BA 4: WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

MODULE IV

Mobile & Social Media Analytics:

 Measuring New Social Web - Data Challenge,

 Analysing Off Line Customer Experiences,

 Analysing Mobile User Experiences,

 Measuring the success of blogs,

 Quantifying the success of Twitter.

Measuring the New Social Web:
The Data Challenge.
• Content creation, distribution, and consumption on the web has fundamentally changed in
recent years.
• Most marketers, web analytics vendors, and analysts are unprepared to measure the new
social-powered web.
• Measuring the new social-powered web presents both a challenge and an opportunity.
• The old approach to content creation, distribution, and consumption involved content being
created by a website and consumed by visitors on the website.
• The evolution of user-generated content (UGC) through comments, reviews, and self-
publishing platforms changed the concept of when content was done and challenged the
control of website owners over the conversation.
• The rise of RSS feeds and content scraping, syndication, or mash-ups shifted content
consumption away from website visits and allowed users to consume content in ways that
website owners couldn't control or influence.
• Measuring the new social-powered web requires new measurement techniques to capture data
on the evolving nature of content creation, distribution, and consumption.
• JavaScript tag on a site can only measure what was published on the site and has limited ability
to measure a living page
• A lot of content consumption happens off-site, such as in feed readers and aggregator sites
• Web analytics tools are blind to off-site activity
• Existing metrics like visits and unique visitors are no longer enough
• Metrics like feed subscribers and conversation rate are crucial in the new social-powered web
era.
• To measure website data, use traditional web analytics tool like Webtrends
• To measure content contributed through comments or reviews, use MeasureMap
• Use Technorati to measure Citations (other people talking about you and how much)
• Use Feedburner to understand offsite content (RSS)
• To track content that's syndicated or scraped off your site, use Event Tracking model or custom
tracking from companies like Clearspring
• The challenge is using tools that collect and report new metrics each in its own way, and
metrics may not match even if they exist in multiple tools.
• Twitter empowers companies and individuals to create and publish content to engage
audiences, but it poses challenges to measurement.
• Content distributed through Twitter gets distributed through various channels, making it
difficult to measure.
• Some Tools can be used to measure some of Twitter's impact, but we are still blind to content
consumed through apps.
• We need new metrics to define real measurement in the social web world.
• New tools and metrics will be introduced to measure success.
Analyzing Offline Customer
Experiences (Applications)
• Rich internet applications, such as Adobe AIR, have become increasingly popular in the past
year
• These applications are fully functional desktop-like programs that can be used online or offline
• Traditional web analytics face challenges in measuring offline behavior of these applications
• The New York Times and Adobe teams used Google Analytics' Event Tracking mechanism to
collect data on user behavior in their Times Reader application
• They also used a lightweight database to collect data when the user is offline, which is sent to
the reporting application once a day when the user regains internet connection
• This approach allows companies to make informed decisions based on actual customer usage
of their apps
• Two caveats to keep in mind: plan ahead for what data to track and use standard
methodologies for data collection and storage.
Analyzing Mobile Customer
Experiences
• Every year since 1999 has been called the year of the mobile, but no year has lived up to the
hype surrounding mobile and mobile analytics
• The number of mobile handsets has grown tremendously, with the iPhone's introduction in
2007 turbocharging the consumption of the mobile web in the US
• Tracking and analyzing mobile consumption of web content should be taken seriously, but not
overly hyped
• Before the iPhone, web-enabled handsets had a rudimentary web experience, but the iPhone
and Android-based phones vastly improved it
• Better browsers in new phones from BlackBerry, Nokia, and others have led to exponential
growth in mobile web content consumption
• Mobile analytics pose a challenge in accurately collecting data, with reporting and analysis still
being in a nascent stage
Mobile Data Collection: Options
We have not seen a massive adoption of mobile analytics yet because the industry has not
settled on how to collect data from mobile platforms. At the moment three options are in play.
1. Logs-Based Solutions
• A logs-based solution means looking at the data in the server logs that contain information
about the visitors to a website. This data can help identify mobile traffic.
• A logs-based solution is an old-fashioned way to analyze website traffic that is not commonly
used today, but it might become more popular if big telecommunications companies start
sharing their log files.
• Website log files contain information that can help identify mobile traffic, but using this data
requires writing custom log parsers with filters and scripts.
• Telecom companies in Asia are experimenting with creating and providing analytics to their
advertisers using their own server logs.
• The benefit of a logs-based solution is that it only requires an IT person with coding skills, but
the downside is that you must build and support your own software or hardware platform.
• Logs-based solutions are not as accurate as other analytics methods because they don't
provide all the information that other methods do.
2. Packet-sniffing-based solutions:
• Packet-sniffing-based solutions are a way to track mobile traffic on your website.
• Telecom companies have data that could be useful for tracking mobile traffic, but it's hard to
get.
• Packet-sniffing-based solutions involve buying and installing a platform inside your network
that collects data from the packets traveling between your web servers and the web.
• These solutions don't require any changes to your website's code, which is a big advantage.
• However, if you host your own websites, you'll need to convince your IT team to install the
hardware, which can be difficult.
• If your websites are distributed or hosted externally, deployment can be even more complex.
3. Tag-Based Solutions—JavaScript or Image:
• Tag-based solutions for mobile data collection work similarly to web analytics tools, but require
tagging your site with either JavaScript or image tags.
• Image tag-based solutions, used by companies like Bongo Analytics, Mobilytics, and Percent
Mobile, involve inserting an image tag into your website code to collect data.
• JavaScript tag-based solutions, used by companies like Omniture, CoreMetrics, and Google
Analytics, involve inserting JavaScript code into your website code to collect data.
• JavaScript-based solutions can capture mobile browsing behavior on phones from Apple,
BlackBerry, Nokia, or HTC, while image tag-based solutions can capture data for all types of
phones.
• However, not all phones are JavaScript-enabled, and many might not have cookies enabled,
which can limit data collection.
• Both solutions require campaign tracking through customer landing pages or customer-tracking
links.
• Companies like Google Analytics, CoreMetrics, and Omniture use JavaScript-based solutions,
while Bongo Analytics, Mobilytics, and Percent Mobile use image tag-based solutions.
• The winner of the race between these solutions will depend on how quickly mobile tracking
technology progresses and how important analytics vendors consider mobile tracking to be.
• Companies with more sophisticated mobile efforts may benefit from using vertical-specific
mobile solutions, while others may stick with web analytics tools, but miss out on some
potential data.
Mobile Reporting and Analysis:
The reporting you want for mobile users is similar to what you want for users who access your
website from computers. You want to answer the following questions:
• How many visits did your website get?
• What were the sources of these visits?
• What are the screen resolutions of the mobile devices that access your site?
• What search engine keywords were used to arrive at your website?
• How long do users stay on your site?
• Did you get any conversions?
Google Analytics dashboard shows data for the segment of users who visited the website using
mobile phones.
It tells you the basic web metrics such as Visits, Page Views, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, and Time
on Site, goals related metrics, screen resolution and keywords used.
You also get traffic sources data.
Measuring the Success of Blogs
A blog (weblog) is a frequently updated web page used for personal commentary or business
content. Blogs are often interactive and include sections at the bottom of individual blog posts
where readers can leave comments.
Blogs are not like regular websites. So, regular tools of analytics cant be used to measure their
success.
Blogs need to be evaluated on the following: Amount of content, Consumption of content,
Interaction with readers, Impact of content, cost and benefit (ROI) of blogging efforts.
The framework and metrics for evaluating blogs are:
1. Raw Author Contribution
2. Holistic Audience Growth
3. Conversation Rate
4. Citations and Ripple Index
5. Cost of Blogging
6. Benefit of Blogging
Raw Author Contribution:
This is one of the basic metric which measures the amount of content (author contribution) on a
blog.
Raw Author Contribution is measured using two metrics:
Posts per month = # of total posts / # of months blogging
Content created = # of words in all posts / # of posts
These metrics indicate the frequency and consistency of your contribution. However, they don’t
indicate the quality of your content.
There are various plugins which can be installed on the blog site. These plugins can generate
metrics for both single author and multiple author blogs.
These plugins work well with blog sites created using Wordpress.
Holistic Audience Growth:
The connection between a blog and a website is that a blog is a type of website that is
specifically designed for publishing and organizing blog posts.
When people want to read your blog, they visit your website and read your posts on your
website.
Therefore, onsite audience growth can be computed from the visits and visitors metric available
in regular analytics tools.
Readers can also sign up for RSS feeds, which means those readers don’t have to visit your site.
They simply consume the content in RSS readers like Google Reader or FeedReader.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a technology that allows users to subscribe to a website's
content and receive updates automatically. A website publishes its content, such as blog posts,
news articles, or podcasts, in an RSS feed format.
We can measure this audience with a tool like FeedBurner and compute Offsite Audience
Growth (RSS Subscribers).
Conversation Rate:
It helps you identify whether you are actually publishing content that engages your audience.
It is measured with the help of plugins installed on the website. The plug-in also computes the
number of words in comments submitted by visitors to the blog.
Conversation Rate = # of Visitor comments / # of posts
Citations and Ripple index:
This measure helps us to understand the IMPACT created by the blog and its posts. It tells you
how many people are talking about you or your company. In other words how much viral is your
content.
When other websites, blogs, tweets refer back to your blog in their own post, they are called
citations.
To measure citations, we use two different metrics:
• Technorati Authority, the number of unique blogs that linked to you in the last six months.
• Tweet Citations, a measure of how many people tweet about your post (measure of how viral
your posts become).
In both cases, we measure the ripple (impact) caused by your blogging efforts.
With the first metric, Authority, we measure the ripple caused by your blog as a whole.
With the second, Tweet Citations, we measure the ripple caused by individual posts.
Cost of Blogging:
Blogging efforts require some costs. These costs need to be calculated for three components:
1. Technology: The money we spend on hardware and software annually. This includes the
website hosting costs and the cost of analytics tools.
2. Time: This also needs to be taken in account. If we spend 2 hours daily in blogging efforts and
our approximate worth is Rs. 1000 per hour. Then, the time cost of our blogging effort is Rs.
2000 per day.
3. Opportunity cost: If we did not blog, the resources we put into blogging would go elsewhere,
into a project that could earn us money. That is opportunity cost.

Benefit (ROI) from Blogging:

It is important to compute ROI for your blogging efforts. four values need to be considered,
which add to your personal or business bottom line.
Comparative Value:
If you create a decent blog, then you may create an asset that is worth something. So, determine
the comparative value of your creation.
A number of tools can help you establish this value. You can find tools that use either your
inbound links or the current number of visitors, blog growth, feed subscribers, and so on, to
compute the comparative value of your blog.

Direct Value:
You can make money off your blog. People use AdSense or other services to display ads alongside
their blogs. Or they maintain a job board, place ads in their feeds, find consulting engagements,
or gain referrals to their business website.
All of these activities bring direct value to you in dollars. Calculate the money you earn from
these actions, which are a direct result of your blogging, and you compute a direct value for your
blog.
Nontraditional Value:
Today, marketing is about being where the customers and the conversation are. Marketing is now
about engaging with customers in ways that are beneficial to them, without asking for anything
in return.
By engaging in the conversation and by listening to customers, we deliver something of value.
This engagement creates customer as your brand ambassadors, who will eagerly spread the
word about a company and its products. That is non traditional value.

Unquantifiable Value:
Your blog content can help readers in multiple ways. They can get actionable value using your
content.
These reader comment or write to you with appreciation. This value cant be quantified but it is
adding personal value to you or your company.
Quantifying The Impact Of Twitter
• Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to share short messages called "tweets"
with their followers. With over 330 million active users, Twitter is a popular platform for
individuals and businesses alike.
• Twitter provides a way for businesses to engage with customers, increase brand awareness,
and drive website traffic.
• Twitter allows businesses to share content, such as blog posts, articles, and videos, and reach a
large audience quickly.
• Twitter's real-time nature also makes it an ideal platform for businesses to provide customer
support and address customer complaints.
• Twitter offers advertising options, allowing businesses to reach targeted audiences and
promote their products or services.
• Twitter can help businesses stay up-to-date on industry news and trends, as well as monitor
competitors.
• Twitter provides valuable insights through its analytics tool, giving businesses the ability to
track engagement, follower growth, and other key metrics.
The approach for measuring Twitter is not to focus on activity but rather to focus on desired
outcomes. The four main measures of success are as follows:
1 Growth in Number of Followers:
• Followers on Twitter are a metric similar to website visits, and you want a high number of
relevant followers.
• Avoid suboptimal ways to increase your follower count and focus on building a relevant
audience for customer engagement and conversation.
• Use tools like Twittercounter to track the growth of your followers and gain context by
comparing your performance with others in your industry.
• Over time, aim to grow the number of relevant followers, but there is no right number because
Twitter helps you be part of a wider conversation.
• Churn rate, which measures the number of followers lost in a given time period as a
percentage of total followers, can be a valuable metric to track.
2 Message Amplification:
• If you tweet something of value, others may retweet it, spreading your message much further
than you could on your own.
• Message amplification is a metric that gauges the perceived value of your tweets and helps
extend your brand.
• The number of retweets per thousand followers in a given time period is an interesting metric
to track message amplification and understand the effectiveness of your tweets.
• Use tools like Twittercounter and Retweetrank to measure your performance and compare it to
others on Twitter.
• Message amplification helps instill discipline in tweeting something of value, which can
ultimately lead to a stronger brand presence on Twitter.
3 Click-Through Rates and Conversions:
• Twitter is commonly used to share links to other websites or to your own website/blog.
• Measuring the activity around these links is valuable for understanding the interests of your
Twitter followers and measuring the impact of links that point back to your website.
• Use tools like Google Analytics to track the traffic from Twitter to your website, including the
number of visits, time spent on the site, and bounce rate.
• Use URL shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl to track clicks on your links and understand how many
people are clicking on them.
• Engagement metrics like retweets, likes, and comments on your tweets with links can also be
tracked to measure interest and impact.
• Average Shared Links Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the response rate to links shared on
Twitter, rather than just the number of links shared.
• This metric is important because it helps you understand the effectiveness of the links you
share and the level of interest among your Twitter followers.
• Use tools like bit.ly or goo.gl to track clicks on your shared links and calculate the CTR by
dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (or the number of followers who
saw the tweet).
• The average CTR for shared links on Twitter is around 1.6%, but this can vary depending on
factors like the type of content, timing, and audience.
• Conversion Rate (Outcomes) measures the success of your Twitter campaigns in driving traffic
to your website and achieving specific goals (such as sales, sign-ups, or downloads).
• To track conversions, you need to encode the links you share on Twitter with unique tracking
parameters, such as UTM codes, that allow you to identify the source of the traffic in your web
analytics tool.
• Use your web analytics tool to measure metrics like Visits, Bounce Rate, Time on Site, Goal
Conversions, and Average Value for your Twitter campaigns and compare them with other
traffic sources.
• This will help you identify the impact of Twitter on your business outcomes and optimize your
campaigns for better conversion rates.
4 Click-Through Rates and Conversions:
• Conversation rate is an important metric for measuring participation in social media.
• It measures whether you are having a conversation or just talking at people.
• TwitterFriends is a tool that can be used to measure conversation rate on Twitter.

• Replies Sent Per Day, 6.4, is the average number of replies you sent during the last 30 days.
That is higher than the benchmark (the Average column) of 2.4.
• Replies Received Per Day, 25, is the average number of replies you received during the last 30
days. The benchmark is 3.2. This analysis would suggest that you actively participate in the
Twitter universe and have a high Conversation Rate.
Emerging Twitter Metrics:
• Engagement: How diverse is the group that messages you? Are you broadcasting or
participating in a conversation?
• Reach: Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience? How far has
your content been spread across Twitter?
• Velocity: How likely are you to be retweeted? Do a lot of people retweet you, or is it always the
same few followers?
• Demand: How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers? Are your
follows often reciprocated?
• Network: strength How influential are the people who @ message you? How influential are the
people that retweet you?
• Activity: Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience? Are your tweets effective in
generating new followers, retweets, and @ replies?
 T h a n k Yo u ! !
Important Questions
• Explain the challenges in measuring success in the new social media space.
• Discuss the options you would use for analysing mobile customer
experiences.
• What are blogs? Why are they important? How would you measure the
success of blogs?
• What is Twitter? Why is it relevant in business world? How would you
measure / quantify the success of Twitter?