First step is to decide what specifics you are looking for and then use the appropriate tools for extracting the best results. There are many tools available, but here’s our list of some good free ones that cover all types of social media channels like social networking sites, video sharing sites, bookmarking sites, blogs and forums. So try them out:

Twitalyzer

It comes up with a lot of metrics that measures your success on Twitter. Apart from showing the growth of your following in a graph, it gives you more useful information like, how engaged your audience is and how influential you are. It also gives you a snapshot based on the past 7 days of activity, with trending information available for the past days.

Trendpedia

Now check what the buzz is around in the blog world. Just choose your topic, enter related keywords and you are presented with valuable information like who’s discussing what, where, when and how. It also finds you articles that talk about your business, products, services and related topics; you can also track the topic’s trend line over a period of time.

HowSociables

It’s a free and simple way to track the visibility of your brand across all major social media sites. For a given brand name it searches and returns you a set of results from social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. You can also receive timely updates on your social media presence to your email and also track your brand popularity.

Twitteranalyzer

As the name suggests it’s all about your Twitter statistics. You can track your followers and friends, their dispositions and what they write about you. You can see followers who are currently online, who retweets your messages, your follower’s stats, their habits and so on.

Socialmention

It’s a social media search and analysis tool that collects user generated content from across the web and delivers a single source of rich information. This immensely helps you to understand what the people around feel and talk about your company, your products and services. It also gives you valuable information like trends on new products, topics discussed on all popular social media sites and so on.

TimeTube

You can now track all YouTube videos that match a given keyword against a timeline to see when they were posted. It’s great help to track videos talking about your brand, related products and services and the time when they were posted in a chronological order. This can be of immense help to track effectiveness of your product line and its future enhancements.

BoardTracker

One of the most innovative forum search engines. If you are an active forums participant then you should be using this. It tracks messages and gives instant alerts, providing you quick and relevant searched information. It ensures that you never miss any related forum thread posted anywhere anytime.

TweetStats

In short it gives you a graphical representation of your tweet stats. It gives you various graphs by analyzing your tweets; it includes tweets per hour, per week, per month, tweet timeline and also the reply statistics. Other features include Top 10 Twitter Apps, Top tweets and so on. It’s the easiest way to get a complete overview of your analyzed Twitter activities.

SM2

Alterian SM2 is widely recognized by industry insiders as the leading Social Media Monitoring solution in the marketplace. As an SM2 Freemium user you can enjoy some of the features and functions of the Professional version, however there are many features like language filters, geo filters, real time alerts, workflow, sentiment analysis and advanced search options that are available only to professional users. Nevertheless, the free version is definitely worth a try for up to 1,000 searches.

The old homepage design:

Analytical insights gathered after studying visitor data (partial list) and the changes made:

• Analysis showed that only 2% conversions out of total were from services listed under “Industries” section. So in new design “industries” was removed.
• Internal search analysis showed that visitors were searching for sub-services under wrong main service section. To resolve this problem, banner was introduced with sub-services dropdowns. Internal search was introduced in new design so that visitors can easily find services.
• Analysis proved that 90% of visitors visited “About us” page in their path to form submission. In new design “About us” link was highlighted in the top body of the homepage.
• Analysis proved that 60% of visitors visited “Customer Testimonials” page in their path to form submission. In the new design “customer testimonials” link was highlighted in the body of site.

Following the suggestions, the homepage design was changed and the following design was created:

Results:
• Overall conversions increased by 10%
• Bounce rate reduced by 15%
• Homepage engagement rate showed improvement

Do you know that making these forms simple and doing some minor or creative changes can have a huge impact on your conversion rates? You might need a lot of info from your visitors, but how would you feel if you find out that about half of them are leaving your website just because they don’t want to fill a lengthy form.

Before we move on to give you some examples of how people have changed their forms to increase conversions, let’s discuss some of the basic design principles that apply to any web form that you build for your website or landing page. So, here we go:

1. Cut the crap: Won’t it be wonderful if we could just download anything from the web or order stuff online without filling out forms? Let’s face it, no one likes to fill forms online, so it’s best to make life simple for your visitors. Ask for only the most important info in the simplest language and avoid optional fields. Your main aim must be to reduce the completion time.
2. Hold their hand: Offer smart defaults, inline validation, flexible inputs, help options for unfamiliar fields while they fill the form. Tell them how many steps are there in the process.
3. Design for easy scanning: Make relevant content groups, separate required and optional fields, keep the field length consistent, and show a clear path to completion.

For more information about best practices, visit Luke Wroblewski’s site:
http://www.lukew.com/resources/ .

Example:
In this example you can see the length of the form was a major problem.

Once the required changes were made to the contact form, conversion rates went up by about 20%.

Here are two examples of creatively done forms that increased the conversion rates by 25-40%

Image source: http://www.lukew.com/
Forms are an important part of your website. Analyze your current web forms and conduct tests to find out how many visitors are you losing from the form page. Making your forms simple is sure to boost your conversion rates.

It’s not about ME but the Customer

The most repeated yet the most ignored catch. Let me repeat and put it up here, this is SO important, you absolutely cannot ignore this. No matter how big you are, you can talk about yourself later, first address the emotional/business need of your prospects in your landing page.

Credibility factor

No matter how good your product looks, it’s the credibility of your product and service that wins. You may get a few people who will obviously try it out but most prospects would like to hear it from someone else or someone that they can relate to. So stamp your genuineness and quality with some emotional and logical testimonials, awards, celebrity endorsements, and so on. This will go on to make a huge impact and rake in more business. So put up a space for this in your landing page.

Call for action

If you miss this you miss the whole action, your entire effort to keep the visitors glued to your site should culminate with a call for action else the whole point of retaining them gets lost. While designing your call for action steps, bear it in mind to keep it as simple, quick and as easy as possible. We all need more prospects and customers, right?

Design

Keep an eye on your site design, do not over burden it for the eyes. Too many flashy stuff, multiple points of focus, unrelated benefits, more choices and multiple call for actions may confuse your prospects, too many stars in your home team may spoil the complete team effort. So be careful with your design, short and smart is the key.

Sample

It’s the easiest and most powerful way to get your prospects into your zone. You can offer a free trail of your product or service for a minimum period and seal a permanent place in the minds of your prospects. Later on, with this opening you can slowly convert them into your full time clients. So get this done in your landing page, do not make them look for a trial.

Let the content speak for you

Most businesses fail to gauge the power of well written content for their websites. You have to rope in professional copywriters here. They sure will add that jet fuel to your content and make it more compelling and mind bending. DO NOT settle for self-written content which looks good but may severely lack the copywriter’s techniques and panache to suck your readers in.

Put up a great support system

In business you have to sell your product twice, the actual sale and the support which happens after the sale, this is where you truly sell your product. After sale support seals the customer’s faith in you. So show a good amount of stuff or support services that make your prospects seek you, and only you.

Now it’s your turn to act

Yes, start with this small but effective checklist and make your website more attractive and sticky.

How effective are words?

A website on diabetics read as “Keeping tab on your diabetes just got a lot easier” and below this headline they put a join in button.

Later they changed the headline as “Maintain Your Optimal Health by Keeping Tabs on Your Diabetes” and highlighted the “Optimal Health” in green colour. All other design and content in the site remained the same.

The second one outperformed the first design and brought in a 33% increase in the conversion rate. The reason should be clear by now; the second headline adds a pain point by directly mentioning the health factor.

Source: http://dmix.ca/2010/05/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-72/

Highlighting the wrong word

This is a small but effective example of highlighting the wrong word. A freelance blog writer in his web page asked his visitors to follow him on twitter. The text read:

“I’m on twitter”. And the word twitter had a hyperlink. The conversion rate was at 4.7%.

Later this call for action was changed to: “Follow me on twitter here” and this time the hyperlink was on “here”. The conversion rate jumped to 12.8%.

This clearly shows the power of words and the impact they create on the minds of the reader.

Source: http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Clarity and focus in design

Most sites equally project all the elements in the web page and this leads to low conversion rates. For instance, a webpage offering an online training program packed its website with four equally visible buttons about the details, and one among them had a call for action link of “register for the online course”. This design could not get them desired results.

Later they reduced the size and prominence of the other three elements and increased the size and changed the colour of the call for action button and this immediately increased their conversions by over 15%.

Lengthy form fields

Whenever you need your visitor to sign up for your service or free trail make sure that you are not making him fill lengthy forms. Surveys have suggested that, just the view of a lengthy form will make the visitor move away from the page. So keep it short and easy, it will pull a clear 50% more. Also make it a point to give pre-filled options for fields like country name, city, state, etc. instead of asking the visitor to enter his complete address.

Benefits should be clearly communicated

Even if you offer your service for FREE, without communicating the benefits you will hardly find prospects pouring in. Every call for action should begin with strong reasons for the visitor to sign up. So instead of just saying “Signup for our free bookkeeping software”, say

“Now get relieved of all the manual paper based accounting with our free bookkeeping software.”

You can quote as much benefits as you want before the call for action.

Source: http://www.abtests.com

Make them feel your product

Let your visitor experience your product.

A website promoting a book managed to pull in 35% more buyers by just putting a 3D image of the book, their initial promotion just had the title of the book. This small change made all the difference.

The secret is the experience you give the visitor about your product visually in their minds.

Source: http://codemonkeyism.com/ab-testing-download-landing-pages/

Reduce bounce rate by making it interesting

Do not design your website in the expected lines. For instance, a website promoting online books/CDs/films showed its collection in a straight line format with the details of the titles below each image.

Later on they changed the view as spines and when the visitor hovers over them the details get displayed. This looked quite different and the visitors played around with these images and spent time looking at the details.

This not only reduced the bounce rate by over 10% but also brought in a 15% more conversion.

Source: http://www.rowtheboat.com/archives/39

Conclusion

A/B tests can be effectively used to deduce the best web page design and content combination for your site. The only thing that you should be doing is to try it.

1. Too much qualitative data: Imagine you have 10,000 tweets on twitter about your product. How do you even start to analyze these tweets? There are applications that could automatically tell you the sentiment. But if you want a better view, you will have to dig deeper to come to some kind of an actionable conclusion, now that’s time-consuming and real hard work, however extremely fruitful

2. Social media is huge, unavoidable and growing: Today, all social conversations about your product might be happening on one or two most popular social media sites like twitter or Facebook. Tomorrow this ever growing trend may give you an entirely new and maybe more effective platform for social exchange. And this is no guess work as social media experts are predicting this to happen around 2015. So here’s our next challenge, keeping track of multiple social media sites to track our brand and market our stuff.

3. Cutting through non-qualitative data: Major problem with loads of data is unsolicited, disguised and unreal data. Tools and technology cannot weed out this unnecessary stuff; this is where pure human acumen should be applied in pruning data and getting the real pulse.

“When surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis may remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.”

-          Gartner

4. Proliferation of tools: No one tool can answer all your questions and support all your analysis. You have to use multiple tools and maybe make them work together to get your data. This may require both experience and keeping track of more and latest tools.

5. No known framework: There are different articles on various Web sites on how to measure social media effectiveness and how your product is doing on the social media zone. But the frameworks they are proposing are yet to mature. You have to understand your need and build your own social media analysis goals.

6. Need for expertise: As the complexities grow businesses have to look for experts who can effectively handle social media analysis. Imagine this, if today’s scenario is almost demanding experts to handle  social media analysis then what will the situation be like tomorrow; more data, more sites, more tools, more platforms, more dependencies and of course more profitability. So this may become a specialized job and mandate engaging social media experts, who can obviously deliver you more profits through this channel of exchange.

Final thought: These challenges are evident and pressing, there may be even more to follow as this phenomenon is only growing. However, remember to overcome them as there are more profits on the other side.

Should a marketer worry about varied streams of data portraying seemingly different stories? “I would think not,” says Seby Kallarakkal, the founder and CEO of the Bangalore-based Nabler Web Solutions Pvt Ltd. Having data from other marketing streams would actually help a Web analyst draw the right conclusions, he reasons during a recent interaction with BrandLine.

“Let me give you an example. We were studying data for a Web site and found a big spike in traffic. A few days later, the traffic went back to the old level. There was nothing on the Web site that could explain this sudden jump. Then we got some additional data — the dates on which the customer had run a TV ad. The jump in traffic coincided with the airing of the TV ad. After a few days, the TV ad stopped. And gradually traffic on the site also dropped.”

Something like this would have been hard to understand without the data on TV commercials, adds Seby. “So, I would think it helps to have data from multiple sources. It helps you build a more cohesive analysis on the traffic.”

Excerpts from the interview:

What’s your opinion on the effectiveness with which enterprises utilise their home pages?

I do not want to answer that question as a designer. Speaking from the perspective of an analyst, the first thing to realise is that your home page is going to be seen by perhaps half your visitors or even less. So if you have something to say that’s very important, do not mention that just on the home page.

Here are a few helpful hints based on our experience in analysing home pages:

Any kind of flash animation with a ‘skip intro’ link is asking for trouble. Unless you are sure that you have a fabulous animation, do not do this.

Design the home page with some expectations. Have expectations of what the user would click on. Then check if that’s happening. If it’s not happening, change something. But do measure again.

When you measure, do segment. What repeat visitors do on a home page might be different from what new visitors do on it.

There are other useful segments — weekend visitors versus weekday visitors, visitors from different geographies, visitors at different times of the day. Their needs could be different and it’s worthwhile leveraging this difference.

Can Web analytics be useful for analysing trends?

My answer would be, ‘Absolutely, yes.’ One of the simplest ways of doing this would be to look at the keywords used by visitors to your Web site. Pull out the data for a year and you will see distinct trends that are happening within your industry. Of course, there are other factors such as how popular you are with search engines.

Once you are done looking at the data on your Web site, you can check Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) for similar trends. Google Trends will have data at a more macro level. For example, try searching for ‘saas’ and ‘cloud computing.’ You will see how searches for ‘saas’ are dropping and that for cloud computing growing. While we will not debate the difference between these two phrases, Google Trends certainly shows how people relate to concepts and ideas, and how it changes over time.

Can Web analytics help a journalist?

I can think of a few ways in which a journalist can benefit from what Web analytics could say about a Web site:

Understanding the life cycle of an article. A journalist could get an understanding of when the popularity of an article peaks and how long it would take for it to stabilise at a low traffic. You could study those peaks in traffic happening after many months. How did those happen? Can you repeat it?

Understand how people came to the article. Did they come on the strength of the Web site? Or did they come directly?

Look at keywords used by people who came to the article directly. Was this the list you were expecting? Would you have rewritten the article if you had seen this list before?

Look at traffic from referring sites? Are you getting any significant traffic from other Web sites or blogs? Were you expecting any? Would you do anything different knowing this information?

Use a tool such as keyword tool from Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.co.in/select/KeywordToolExternal). The journalist might want to do a bit of research on what people are looking for before writing the article. Once you publish the article, compare the list you made with the list that comes from actual data on your Web site.

Benchmark your article against your own and other journalists’ writing.

If you are promoting your article on various social media Web sites, track it to see if your efforts are paying off. If so, would you spend more time promoting them?

Look at how effective your cross-linking has been. When you cross link your (or others’) articles from an article, do readers follow those links? Which ones did they follow and which ones did they not?

All these are questions that can be answered using the Web analytics data.

Please outline a few low-hanging fruits for conversion …

Here are a few easy-to-implement ideas for increasing conversion on your Web site:

a) No prizes for guessing this one. Identify a Web analytics tool and install it. You can’t improve the conversion rate if you don’t know what it is now. Once you have the Web analytics tool, set it up correctly. Identify what you refer to as a conversion and set it up on the tool. You are ready to roll now.

b) Look at pages that are terrible at keeping visitors. Web analytics tools would refer to these visits as bounced or short visits. It just means that visitors to these pages left them without seeing any other page. Most of the time, this is bad news. Fix these pages. Rewrite them, add a message, do something. You have to stem the leak.

c) Look at conversions where the visitor has to go through a series of pages. In the Web analytics context, this is referred to as a funnel. Wherever there is a funnel, typically there would be dropouts at each stage. You can work on reducing this percentage. You can try and reduce the number of steps or do something to stop people from abandoning your funnel. For example, if people are leaving at the payment page on the Web site, try to explain why your site is secure.

d) Learn testing. You can start with something as simple as A/B testing. It means you study two variations and choose the better converting one. You can do this manually and keep a tab on when and where you have maintained the two versions or use a tool. Again Google’s tool for this is free. It’s called Google Optimiser (www.google.com/websiteoptimiser).

e) Look at your daily traffic and decide for yourself the threshold number you need for running your experiments. If you get just 10 visitors / day, no amount of optimising will lead to more conversion. Do a short burst campaign and get people to visit the Web site. Then start experimenting and measuring conversion. Pay-per-click campaigns are quite effective if you want a short burst of visitors.

What kind of questions should a CMO seek from social media analysis?

a) What are people talking about my brand? Is it positive or negative? What’s the percentage split?

b) What’s the volume of people talking about my brand? What’s the frequency? When are they posting?

c) Specifically, which features of my product are being appreciated by customers? Which features of the product are frustrating the customer?

d) Who are the influencers in the industry? What are they saying?

e) Which sites have conversation about my brand? Where do I need to step in and respond?

f) If there is something that I need to communicate about my brand, where do I make myself heard?

g) What’s the effectiveness of my social media efforts?

h) How am I doing vis-à-vis my competition?

NodeXL is a template for Excel 2007 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window. You can easily customize the graph’s appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph’s layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate a set of graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of data formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and your local email are provided.

SiteScan™

This is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if the Google Analytics (GA) Tracking Code is installed properly on your website. It checks for both legacy urchin.js and the newer ga.js tracking code. It scans for several configuration pitfalls and gives you the result in an easy readable file format. It also identifies whether the tracking code is properly installed in your webpages or not and include all these information in the diagnostic report. All this makes it easier for you to track these pages and fix them for optimum performance.

WASP

You know how tagging your online ads are crucial for your business promotion. WASP is a Firefox plugin which allows you to test the state of your analytics tagging faster than ever without having to look at source code. Now with WASP you can see your tags, save time, see detected values, find missing tags, detect double tagging, capture flash events and export data. It is reported that over 10,000 people use WASP to visually detect over 200 analytics solutions.

This is how a quick WASP report looks like:

Statistics Detector

This is a free Greasemonkey script for Firefox. Initially written to detect the usage of Mint in your webpages, this script has now evolved in to a package which detects any JavaScript-based statistics packages. Currently this script supports over 35 statistics packages including Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, SiteStat, etc. Installing and using this is quiet easy.

ObservePoint

ObservePoint offers a wide variety of services including site auditing, monitoring, browser plugins and alerts. All these service can effectively take care of your online marketing data. Some of the stand out services include:

• Automated Tag Discovery
• Invisible Tag Vendor
• Web-based, so no software required
• Tracking missing pixels and tags on your pages
• Worldwide monitoring
• URL monitoring alerts and so on

Accenture Digital Diagnostics

As part of its Digital Optimization Service which delivers an enhanced digital experience to the customers, Accenture provides Digital Diagnostic Service which scans a company’s website, identifies performance barriers and develops a prioritized and targeted roadmap toward an improved site. Other notable service includes Digital Optimization, Digital Advantage and so on.

HBX Active Viewer

This is an excellent tool if your website has a form based application for collecting user information. You never know where and why the user has dropped off your site especially when filling a long form. With active viewing you can work out where exactly the user dropped off and based on this you can make necessary changes to your form, you can also make it friendlier and easy to fill based on this information.

Even on content driven sites it can help you especially with your landing page and recommend things that should go in there which make your landing page stickier.

Httpwatch

This is an integrated HTTP sniffer for IE and Firefox that provides new insights into how your website loads and performs. Key benefits are:

• Seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without changing network settings or adding proxies
• See low-level HTTP information such as headers, cookies, etc. and millisecond accurate timings.
• Real-time page and request level time charts show performance bottlenecks
• Your users and customers can send you log files
• Automatically detects and highlights potential configuration, performance and security problems

Omniture Debugger

This JavaScript-based debugger allows you to view the parameters sent in an Omniture SiteCatalyst image request.

Omnibug

Omnibug is a plugin for Firebug to ease developing web metrics implementations. Each outgoing request (sent by the browser) is checked for a pattern; if a match occurs, the URL is displayed in a Firebug panel, and decoded to show the details of the request. Requests can also be logged to the file system. It supports Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics/Urchin and Moniforce. Custom matching rules can be defined to support other systems.

Charles Debugger

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers which contain the cookies and caching information.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to give you a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

HTTP Header

There are many services which will allow you to inspect the HTTP headers that your web server is sending along with your files. You can use this to verify that the correct MIME type (the Content-type: line) is being sent for each file type. This can be a really useful tool.

HTTP Fox

HttpFox monitors and analyses all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web servers. It brings together the functionality from tools like HttpWatch or IEInspector to the Firefox browser.

It gives out the following information as per your request:

• Request and response headers
• Sent and received cookies
• Query string parameters
• POST parameters
• Response body

End Note

Though there are many auditing tools and services available these are most widely used ones. As most of these are free tools you can right now put them to use and maximize your benefits.

The following seven points are crucial to create a significantly insightful web analytics report:

1. Basics: This includes tracking numbers that help you understand the visitor statistics and hence help you take necessary actions that may end-up making the website efficient and effective. How many people visited the site? From which traffic source did they come from? Who the users are? Which pages did the look at? Which pages did they spend most of their time on? The answers to these questions should then be compared to the goals that you set out with. Analysis of this data will help you figure out if your site is working. It will also hint toward what needs to be done for the site to work better and for your goals to be achieved in a faster and efficient manner. For example, if your site needs 2000 visitors a day, and web analytics show that most of your visitors currently come from a certain search engine, placing adverts and working on SEO would be the solution.
2. Performance: Visitors could be engaged more on a certain page but look carefully. Is it because the particular page takes too much time to load? If a certain page has more engagement rate and/or more clicks, is it because the page coughs up errors and hence requires reloading. This could damage the website’s and the company’s reputation in the long run. So, even though the data makes the performance seem good, it must be used to cross-check and make sure that the website is functioning well.
3. Campaign effectiveness and ROI: If you have a website, then you must invest in some marketing activities across the internet to get more traffic. However, your marketing campaigns and initiatives have to be measured. One has to understand how many visitors are being generated for every $ spent. Web analytics is the best way to track, measure, and optimize website traffic, conversion rate as a result of your online marketing initiatives. It can also play a key role in helping you decide which online campaign method to select, how much to spend, which campaigns are not performing  and which ones are high performing campaigns deserving higher budget allocations, etc.
4. Goal conversion rate: This will indicate the percentage of visitors that convert on at least one of the goals defined for the profile of the website. It tells you exactly how the website translates into business development. This is the ratio of site visitors against the goal set up by company, which can be number of form submissions, catalogue requests, trade enquiries, call back requests, actual sales, etc. It is this number that will tell you whether your website has helped your business at all.
5. Geographical stats: Knowing which geographical region gives you maximum traffic can help you understand your website user behavior better and also help you differentiate between your offline and online market. A popular calendar company’s website received majority of its hits from the US. After analyzing the data, they realized that their product had a huge market among Marathi immigrants to UK and US. They ended-up developing a soft copy of the calendar and this started generating revenues from their website.
6. Keyword phrases and search data: Knowing which keywords led the user to your site is crucial information that can help you with SEO. This data also holds a key to understand which key phrase is used most. Understanding what the visitors were looking for when they stumbled upon your site. Answers to questions like, are these relevant searches, if yes, is the website fulfilling the user’s need, will help you create a better user experience for your site.

Every website is different hence has different needs from web analytics data, however, generally speaking, the seven points mentioned above, should help you build a clear picture about your website’s performance.

We are living a world of constant flux. Technologies emerge, communication channels open and consumer behaviors adapt. These changes are apparent in the ways in which consumers interact with marketers and their brands as well as the ways in which consumers empower one another. Marketers are experimenting with all sorts of online marketing and social media channels without properly understanding the results it is generating for them.

Social media measurement means so many different things to different people that there’s no one way to define the exact need. Hence, the measurement of social media activities requires assessment of the performance of social media initiatives in the context of unique business objectives for each organization.

Key things to keep in mind before you measure your social media initiatives:

• Align success metrics with business objectives and create a solid measurement framework: Merely collecting digital data without cause is a recipe for disaster. Align key success metrics with business objectives and then look for vendors who have appropriate offering and can give you customized solutions. Create a social media measurement playbook that aligns your organization on the goals, objectives, expectations and actions of your social marketing efforts. Then map those capabilities with measurement technologies and process to get the job done. This requires a pragmatic strategy and a measurement framework that is unique to your company.
• Make learning your primary goal: Every measurable business objective provides an opportunity to learn about consumers and the ways in which they interact with you, your brand and each other. Social Marketing Analytics lets you understand these behaviors, test new initiatives and improve the overall effectiveness.

The social media measurement framework:

No single set of objectives can accommodate all business models or corporate initiatives. But the four important objectives that serve as a foundation for effectively measuring social marketing using an objective-based methodology include:

1. Foster Dialog
2. Promote Advocacy
3. Facilitate Support
4. Spur Innovation

Let’s discuss each of the objectives and the associated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in detail.

Social Business Objective: Foster Dialog

Dialog involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its own. With measurement, Dialog provides knowledge back to the organization.

Dialog requires:

• Building awareness and word of mouth activity through conversations by creating original content on blogs, communities, or any other social channel that offers information as a catalyst for discussion.
• Engaging with individuals to determine their response to ideas, thoughts, products and activities generated by the organization.
• Responding to individuals on behalf of the brand through genuine interactions.

The key performance indicators for fostering dialog are:

• Share of Voice: Share of Voice is the relative percentage of brand mentions in social channels (i.e., articles, blogs, comments, Tweets, videos, etc.) among a competitive set.
• Audience Engagement: Audience Engagement is the proportion of visitors who participate in a specific marketing initiative by contributing comments, sharing or linking back.
• Conversation Reach: Conversation Reach is the number of unique visitors who participate in a specific brand/issue/topic conversation across one or more social media channels.

Social Business Objective: Promote Advocacy

The business objective of consumer advocacy enlists the support and dedication of individuals that are ambassadors for certain products, brands or organizations, despite having no official connection. Advocacy allows businesses to extend their reach beyond their immediate circles of influence by taking advantage of word of mouth and viral activity.

Advocacy requires:

• Encouraging word of mouth activity by promoting and endorsing conversations shared by individuals.
• Developing relationships with individuals who have an affinity towards the brand.
• Nurturing existing relationships with customers as a proven method of building advocacy within an easily identified segment.

Key Performance Indicators that indicate the health of an advocacy program are:

• Active Advocates: Active Advocates include the number of individuals generating positive sentiment over a given time frame (i.e., past 30 days).
• Advocate Influence: Advocate Influence is the relative percentage of influence for an individual advocate across one or more social media channels.
• Advocacy Impact: Advocacy Impact is the direct or indirect contributions of advocacy on conversions.

Social Business Objective: Facilitate Support

The capability to provide support through social channels is imperative.

Support requires:

• Resolving service issues through social media channels via direct company response and crowdsourcing alternatives.
• Expediting issue resolution with quality and integrity.
• Elevate satisfaction through flexible support options.

Performance indicators for customer support can be compared to traditional channels include:

• Resolution Rate: Social Media Issue Resolution Rate is the percentage of customer service inquiries resolved satisfactorily using social media channels.
• Resolution Time: Resolution Time is the amount of minutes/hours/days required to produce a human-generated response to customer service issues posed in social media channels.
• Satisfaction Score: Customer Satisfaction Score is an indexed score indicating the relative satisfaction of customers.

Social Business Objective: Spur Innovation

Organizations that are truly listening to their customers take cues from social media comments, suggestions and conversations to source and identify product needs, service requirements and other innovation opportunities.

Innovation requires:

• Gathering customer insights via social media channels with a clear mission of identifying market needs and service opportunities.
• Processing ideas and community feedback as a means to drive products and services requires receptive product managers.
• Delivering new products and services to the market with credit and acknowledgement to customers.

Performance indicators for Innovation include:

• Topic Trends: Topic Trends include key brand/product/service topics identified by monitoring social media conversations.
• Sentiment Ratio: Sentiment Ratio is the ratio of positive: neutral: negative brand mentions about specific products or services over a given time period.
• Idea Impact: Idea Impact is the rate of interaction, engagement and positive sentiment generated from a new product or service idea.

D. Murali

With feet firmly on the ground, in Nageswara Rao park, the topic of discussion that Seby Kallarakkal and I engage in is the ‘future of Web analytics.’ He begins by asserting that tools will become more intelligent. We have been seeing Web analytics tools with more features, more customisation and more reports, elaborates Kallarakkal, founder and CEO of Nabler Web Solutions Pvt Ltd, Bangalore (http://bit.ly/F4TSeby).

“Soon, we should be seeing Web analytics tools moving towards more intelligence, giving analysis, conclusions, and perhaps even recommendations. If no one does it, we would be very tempted to build one.” Who can hold a ‘building’ task from someone with an IIT Kharagpur architecture degree, and a BITS Pilani MS in software systems, I remind myself…

There will be more tools in the market, even as the cost of developing a Web analytics tool gets cheaper, he continues. “We are going to see Web analytics tools developed by smaller companies. And these tools are not going to follow traditional reporting styles. They are going to experiment with different metrics and different presentation styles. They are also going to appeal to niche target audiences, or focus on niche areas of Web reporting.”

Two other trends that Kallarakkal foresees are the integration with mainstream BI (business intelligence) tools, and an increase in data sources. While the former is already happening, we will continue to see more integration of Web analytics data with the existing BI tools within the organisation, he explains.

As for handling more data sources, he cites as example the data from social media sites. Shouldn’t we then be talking about marketing analytics tool rather than of Web analytics, he suggests. Our conversation continues over e-mail.

Read the excerpts from the interview: http://bit.ly/aNacKT