigns to be tweaked for relevance and a better rate of return.

Further Reading: Paine, K. D 2011, Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships, Wiley

This was often due to the difficulty of accurately measuring how much a particular advertisement has influenced a customer’s decision to purchase, or what kind of changes would be necessary to change customer behaviour.

One of the most useful aspects of digital marketing, compared to this kind of traditional offline marketing, is that it is measurable.

Imagine that a new restaurant has opened in your town.

In a non-digital world, you find out about this restaurant in a review column in a Sunday newspaper, you hear an advertisement on the radio or a friend tells you about their experience there when you meet for coffee.

The interaction is passive, and until you actually visit the restaurant or phone them to make a booking, they have no indication of your levels of interest, or even awareness. Any marketing or PR efforts undertaken by the restaurant in this scenario have to be lumped together as part of a general campaign and tenuously linked to any increase in footfall into the restaurant.

In a digital world, you might come across the restaurant in very different circumstances.

Say for instance, you are searching in an online restaurant guide for a new place to try and come across this same restaurant. The guide has given them a good review so you click on the link to have a look at their website. The sample menu on the website seems to suit your taste so you use their form to make a booking online, signing up for their monthly newsletter as you do so.

In this context, the customer is actively searching for the service being advertised and the restaurant can track and measure their interest and engagement at every point of the online journey:

• The click-through rate from their profile on the review site.
• Your journey through their website; which pages you visit and how long you spend there.
• The number of bookings that come through the website.
• The number of newsletter signups and from that, customer information which can be used for more targetted special offers and updates.

Digital measurement allows marketing campaigns to be responsive to customer feedback, to change quickly when a campaign is not being received as expected and gives the marketing department hard figures to justify every cent that is spent.

TL;DR Measurement = Proof, not Spoof!

Marketers have a reputation for being full of rubbish

A disproportionate amount of these tools are from Google, so let’s hope they’re not evil.

I will probably add to this post as I find other interesting links and software.

If you have any suggestions of useful sites to add, please comment and I’ll add them to the list.

All of these tools and sources are free to some degree, unless otherwise stated.

Marketing Research

iReach Insights – marketing research company

amas – internet strategy and market research agency

Adwords Keyword Tool – free keyword research tool from Google Adwords

Planning

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) – guidelines and standards for creating online advertising campaigns

Adplanner – ad planning tool from Google

Social Media Overview

Tools which give you a broad overview or ‘dashboard’ of several social media channels at a glance:

Hootsuite – manage multiple profiles and keep track of when your brand is mentioned

Tweetdeck – just for twitter

Social insights from Google analytics – view social interaction in the context of your website

thinkUp – an open source tool for analysing your social media presence

Schedule posts and content

Write posts and updates in advance and schedule them for release at required intervals:

BufferApp – write posts in advance and schedule them to be published at chosen times

Facebook Scheduling – schedule Facebook updates

WordPress schedule posts – learn how to schedule a post for later publication

Sentiment Analysis

Analyse the overall sentiment or emotions behind posts made about your brand:

Sentiment140 – Twitter sentiment tool

Website performance and statistics

Track your website’s ranking and how it is performing technically:

Alexa – website ranking tool

Google Analytics – powerful, free tool for website traffic and usage statistics

Stat My Web – website ranking, monetary value and other details

Trackalyse – subscription service which allows you to analyse Facebook Page engagement and benchmark your performance against competitors.

Monitor brand mentions

View when your brand is mentioned online:

Social Mention – real time social media activity and brand mentions

Google Alerts – email alerts set for keywords or phrases

Google Blog Search – find out if people mention you in blogs

Offline tools

One of the most useful tools in measuring and planning your online presence is spreadsheet software. Use Libre Office, free and open source office productivity suite, to create the following spreadsheets:

• List the URLs, usernames, social media platform and what that platform is used for so that you can keep your message focused and appropriate for each online channel you use.
• Use a template like this one to plan your posts and content across social media and your website.

Places to find more information:

Mashable: http://mashable.com/social-media/

Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

20 free social media monitoring tools: http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/09/20-free-social-media-monitoring-tools.html

These methods include misrepresentation of their audience or fans and obtaining information using unethical or even illegal means.

The right way to go about improving your online presence is to create content that is valuable and useful for your fans, to engage with them in a constructive and proactive way and to be completely open and transparent about the way that you gather and use information.

The following tactics represent the wrong way to go about it:

Lying with statistics

Infographics are one of the worst offenders for providing half-baked ideas or misleading information and statistics as fact.

Aside from taking advantage of the laziness of online readers, the presentation of statistics and “facts” in general can be problematic, unless the reader is willing to check sources and ensure that the information being provided is reliable.

An unscrupulous digital marketing agency could intentionally misreport or misinterpret Google Analytics reports to a client in order to exaggerate the success of a campaign for which they had been hired.

Likewise, one of measures for a brand’s success in social media is the number of followers or “Likes” your profile has. Artificially inflating this number is a way of making your brand seem more popular and engaged than it really is. This can be done by:

• Paying people for Facebook Likes, blog comments or follows on Twitter.
• Creating fake accounts which interact with and share your posts, a tactic that Orangina were accused of employing.

This is probably done in order to improve Edgerank in Facebook, the algorithm employed by Facebook to determine what importance to give your posts in a fan’s newsfeed.

Black Hat Social Media

The term Black Hat as applied to social media, generally means the practise of violating a platform’s terms and conditions, as well as the unspoken rules of decency online, in order to more easily and cost-effectively spread your message or reach fans online.

Black Hat tactics which can impact the success of more morally grounded digital media campaigns include:

• Using a personal profile instead of a business page
• Running a Facebook competition directly on a page instead of through an app

Caution should also be employed when signing up to third party applications in order to monitor and track your online presence. It’s worth asking the question:

When you are allowing these apps access to your social media accounts, just how much information are you giving them?

Invasive Tracking Techniques

One of the most difficult balances to achieve when measuring interaction online is to ensure that any tracking techniques used give useful results, but do not infringe on a user’s privacy.

Regular tracking techniques include the use of cookies – small text files placed on a user’s computer, allowing a website to serve them relevant content and to remember their preferences from previous visits. Cookies can also be used to track a user’s surfing habits in order to serve targetted ads. The use of cookies by European websites is now governed by EU Law.

One of the most nefarious uses of tracking technology, of which relatively few users know about, is that of Flash cookies. These are cookies, or “Local Shared Objects” which are created by Adobe’s Flash plugin. They store more information than traditional cookies, can’t be deleted in browser preferences and are used to re-create (“re-spawn”) cookies the user may have already deleted, keeping the original unique ID intact.

Learn more

Bleachbit is an open source tool for Linux and Windows users which can kill Flash cookies.

If you want to learn more about Black Hat tactics and become morally reprehensible, this is a good resource: http://www.blackhatworld.com/

A combination of different channels must be employed online to reach your customers effectively, with blog posts, tweets, status updates and comments all feeding back in to the marketing plan.

Digital marketing relies heavily on analysis of past efforts on these websites and social media sites in order to predict the success of future campaigns and to gain insight into your customers.

But how do you keep track of it all?

There are two main aspects to monitoring your online presence:

1. Analyse what your posts say about your brand
2. Track what others are saying about you

Analyse What You’re Saying

One of the most difficult aspects of having a presence on a large number of different social networking websites is keeping tabs on all your own information.

In an ideal world, you would plan every post, Tweet and status update in advance and would keep a complete historical record and a backup of your interactions. Having a record of these interactions allows you to see what kind of content is most popular with your audience, to avoid repeating yourself and to better plan for future campaigns.

Some backup and analysis tools include:

• ThinkUp – a tool which allows you to both backup and view statistics about social media accounts
• Google Analytics Social Reports – view reports on what social content is engaging your users most

Keep Track of What Others are Saying About You

Some of the most horrific social media explosions happened because the company or brand involved did not respond to the criticism or address issues quickly enough.

Keeping an eye on your online reputation can make or break you. Some reputation management tools include:

• Google Alert – you receive an notification when a chosen keyword or phrase is mentioned online.
• Hootsuite – manage multiple profiles and keep track of when your brand is mentioned.

One Tool for Everything?

In an ideal world there would be a tool which does all of the following:

• Keeps a secure backup of every single post or interaction you make, across all online channels
• Allows these posts to be restored intact in case of emergency
• Allows you to view statistics about the types of content and interaction on your account
• Tells you when your brand is mentioned online
• Gives you an overview of the sentiment expressed about your brand
• Plan campaigns across different channels
• Schedule posts in advance and roll them out across different social media accounts
• Is completely secure and does not misuse this sensitive brand information in any way
• Is free and open source

Is there such a thing?

Website usage statistics can be retrieved using a variety of methods and similarly, it can be interpreted and analysed using several different models.

One of the reasons that analytics programmes such as open Web Analytics and Google Analytics have become so popular is that they give web developers (or digital marketers, system administrators, financial planners etc) a way to easily understand and interpret the information collected about visitors to the site.

These programmes provide user friendly, visual information about the traffic to their sites, allowing data to be broken down and visualised in different ways. These often inlcude:

• A dashboard with an overview of relevant statistics
• Breakdown of users’ geographical locations on a map
• Graphs and charts of interaction over time, allowing analysts to identify trends in usage.
• “Heat maps” showing the locations on webpages that users click

Viewing Server Logs

The most readily available tool for web developers when measuring traffic to a website are the server logs. Server logs are a collection of statistics created by the web server and generally contain information about the requests made to the server including:

• IP address
• user agent string
• referring site
• request date/time
• pages requested

Unlike some analytics programmes which have come under criticism, viewing the website information via these logs requires absolutely no compromise of sensitive website or business data.

Unfortunately, although server logs contain a lot of useful data, their native format makes it difficult to visualise this information.

There are several open source tools which allow website owners to more easily interpret these logs. One such tool is Logstalgia, a “website log visualisation tool” which allows you to view activity on your server logs in a graphical format and in real time!

Both Webalizer and AW Stats are also useful in interpreting server logs, providing information based on server logs but presented in a format similar to the other analytical tools above.

It is particularly important to be responsive to usability problems online, where users can easily abandon your site or social media channel if it is not performing well.

Easy access to website traffic and other statistics makes both the web design and marketing processes organic and iterative.

Designs and campaigns can quickly evolve, depending on how effective they are for their end users.

But how is this usage information collected?

Methods of Data Collection

Some of the following methods are used by analytics software in order to determine website traffic and usage:

• IP address
• Cookies
• Page Tags
• User Agent String

IP Address

One of the most common clues for discovering more information about the physical location and habits of your website visitors is by recording their IP address.

Issues: IP addresses do not reflect each machine that accesses the site, but rather the public IP address of the network used by each machine. Therefore, you could have several connections from the same IP address that are only registered by your analytics software as one unique visitor.

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of data stored on a user’s computer by a website. Cookies can be used to assign a unique ID to each user who visits a site, in order to tailor the information presented to that user, or to record their actions.

Issues: Cookies can be denied or deleted by users and according to EU Law and privacy concerns, their use is now subject to gaining the website user’s informed consent.

Page Tags

Also known as tracking bugs, page tags are often implemented as tiny 1x1pixel images on web pages or emails. When the page loads, the image is downloaded from the server, creating a record on the server logs. Page tags are often used in email campaigns such as newsletters.

Issues: Emails opened as plain text (or text-based browsers) do not download this tracked image and thus may impair reporting.

User Agent String

The user agent string is information which that can be requested by a script or server, that reveals the browser and operating system details of the user accessing that page.

Issues: The user agent string can be easily faked. Firefox even has an add-on to switch your default user agent on the fly.

Explanation of the user agent string from whatsmyuseragent.com

Collecting Accurate Data

As there are a number of issues with each type of data collection method above, a more accurate way of recording interaction with your site would be to incorporate a number of different collection methods in one go.

Google Analytics uses a combination of factors like these in order to more accurately reflect a website’s usage.

For example: Capturing a visitor’s IP address will tell us the information provided by their router. If we also have the user agent string from their browser, this tells us their browser type and the computer’s operating system. We now have a much better idea as to whether or not we are getting multiple visits from one person or a series of different users that are all on the same network.

Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

Frank Lloyd Wright

One of the most powerful items in a digital marketing toolbox is the analysis of website statistics and usage information.

The regular analysis of these usage statistics can allow web designers and marketers to view the ways in which users actually engage with their sites and to adjust any problematic areas if necessary. In effect, the proper use of web analytics can determine the overall success of a specific website or marketing campaign.

Among other things, website statistics can be used to track:

• the browser and operating system the user is accessing the site with
• where they are located geographically
• what website they have come from
• where they go after your website
• how long they spend on the site
• the route that they take through the site
• the time and dates that the site is being accessed

Accessing Website Statistics

Digital marketers can view this information by examining the raw server logs or by using software which combines and presents the results of several data sources:

Server logs: The most basic tool available to web developers when measuring traffic to a website are the server logs. These are a collection of statistics created by the server which record information about the requests it receives.

Analytics software: Software which uses a variety of data collection methods in order to present a user-friendly analysis of website usage and metrics e.g. Open Web Analytics, Google Analytics

Video: Web analytics A tool and a process

Something that we discussed recently in the NCI Digital Marketing class was of an expensive display advertising campaign on a popular website which resulted in an abominably poor click-through rate, i.e. the number of people who actually clicked on the ad or engaged with the campaign in the manner intended was very low.

On paper (or in the analytics) this campaign was a complete failure.

However,  the value of exposing the brand to a high volume of potential customers is much harder to measure, but potentially much more valuable to the advertiser.

Tangible Results Are Not Always The Most Important Ones

Campaigns which are not in themselves successful in terms of sales volume, help to create an impression of the brand that could influence a customer even after they have forgotten about seeing your ad.

One interesting example of this, which also came up in class, is the series of Old Spice viral videos and accompanying social media efforts:

While creating an impression of a really successful campaign, the actual sales increase after airing the videos was less than half as that of a close competitor.

But how do you measure the subtle influence that the average punter may have experienced due to this campaign, when they are standing in the supermarket aisle?

Every single post, picture, interaction and conversation…gone.

Do you have a regular backup schedule or automated solution for ensuring that valuable data about the relationships your business is cultivating can be restored in such an event?

At the moment, the reality is that once you use a social network to reach your audience, your ability to create a record or a backup of your data depends on how portable that social network allows your data to be*.

Getting Data out of Social Networks

Some platforms, Facebook for example, do include an “export” function so that you can save a snapshot of your social media account in case of emergency. However, the reliability of this backup depends entirely on you remembering to go and do it regularly.

Additionally, the type of exported files produced are often platform-specific and not easily interpreted by anything other than the import function of the platform itself.

Twitter is particularly difficult to extract posts from (in the past I have resorted to the fairly Luddite copy-and-paste-into-a-text-file strategy for retaining copies of my Tweets), although there are reports that they are working on this.

On the other hand, some online streams are particularly conscious of the portability of your data.
For example, Google have a specific task force dedicated to ensuring that you can retain a copy of all the data across your Google accounts, the Data Liberation Front.

Tools for Backing Up Your Online Presence

Once you have had an online presence for a while, the amount of content generated can become more valuable for analysis, but also more difficult to sort through and find.

One application which allows you to both analyse trends in your social media posts and to retain a copy of all your posts and interactions across Facebook and Twitter, is ThinkUp. ThinkUp is free, open source software which operates across your social media accounts, allowing you to analyse and visualise trends.

“With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application.”

Other tools include:

• Backupify – cloud backup and recovery for Google Apps, Salesforce and social networks
• Backup my Tweets – does what it says on the tin!
• If this then that – allows you to automate aspects of your online presence based on a set of triggers, e.g. “if I add a new image to Instagram, then save it to my Dropbox account”.

*As a sidenote, a major plus of using open source applications is that this kind of functionality is usually important to developers and communities and so, is regularly included (or at least acknowledged).