Engaging Facebook Fans with Posts!

A service provider in India has recently partnered with Facebook to launch a new “Facebook Phone”. It gives users affordable pre-paid and post-paid plans to surf, upload pictures/videos, update status messages and chat with their Facebook friends.

If you are guessing that am going to tell you about the benefits of having a Facebook Fan page, then you are wrong. I’m sure all the enterprises already own a Facebook page and have a fair share of fans. They constantly update the page with status messages, photos and videos. The posts get tons of likes and comments. You are familiar with Facebook insights and must be doing a regular report about the volume of new fans, likes and comments etc.

But does this mean all your fans are constantly engaging with your page? Do you know what your fans like or dislike? (more…)

Using Google Analytics to reduce PPC charges

Are you tired of spending a lot of money on keywords to drive traffic to your site?

Well the solution to this can be as simple as just closely monitoring your Google Analytics data. This data can help you lessen your expenses when you are bidding your keywords in Google Ad words.

Let me show you how this can be done: (more…)

Tracking QR Codes with Google Analytics

Measuring online marketing campaigns was always possible but measurement of offline marketing to understand how it affects the online visibility of a particular company was a challenge.

But now this gap is almost filled by the introduction of QR codes, seen by most of us in magazines, newspapers, TV commercials etc.

QR code or “quick response” is the code which can be easily scanned by mobile devices and quickly direct the person to the required website. This code helps in accessing the resource instantly. This way we can measure how offline campaign is leading traffic to online platforms.

But how will we attribute the visits coming from QR code to a particular website? It is as simple as campaign analytics and be easily done using URL builder, provided by Google for Google analytics users.

Here are some steps which will help us track visitors through QR codes: (more…)

Measurement Plan and Campaign Analytics

Big enterprises that run massive campaigns end up making a crucial mistake at the very beginning and that mistake is not making a measurement plan for the campaign.

At the end of each campaign, the stakeholders are drowned with reports from marketing, sales, merchandising and campaign managers. They are flooded with all kinds of metrics like CTR, CPC, visits, video views, photo uploads, discount coupon downloads, Facebook fans, Twitter mentions…. the metrics and reports are never ending and none of them tell you in plain simple language if your campaign was a hit or not!

‘Measurement plan is a document that states all the metrics that determine the success of a campaign.’ Simply put, a measurement plan acts as a target or even as a benchmark (if you have run similar programs in the past) for your campaign.

Here is an outline of what a measurement plan should ideally contain: (more…)

Why Analytics and Adwords Conversions differ?

Every month after I send the monthly report to my client he always comes up with one question, “Can you please see why Analytics and AdWords are reporting different numbers for PPC leads? Which one is correct and what is causing this discrepancy?”

I am sure this question would have crossed through many of our minds too. Due to several reasons, data collected by javascript and cookie creation cannot be 100% correct. There can be many possibilities here. (more…)

Building ‘Data Blocks’ with Omniture Excel Client

We analysts are in love with Microsoft Excel as it helps us view and manipulate data in numerous ways to gain more insights.

Most of the analytics tools give us the data we require, but consuming it on Excel is even better.

Omniture Excel Client helps you get your data on to your Excel sheets by a click of a button. Yes, it’s one powerful Excel addin which can pull data from SiteCatalyst on to your Excel.

What’s the benefit of this? You can access your data just by building data set blocks for one time and use it whenever you want by just refreshing the data set. Also, you can have direct interaction which means you need not edit the data block to change any filters. (more…)

Tracking Visitor Traffic via ‘Bookmarks’

Direct Visitors to my website were increasing daily and I was very much interested to know whether they were coming from the ‘Bookmarks’ already saved in their system or were all together new visitors. One fairly strong indicator of audience loyalty is whether or not people have saved your website address in their bookmarks folder.


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Data Visualization with TREEMAPPER

Analysing huge datasets can be a problem sometimes. Which keywords get more traffic and have good conversion rate compared to others? Which traffic sources get the maximum qualified visitors to your site? Which page is good at driving visitors or which engages a visitor well?

You would often wish there was some visualization solution that could answer these question in one shot. My answer to this would be Treemapping! There might be better solutions but Treemapping works wonders for me !

To begin with, lets understand what are Treemaps?

Treemaps display hierarchical data as a set of nested rectangles. Microsoft has an ‘excel add-in’ which can help you create great Treemaps. (more…)

Macro to separate Branded and Non-Branded Keywords

Whenever we start any ‘Keyword Analysis’, the first and foremost thing we need to do is to categorize the keywords into Branded and Non-Branded. Analyzing the keywords by categorizing them will give you more insights. If this categorization is done manually then this will take up a lot of time. So the best thing is to automate this process.

For this, we have written an excel macro, which will help you save time and concentrate on analysis. (more…)

Launching ‘Omniture Discover’ without logging on to ‘Site Catalyst’

Do you spend lots of time analyzing data with ‘Omniture Discover’? Are you tired of keying in your username and password every time you login to ‘Discover’?

Launching ‘Discover’ application after you login to your ‘Site Catalyst’ account is time consuming. We all know that if we log in from ‘Site Catalyst’, you are automatically logged in to ‘Discover’. But what if you are not logged on to your ‘Site Catalyst’ account? What if you don’t have the ‘Discover’ URL provided by your ‘Omniture’ admin? Can there be an easier way to access your site data? (more…)

Online Excel Tutorial-2: Extract keywords from a search query

This is the second post in the series of online tutorials which will help you convert your day to day excel usage into strategic functions that help draw out more from your analysis.

The following video talks about a function that lets you extract keywords from a search query. This helps in situations where the internal site search reports are not set up correctly in the analytics tool but the keywords still have to be reported upon. (more…)

Online Excel Tutorial-1: Count the number of words in a keyphrase

We bring to you a series of online tutorials which will help you convert your day to day excel usage into strategic functions that help draw out more from your analysis.

The first in this series is the following video, which talks about a function that lets you count the number of words in a keyphrase. This will bring to light a number of stories about the keywords bringing traffic to a website. This is especially helpful for those who carry extensive Ad words and PPC campaigns. (more…)

Can there be web analytics benchmarks to compare metrics?

Consider a scenario where you have a website and you also have an analytics code embedded into it. You check metrics everyday but always get stuck at one single question- ‘What are the benchmarks on which you should compare these metrics?’ i.e. how to measure your website metrics against market standards.

Basic terms such as ‘time spent’, ‘bounce rate’, ‘page views’ will be relevant for the website only if they can be compared against some reference value. To understand these terms and their relevancy to the website, two simple rules should be followed which will convert simple numbers into meaningful data. (more…)

Understanding your Blog’s ‘Traffic Ecosystem’

The internet has become the new age knowledge center and blogs have become the new age information syndicates. Have a problem? The World Wide Web is sure to throw up millions of sources at you, with each blog looking fancier and more informative than the other. In such a competitive scenario, how does one make their blog stand out? What makes those few blogs have a subscriber base of thousands, whereas some quality blogs are left with no followers?

The problem is that most of these blog owners consider macro traffic volume as the absolute indicator of overall success, instead of realizing that more traffic need not mean more revenue, conversion and success. It needs to be realized that each website’s traffic is comprised of a variety of unique traffic sources and to identify these sources and their impact on the conversion rate and revenue, one should start by defining what can be called the ‘TRAFFIC ECOSYSTEM’.

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WAW-The Event that was

Two weeks have gone by since Nabler and Webtrends organized the Web Analytics Wednesday meet. The event was a gathering of digital marketing and analytics experts and enthusiasts from all over Bangalore and cities like Chennai, Bhopal, Pune and even Singapore! It was good to see excitement within the digital community for this event. Around 120 people turned up and to make things even better, everyone was dot on time despite the notorious Bangalore traffic and rain! Though the title says Wednesday, it was held on a Friday to help everyone take out time from their busy work schedules. And what a great way it was to kick start the weekend. They were great 3.5 hours of networking, knowledge building and fun.

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